Is the e-portfolio movement running out of steam?

It was announced recently that the national e-portfolio in Australia had been cancelled and replaced by a ‘connecting and sharing’ forum. Is this a sign that ePortfolios in Australia is losing momentum?


I attended the national event in Australia a couple of years ago and came away from it with a suspicion that the e-portfolio movement in Australia is being ‘bogged down, with the same issues that affect the discussions about e-portfolios in Europe. There was still too much talk about what is an e-portfolio rather than what they can actually do. The discussion was also dominated by academics without any real attempt to engage the commercial sector.

The announcement about the new Forum in Sydney in September is also accompanied about details of two events. The first event examines ‘ePortfolios as Personal Learning Spaces’. There should be a question mark at the end because there is little evidence that anyone wants to use e-Portfolios as a personal learning space primarily because, in my view; they don’t see the point. This sort of solution has been offered across many Higher Education institutions in the UK but there is little evidence of widespread use.

The second event is about the ‘Using eportfolios for online & Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) assessment’ I am unsure what will be presented but they perhaps should have a look at the Recognise project recogniseme.ncl-coll.ac.uk/ which is already using an e-portfolio for RPL and it works.

I would suggest that the key questions that this forum in September needs to address, based on the lessons learnt from the wider e-portfolio community are;

• Why is the role of e-portfolio in relation to digital identity even being considered when there are far better and more ubiquitous applications that do this like Facebook etc?

• Is the e-portfolio community really being responsible in supporting ‘Do-it-yourself’ e-portfolio solutions when there are already e-portfolios solutions developed that work? I understand that there are clever people who can build a car from a kit but is that a sustainable model for the future production of cars!

The forum also needs to think about what is the point of re-inventing the wheel continually when there are already solutions that are developed that could effectively work in Australia. I am mindful there is a concern that many of these are developed by ‘commercial companies’ and therefore a dependency on these companies could develop. However by opting for internally developed solutions, all that is happening is that dependency on a company is being swopped with a dependency on a group of individuals in an IT department.

Why the development of e-portfolio needs to continue to be pursued is that is tantamount to the ‘bleeding obvious,’ that technology should be able to bring real benefits to assessment and specifically the assessment of vocational skills. The current paper based systems are indefensible in how they divert people from real teaching and learning to bureaucratic activities; their cost and their impact on the environment. However the e-portfolio community should start taking a more responsible approach to moving this whole debate forward or else it will run out of steam.