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This article describes the origin, design, and implementation of the Haworth College of Business Electronic Portfolio Project, a curricular innovation that is one of the key components of the college’s newly revised and reaccredited undergraduate business program. Included in the article is a description of the portfolio process, its creation, and initial implementation, including implementation challenges and issues. Throughout the discussion, goals and the challenge of meeting them are examined, and suggestions for continuous improvement are explored. The article offers key issues to consider before adopting a portfolio process on a large scale.

A member of the North Dakota University System, Valley City State University (VCSU) offers baccalaureate degrees in education, business and the liberal arts to a student population of 1,100. In 1995, VCSU adopted an electronic portfolio initiative and in 1996 became the second four‐year laptop institution in the USA, providing laptop computers to all of its faculty and students. This article describes VSCU’s grant‐funded best technology practices project, which enables students to complete electronic portfolios on CD‐ROM, which is proving to be an effective strategy for improving teaching and learning.

This action research uses grounded theory and constant comparative analysis of electronic portfolios to explore how prospective secondary social studies teachers connect theories and practices of democratic education to give meaning to the complexity of learning how to teach in more democratic ways. I use contrasting case studies to focus on the relative value of theoretical/experiential ways of knowing. I conclude that students need to move more fluidly between theoretical and experiential or narrative thinking to galvanize their wills to teach more democratically. Because teaching democratically implies that teachers have a democratic world view, documenting how one learns to become a teacher cannot be adequately accomplished with only lesson plans, unit plans, or K-12 student work. Instead, those who wish to construct identities as democratic educators need to articulate their struggles through theoretically positioned stories about day-to-day classroom interactions in which they acknowledge the central role of beliefs, values, and epistemic orientations.

E‐portfolios, which document and facilitate learning and performance, have recently attracted interest in the USA, UK, and Europe as means to increase employability and support lifelong learning. This article aims to critically examine these objectives in order to guide the future e‐portfolio practice.

Social theory, drawing on the work of Foucault, suggests that the discourse of employability and lifelong learning shapes individuals into means to fulfill economic objectives. This theory is applied to show that many e‐portfolio projects participate in this discourse. In the USA, the discourse around integrative learning suggests an alternative.

Integrative learning has two different styles, which correspond with two different types of self, the network and symphonic. The network self suggests ways for e‐portfolios to promote employability, while representing the symphonic in e‐portfolios creates space for a broader conception of what is important in life that pushes back against an entirely economic conception of citizenship. e‐portfolio projects have made progress cultivating both kinds of selves, and two, the Nedcar project in The Netherlands, and the eFolio Minnesota project in the USA, are examined. These selves need to be woven together, layering the networked and symphonic, to create e‐portfolios that promote employability while asserting the value of their authors as whole human beings. The idea of “good work” developed to describe the professions may serve as a model for this integration.

Much current work developing e‐portfolio software, services, and policies uncritically embraces the problematic conceptions of employability and lifelong learning discussed. The alternative model proposed in the paper can inform future work.

The use of e‐portfolios in recognition of prior learning (RPL) processes in workplace and professional practice contexts has attracted little attention in the literature due to its emergent nature. This study seeks to explore the growing incidence of e‐portfolio‐based RPL (e‐RPL) and professional recognition (e‐PR) processes in Australia and the implications this has for recognising workplace learning.

The paper utilises an exploratory study and involves a content analysis of a selected sample of data sources. The sample includes the abstracts and papers presented at the 2009 VET E‐portfolios Showcase and the 2010 ePortfolios Australia conference and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (AFLF) funded E‐portfolio implementation trials 2009 and 2010.

The paper finds an array of e‐RPL and e‐PR operationalised across multiple fields/disciplines and contexts. The incidence of e‐PR is more dominant than that of e‐RPL. The findings result in the development of a framework that provides the conceptual scaffolding for recognition systems in the workplace.

The study is limited to Australian based data sources. Further analysis could be expanded to international contexts to increase the data and evidence on e‐RPL and e‐PR processes and the implications these have for recognising workplace. The framework developed from the study provides a conceptual launch pad into future lines of inquiry which can critically explore the underlying pedagogies and knowledge paradigms which have dominated in formal learning systems.

The paper includes implications for the correct matching of practices and tasks to appropriate types of e‐portfolio based RPL and PR along a continuum of formal to informal learning and varying degrees of learner control.

This paper presents an analytical framework for exploring e‐RPL and e‐PR as distinct processes of recognition through a synthesis of RPL and e‐portfolio research and theoretical constructs. The framework includes a typology of e‐RPL and e‐PR based on Smith and Tillema's typology of portfolios and Cameron's models of RPL. The framework will assist in analysing recognition processes undertaken in workplace contexts.

Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogging, allow for locally developed, cost-effective, and holistic alternative portfolio assessment systems. By enhancing critical reflection and fostering social interaction, blogging portfolios or bPortfolios become integral formative and summative assessment tools for all teacher education students enrolled in a university program. Blogging platforms such as WordPress.com are free to use and are available worldwide allowing bPortfolios to be implemented at any institution where students have Internet access.

Since the early 1980s, a paradigm shift, caused by the work undertaken in the field of cognitive psychology, has occurred. This shift is known as the move from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered or learning-centered instruction, and emphasizes the importance of building new knowledge on previous ones, interacting with peers, making meaningful and reflective learning and being engaged in his own path to foster learning. This new vision of teaching has created a need for new learning and assessment instruments that are better adapted to these pedagogical realities. In this context, the electronic portfolio or e-portfolio is one of the most versatile and effective tools that have been proposed for this purpose. More specifically, the interest in e-portfolios has grown considerably with the emergence of the competency-based approach and portfolio-based competency assessments. The purpose of this paper is to describe a semantic-based representation of e-portfolios, defined on the basis of official e-portfolio standards and specifications. Moreover, a comparative study of several well-known e-portfolio solutions has been carried out based on different facets, such as functional features, technical and organizational features. The objective is to identify those features that are mostly supported by e-portfolio solution providers and accordingly to gain a fairly accurate idea of the common structure of e-portfolios. In addition, the authors take advantage of an already implemented ontological model describing competency-related characteristics of learners and learning objects and combine it with the e-portfolio ontology, with a view to support a more reliable and authentic competency assessment.

The proposed e-portfolio ontology was built following the ontology development methodology Methontology (Fernandez et al., 1997). In addition, it was constructed using the Protégé ontology environment (Protégé, 2007) and was implemented in OWL (Web Ontology Language) (Antoniou and Harmelen, 2004).

The proposed e-portfolio ontology provides humans with a shared vocabulary that enables capturing the most important elements in e-portfolios and serves as the basis for the semantic interoperability for machines.

The main advantage of the e-portfolio ontology lies in its ability to provide a common and semantically enriched representation of e-portfolio artifacts, thus facilitating the interoperability and exchange of competency evidences between different learning systems and platforms. In addition, capturing the semantics of e-portfolios helps to make them utilizable by intelligent applications.

The purpose of this paper is to find answers to the following questions: How do employers think about e‐portfolios? Do employers really see e‐portfolios as a suitable hiring tool? Which factors in students' e‐portfolios attract potential employers? Can e‐portfolios be successfully used by students in their search for a job?

A semi‐structured interview survey was used in this study. All ten interviewees were HR managers from ten different companies. They were interviewed face‐to‐face between December 2010 and May 2011. In order to collect a broad range of multiple ideas, the interviewees came from a wide range of industries including tourism, product design, real estate, information and technology, insurance, recruitment service, and others.

The results of this survey showed that the e‐portfolio is perhaps still in its early stage of development. Nevertheless, the employer interviews indicate a high and consistent level of interest by the employers, indicating a promising future of the e‐portfolio as a job search tool. In addition, employers can use specific information to conduct to pre‐screen candidates. On the other hand, they may include the e‐portfolio as a factor in the final phase of the selection process to obtain a deeper and more complete level of information (e.g. learning reflections) that can clearly demonstrate a job applicant's characteristics and potential for career development.

Faculty members and career service staff in universities and colleges should consider promoting e‐portfolios to employers as a promising tool for selecting their next employee.

The purpose of this study was to present a pilot electronic portfolio (e-portfolio)-integrated learning environment by integrating library resources into an e-portfolio system for its application, and to explore reader’s satisfaction of the integrated system.

This study develops a research model by modifying the information success model to explore reader satisfaction to the understanding of the adoption of integrated system. The sample consisted of 289 graduate and undergraduate students. In total, 189 were considered useful and used for analysis. A regression analysis was then conducted to identify key causal relationships.

The findings show that reader-perceived benefits, information quality and system quality are critical factors for the reader’s satisfaction. Overall, the model explained 84 per cent of the variance in reader satisfaction. Thus, the results show that the proposed model does satisfactorily explain the reader’s satisfaction of the integrated system.

There is scant research available in the literature on user satisfaction of pilot e-portfolio-integrated learning environment from a reader perspective. The findings of this research provide some useful insights into a reader’s satisfaction toward adoption of the integrated system. In addition, it will be valuable for better understanding of factors affecting the determinants of reader’s satisfaction, which improve the reader’s satisfaction of the integrated system and thereby boost realization of collaborative learning environment.

Through the action research study, this paper aims to examine how e-portfolios improve students’ critical, reflective and creative thinking as part of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). Besides, this paper also explores how e-portfolios enhance students’ speaking skills. The study is carried out to improve the current state by identifying and solving problems in specific contexts.

This investigation was designed to seek the improvement of the students’ higher-order thinking and speaking skills after the implementation of the e-portfolio. Action research was chosen because action research is suitable to bring change and improvement in the system or assume to bring progress in the system. This study was designed in two phases, featuring reflection and connection between previous and new data.

By completing this action research study, the authors assisted students in improving their higher-order thinking and speaking skills. The improvement was related to the indicators for learning success, which were explained in this research. The HOTS criteria include the capacity to analyze essential facts and arguments that the students presented in their spoken works logically and critically.

HOTS encompasses critical, logical, creative and metacognitive thinking skills. Future research should go further into the usage of e-portfolios in the development of students’ metacognitive capacities. Moreover, because this investigation was carried out using action research methods, it is crucial to recognize that no generalizability can be offered for the findings.

The study’s findings should also benefit practitioners and instructors endeavoring to enhance students’ e-portfolios, critical thinking and digital skills in the classroom.

The discussion focuses on important development topics. Everyone, not just students, should be encouraged to participate in creating and developing our technological future. The analysis offers unique and essential perspectives into what to explore for such a substantial attempt as implementing digital technology, specifically to construct an e-portfolio.

Despite the widespread usage of e-portfolios in English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction, there is a lack of research on how e-portfolios can enhance EFL students’ HOTS and speaking abilities. Hence, this study addresses a deficiency in existing research by examining the potential of e-portfolios to enhance students’ HOTS and oral communication skills within the context of EFL.