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This paper aims to report insights from the planning and execution phase of an interactive radio instruction (IRI) intervention envisioned as a medium-term response plan to address school closures amidst the global Coronavirus pandemic. The project has been envisioned by a local development agency in the province of Balochistan for adolescent out-of-school (OOS) girls.

This study reports respondents’ academic achievement through the one-group pretest-posttest design method across numeracy, literacy, civic education and indigenous crafts. Participating adolescent girl respondents were randomly selected from six districts of Balochistan and the results assert a positive impact of IRI intervention. Thus, showcasing IRI as a promising approach to address protracted challenges of educational accessibility in remote areas of Pakistan.

The mean score comparison of pre-test–post-test across four curriculum subjects indicates the greatest gains in numeracy and civic education. Results also highlight the significance of the pedagogical capacity of IRI developers and the quality of supplementary educational kits paired with IRI during this intervention.

The findings of this study focus on design and implementation phases eliminating the analysis of learners’ behaviour, environmental factors and family support. Further research is suggested to identify gaps in related dimensions for the success of IRI in Pakistan.

This study contributes data-driven findings from a pioneer on-going IRI project in Balochistan, a hard-to-reach province where the ratio of OOS adolescent girls exceeds 78%. This study also proposes vital steps for the longevity of IRI to solve protracted educational crises in Pakistan.

The purpose of this article is to outline a vision for digital stories of development, or online personal learning environments, which may eventually replace what we currently call “electronic portfolios” in education.

This is a conceptual article that provides a lifelong, life‐wide perspective on electronic portfolios based on the authors' research, focusing on some of the issues that need to be addressed to make this vision a reality.

Based on the concept of “lifetime personal web space,” this online archive of a life's collection of reflections, memories, digital artefacts and memorabilia, both personal and professional, has the potential to change the current paradigm of electronic portfolios, mostly institution‐bound, and focus instead on the individual or the family as the center for creating a digital archive, which can be used in a variety of contexts across the lifespan, from schools to universities to the workplace. Finally, this archive can be used to develop personal histories and reflective narratives to preserve our stories for future generations. A possible scenario is followed by the challenges faced when developing this service for widespread dissemination. This is not a formal research paper with analysis, discussion or results. The paper is meant to provide a vision or future direction for electronic portfolios that could be stored in the internet “cloud” for a lifetime and beyond.

This paper encourages individuals as well as institutions to explore new ways to construct electronic portfolios in the Internet “cloud” so that the owner of the portfolio has access across their lifespan. This paper could also be used by Web 2.0 developers to improve the development of tools, making them more useable and accessible across the lifespan, from early readers to the elderly.

This paper provides a future vision of the potential for cloud computing to be used as a lifetime store of memories and digital memorabilia, as well as a broader vision of the electronic portfolio process across the lifespan.