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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.

An e‐portfolio is a useful tool to increase reflection and awareness in teachers and students. However, benefits of e‐portfolio use are weakened by difficulties due to the lack of motivation, the heavy weight of creation and revision of the e‐portfolios, the rigid tool structure. The paper aims to answer these emerging issues, showing how to cope with the above‐mentioned questions, by proposing a structure for an e‐portfolio able to fulfil the users' needs and to be perceived as an extremely usable and motivating tool.

In the paper three types of e‐portfolios are described. A brief survey of how the students used them with related data is provided. The research is based upon qualitative (students' posts) and quantitative (log tracement) data.

After five years of experimentation and over 200 e‐portfolios analysed, the paper describes lessons learned and suggests some guidelines that might be useful to plan the introduction and the implementation of an e‐portfolio in post degree courses and for adult and in‐service learning.

In the paper some guidelines for designing formative portfolios are shown. These guidelines might be used to design and build feasible e‐portfolios in different kinds of courses. The new perspective is about the use of formative e‐portfolios in different learning paths. The paper shows how, starting from the same structure, the model is able to fit various needs, proposing technological and pedagogical devices in order to foster reflection and to promote formal and informal recording of learning activities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the attitudes of staff and students towards adopting the use of e-portfolios for the purposes of supporting the concept of personal development planning (PDP). The study compares and contrasts the views and opinions of staff and students at one UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) about whether e-portfolios can support PDP.

Adopting a case study approach, this study presents empirical data gathered from two surveys involving 460 students and 182 lecturers from one UK HEI, collected from four different campuses across the West of Scotland.

The results of the surveys showed that the framework the authors used in the research to collect information about students and staffs attitudes was effective and that further research is merited for a more extensive investigation into PDP e-portfolio usage within HEI.

The research was conducted at only one UK HEI so at this stage of the research, it is difficult to assess how generalisable the findings are.

This study provides useful empirical evidence to educators who may be considering employing e-portfolios within an educational context. For example, the views of students and staff identified in this paper can aid towards informing educators about some of the issues that might impact on using e-portfolios for supporting PDP in higher education.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that presents survey data on both students’ and lecturers’ attitudes towards e-portfolio use to support and facilitate PDP.

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.

A portfolio is used to plan, organize and document learning, and it accumulates results of learning. However, there are some problems in managing a portfolio. For example, it is very difficult to keep the portfolio in the original form physically, and it requires a lot of time and effort to keep it updated. These problems can be solved by an electronic portfolio (e-portfolio), a collection of electronic evidence assembled and managed by a user, usually on the Web. It can efficiently support a learner to manage his or her learning history and keep on learning more to move on to the next level in life so that the learning community becomes more sustainable. This paper explains why e-portfolios are needed to nurture sustainable learning communities. An overview of e-portfolios has been introduced with definitions, advantages, and types of e-portfolios. Furthermore, global trends of e-portfolio applications and Korean activities in e-portfolio applications have been described. Finally, global e-portfolio standardization activities are explained, followed by Korean e-portfolio standardization activities.

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 shift from paper portfolios to e-portfolios has arrived in educational institutions worldwide. This study investigates e-portfolio systems as a means of improving performance-centered assessment, enriching students’ learning experiences and documenting the students’ progress and achievements. The current study reveals the experience of implementing a course-level framework for e-portfolios and an approach taken in initiating student electronic portfolios in the Department of Educational Technology (DET) at Ajman University of Science and Technology, UAE. Data was obtained in several ways, including Likert scale responses and interviews with the participants; students’ journals and final reports; notes from the Practicum site supervisor and the DET lab technician; and analysis of the electronic portfolio product. The work and responses of the Practicum students were compared for three consecutive Practicum classes. Analysis of the results showed that developing formative and summative portfolios fluctuated extensively between the three Practicum classes of DET graduates, as did the outcomes. In spite of this fact, the findings suggested that the use of e-portfolios could serve as an influential learning and assessment tool when driven by a clear understanding of the desired outcome and the specific skills to be assessed, and when sufficiently mentored, peer-reviewed, and based on sensible principles.

E‐Portfolio is a powerful tool for demonstrating evidence of learning and achievements in graduate research. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept, structure and functions of e‐Portfolio in graduate research and discuss the significance of the role of e‐Portfolio in enhancing the quality of graduate research students and their learning environment.

The discussion starts with the concept of e‐Portfolio in the context of modern digital technology and innovative educational perspectives, which emphasise critical thinking, social interaction, task‐based learning, and independent learning.

It is found that e‐Portfolio greatly enhances three important aspects of research students: academic development, research profile and social networking. E‐Portfolio empowers research students to take full control of their own learning and research journey.

The paper shows that e‐Portfolio contributes to the enhancement of educational practices in terms of moving the teaching and learning focus from supervisor‐centred to student‐centred learning and research, as well as from technological control to technological empowerment.

Assessment of student learning in graduate education often takes the form of a summative measure by way of written comprehensive exams. However, written examinations, while suitable for evaluating cognitive knowledge, may not fully capture students’ abilities to transfer and apply leadership related knowledge and skills into real-world practice. This application brief describes a new form of comprehensive exam in the form of an e-portfolio process, and how an institution has turned a common assessment management tool into an instrument for learning. This brief offers the perspectives of two professors who developed and assessed the student projects, as well as a graduate student who has completed the process. Recommendations for future use to enhance the quality of the experience are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a semi-experimental study conducted over a period of two years of five degree programmes using a web-based personal tutoring system to enhance learner engagement and students’ self-efficacy, towards using personal development planning (PDP) e-portfolios.

The study adopts a semi-experimental approach using quantitative methods utilising a pre- and post-test design in the form of a general self-efficacy questionnaire inventory.

The study investigated the extent to which using a virtual learning environment web-based personal tutoring system (VLE WBPTS) can impact positively on the learners’ self-efficacy of the students’ undertaking a degree programme which promotes engagement with PDP e-portfolios.

More empirical research is required to establish whether PDP and e-portfolios have a positive effect on students’ perceived self-efficacy. Further testing is required to establish whether the VLE WBPTS can have a positive effect on other beneficial elements associated with PDP and e-portfolio usage such as students: learning styles, learner conscientiousness, reflective thinking and effective learner skills.

The introduction of interventions that involve the utilisation of a VLE WBPTS may have a more significant impact and yield positive results when the period of usage is extended beyond the initial period of six weeks to a minimum period of 12 weeks.

This study was one of few studies to use a pre/post-test design to collect and analyse empirical data about whether a VLE WBPTS can have a positive effect on students’ self-efficacy towards using PDP e-portfolios.