E-portfolios

E-portfolios (Source: Bill: Participatory Learning, goo.gl/Lz6H2M, under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence)

E-portfolios have come to prominence in education as a way of providing a record of students’ progress and showcasing their work. Confusingly, the term may be used to refer to at least three distinct – and fundamentally different – types of collections of material. An e-portfolio may be:

• • a constructivist learning tool (sometimes also called a PLE)
  • an assessment tool (including displaying key work from a PLE for assessment purposes)
  • a CV-building tool (including displaying key work from a PLE as a digital CV)

Nowadays, many educators refer to e-portfolios intended as constructivist learning tools as PLEs: these are online spaces where students can track their progress by recording all their work, including drafts, feedback, and even mistakes from which they’ve learned. The term e-portfolios may then be used in a more restricted sense to refer to the display format of PLEs, where a selection of a student’s best work is presented for assessment purposes or as a digital CV.

Using this narrower definition, an e-portfolio is a collection of documents, often in multiple media, demonstrating the achievements of an individual. Educational e-portfolios may be generated wholly by learners themselves, or may be generated partly by teachers and institutions. They are usually regularly modified and updated during the period of study. It has become common for e-portfolios to draw in material from other web 2.0 services like social sharing accounts (with students linking to their Instagram or Pinterest image sharing accounts or YouTube videosharing accounts, for example) and to incorporate RSS feeds (with students building in feeds from their blogs, or their Twitter [now renamed X] microblogging feeds, for example).

It should be remembered that e-portfolios are not a “tool” as such, but rather a concept which may be realised using a variety of tools, platforms and apps. They may be constructed in the following locations:

• • There is inbuilt e-portfolio functionality available within the major institutional LMSs. This is convenient for enrolled students to use but it may not offer full web 2.0 flexibility and connectivity, and it may place limitations on students’ ability to export and repurpose their work after graduation.
  • There are dedicated institutional e-portfolio platforms which may be linked to LMSs. Well-known examples include the free, open source Mahara and the commercial PebblePad. If linked to LMSs, these can be convenient for enrolled students to use, and they generally have more flexibility than the inbuilt e-portfolio functionality found in LMSs. (Note that some similar functionality can be found in educational platforms like Google Classroom and Microsoft OneNote). Such dedicated e-portfolio software often has the advantage of easily allowing different views of a student’s material, making it easy to maintain a PLE (containing all of a student’s work) alongside a true e-portfolio (displaying a selection of the best work); this may also be possible to some extent with e-portfolio functionality within LMSs. However, institutional e-portfolio platforms may still not offer full web 2.0 flexibility and connectivity, and may still place limitations on students’ ability to export and repurpose their work after graduation.
  • There are many e-portfolio creation and hosting services now available, ranging from free through freemium to fully paid services; for a regularly updated overview of free portfolio creation services, see Best Free Online Portfolio Creators. If e-portfolios are used as online CVs, it’s possible to make use of dedicated CV creation and hosting services which, again, range from free through freemium to fully paid services; services which allow free creation of CVs include Canva’s Free Online Resume Builder and VisualCV. Such services allow students greater freedom and flexibility while giving them more responsibility, but some may have costs attached if users wish to access more advanced functionality.
  • It is possible to build e-portfolios manually on web 2.0 platforms like websites, blogs, wikis or social networking sites, or to make use of aggregator services like Symbaloo to connect a range of web 2.0 services (for a video about Symbaloo, see the PLEs page). These options allow students maximum freedom and flexibility, but they also require them to take much greater responsibility for their own e-portfolio designs, structures and content.

Ultimately, the choice of an e-portfolio platform will depend on a variety of factors including the purposes intended; the presentation formats available; the level of security needed; and the degree of freedom and responsibility to be given to students.

Further guidance on building e-portfolios, as well as examples of e-portfolios, may be found in the following sources (bearing in mind that some sources work with broad definitions of e-portfolios, and others with narrow definitions, as discussed at the top of this page):

• • E-portfolios and their Uses in Higher Education [Web article] (Zach Winchell/Wiley University Services, 2018)
  • Getting Started with E-portfolios [Web guide] (JISC, 2021)
  • Success with E-portfolios in Education [Video] (Russell Stannard, 2022)
  • ePortfolio Project [Catalogue of examples] (Auburn University, 2023)
  • The Complete Guide to Student Digital Portfolios [Web guide] (Mohamed Khafaja/Campus Press, n.d.)
  • ePortfolios for Learning [Blog] (Helen Barrett’s ongoing blog)

More references on this topic are available on the Publications on Digital Learning page.

Last update: January 2024.