| Moving beyond the familiar one-semester/one-class limits of managing student learning artifacts gets one into unfamiliar territory. The following issues need to be addressed.
In other words, how does an administrator/faculty member- alter the curriculum to integrate eportfolios?
- deal with long-term storage, privacy, access, and ongoing vendor support?
- address interoperability among platforms so student work can move to a new campus upon transfer?
Despite a general recognition of the usefulness of an eportfolio, the key to success is how well the campus population is prepared for using this new tool. It's not a simple add-on to existing courses; if it is, students may not see the value. The purpose of an eportfolio is to make it more than just a simpler way to log student work.
Even if one hundred percent of the faculty in a program have adopted eportfolios, students still may not see their value if the faculty have not re-thought their courses to accommodate eportfolios. Unless they do, the standards initiative in that program may be undermined.
Implementation issues include- Storage
This may be the key problem. If all student work is stored in eportfolios for perpetuity, considering the size of multi-media files, how can universities manage the volume of data? If they can, how will universities maintain accessibility over the years as file formats change?
- Security
Can we maintain a high level of security for personal information transmitted over the wires or stored in a server on campus?
- Standards
How useful will electronic portfolios be, for assessment and re-accreditation on campuses, if implementation is spotty or non-standardized? For implementation to work, years of preparation may be necessary within a department, program or college.
- Certification
Should institutions of higher education attempt to certify student work, stored in campus-based eportfolios, as authentic? Namely, should we include this work as part of the official transcript?
- A question for the industry
How can universities commit to an eportfolio tool that is in its first release and not yet established in the market? How can we count on a small vendor remaining in business over the years? How do we select from among a large array of unproven "solutions?" There's a great disparity between the huge commitment universities may be contemplating over time and the just-emerging state of the business: We have commitment on one side and experimentation on the other.
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