Vendor Products

There are a host of products out on the market that specifically provide ePortfolios, and there are supplements to some LMS.

See a MERLOT Collection of reference materials for this topic.

Before you start your search have a clear understanding of the institutional goals, what type of maintenance and support you need, and your pricing model. By carefully evaluating your campus needs you will weed out many vendors. (See SFSU's Needs Assessment )

The interest in ePortfolios continues to grow partly because accreditation agencies (such as NCATE for education, ABET in the engineering, sciences and technology areas, and the AACSB for business) have become more outcomes driven, requiring examples of student learning as well as an aggregation of assessment data for internal program evaluation. For students an e-Portfolio may serve as an area to demonstrate knowledge and reflect, and it may be a digital repository that allows webpages to be customized and provide access to selective audiences in a secure environment. To a faculty member use of an ePortfolio can increase pedagogy and it may be a way to build rubrics and handle administrative tasks. Institutions may use an ePortfolio system to provide continual collections of data, analyses, and samples of student and faculty achievement.

An ePortfolio system can document student progress and development over time and complex ePortfolio systems are being developed by institutions and software companies to support the collection, organization and presentation of this data. The rapidly changing environment makes planning on how to choose and use ePortfolios a challenge for us all. Below is a short collection of questions to be used for reviewing ePortfolio systems. This script for reviewing ePortfolio products (pdf) is not meant to be a comprehensive list; rather it is a starting point.

SFSU recently developed an ePortfolio Development Report (pdf) that might be relevant for you. This includes "A Case Study on Selecting an Open Source ePortfolio Tool" wherein they create a framework for the project, populate a candidate pool, select the most appropriate system, and conduct an in-depth analysis of the selected system.