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The word on e-portfolios is out in higher education. According to the 2013 survey from the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR), use of e-portfolios has increased sharply since 2010, when the survey first asked about them: 57 percent of US postsecondary institutions say they have made some use of e-portfolios in the past year, and 53 percent of responding students report engaging with e-portfolios in at least one course in the past year (Dahlstrom, Walker, and Dziuban 2013). The continuing proliferation of vendors and products attests to a growing market for e-portfolio platforms. From my own experience directing a campus-level e-portfolio initiative, I know that, increasingly, faculty members, advisors, student life professionals, and career services staff are hearing about e-portfolios through their own disciplinary and professional venues and bringing ideas about them back to their campuses.
A growing body of e-portfolio research and resources is supporting this surge of e-portfolio engagement, including a relatively new international professional organization founded in 2009, the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), which offers annual international conferences and regional gatherings in the United States and Canada, and the International Journal of ePortfolio (IJeP), founded 2011, which provides e-portfolio researchers and practitioners an online and print outlet for disseminating their work. These developments follow several prominent national and international networks and projects that, beginning in the early and mid-2000s, have fostered the growth of a community of e-portfolio users and contributed to our understanding of effective e-portfolio practices. These include, among others, AAC&U's VALUE project, the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, the Electronic Portfolio Action and Communication group (known as EPAC), the Making Connections National Resource Center at LaGuardia Community College in New York, and that center's current project, Connect to Learning.
E-PORTFOLIOS, YESTERDAY AND TODAY
Where is all this interest and activity coming from? E-portfolios represent a convergence of several ideas and practices that have developed within higher education over the past few decades. They are, of course, direct descendants of reflective print portfolios, which have had a long history in college-level writing programs and teacher education programs and had already begun attracting interest from other disciplines by the late 1980s and early 1990s (Batson 2002; Yancey 2001). These print portfolios were meant to...