The Promise of the Student Electronic Portfolio: A Provost's Perspective

Abstract

The development and pervasive adoption of student electronic portfolios have the potential to transform higher education at both the institutional and national sector levels. While much depends on the continued expansion of the ePortfolio’s technological capabilities, its transformative power derives from allowing students, faculty, and institutions to actually do what heretofore they have only imagined: enable each student to have a personally managed, meaningful, coherent, integrated lifelong record of learning that demonstrates competence, transcends educational levels, and is portable across institutions of learning—formal and informal. The ePortfolio is lifelong learning co-owned and co-managed by the individual student.