One of the important technologies which deliver more effective and efficient services to students, lecturers, administrators and universities is Electronic Portfolio. It's defined as a student collection of learning progress, accomplishments and reflections. Nowadays most of the universities have joined to use e-Portfolio, due to the advantages provided for their organizational success. Despite of their large investment in e-Portfolio, its utilization is not continued. A major challenge is “how to increase the continuous use of e-Portfolio.” Most of the literature has ignored the role of motivation in its continuance usage. Regarding these issues, the main goal of this chapter is to highlight the importance of motivation in e-portfolio context to sustain its utilization. By reviewing the literature, the self-determination theory (SDT) integrating with IS-Continuance model is proposed as the best solution for overcoming the current problems. Autonomy, competence and relatedness are supposed to have a significant influence on continuous use of e-Portfolio system.
TopIntroduction
The development of information and communication technology is an inseparable part of any organization in recent years. The main aim of new technologies is to assist organization to become more flexible and adaptive to any future changes to better cope with new advancements. The convergence to a learning organization leads to agility to respond to new adjustments (FRSA, 2010).
New technology has enabled universities to serve students in new and creative ways, such as delivering the learning material and administrative services via electronic tools to make the services easier, cheaper and faster (Sutarso & Suharmadi, 2011). The electronic service for universities was developed to deliver learning and administrative services more efficient and effective than their manually one. There were also high demands for sharing the process with students so that they could simply perform activities themselves, resulting in reducing university workload and involvement. Electronic-based services, therefore, were the best solution for both students and universities (Sutarso & Suharmadi, 2011).
These days a broad range of digital educational devices exists for universities, teachers and students such as computers, e-mail, electronic presentations, discussion rooms, video-conferences, computer assisted learning, web-learning, online training, distance education, eLearning, virtual learning, digital training and more. These new tools have different influence on the process of learning since they change its scope (new students, people all over the world, worldwide competition), its methods (course size, learning events, online exercises, simulations, auto-evaluation), and its sequencing (full time face-to-face, full time online, blended learning, long-life learning) (Youssef & Ragni, 2008).
One of those mentioned technologies is called Electronic Portfolio (e-Portfolio) which known as an online collection of learner output to demonstrate his/her progress over the time and to reflect on and share the experiences and achievements. They are used in different sectors such as nursing, medical, universities and other areas.
E-Portfolios can have a fundamental responsibility to support students as a navigational strategy for 21st century learning outcomes. Undoubtedly the new technologies will move on and hence the e-Portfolio functionality will be changed in the future. However, lifelong learning is an important concept which might be leads to be in need of an e-Portfolio solution to record learning process and exchange information (Stefani et al., 2007).
There are several benefits of using e-Portfolios such as easy way to search, enabling the use of multimedia projects, and allowing effective feedback on student work. The advantages of e-portfolios, both for learning and evaluation, recommend that they will play an increasingly important role in education (Love et al., 2004).
The organization can take lots of benefits by using e-portfolio. The staffs and students can share their experiments and achievements about different topics, so others can use their advices to get better results in their work. In the other word, it helps the organizational agility to respond to any changes or any new technologies.
On one hand, new technologies facilitate learners with more control over how, where, and when they experience educational and professional development in achieving their individual goals (LaCour, 2005). On the other hand, Investment in information technology applications can lead to increasing the productivity only if they are accepted and used by users (Venkatesh, 1999).