A Short History of the Portfolio and ePortfolio
Portfolios have been utilized for career purposes since the early 1800s to showcase achievements in music, fine arts, photography, architecture, and graphic design (Blom & Hitchcock, 2017). Portfolios remain a widely used tool for evidencing professional competencies where selected items of work are compiled to demonstrate the achievements and abilities of the owner.
The use of ePortfolios in education evolved out of print-based student portfolios with significant writing components. Due to the challenges of handling media in the infancy of the internet, ePortfolios emerged as written works in disciplines such as English studies (Connolly, Gould, Hainey, Waugh & Boyle, 2010). Portfolios and ePortfolios have both been used for the owner to analyse and reflect on their work – students collect their work, select examples to showcase, and reflect on what they learned (Yancey, 2001).
With improvements technology, the content in ePortfolios developed to more closely resemble a modern version of an artist’s portfolio (Meyer, Abrami, Wade, Aslan & Deault, 2010), containing electronic artefacts such as text, audio, images, video, multimedia, certificates, and digital badges. In addition to the enhanced content options, ePortfolios offer advantages over print portfolios, including the ability to reach vast numbers of people (Rowley, 2008), and the ability to showcase digital tools that are commonly used in the conceptual and creative process (Cleveland & Cleveland, 2004).