An Evaluation of Electronic Portfolio Platforms in Higher Education

Electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) are emerging as a catalyst encouraging individuals to take more control over their learning and development. The upsurge of ePortfolios in higher education deserves special attention and users need effective methodologies and guidelines for selecting appropriate systems. This paper describes an evaluation framework which adopts heuristic inspection techniques from three perspectives: individual developers (students), audience or users (teachers) and institutions. Specifically, eight areas were identified as necessary to include for the system inspection: content construction, content management, personalisation and aesthetic control, interaction and networking, assessment of teaching and learning, reporting, system integration, and cost. The proposed framework aims at allowing educators to perform accurate evaluations of ePortfolio platforms to meet individual needs. In this paper, we apply this framework to present a comparison of four widely used ePortfolio platforms. This experience reveals the advantages of adopting such a multi-perspective evaluation framework so as to achieve maximal benefits in learning with ePortfolios. http://www.e-case.org/2010/