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8/9/2005
The point is that people will be using ePortfolios for their own purposes. It’s not just something that they’ll be told to use in a formal educational setting. One key factor: People like to collect things. They like stuff that is media-rich that they can put in their portfolios. So, young people will choose to use ePortfolios in their leisure time; to use them for fun. Which you would almost never do with a CMS—I suspect almost no one chooses to use a course management system on their own time for fun. It’s something that you do within a class setting. The CMS is very useful, and revolutionary, but ePortfolios are potentially going to dwarf the CMS market.
And student ownership is an important point about ePortfolios. The more engaged, the more time on task, the more that a person puts into something, the more they learn—this g'es along with all the data I’ve seen over the years. The challenge has always been, how do you engage students? You can use multimedia in the classroom to engage them—and that works for a couple days, but then the engagement slips away. So, there’s got to be something else to engage them. And that’s ownership.
What higher education needs to realize is, using ePortfolios is not a choice
that you make because you can prove that it’s educationally valuable,
or that it works. There is not really a choice here: The return on investment
is staying in business. Do you want to stay active and viable as an institution
of higher education? It’s a critical thing to recognize that the focus
now is choosing the right platform in this highly volatile market, and getting
started with it.