Additional discussion here
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27348I would say that e-portfolios have, in the main, two different purposes. 1) An employment type portfolio that showcases skills, knowledge, or products and 2) An academic portfolio that demonstrates growth. I have looked at a number of e-portfolio systems, some open source and some proprietary, and it seems fairly unusual to find anything that tries to address both purposes. For one thing, students interested in "showcasing" may not wish to retain work that is eclipsed by more recent efforts. That is at odds with showing "growth", which demands that artifacts be collected over time and hopefully show the cumulative positive effects of maturity and instruction. I expect trying to do both is a daunting task for the software developer.
Institutions often wish to leverage portfolio artifacts to provide information that assists them with assessment--not only assessment of an individual student, but if possible, to aggregate data from multiple artifacts over time to provide information on whether or not courses, programs, or institutions are producing the desired outcomes in their students. This desire may be at odds with the students' desires to create a more flexible, personally meaningful record of his or her work.
The main weaknesses of most portfolio systems I have seen are:
1) Some of them are limited with regard to the types of files they can accept. All artifacts are not single files (i.e., webpages) and some artifacts can be very large (i.e., 30 minute videos). Some are text based and some will contain multimedia content. And you have to worry about inappropriate or illegal (copyrighted) content on the school servers.
2) Many of them are limited with respect to the templates students can use. For the most part, an admin at some level sets up the objectives that he/she wants the students to address with the chosen artifact. This may influence/limit the type of artifacts that the student may choose to use. The student does not have the option of proposing objectives that were personally important, or have flexibility with regard to layout, images, look and feel, or anything else that might be desirable for personalizing the portfolio. This is good for the student who appreciates the structure as a time saver, but can frustrate the student who desires some artistic control.
3) Virtually none of them allow for cross referencing artifacts. Instructors who are evaluating the portfolios do them by student, not by outcome. I was always astonished that so little had been done with the
database capabilities behind the portfolios--no searching, no querying, no sorting.
4) Many of them are not very accessible for the disabled or impaired.
Two portfolio systems that I have seen that come very close to "doing it all" are LiveText (proprietary) and Denver University (Denver, Colorado, US).
LiveText has an interesting marketing plan--they charge students a one time initial fee and the students own the portfolio until they graduate (I believe undergraduate, here). My recollection is that the fee is <$150--about the price of a new textbook. After graduation, the students may retain the portfolio for a reasonable yearly fee. The institution is granted a powerful portfolio system without investment by this means.
The student grants the instructor access to the work, and as an institutional partner, the instructor is allowed to build the set of objectives and rubrics for which the student selects artifacts. The student can also create a personal area to upload whatever they like. Students control access: public, private, or by invitation. LiveText has an impressive rubric/scale system that can be tied to each artifact (as others in this topic have discussed), and the rubrics are also tied to standards that have been published by national or state organizations or the institution itself. The institution can then gather data across semesters, across courses, or across instructors.
The DU system is similar and it was being provided at no cost to interested US universities, but it was not open source and required
oracle (I think--it was a couple of years ago when I saw the demonstration) to run it. One of the things I remember about the DU system is the provision for dealing with artifacts that could not be captured in the portfolio system. Example: civil engineering. You might upload a picture or a report, but the evaluation took place on-site. It was merely recorded against a place-holder in the portfolio. It is rather like the offline assignment in Moodle.
So there you go. Portfolios are different things to different people.
There is a strong movement for using portfolios to assess learning by
examining student work. "Authentic" assessment and constructivist
learning go together very well, because many types of learning simply
cannot be measured or verified by objective means, such as paper and
pencil test. The electronic portfolio is an emerging tool that employs
technology to capture, tag, sort, and record information in a way that
can demonstrate growth and development for an individual student, a
program, or an institution. If well designed, it can also provide students with a way to "showcase" work for prospective employers, or for personal goals. Electronic portfolios have great potential. The
software challenge is to meet the needs of such a variety of users.
, using moodle for this - in the hope that in 5 years time I/someone will have solved the storage/hosting issue that this creates. But I thought that we could give this a shot now because we want to use Moodle for the 
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