e-Portfolios are personalized, online collections of your work, chosen by you to represent to diverse audiences your knowledge, skills and interests. Developed over time, e-Portfolios show your history  from  a course, degree program, or during  your career. An e-Portfolio can include essays, presentations, research papers, images, videos, projects, reports as well as work samples. You can also add personal thoughts and written reflections about the work included in the portfolio, and invite feedback from others. This archive helps you (and your audience) see your personal development over time. Highly customizable, e-Portfolio collections can be organized as subsets to present to instructors, potential employers, and others via login. Using login access,  ensures selective permission to individuals or the public.

Portfolios have shown great potential to document individual learning and growth for UBC students and faculty. e-Portfolios give students a sense of ownership and put them at the centre of their learning process. The UBC Campus-Wide Online Environment for E-Portfolios: Community Building and Pilot Projects has studied the use of e-Portfolios and  learned more about the challenges and benefits of this human-centered approach.

A three-year pilot project (2003-2006) funded by the Teaching & Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF)  revealed various successes and benefits. These included an increase in community and group work among students and instructors, and an elevated student understanding of the connections between their learning pillars. After grasping the folio thinking process, students and instructors felt  they were better able to reflect on their learning and teaching goals at the university. This “folio thinking” promotes self-awareness, motivation, and direction, invaluable traits for  individuals in academic, professional, and social settings. The e-Portfolio Pilot Project also gave students and faculty a chance to develop their skills and abilities in information technology. By digitizing their work and developing and managing their own personal e-Portfolio Web sites, they received hands-on experience with a wide variety of technologies they did not have access to previously