Any e-portfolio user, practitioner, teacher, technologists or a policy-maker is welcome to submit a "story", i.e. a scenario of their experiences or plans to use e-portfolios in an educational setting. There is a template at "Submit a scenario". You are also welcome to browse and view the scenarios from other people at "View scenarios".

What is an e-Portfolio Scenario?

The primary purpose of the "story" is to identify how a portfolio is used, by whom and for what purpose. The main story element should be told from several different perspectives looking at what the different stakeholders do and what they require from the e-portfolio. Central to every scenario is the learner’s perspective of the process. The image below attempts to illustrate some of the different perspectives. In your scenario you can choose the perspectives that are important for your case, however, the learner's perspective is always required.

The people involved in the scenario is a key resource for understanding the full potential of e-portfolios in education and lifelong learning, as well as to help the development of more formal specifications for future e-portfolio applications. Scenarios of e-portfolio usage in all levels of education and training should help us to understand that different types of learners may require different things from an e-portfolio.

How to fill in an e-Portfolio Scenario?

A template has been designed to describe the portfolio usage in a uniform way. This allows an easy comparison of different scenarios, and also makes the database searchable in a variety of ways. The flexibility of the template allows any user to describe a unique way of using portfolios in any educational setting. The following describes the work flow.

NOTE: only the fields marked with (*) are mandatory to fill in. There are only eight mandatory fields allowing you to make your scenario either fairly short or longer.

Log-in

First of all, you are asked to give some general information about yourself, and create a log-in so that you can still later edit and modify your scenario.

Three main parts

There are three main parts in the template: General info, Scenario, and References.

First part (General info) of the common structure includes a general description with additional elements that will describe the type of portfolio, the status of the implementation, the primary and secondary users of the portfolio, the time frame and the context of the usage.

The second part (Scenario) will give a short description of the scenario, and add different perspectives. These perspectives will elaborate to tell the same story from the learner's perspective and from at least one other perspective (see the image above: admission staff, adviser/counsellor, coordinator, employer, manager, mentor/tutor, policy maker, technologist and worker's union). The more perspectives you add, the more interesting your scenario will become. Explain also what kind of outcomes they expect from the use of e-portfolio.

The last part (References) you are asked to explain terms used in your scenario and any references or links that you wish to make to let others to know more about your experience.

If you have any questions or suggestions to improve the template, don't hesitate to contact us.