Australian ePortfolio Symposium 2008

QUT are running an Australian ePortfolio Symposium at their Kelvin Grove Campus in Brisbane, on 7 - 8 February 2008. The idea of an electronic portfolio (digital portfolio) is to have your educational qualifications and similar in a digital form which can be electronically verified. At present employers, universities and registration authorities have to spend a lot of time and effort checking if paper certificates are genuine.

The US approach to ePortfolios is to have companies or consortia of educational institutions provide them. An example is Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium (CTDLC)'s ePortfolio. EIfEL (European Institute for E-Learning), has been working with HR-XML.

Australian Universities are working as the Australian ePortfolio Project, with government funding. AeP is now conducting telephone interviews about potential use of ePortfolios.

The ACS is working on international accreditation for ICT professionals this has recently received support from Microsoft. The ACS already has a system it uses for recording qualifications and experience of its own members. It is likely that something similar will be used internationally. The ACS exposes some of the information in its system to other members and more limited information to the public via a member's list and consultant's directory. I have suggested the ACS provide an ePortfolio, as an option for members, from the same data, using the standard format. The ACS just needs to format the data in the correct format for this.