Challenges

What is the current situation?

How can the ePortfolio contribute to solving this challenge?

 1 - Ensuring lifelong employability and social inclusion

Economic development requires agile organisations that can adapt to market needs and employees that can constantly improve their competencies to addapt to new occupations.

This is resulting in:

• New markets and occupations that are not always within reach given the current employees
• Transitional labour market and new career patterns ("portfolio careers")
• The responsibility of the State to provide a secure framework for employability
• The responsibility of the employer to contribute to this framework
• The need to anticipate the need for changing competences

• Providing tools for anticipating needs for competences
• Providing a better view of the available competencies in a territory
• Facilitating the installation of new businesses
• Providing the right competences for the job market
• Providing support during transition periods - retraining
• Supporting continuing professional development – while employed
• Providing a better competence assessment instrument

2 - Coping with profound demographic changes

The population of western countries is decreasing and getting older.

This is resulting in:

• An ageing workforce
• Pressure on pension funds and revenue of retired people
• An increase in the number of health and social care workers
• A decrease in the number of pupils and students
• Increased migration – an opportunity for some countries, but the source of brain drain in both developed and developing countries
• reduction of 30 to 40% in the school (K12) population
  

• Identify and valorise the assets of retired people to contribute to community activities
• Help to keep people in the workforce for as long as possible by valuing their assets and assisting them to develop new competencies
• Provide a transferable, comprehensible means of evaluating the competencies and other qualities of migrant workers
• Promoting a better relationship between educational institutions and the broader community by encouraging and valuing work and community experience as part of the curriculum

Owing to rapid technological and socio-economical changes, many institutions are subject to profound reorganisations to avoid becoming obsolete.

For example:

• National post offices: email is competing with physical mail while eCommerce boosts parcel delivery
• Media: resellers of physical media close (e.g. Tower Records) while online music and book sales increase
• Libraries: new media change the work of librarians

• Supporting the evolution of competencies
• Providing an overview of available competencies in an organisation
• Providing support during transition periods
• Promoting better management

The physical and virtual access and mobility of students depends on the creation of proper mechanisms, legal frameworks, infrastructures and quality assurance mechanisms. The Bologna process in Europe and other regional legal frameworks  are attempts to make Higher education more transparent.

This has an effect on

• Competition between HE institutions, locally, nationally and internationally
• The implementation of BaMa (Bachelor Master Doctorate)
• The structure of institutions
• Collaboration across institutions and borders

• Document learning across multiple institutions
• Provide a track record to support quality assurance across institutions
• Provide evidence of/for study abroad
• Allowing institutions to offer organisational, staff and programme portfolios to attract candidates.

While we recognise that learning happens everywhere, in formal and informal settings, there is still too much focus placed on formal learning. Formal learning itself is still mainly organised on models adapted to the industrial age.

This has consequences for

• The development of learning technologies almost uniquely focused on formal learning
• The recognition and valuing of outcomes of learning still tied to formal qualifications
• Small &Medium Enterprises (SMEs) participation in learning activities
• Integrating knowledge and competency management – which are in separate silos today

• Provide support for informal and non-formal learning
• Provide a means of valuing the outcomes of learning acquired by non-formal routes
• Provide a link between competency and knowledge management that could be useful to SMEs
  

The consequences of low literacy and low levels of education and qualification are:

• Lower economic performance
• Inability to cope with change
• Lost sense of community and social exclusion
• Lower participation in lifelong learning activities

• An alternative method of development and assessment
• Provide support for informal and non-formal learning
• Support for informal recognition
• Support for formal recognition of prior learning and experience - APL
• Support the development of meta-cognitive skills, such as learning to learn
• Support community learning
• Support local and folk culture development through story telling

The ubiquitous nature of new technology changes the way we interact with the world. When using digital technology we create an imprint that reveals our behaviour. It is possible to "Google" the name of a person and find personal information

This has an effect on privacy:

• Identity management
• IPR management
• Social networks

• Provide a framework to control access to personal data
• Provide an interoperability framework
• Provide an instrument of co-operation among different agencies, for example, education, health, social services…

Today, most of the efforts of standardisation on ePortfolio technology have focused on data model structures and very little emphasis has been placed on the architectures and protocols. It is as if we were focusing on the definition of HTML and neglecting the HTTP issue.

The consequences are:

• Lack of technical and human interoperability
• Discontinuity of the learning space
• Each ePortfolio platform develops its own idiosyncrasies
• Unorganised market
• Difficult to compare existing solutions
• Obsolescence of ePortfolio solutions
• Lack of scalability of ePortfolio Information Systems.

• A global interoperability framework that will connect all types of ePortfolios to all types of institutions, local, regional, national and international.
  
• Rethink information systems architectures to make them ePortfolio centric.
• Include all relevant standards on digital identity management, federation of services, query mechanisms, etc.
• Extended conformance testing programmes to cover the whole gamut of technology involved in ePortfolios (digital identity management, data synchronisation, etc.)

The consequences are:

• Lack of communication across stakeholders
• Lack of mobility
• Lack of transparency of qualification systems
• Poor quality control of assessment processes
• Difficulties to implement frameworks in ePortfolio technologies

• A reference model for the implementation of competency frameworks.
  
• An architecture model to support the quality control of the various assessment and accreditation processes
• An agreed model for the assessment and accreditation of competencies.

The implementation of ePortfolio technology can (should) have a profound impact on the organisation and its environment. Successful implementation requires proper staff and executive management preparation.

Lack of competencies and preparation consequences are:

• Limited impact on the outcomes
• Lack of scalability -- moving beyond initial pilots
• Stress on staff and students

• Update of competency frameworks to include ePortfolio practice.
• Better communication of success and failure stories

While we recognise that learning should be learner centred, most learning technology is still focused on providing institutions with a solution to their problems and very little technology is developed to providing lifelong learners with their own technology.

The consequences are:

• ePortfolio solutions still largely organisation-centred
• ePortfolio solutions can be inflexible and template centred
• ePortfolios tend to 'belong' to the organisations, not the individual
• Solutions seen as being produced for a particular purpose, e.g. assessment, not (yet) a lifelong learning instrument.

• How can educational organisations of all types encourage the development and maintenance of learner-centred lifelong ePortfolios?
• Research on new learning and ePortfolio architectures