This chapter explains how to design and integrate e-Portfolios into Moodle courses. We will also learn exciting new techniques to organize the information for our students as well as combine everything learned so far in interacting with e-portfolios.

The recipes are short and precise; beginning with simple portfolios before moving on to more interesting and complex ones. We will take a look at all the portfolios made available until now in Moodle 2.0.

Unfortunately, the three most interesting portfolios available in Moodle 1.9.x—Mahara, Exabis, and MyStuff—are not available at the time of the writing of this book in Moodle 2.x. Therefore, they won't be covered in this chapter.

Another interesting portfolio that is worth paying attention to is Box.net. You need to sign up for an account in order to create an application and get the API key to use it in the Moodle course. An interesting feature of this portfolio is that you can embed a folder in any activity that you design.

An E-portfolio (electronic portfolio or digital portfolio) is a collection of electronic evidence gathered and administered by a user on the Web. The evidence should be inputted files, images, and text, among other types of files. Furthermore, E-portfolios in Moodle 2.x enable information to be exported to external systems.

In order to benefit from e-portfolios in Moodle, they must be enabled. Also, as the recipes in this chapter are interrelated, it is best if they read one after another.

When exporting either images or text to a portfolio, we can choose among the ones that we have enabled. Therefore, when dealing with the last recipe, we can select which portfolio to use. After exploring the options that each of them offers, we can decide which portfolio is the best option.

Another characteristic to be considered as an advantage is that portfolios gather files saved on the Web, not on our computer (except for File Download). That is to say, we can change the files anywhere; all we need is an Internet connection, so we just log in and edit the files we need!

We can also share the files and let other students edit them, like in the Wiki activity. We can use Box.net in order to create and embed a folder in our Moodle course in which students can upload files. It only takes some steps, and is a different task that students have to deal with.

To sum up, we could say that e-portfolios are easy to back up, and have a good portability as well as shelf life. Therefore, it would be advisable that we consider them when we design any Moodle course to use them and teach our students to use them too.

The baseline topic of this chapter is History, so we create activities related to that. Besides, the results of the eight previous courses created before is to be considered as well because what we need to export is what our students have written on Forums, Chats, Databases, and other activities that they have carried out.