Our educational institutions are just that — institutions. Their structures and processes are heavily entrenched, and — at least for public schools — very reliant on government funding. We all know that’s driven by tax bases and test results.

Yet here’s what I saw at a Web company where I worked: a young man (probably the youngest in a very young company) who’d dropped out of college at the undergrad level (most of us had grad degrees or doctorates) was hired as a programmer when he proved he could hack our security system and write some code as directed.

It wasn’t about a degree or even a portfolio of his work. Instead, he was given a couple of tasks to prove his ability to perform the require work, and he passed them, so he was hired. He quickly became one of the most valued programmers we had.

Many companies really don’t care as much about academic degrees as they do about an individual’s ability to perform on the job.

Several of my past positions included hiring. Educational degrees served simply as an initial screening mechanism — no degree meant the resume went in the “Thank you, no” pile. It was the easiest early bar to set when faced with hundreds of resumes for a single position.

So from my perspective, the primary challenge to e-portfolios is how to quickly filter them. And filter them you must. Maybe the online job services are better, but in looking for a meeting planner, we mistakenly used the word “logistics” in our description and got flooded with applicants from the trucking industry.

It seems to me the idea is great, but the scaffolding for success isn’t quite sturdy enough yet…

I definitely agree with you that schools aren’t doing much about preparing students to be more “self-directed” to learn more & exchange experiences and expertise with others. Also, actually I believe that an e-portfolio would enable both students and long life learners to “signal” their knowledge and skills. However, there need to be a shift in thinking by the companies, schools and other employment agencies towards accepting e-portfolios as reliable sources of showcasing one’s “real” talents.

I definitely think a new credentialing system is needed, one that is not tied to the student’s geographic location. As a graduate student, I notice professors are taking more and more advantage of the ability to skype in guest speakers. But why not draw on this kind of expertise for every topic in your course of study? Rather than earning a transcript that says you met the requirements of x course taught by y professor, develop a body of work that reflects your learning and showcase it in your online portfolio.

And I agree with you, Will, that students should be developing those e-porfolios in K-12 as well. One good example of this is the Graduation Portfolio System being developed by the Asia Society’s International Studies Schools Network. As a side note, my high school students and I are participating in the Flat Classroom NetGenEd project, and one of the topics is “open content.” It will be interesting to see how the students in the project predict OER will impact education in the future.