Why Students Use Electronic portfolio: from Uses and gratification Perspective

E-Portfolio is considered as a digital collection of students’ work which demonstrates their reflections, experiences and progress over a period of time. Students can collaborate with other students and their lecturers through e-Portfolio. This paper explains the importance of uses and gratification theory in an electronic portfolio. Using the theory, this paper will investigate and examine the gratifications that students receive from the use of e-Portfolio. Generally speaking, this paper intends to provide a better understanding of why students use e-Portfolio. For the purpose of this research, an exploratory study is applied using 15 in-depth interviews with the students who use e-Portfolio. The result of qualitative content analysis shows that the e-Portfolio use is motivated by eight major themes including giving and receiving feedback, long-term consequences of use, selfdocumentation, information sharing, informativeness, social interactions, entertainment and convenience utility. Among these themes, giving and receiving feedback, long-term consequence of use, information sharing and self-documentation have the considerable influence on student motivation to continue e-Portfolio utilization. These themes can help universities to be aware of their students’ needs and reasons of using e-Portfolio. Therefore, universities can change some of their policies to motivate the students to continue the use of e-Portfolio.