Using AI in e-Portfolio assessment: Implications for stakeholders

Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently become the talk of the town and its use in education has become even more controversial. Generative AI tools, namely ChatGPT, refer to any pre-trained enormous corpuses, which simulate human thinking, reasoning, and speech by creating verbal responses, essays, poems, lyrics, songs among many others. In close connection with AI technology, e-Portfolios allude to digital dossiers, which assist learners to create, curate, reflect, and disseminate their multimedia artefacts to fulfill diverse purposes. Since students can deploy digital resources to create portfolio artefacts, they may utilize AI-generated materials as makeshift e-Portfolio tasks improperly if not unethically. Hence, this paper aims to argue the importance of developing AI literacy among key stakeholders, namely teachers, students, and researchers when they engage in e-Portfolio assessment. The paper first introduces AI applications in language education and describes their affordances as well as challenges. It then delineates e-Portfolio assessment in terms of its definition, process, and integration in L2/EFL contexts, followed by how AI-powered software can be pedagogically linked to e-Portfolio tools. Drawing upon Davis’s (2008) componential language assessment literacy model, the paper goes on to propose major elements of AI literacy among teachers (architects of AI-based e-Portfolio programmes), students (consumers of AI tools in their digital dossiers), and researchers (trendsetters of AI use in e-Portfolios), and how these elements (i.e., knowledge, skills, principles, self-awareness, and beliefs) enable these three groups of stakeholders to implement, adopt, and innovate AI in e-Portfolio assessment respectively. The paper closes with recommendations and implications for future AI development in a wider alternative assessment context.