The e-portfolio community in Germany is not as visible, vivid, and sustainable as it is for instance in United Kingdom or Austria. There is no policy support by public authorities at the federal or regional level. Activities are limited to local research, to development of proprietary e-portfolio solutions, and to pilot studies. In the context of this investigation, the identification of e-portfolio activities as well as of e-portfolio researchers, developers, and users turned out to be a successful achievement.

Because the community is not in high gear, no e-portfolio portal or community platform has been set up. Some researchers maintain a (private) weblog or contribute to an online platform run by their department. Despite of this fact, there exists a German-speaking community Portfolio-Schule (Germany, Austria, and Suisse) of pedagogy researches and teachers who investigate the application of paper-based portfolios at school.

Concerning e-portfolio solutions, web-based systems — partially LMS with some e-portfolio functions — are the predominant choice. None of the systems provides import/export facilities for IMS e-portfolio encoded data which reflects the lack of relations to the international community. Also, there is neither any open source nor any ready-to-download-and-test solution on the market.

E-portfolios are not anchored in any school curriculum. Therefore, if they are used then only in form of a class education accompanying tool. Pilot studies are being conducted occasionally at German schools. The most prominent study is eportfolio-hessen. There exists only one higher education curriculum, the Master of Distance Education Program (MDE) in Oldenburg, which requires the use of e-portfolios to finish the grade successfully.

Other e-portfolio related activities deal with personal development planning and competency/skill management (e.g., Talent Relationship Management (SAP), KOWIEN, Professional-learning).

A feasibility study identified 200 PDP initiatives and 50 PDP passports which are merely locally used. Based on the study’s results, a global framework has been devised. It’s implementation, the ProfilPass, is currently being disseminated all over Germany and it is considered an instrument that completes EuroPass.

A constant key problem in Germany is data protection that has a strong visibility in the public and in the media. It is a key obstacle for tracking employee data. So far, there is no explicit employee data protection law. However, the protection of individual-related data is considered a base right. The key data protection principles are: data prevention and data economy, necessity, and earmarking. Whenever an employer wants to track individual-related data he has to inform his employees, to ask them for permission, and to show that his intentions are justified and that they do not violate his employees’ right on informational self-determination. Against the background of this complex issue, companies rather prioritise the implementation of e-portfolios low.

Eventually, we can summarise that Germany has a relatively low but growing degree of awareness of e-portfolios.