The retention of artifacts created by students is required to demonstrate their attainment of standards to enter the teaching profession in BC. So in our case there is a driver that cannot be ignored. Electronic creation & archiving is the obvious choice for long term solutions in this situation. I believe re. our tool choice--Mahara--we have the flexibility for the students to provide what we need for reporting out, for developing a capstone portfolio to reflect & celebrate their accomplishments as well as morph it into something they can use to get a job. I think the "sell" would be more difficult without platform flexibility to meet the institutional & individual needs.
Re. faculty buy-in--as previously stated we must have this electronic portfolio and it must be built through our programs and classes. Faculty have a range of comfort learning new technologies--so I imagine a phase-in approach with early adoption driven by those who are passionate about technology and/or eportfolios will be the route. The need to tag content with course data (e.g. course codes) may create some interesting potential issues re. assessment of courses & instructors via eportfolio content--or not. One of the challenging aspects of working in post-secondary education, unlike the business sector--or even K-12 in BC, is that we can't take a day or 1/2 day and say "OK, today everyone in our department will learn the basics of how to work the eportfolio system." Even in K-12, the administration had control of a school based day--and could set the agenda.
It's also challenging for a school or department to look at each instructor contributing to the overall graduation/skill set of a student through each assignment. I think eportfolios, in the teacher credentialing area, can develop a more systemic perspective re. assignments then previously. Not just how does this assignment help students pass this course--how would it evidence that this student is now more ready to be a teacher--ready to be a credentialed teacher? At the same time, this could be a great asset to program development--helping align all that is done with the ultimate objectives of a program.