Environmental Studies Pilot
Starting Fall 2014, students from Mark Shibley's Fall Environmental Studies Capstone class (ES 494A) will participate in an ePortfolio Explorations pilot. Participation involves using a template to create a Google site, customizing the site, adding content, and giving the SOU ePortfolio Task Force feedback on the process. In return, the Center for Instructional Support will provide individualized training, consultation and support to help you create and maintain your ePortfolio.
You will be able to customize the ePortfolio for multiple uses, including use as an online resume.
What can you do with an ePortfolio:
- Collect work that you've done, in an electronic format, for re-use later.
- Organize your work.
- Reflect on your work, to make connections with previous experience, across courses, and between school and work.
- Showcase your work to different audiences, for different purposes:
- Graduate school application — to show the quality of your previous academic work.
- Your family, your friends — to share work that you are proud of.
- You - to reflect on all you've accomplished, and celebrate.
- Your instructor — to provide evidence of what you've learned, get feedback, and show your progress over time.
- A potential employer — to demonstrate your skills, knowledge and abilities.
Examples of ePortfolios
Get Started!
- Fill out the ePortfolio Exploration Project Contact Form.
- Create your ePortfolio and customize color.
- Add some ePortfolio content.
Videos about ePortfolios (2:30 minutes)
Comments about ePortfolios
Student
Putting my portfolio together made me feel pride and joy.
Employer
The single most important skill to help potential employees get in the door is the ability to self-reflect and to be able to articulate the connections between their experiences and the needs of the job they're applying for. They need to be able to concisely articulate what they did (skill, competency or ability), how they did it (a story), and why they did it (thought process about the choices they made). Creating an ePortfolio is the process of engaging in collection, organization, reflection and connection that leads to a person's ability to speak intelligently and concisely about the what, how and why. In other words, to tell the story about themselves.
Instructor
Students who wait until their senior seminar or capstone course to try to pull together and organize their work, to show that they have achieved a required learning outcome, often discover that they don't have copies of the work they were going to use to demonstrate that achievement — they don't have that computer any more or it crashed, the files are on a thumb drive they can't find anymore . . .