Mandy Pacheco
As an instructor in the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, my students come from a variety of academic and career backgrounds and have equally diverse goals. Some are traditional college age, some are mid-career, and a few already retired from the workforce. Digital portfolios have served as a tool for helping them to better understand and synthesize their educational and professional journeys. Reflection is naturally built into this exercise, as they consider important elements of their past histories and strategically build stories for the future.
For my youngest students with limited time in the workforce, digital portfolios often serve as a reminder that professional experience is just as important as academic credentials. For the more seasoned, they tend to remember how far they’ve come, and are inspired to continue to stretch themselves, though not without the occasional technological growing pain.
My background in career counseling and experiential learning informs the way in which I teach digital portfolios. In class, we discuss the importance of audience analysis as well as artifact selection. With prospective employers or graduate school admission officers as primary targets, students are encouraged to research the traits, skills, and experiences most important to the stakeholders in specific career fields, and craft their stories to match.
Digital portfolios are living entities that should be changed as experiences and goals evolve. Rather than a one-time project, I encourage my students to continue developing their sites long after my class ends, and to post a link on their LinkedIn profiles, resumes, and/or professional websites.
When first confronted with a digital portfolio assignment, students sometimes balk. A perceived lack of technological skill, career experience, or time can cause students to experience anxiety at first. Breaking the assignment down into manageable components, offering in-class “workshop” opportunities, offering small-group peer feedback sessions, and adequate instructor availability for questions and ungraded feedback along the way tends to lessen the stress. In the end, most students are proud of their efforts. Many use the digital portfolios developed in my classes to procure internships, jobs, and graduate school admissions offers, and tend to find that the effort invested was worth it.