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Teaching ePortfolio

Faculty teaching General Education courses participate in a campus-wide effort to help students integrate their general education experience by weaving together an interdisciplinary understanding of their learning, connections to their everyday lives and cultures, and the relationship between their coursework and professional goals. 

Signature Assignments 

SLCC uses the ePortfolio requirement to connect the entire General Education experience for students. The Signature Assignment and Reflection component of your class is critical for helping students make connections between their learning, courses, and lives. How you design and explain your course signature assignment and reflection prompts to students has a direct impact on their engagement with ePortfolio and the results of our annual General Education assessment. 

If you are looking to update your Signature Assignment or preparing for a 5-year course review where you will need to align your Signature Assignment with the Designation map for your course, visit Signature Assignment and Reflection Guides on the General Education Committee Sharepoint site. 

Term Start Prep

Figuring out how to integrate the ePortfolio into a course can be daunting. To ease the process, we have created an ePortfolio Sharepoint site with resources and Canvas Commons pages that you can import directly into your case. Check this site before the start of each term to get the most up-to-date help. 

The Key Sections of an ePortfolio 

ePortfolios should help your students share who they are with their academic community, showcase and describe their best work, and illustrate the meaning they are making between their courses and their lives and goals.  Each section of the ePortfolio serves an important purpose for this curation of their learning journey. 

Your students’ ePortfolio welcome pages are an offering that helps you get to know who is in your classroom and what matters most to them. You can use what they share to think about activities that connect to the lived experiences of your students. They can help you understand important things about their culture and values. This information will help you provide examples throughout class that are tied to their passions and hobbies. They can help you get a sense of what supports their learning and what gets in the way.

Tip: One great way to help students get comfortable with ePortfolios early in the term is to have them submit their welcome page as a low-stakes term-start assignment. This gives them experience with Digication and simultaneously gives you an opportunity to get to know your students better.
The My Pathways pages help you get a sense of each student’s goals in your classroom. This can help you encourage them in ways that connect to what they are hoping to accomplish while at SLCC. Encouraging them to regularly update those goals based on new realizations helps them see that you are more than just a content expert. You are also actively invested in their success.

Tip: When mid-term rolls around and it is time for students to start thinking about what they will take next term, you can also do a temperature check on how students are doing in your class by creating a low-stakes reflection related to their learning goals. Are there any areas where they could use some additional support?
Course pages are used in a variety of ways that support student learning. They help students showcase and reflect on the work they are proud of in your class. They help them examine how they learn and use what they learn to build better study habits and life skills. They help students make connections between their lives and what they are learning. They help students identify ways that their experience and culture connects to what they learning in the classroom.

They also help faculty get a sense of how students are experiencing their courses and what students are taking away from their learning experience. SLCC uses these signature assignments and reflections to assess how students are learning general education outcomes and identify opportunities to support faculty in identifying opportunities to improve signature assignments that showcase general education learning outcomes. You can get support from the AD of General Education and the ePortfolio Manager to continuously improve the signature assignments and reflection prompts for your class based on what you most want students to learn and how that connects to our general education outcomes.

These course pages are also used in Five-Year General Education Course Reviews to help us support faculty in thinking about what is working or not working and how to revise the assignment to better meet the course and gen ed goals. As a best practice, we recommend that faculty preparing for 5-year course review work with the ePortfolio Manager and/or AD of General Education to make sure their signature assignment revisions align with the Signature Assignment Maps and to brainstorm ways to connect the course content more seamlessly with General Education outcomes.

Tip: You can have students showcase their best work or use the signature assignment as an opportunity to scaffold their learning and help them see where they started and where they ended up at the end of the term. These pages are where you specifically help students make their own connections between your course and their lives.
Encouraging your students to engage in events, activities, student unions, sports, and other great resources on campus will help them establish a strong campus support community and continue building connections between what they learn in class and what they learn outside of class.

Tip: Help students engage with the campus community by having them attend one campus event and update their Learning Outside of Class page with a reflection on how the event related to what they are learning in your course and any new insights they got from combining the lens of the event with the lens of your course.