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Using ePortfolios to Plan and Pursue Career Objectives

To Support Graduate Students and Post‐Doctorate Fellows

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What is the number one profession for someone with a PhD in Sociology?

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“My expectations have changed since I started my PhD. I am open to a lot more career-wise, partially out of optimism and partially out of desperation. I have too much education.”

- SFU Graduate Student

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Academic Track is Broken…..

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Identifying strenghtsRole of risk takingRelationship building

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•Flexibility •Students as experts

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INTEGRATION SELF-AWARENESS

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Self Awareness

• Reflection • Discovery • ePortfolio an

appropriate tool

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Learning Journey

• Discovery• Document and

assess their progress

• Develop an integrated picture of their learning journey (Bhattacharya & Harnett, 2007)

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ePortfolio Architecture

• Upload pre-work and post-work associated with core sessions– Documents created– Key take-aways– Insights– Actions committed to/plans to complete

them

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ePortfolio Evaluation: is it strengthening integration and awareness?

• 25 trained on ePortfolio• 11 had completed those components

associated with core sessions they had attended

• 10 interviewed

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• Where is it?• Hidden treasure• Love-hate relationship• More docs at once• Visual layout• Photos• Private and Access• Not intuitive/user friendly• Lost to familiar

Canvas ePortfolio

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Inquiry:

“APEX asks the questions the ePortfolio creates the space to explore them. Its not a published thing like LinkedIn, its more like a living document, a work in progress.” – graduate student

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Reflection:

Deepening or Widening Thinking

“I found it useful to reflection, I don’t normally do that, I’m very busy. I normally just reflect in my head but when you write it down it does force you to take things deeper. The ePortfolio was helpful because it included different questions than what I would ask.”

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Reflection:

Summative rather than generative

“Most of the deep thinking I do in the sessions, the portfolio is more like a summary documents, it keeps a record so at the end I can look back at where I have been. Canvas is not very generative for free writing or thinking.”

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Integration:

Connecting Curriculum With Behavior

“I retain more of the learning from actions I take because of it—like my task was to make contact with at least one person during a workshop. Writing down the challenges I faced after doing that made those learnings more cemented, more solids. I have done lots of other networking since then but it comes back to that first time, what worked and how I can do it differently.”

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Integration:

Weaving Curriculum into Cohesive Whole

“I like that I will have an end product where all of my information is together., because the program is pretty complex with lots of different parts this ties it all together.”

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Integration:

Weaving Curriculum into Cohesive Whole: empowering effect

“I find I’m pretty avoidant about a lot of the APEX material, because it’s about thinking of the future. I like that the ePortfolio puts it all in one place. It’s less threatening because its material that you made yourself.”

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Recommendations

Challenge: finding time/remembering what do to Solution: email reminders

Challenge: Navigating architecture Solution: as much templated as possible

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Conclusion

“I think you can’t rely on it too much, in that the real value of it is that its part of this program that has all these face-to-face experiences where really great collaboration happens.”