In June of 2021, I was contacted with an internship offer from Judi Haskins, the director of the peer leadership program I have participated in since I was a sophomore at Montana State University. The internship, she told me, would focus on a new initiative for ePortfolios, and include website design work, content creation, and workshop opportunities. Intrigued, I jumped at the opportunity.
The preliminary stages of the internship involved predominantly gathering information and figuring out what MSU's rendition of an ePortfolio program would look like. This included a lot of meetings, a lot of research on best practices, and a lot of visits to both Auburn University and Salt Lake City Community College's websites for their own ePortfolio projects. Eventually, we settled on using roughly the same outline for our students as SLCC has created. Why reinvent the wheel, we thought, when the car has already been built?
A constant inspiration, SLCC's ePortfolio support site for their program was endlessly helpful in my crusade to build MSU's program. Students at SLCC are required to create and maintain an ePortfolio in order to graduate, and their program includes guidelines, tutorials, a unified platform for students to use, and examples from students whose ePortfolios particularly demonstrated what the program was meant to promote.
Of course, we didn't want to copy SLCC's program outright. For one, ePortfolios are not required for MSU graduates and are instead predominantly an optional engagement piece that students are not obligated but are encouraged to complete. We are also fortunate enough to be an Adobe Creative Campus, so the obvious choice for a platform for the ePortfolio was Adobe Spark. And though I borrowed the four sections used by SLCC -- Welcome, Goals & Outcomes, Coursework, and Outside the Classroom -- we decided to tailor the content requested in each section to MSU students with a mind towards our ePortfolios being assessed with less of a grading-oriented system.
Because of my engagement with Sophomore Surge, I have interacted a lot with first year students throughout my college career. Because of this connection, we decided to make the first semester of the ePortfolio program freshman-facing, focusing on fostering intention and involvement from the beginning of these students' academic careers. Through dedicated work with the Campus Advising Action Team (CAAT), I began to formulate a website that would contain all of the information, both for students and faculty/staff, to make ePortfolios possible for the MSU community at large.
Because much of my work throughout the summer was guided by and in conversation with the CAAT committee, I had a unique perspective on the reasons behind introducing an ePortfolio program. As I designed MSU's ePortfolio website, I included elements of the program's aims to serve students and allow them a space to reflect on their achievements, including attainment of the university's recognized core qualities. Gaining access to MSU's web design program also gave me the unique opportunity to take a few quick online courses on both web design and universal design, ensuring all content uploaded would be accessible to anyone interested.
An unforeseen but certainly welcomed side effect of this work was a forced familiarity with Adobe Spark. Initially we had entertained the idea of giving the students a choice in platform, since many different disciplines work on something akin to ePortfolios. The College of Business, for example, has all of their students create a LinkedIn profile as part of their professional development. However, in exploring different avenues we decided that the best way forward would be on a united platform. Then, we were put in contact with Academic Technology and Outreach (ATO), an office on campus that includes a Digital Literacy Integration Team that works closely with Adobe and employs student ambassadors to promote and demonstrate different Adobe products.
This connection was a turning point in the creation of the ePortfolio program, because I suddenly had the help and support of an entire office dedicated to the advancement of technology and learning on campus. It was serendipitous that we should begin working together. With the decision to stick with Spark, I was able to not only populate the MSU website with more focused support, but I also began to familiarize myself with the program and its features.
With minimal design experience and an unwarranted amount of confidence, I began creating graphics for the ePortfolio website. Though working on the MSU domain allowed me access to stock photos from around campus, I wanted to include other visual elements on the site to create a more interesting, dynamic experience for users. I made images like the one on the right in the post feature of Adobe Spark, increasing my knowledge of Spark usage capabilities as well as making me more aware of brand design, since all of my images had to conform to MSU's brand parameters -- most importantly, the color palate. DELETE>
As summer drew to a close and the beginning of the fall semester loomed closer, I began to look into designing modules and workshops to run during the school year. The semester lent itself perfectly to breaking up ePortfolio creation into three sections; Module one would lead students through learning how to use Adobe Spark and help them create a full ePortfolio shell to later populate with content, module two would fall right before advising and give students the opportunity to look into what classes they were interested before meeting with their advisors, and module three would have students filling in the rest of their ePortfolio with applicable content including reflection on the semester and on the years ahead of them in their college careers.
As the program's development continued, its goals became more clear. These ePortfolios would be a place for students to hone skills such as reflection and communication, as well as making them more conscious of design elements and putting forth their strengths in a unique and representative way. Administrators hoped ePortfolios would encourage students to be more intentional and involved in their college careers, and I attempted with each tweak and development to honor these goals. These portfolios, they articulated, would and should be living documents that grew and changed as students progressed through their college careers.
Part of preparing for August and the start of the fall semester was setting up workshops, including times, dates, and locations that would be accessible to as many students as possible. We decided that the best course of action would be be to offer a couple workshops (2-3) per module period. This ended up being per month during the semester, with our first round of workshops scheduled in September, second in October, and final set in November. We also decided on different days and times because students have such a wide variety of class schedules and we wanted to cast the widest net for engagement.
The ePortfolio website went live right before the semester began, with the first couple of workshops for September outlined. I used CatsConnect, a tool used by MSU to schedule and collect RSVPs for events, to link each workshop date on the website to an event page for the workshops. The biggest question we had, going into the semester, was: How are we going to create interest and engagement in this program?