|
The Online Career Portfolio: Helping Our Students Succeed
Karen B. Andrews
Director of Career Services
Kennesaw State University
kandrews@kennesaw.edu
Posted: August 2005 Student Affairs Online, vol. 6 no. 3 - Summer 2005
Four years ago in Las Vegas at the NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers) conference I had the pleasure of listening to some of my colleagues discuss the merits of online career portfolios (OLCP). Up until that time I was not a fan of OLCP. My opinion was similar to others in the career services profession. I thought it was absurd to expect employers to go through a voluminous portfolio when they barely have the time to read a one page resume! During the NACE presentation, I had my epiphany moment. It is not about a presentation tool to employers (although that can always be a possible use). The real purpose of the OLCP is as a developmental tool. If introduced early enough in a student’s college experience, the OLCP can assist our students in understanding the relevancy of their experiences. Using skill sets as the foundation of the OLCP brought new significance to the portfolio. It was no longer just a scrapbook.
When I returned back to Kennesaw State University (KSU) from NACE, I was encouraged by my Vice President to develop an OLCP for KSU. Little did I know the dramatic change this project would make in the Career Services Center. After development of the first phase of the project, we piloted the OLCP on a group of 200 students in 6 classes in the fall of 2002. At the end of the semester we surveyed the students and had a meeting with the faculty. The response was very positive.
We spent the spring of 2003 making a few technical changes and then I spent the summer meeting with every Dean and Department Chair on the campus. I had learned from my research that if the OLCP was going to succeed on our campus it was critical to have the support of the faculty. I had spoken to several colleagues across the country whose attempts at having an OLCP on their campus had failed due to the lack of faculty support.
In the fall of 2003, the OLCP was released for the entire campus through the classes. Our initial hope was to have 750 students using the portfolio in the fall. We ended up with 2500.
Since that initial success, many positive outcomes have come as a result of the Online Career Portfolio. Our College of Education (COE) requires the OLCP of all their majors. The OLCP played a key role in the COE’s successful accreditation review by NCATE. The COE has really championed the OLCP. It is critical to get a program to spearhead the OLCP. Academic departments do seem to note what each other are doing.
Since the initial development, we have added many improvements. The most significant is an Archivist Module. This module allows for individual academic departments to “save” a copy of a student’s portfolio for future study without hindering the student from making future changes to their version of the portfolio. The archivist also has the ability to customize the categories a student in their major can choose. This greatly helps the departments to focus the portfolios on the learning outcomes they have established.
We also added a feature to the faculty module. Besides the ability to review OLCP of their students online, the faculty can also retrieve skills reports and make comments on the portfolios to the students. The students are notified via email that their professor has critiqued their portfolio and they can go to their “view” version of the portfolio and get the feedback. This critique is viewed only by the professor and the student. If the student emails a link of their OLCP to another person, that person will not be able to view the comments made by the professor. Confidentiality was critical in the creation of the OLCP. Too often people forget that the www stands for World Wide Web, meaning the world has access to all your information. Not a good idea. This is why we made all modules password protected.
Currently at Kennesaw State University, almost 200 faculty members use the OLCP in their classes. This comes to about 6,000 students having a portfolio at KSU. At the end of every semester we still survey the students and faculty to see how they like the OLCP. Although response rates are low (around 30%), the results indicate that 85% of the students surveyed found the OCLP beneficial, 81% planned to continue using the OLCP even after their class requiring it had ended, 87% found the OLCP user-friendly, and 85% would recommend the OLCP to others. The faculty response has been even more positive with 100% of the faculty stating that they would use the OLCP in their classes again and would recommend the program to their colleagues, although the response rates for the faculty surveys are even lower at 15%.
The positive response to the Online Career Portfolio continues to grow at Kennesaw State University. Several student organizations use the OLCP for their members. More departments each semester add the OLCP to their syllabi. The visibility and status of the Career Services Center continues to strengthen on campus. Our relationship with the academic side of campus has never been better. In a time when collaboration is promoted across our campuses, the OLCP has become a natural bridge builder.
Click here for printable version
|
