Digication provides faculty the possibility to leverage the Courses option to accomplish their pedagogical goals and increase the efficiency of assessment processes. This feature can be therefore leveraged to benefit both faculty- and student ePortfolio-users.
The Course option provides a variety of capabilities to faculty members:
- faculty can create a Course page for each of the courses they teach and use it to manage their courses effectively
faculty can create ePortfolios containing course materials to enhance their teaching strategies and associate them with their Courses
faculty can create discussion spaces for students to comment on specific course materials
- faculty can invite students to associate their ePortfolios with the course ePortfolio or associate their own professional ePortfolios with it and inspire students
- faculty can create course templates for students to use as frameworks in which to develop their personal course ePortfolios
faculty can create assignments and set up student work assessment rubrics for efficient evaluation processes
Below you may find an overview and specific details that will help you leverage effectively the Courses and ePortfolios options in your dashboard to achieve the previously listed goals:
Create a Course
The Course option in the dashboard provides faculty with the possibility to manage the courses they teach with increased effectiveness.
To re-familiarize yourself with the steps for creating a new Course you may want to consult the following link.
Create a resource ePortfolio with course materials and associate it with your Course
Faculty can create an ePortfolio that comprises relevant course materials and share it with students by associating it with a given Course.
ePortfolios can be developed as virtual repositories of course materials and used to enhance the teaching strategies in a given class. Faculty can include in their resource ePortfolios a variety of files in different formats: rich text, images, video, audio, Powerpoint Presentations, and other kinds of files needed. Faculty can also embed in the course-materials ePortfolio external feeds, such as Twitter, and links to external sources that contain relevant materials. All these embedding features will permit faculty to engage students by presenting the curricular material in visually stimulating ways.
To take advantage of these capabilities you only need to create a new ePortfolio in your ePortfolio option of the dashboard that is dedicated to a particular course. In the new ePortfolio you can start embedding the desired materials and you can customize the background and coloring to suit your teaching aims.
After creating the course-materials ePortfolio you intended, you can share it with your Course created in the Courses option. The steps for doing so can be found here.
More useful information about customization of ePortfolio sharing options can be found in this article, and also by following this link.
Invite Students to Discuss Course Materials
The ePortfolio containing course materials can also serve as a space in which students can discuss and analyze specific aspects of the materials. The platform permits you to determine how focused the discussion should be, so you can specify the particular passages of the material you want your students to discuss. You can also use this feature to encourage student collaboration and peer-to-peer feedback.
Invite your Students to Associate their ePortfolios with your Course
Faculty can encourage students to create and associate their ePortfolios with a given course they teach. This way, students become more motivated to create well thought-out ePortfolios and gain the possibility to share their work with a larger audience consisting of both faculty and peers.
To allow students to share their ePortfolios with your course, you need to follow the same steps as those involved in associating a course-materials ePortfolio with your course. To review the steps please follow this link.
After having students contribute their ePortfolios to your Course, you can easily manage all the ePortfolios associated with that specific course by clicking on the ePortfolios tab of the Course.
Create a Course Template for your Students
Faculty may want to create Course ePortfolio templates for their students to provide them with the necessary encouragement for starting their own ePortfolios and to ease them into ePortfolio usage for a given course. The template ePortfolio can include a customized background and color that faculty consider appropriate to the course. Also faculty can include text and media files that inform students of the best usage of their ePortfolio space, as well as course-related categories of content. Faculty can opt to fill the template ePortfolio with further content if they consider it helpful.
Once a course template is created, the relevant student and faculty groups are added to the newly created e-Portfolio by default. This way, students can add their e-Portfolios to a given course immediately, and faculty and students can dedicate more time to substantive course matters.
Faculty can easily create an ePortfolio template by taking note of the steps documented in this article.
For a more in-depth look at ePortfolio templates, you may review the following steps.
- Create Assignments with Courses
Faculty can create assignments for each of the courses they teach in the Course option and associate them with desired assessment rubrics. Faculty can also import desired assignments from an assignment library as well. The assignments can be customized to meet faculty members’ needs.
To review the steps for creating assignments please refer to the following link.
You may also want to review the steps for creating and editing assessment rubrics here.
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