SIT223 – Information Technology Professional Skills Portfolio Assessment
This assignment is assessed against ULO2, GLO2, GLO6, GLO7 and GLO8.
1 Introduction
All the learning activities in this unit are designed to provide you with the opportunity of achieving the second learning outcome: Develop a portfolio that demonstrates evidence of emerging professional skills for practice in the discipline of IT. The activities you have embarked on during this unit, encompass the following Graduate Learning Outcomes (GLO):
• discipline knowledge and capabilities (GLO1),
• communication (GLO2),
• critical thinking (GLO4)
• self‐management (GLO6),
• teamwork (GLO7), and
• global citizenship (GLO8).
When you are completing each activity throughout SIT223, you need to think about how your learning impacted upon each of these professional skills. Your participation in the learning activities will provide the evidence that you need to show you have emerging professional skills which are under continual development.
You will be given the opportunity in your seminar in Week 8 to gain feedback on your draft portfolio from your tutor. The final submission is due in Study Week (Week 12).
2 What do you have to provide?
This assignment has three parts:
• Reflection on your employability skills (5%)
• Reflection on your presentation in assignment 3 – Shark Tank presentation (10%)
• Reflection on you learning throughout the unit (45%)
2.1 Employability Skills reflection (5%)
If you recall, we practiced Employability toolkit during the seminar on week 2. Your activities in seminar and then as part of your assignment 1, required you to analyse, discuss, and reflect on your employability toolkit results. You are required to do the employability toolkit questionnaire again (during weeks 10 or 11) and compare the results you achieve with your
results from your first attempt in the beginning of the trimester. In your reflection on the comparison, try to also answer the following questions with regards to your employability results.
1. Has there been any changes in the results? What is your justification for the changes if any (changes could be both increased, or decreased literacy levels)? If there are no changes, why do you think it is so?
2. Do you feel that your profile/results is an accurate reflection of your career thinking? What do you find most/least accurate?
3. Which aspects of the profile reflect your strengths? When completing the tool, did you take into account the capacities you have developed through sport, music and/or work?
4. Which aspects of your profile stand out as limiting your employability?
5. With this knowledge, where do you need to focus?
6. Given that your peers and classmates have also completed the tool and based on the discussions during the seminars and trimester, do you think that you are too easy or hard on yourself?
7. Would it be useful to talk to a careers advisor, lecturer, program coordinator or mentor? If so, who could you talk to first?
Please try to keep your reflection concise. While there is no word limit (no lower or upper bounds), we would expect you to provide around half a page of reflection on this activity (12-point font, 1.0-line space).
2.2. Shark Tank reflection (10%)
For your assignment 3, you work as part of a group, preparing a Shark Tank presentation to pitch your idea and the business model. For most this should have been your first attempt at trying to pitch to investors and make them interested in their idea. Given the changes in Information Technology, you will most probably be running your own start up company, or work for one.
In this section of your portfolio, we would like to reflect on your activity during assignment 3, and seminars for weeks 8 and 9. More specifically we want you to provide the following:
1. Briefly describe what the idea was and how did you plan for the start up to be formed (what was the business model)?
2. How did you come up with this idea? What were the clues?
3. What did you learn from this activity?
4. Do you think that you would be continuing this path (to pitch ideas, and running your own start up in future)? and if so, what would you need to change/learn/do?
Some of your experience from Shark Tank activity would relate to your broader GLOs, like team work, communication, and global citizenship. You may use them for your reflection on your GLOs as well (see 2.3 below).
2.3 Learning Portfolio Reflection (45%)
At a minimum, for each of the professional skills (GLOs) listed in section 1 introduction, you must provide evidence that demonstrates that they are developing or being refined to professional standards and are reflected upon in a cohesive portfolio. You need to be aware that your learning is not neatly packaged into activities that are directed solely at one learning outcome. The assessment maps to specific learning outcomes but there are others that are not explicitly assessed. For example, self‐management is not assessed as part of assignments 1, 2 or 3, but the learning you achieved through the activities supporting these assignments includes a significant amount of self‐management. Self‐management is not just about being an independent learner but includes skills that you develop through activities such as teamwork, including communication, collaboration and emotional awareness.
In preparing and compiling your portfolio, you will need to be explicit in identifying which skills you are referring to throughout and, given portfolios are a communication medium, you will also be demonstrating your communication skills.
You should be constantly updating your portfolio with your experiences in the seminar activities and the other assignments from this unit as they are all key sources of evidence.
You need to provide a reflection on the following GLOs:
• discipline knowledge and capabilities (GLO1),
• communication (GLO2),
• critical thinking (GLO4)
• self‐management (GLO6),
• teamwork (GLO7), and
• global citizenship (GLO8).
In the following section, we provide you with more details of what a reflection is and a sample template to get you started. However, please keep in mind that you are not required to exactly follow the template, but keep notice of the content provided in them so that you can provide a complete reflection. Any other format or template you use should include the required content as the template describes.
2.3.1 What is a reflection?
Reflective learning is about helping you make connections between what happens in the classroom and what you need to do in practice. It is an opportunity for you to think more deeply about your learning, about the connections between what you are thinking, what you are being taught, and what you are doing. Put simply, a reflection will help you look at an event, understand it and learn from it. The written reflection serves as evidence of the learning you have achieved.
In order to achieve reflective learning, the type of learning needs to be active rather than passive (passive learning occurs in a lecture theatre for example whereas active learning is where the learner, i.e. you, is fully engaged with and in control of the learning activity). Reflective learning allows you not only to learn from the activity itself but also to learn from your participation in the activity.
One approach is the what, so what, now what. As far as this Portfolio is concerned, your commentary on your reflective practice should include your observations about:
1. Experience – what learning impacted upon this particular skill? You need to be specific and cannot, for example, simply reference “in‐class” but rather “in the Media Watch presentation class…”. Make sure you present your experience, not the team, or others in the class or seminar. You need to be egotistical in this context.
2. Reflection – so what, discuss what you have learnt; examine what you have learnt about yourself, relationships, attitudes, understanding, practice etc.; how your experience differed from the theory; what was significant to your learning.
3. Outcome – now what, a new perspective, a change in behaviour; how will you apply the learning in the future; what you need to do to improve future outcomes.
An excellent example of how to implement the what, so what, now what model has been developed by Academic Liaison, Employability and Skills (ALES) at Cumbria University and can be found at
www.cumbria.ac.uk/Public/LISS/Documents/skillsatcumbria/ReflectiveModelRolfe.pdf.
2.3.2 Sample template
Learning Outcome
Specify which ULO or GLO, this entry is referring to
What?
Suggested approaches to your response.
… was the problem, the situation, was I trying to achieve, actions did I take, the response of others, consequences for me or others?
So what?
Suggested approaches to your response.
…does this tell me, imply, mean about me, others? …other knowledge can I bring to the situation, what should I have done to make it better, is my new understanding of the situation?
Now what?
Suggested approaches to your response.
…do I need to do to improve, resolve the situation? … broader issues need to be considered if this action is to be successful? … might be the consequences of this action?
(the prompts in this template are adapted from Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model)
Your submission must be concise and to the point. You may include more than one relevant example from this unit in relation to the What? component but each must relate to different aspects of your reflection. So for instance, if you include several examples in relation to GLO2 – Communication, you have to make it clear how each contributes to your learning in your reflections in the so what?/now what? components of your submission for GLO2.
2.3.3 Resources for further assistance
There are a number of resources available to assist you with this assessment including:
• Cottrell, S. (2015): Skills for Success: Personal Development and Employability.
Palgrave Study Skills. Chapter 8: The art of reflection. (see library website)
• Deakin Air (2014): Portfolio and reflection – Study support. Available via https://video.deakin.edu.au/channel/Portfolio+and+reflection+‐
+Study+support/49238832
• Williams, K, Woolliams, M, and Spiro, J (2012): Reflective writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Pocket Study Skills. (See library website)
• VCC Baking & Pastry Arts (2013): What is Reflective Learning? Available via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIsznZR4hzY
• Pas examples of portfolios are available in CloudDeakin in Resources>>Portfolio Samples. Please note that these are portfolios submitted by students during the past trimesters. While they are mostly similar in content, your portfolio assignment and its rubric is different.
3 Submission
You will prepare either:
• A single document which will be submitted in CloudDeakin to the appropriate dropbox as a Word document (.docx, .doc or .rtf) or in Adobe PDF format.
• OR CloudDeakin Portfolio presentation, which will be submitted to the appropriate dropbox.
• OR any other format we can view which may include a website you develop for this, a PowerPoint presentation, a video, etc.
You do not need to stick with the tabular format of the template nor do you need to only include text. We encourage you to include images etc. as evidence. Although the portfolio assignment is about the learning you have achieved in this unit, you are bringing skills to the table from previous learning and life experiences. So, you need to emphasise how your skills have grown, improved, extended in the context of this unit and other outside unit experiences.
4 Final words
You can expect to prepare approximately one pages per graduate learning outcome. If you use one and a half pages for your employability toolkit comparison and your Shark Tank reflection, this would equate to approximately a total of 8 pages if you address all the requirements of this assignment.
Remember that this assignment is worth 60% of the marks for this unit so you can expect it to be a substantial piece of work. As you have already completed a number of weeks of learning activities you should start building your portfolio as soon as possible so you have a significant draft to share with your tutor during week 9 seminar.
It is worth noting that of the 150 hours you are expected to allocate to this unit during trimester, you should anticipate to spend at least 25% of the time on assignment preparation, more realistically half the time (so at least 30 – 40 hours). This assignment is worth 60% so you can anticipate you need to spend at least 18 hours preparing your portfolio submission. If you are aiming for a good mark (as opposed to a pass) you will need to put in more effort, and hence more time into the preparation of your portfolio.
Good luck.
Iman (on behalf of the unit team)
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