ePortfolio Development: Enterprising your Degree (EDED)
Graduates must be able to exhibit a variety of abilities such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and teamwork, as well as use these graduate attributes in a variety of career scenarios. This means that efforts should be undertaken to strengthen young people's workforce connection. Graduates must have the required competencies and attributes for companies to choose them. To address this need, as well as have students reflect on their development of graduate attributes through their undergraduate experience, CTL rolled out a module called Enterprising your Degree: ePortfolio Development (EDED). This module is positioned as a capstone for final year undergraduate students, and postgraduate students registered for PGDiP, Honours, Masters or PhD degrees.
The EDED module promotes the development of electronic portfolios, or ePortfolios, which are structured collections of student work, demonstrations, and artifacts that provide evidence of students' learning development, success, and skill set. The overarching aim of the EDED module is to prepare final-year and postgraduate students for the workplace. This is achieved by teaching students how to evaluate their skillset and market themselves to employers, investors, and peers. Another important aspect of this module is to help students create their own website showcasing evidence of their skills, and create an outstanding professional LinkedIn profile. Students are also taught to think about how they make career decisions, to put together a future work plan, and to create a CV that can be used to apply for work.
This module is offered for free to students and is positioned as an 8-credit, off-curricular module. This means that it does not impact degree attainment. When we asked students if they would recommend this module to others, they said:
“There are certain things that we should know before being exposed to the world of work that we think we have an idea of and that absolutely we don't.”
“I would recommend this module to other students because it is a very helpful module for them to prepare themselves for the outside world as soon as they leave university, they need to have a plan on how to put themselves more out there which is what this module offers.”
EDED is offered in both the first and the second semester (students can choose the semester that best suits their schedule as it is a repeat of the content) and is presented in a 2 day workshop across the Bloemfontein and QwaQwa campuses. Postgraduate students who are not on campus can participate in the module asynchronously. The asynchronous option is available to all students who register for EDED, to accommodate timetable clashes, the need to work through content again, etc.
Contact us
E: EDED@ufs.ac.za