TH490: Senior Capstone in Theatre ePortfolio Resources: Introduction

What are ePortfolios?

ePortfolio: A personal website that communicates and showcases skills, experiences, and learning to an audience (e.g., employers or graduate schools). The purpose of an ePortfolio is to tell a story about your professional identity and support that story using artifacts. Those artifacts are curated and contextualized using reflective text that explains how your artifacts connect to future plans or goals.

Types of ePortfolios

Portfolios generally take three forms: reflective, showcase, and/or assessment. When writing reflective portfolios, students evaluate their own performance and self-identify gaps therein; document their professional, and occasionally personal, values and beliefs and changes over time; and connect theoretical ideas to applied practice. In showcase portfolios, students self-select artifacts representing their best works; showcase portfolios document students’ achievements and may include work samples for future employment. For assessment portfolios, students document how their achieved learning outcomes and may be asked to include specific rather than self-selected artifacts on their portfolios. While some portfolios use a single form, e.g. a reflective portfolio, other portfolios may serve multiple purposes and combine two or all forms.

For TH490, the main purpose of your site is to showcase your work and skills, although you may find it beneficial to include some reflective pieces as well.

Key Concepts

ePortfolios show employers that you have communicative strengths, regardless of your major. These include:

• Audience: The ability to tailor your writing and design to a particular community such as your disciplinary or professional community
• Purpose: The ability to focus a communicative task around a specific and identified message with artifacts and writing reinforcing that message without going off topic
• Critical Thinking through Reflection: The ability to use clear and coherent writing to contextualize artifacts and connect those experiences to your professional goals
• Visual Literacy: The ability to apply visual design principles to create a site that is aesthetically pleasing for your audience and up to your professional community’s standards for design
• Technical Competency: The ability to create a site that is easy to use, efficient, engaging, and accessible for your audience
• Effective Communication:The ability to create a cohesive ePortfolio, bringing together writing, design, artifacts, and technical knowledge to show yourself to be a competent professional communicator

"An Introduction to ePortfolios" by Amy Cicchino & Heather Stuart of Auburn University is licenced under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 / Slight modifications from original

In this Libguide, you will find articles explaining the benefits of having a portfolio, some helpful tips on starting your own, and some inspiration—for when you are feeling overwhelmed or lost. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.