Tag: ePortfolio

Michigan Tech Essential Education Seminars prepare students for Success

Starting college is a pivotal moment, and at Michigan Tech, we’ve designed a first-semester experience to help new students navigate it successfully. The Michigan Tech Seminar in Essential Education, offered through a wide variety of introductory courses, helps students not only get acclimated but also chart their academic journey, practice reflection, and build a sense of community. This isn’t just another class; it’s an integrated experience with core modules that are adapted by instructors to fit the unique needs of different majors.

The seminar is built on three key pillars:

Essential Education: these modules help students understand the “why” behind their education. By introducing Michigan Tech’s Essential Abilities, students are prompted to reflect on our key learning outcomes and their own strengths and areas for growth. This self-assessment is more than an exercise; it’s a tool for creating a unique academic plan. Students are encouraged to explore a wide range of opportunities early on, including Essential Ed minors, undergraduate research opportunities, study away programs, and student organizations, helping them set concrete goals and map out a pathway to achieve them.

Husky Folio: Michigan Tech’s pedagogical approach to helping students recognize, reflect on, and collect evidence of their learning, is a powerful tool for career readiness. The Husky Folio modules introduce students to the practice of documenting and reflecting on their learning. Through a series of assignments, students learn how to use our Husky Folio platform to tell the story of their academic and personal growth. This is valuable practice not only for future classes but also for preparing them to articulate their skills and experiences in a job interview.

Husky Life: The Husky Life modules focus on crucial aspects of student success: academics, community, and wellbeing. These modules connect students with vital campus resources and encourage them to build relationships with peers, faculty, and staff. Instructors can tailor assignments to fit specific professional development needs, with many sections focusing on resume building and departmental networking. The modules also address key life skills, with instructors able to choose topics like time management, stress reduction, and coping with loneliness, ensuring a holistic approach to student wellness.

Because we recognize that transfer students have unique needs, a seminar specifically designed for these students was also developed. Evidence suggests that a significant number of our transfer students may face academic challenges, with nearly half having a GPA of 2.5 or lower (about 33% of our total Michigan Tech undergraduate student population have a GPA below 2.5). We know that having a sense of belonging on campus contributes to academic success for students. (https://www.ihep.org/publication/student-experience-and-belonging-strong-outcomes/) Through the Michigan Transfer Seminar, we are working to build community among new transfer students while also helping them learn about campus resources and plan for their future, ensuring they have the support they need to succeed.

The success of the seminar is a testament to strong cross-unit collaboration. Developed by faculty from diverse academic disciplines as well as student affairs staff, this partnership has created a seamless introduction to campus life, beginning with summer orientation and continuing through the fall semester. This collaborative effort also resulted in a $650,000 State of Michigan MiLEAP College Success grant, which will support continued development of the modules and innovative teaching practices over the next three years.

The seminar also serves as an incubator for new ideas in curriculum design. The shared modules are designed to be both structured and flexible, allowing them to be effective in courses ranging from small seminars to large lectures and in subjects as varied as Engineering Analysis, First Year Arts Seminar, Explorations in Computing, and Natural Resource Professional. This adaptability ensures that students across all disciplines receive a high-quality, relevant experience.

You can learn more about the shared seminar modules and other seminar-related programming through the “Essential Education Resource Hub for Instructors” in Canvas <Essential Ed Resource Hub for Instructors> Courses that serve as seminar courses can be found on our Michigan Tech Essential Education website <Program Requirements | Essential Education | Michigan Tech>.




Folio Thinking: Inquiring, Reflecting, and Integrating Knowledge

Welcome to the first installment of the Husky Folio blog. In the coming months, we’ll explore Michigan Tech’s new Husky Folio program, which builds and enhances metacognition using ePortfolios to inquire about, reflect upon, and integrate knowledge. At its foundation is the concept of folio thinking.

Folio thinking encourages deeper thinking, self-assessment, and growth by maintaining a personal collection of work, ideas, and reflections. This approach helps students track their progress, identify areas for improvement, and develop a habit of continual self-improvement. It fosters a deeper understanding of key concepts, encourages individuals to connect their learning to real-world applications, and empowers them to actively participate in their intellectual development.

You may have heard the term folio thinking used in the last few years as a diverse team of Michigan Tech faculty and staff worked to infuse the curriculum with more opportunities for reflection. This team studied modern learning theory and best practices in helping students succeed in and out of the classroom. One “high-impact practice” recognized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is the use of ePortfolios to “[make] meaning through reflection and thereby [develop] deeper, more intentional identities as learners.”1 Folio thinking is the process of collecting, organizing, reflecting on, and drawing connections between learning experiences. The ePortfolio is a student’s electronic home for this work, their Husky Folio.

Suppose you have a LinkedIn profile and are active on the platform. In that case, you’ve already engaged in a simple form of folio thinking by curating the information you feel best reflects your professional identity. Husky Folio is a more structured yet flexible way of collecting learning experiences and reflective activities and integrating them into portfolios. Depending on the need, students can turn those artifacts into portfolios demonstrating learning to faculty, recruiters, admissions officers for graduate school, or friends and family.

Starting this semester, students taking one of the First-Year Seminar courses will gain experience using the ePortfolio platform PebblePad. Students will have the opportunity to consider where they would rate themselves on the new Essential Abilities and reflect on an experience or concept such as academic planning. They will also create an “About Me” ePortfolio.

Incorporating folio thinking into existing coursework can be as simple as taking a few minutes at the end of class to share their thoughts on how the course material relates to their personal experiences, career goals, or societal issues. For example, “How do you think the concepts we’ve covered so far relate to your future career in [specific field]?” or “Discuss how the material we’ve studied impacts society. What role do you see yourself playing in addressing these issues?” You can also provide more formal opportunities, such as having each student in a group project write an individual reflection on the group dynamics, their contribution, and what they learned from the collaborative process. You can find more examples of ways to incorporate folio thinking into various courses by reviewing the resource document below and learn more about the value of learning portfolios from this helpful video.

In the next installment of the Husky Folio blog, we’ll discuss the tool PebblePad and begin to explore creative applications in each unique course and degree. In the meantime, if you want to know more, visit the William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning Open House on Thursday, September 5, between 1 and 2:30 p.m. and see our table! You can also attend a Lunch ‘n Learn on October 22 and learn more about how faculty are employing folio thinking pedagogy in their courses this semester. You can also email Dr. Nancy Barr at nbbarr@mtu.edu to discuss how a Husky Folio could creatively support your course needs.


1 Eynon, B., & Gambino, L. M. (2017). Introduction. In High-Impact ePortfolio Practice: A Catalyst for Student, Faculty, and Institutional Learning (p. 1). Stylus.


Written by: Nancy Barr, PhD, NREMT, Assessment and Writing Support Specialist, Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education