The N-TUTORR fellowship programme is an opportunity for third level students to work on projects to improve their college experience.
Last year Munster Technological University Cork classmates Shannon Morrissey and Nodhlaig McCarthy were awarded an N-TUTORR Fellowship for their proposal to develop a step-by-step guide to help students make the most of an innovative e-portfolio solution, called Portfolium, that allows them to showcase their college work.
Portfolium is like a 3D CV on steroids. It enables third-level students and recent graduates to present all their academic work and projects in one place, as well as relevant extracurricular experiences such as volunteering or internships.
It also combines a social networking element that allows students to connect with businesses and employers and showcases their academic accomplishments in text, images and video form, as well as links to platforms such as LinkedIn and X.
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Portfolium was already available to Munster Technological University (MTU) students as part of Canvas, the digital learning platform on which lectures are posted and assignments submitted in the college. But it was not being utilised by students in their department, says Nodhlaig McCarthy who, like Morrissey, is in her third year of a four-year degree in coaching science and sports pedagogy. The pair received funding under the N-TUTORR fellowship to develop their Portfolium guide.
For McCarthy, a camogie and Gaelic football player who hopes to become a coach and a sports physiotherapist, Portfolium offered the perfect format in which to store and record all the achievements she has gained during her years at MTU, including work experience and volunteer work.
“It is an online platform which showcases a student’s best work to future employers, classmates and lecturers,” she explains.
“You use it to create an archive, uploading Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints or voice memos, and you can link it to YouTube videos. If you put it up and attach your CV, your LinkedIn, Twitter and all those platforms to it and it just looks really professional.”
Thanks to McCarthy and Morrissey’s step-by-step guide, their classmates can now use it to store all the various coaching practice certificates they have gained through their years at college. It also allows them to show the work they undertook to achieve each certificate.
“So, for example, we’ve done all these modules such as our FAI PDP 1 coaching certificates in soccer, which included drawing up lesson plans and doing projects. But at the end, all that activity boiled down to just one line on our CV. Prior to Portfolium there was no way to display all the work we had put into getting those certificates, in a way that people could see,” McCarthy explains.
“Now students can put up videos of themselves coaching, show their lesson plans and projects and all the different elements that went into that work.”
It allows employers to see the person behind the achievements. “In coaching, 90 per cent of what you’re going to be doing is volunteer work, which might just make up a small part of your CV. But on Portfolium you can show the volunteer work you did with your local club, say who you worked with and what you did, upload videos of yourself in action, and explain the pedagogic approach you took,” she says.
The social networking element is important too. “You can connect with people that you have worked on projects with, to show you can work in those kind of team environments,” she explains.
The step-by-step guide is already being used by first- and second-year students on MTU’s coaching science and sports pedagogy course, with McCarthy and Morrissey hosting workshops to help them make the most of it.
“Previously, if you were doing a CV, you had to try and remember the various courses you did in first year, and the projects you worked on. With Portfolium the students can just tip away at it from the beginning, just adding those details as they go,” she says.
The new handbook also helps students make the most of the various media they can include, from pictures and video clips to voiceover and text. Morrissey and McCarthy designed the guide using universal design for learning principles, which put a premium on user experience and accessibility.
“The guide is designed to be easy to use and accessible to everyone. Because we have text you can read it, but there are also pictures and videos, and Shannon recorded a voiceover for it too. So you can hear it, see it, read it and get the information in whatever way you need it,” she explains.
Developing the guide has given both students a much clearer understanding of the benefits technology can bring to the learning environment. “It has also shown me the importance of showing my work and making myself stand out to future employers,” McCarthy explains.