14 Project, Portfolio, Performance
The payoff to students for doing well in school is a high Grade Point Average and a diploma. That is good as far as it goes, but most of our IT students really want more beyond just the school-based rewards. They want jobs, income, professional advancement. They want a secure, fulfilling, and happy life. Also, because students are often resource constrained – time, money, and attention for studies being at a premium – the more school work can carry them directly to the promised land of income enhancement, the more they will appreciate our efforts. For this reason, it’s a good idea to focus on three P’s – projects, portfolios, and performances. The reason is simple. Each of the three P’s work well for formative and summative assessments (school requirements), but they each also speak directly to job search and career enhancement. The connection between more traditional educational outputs like passing tests or writing papers to workforce skills is indirect at best. Projects, portfolios, and performances, by contrast, speak directly to what employers are really looking for and can have a positive material impact on student job search in near term. The return on educational investment for students will be far greater if we target our curriculum and assessment practices at the three Ps.
Projects
Projects emulate what work groups in business actually do. Namely, they involve goals, requirements, deliverables, quality assurance, testing, and collaborative processes to make all these things happen. The more students in class create projects similar to actual workplace productions, the more qualified they will become for the actual workplace. In school, because of the calendar, we often need to steer students toward a quasi-waterfall model of project management. The school term is only so long, so project stages may need to be set in advance to get results on a short timeline. It is also possible, however, to adapt something like Agile sprints to school projects as well. One technique that is very simple for this purpose is to have students file weekly progress reports with retrospective self-assessments of what they achieved, and forward looking goal setting for the upcoming weeks. This keeps projects on a school-friendly schedule while allowing students to adapt and adjust along the way.
Portfolios
Portfolios are not so much a project assignment as they are a medium for presenting project assignments to the world. Like most everything else nowadays, HR recruiting is largely digital and Internet-based. Job seekers must assume that prospective employers will be using search engines to check them out. Ideally, students should want their best work to show up prominently at the top of any Internet search for their name or their work history. A self-designed online portfolio is great for this. IT students, especially, are trying to convince employers they can add value to a company’s digital sales or operations. Showing the