Skip to main content

Portfolio: What Articulate recommends

By

Articulate's blog makes helpful suggestions about creating your portfolio. Here's what they suggest. What are your thoughts?

Focus on quality over quantity.

A great e-learning portfolio should spotlight your skills and experience. That means your goal is to curate a small collection of high-quality work samples that demonstrate a range of skills. Don’t get too hung up on having dozens of projects in your portfolio. It’s better to showcase three or four beautiful, unique projects than a dozen mediocre ones with a similar look and feel.

Provide a brief description of each project.

Don’t simply post a bunch of links to your portfolio website and call it done. A great portfolio should look nice AND give prospective clients and employers context for each project. Write a brief description explaining why you chose to include each project in your portfolio. You can also highlight the challenges the project presented, the solutions you found, and any goals you achieved for yourself, the client, or the learners. Even just a few sentences will give visitors to your e-learning portfolio a better idea of who you are and how you work.

Feature your technical skills.

E-learning professionals are often masters of multiple apps—both for authoring e-learning courses and creating custom media to enhance their projects. If you’re proficient in multiple apps, be sure to name them and provide links to relevant samples in your portfolio. For example, if you’re a whiz in Storyline 360, call that out and link to a published Storyline project. If you’re a pro at editing video in Adobe Premiere or podcasts in Pro Tools, call those apps out too.

Showcase your professional background and achievements or endorsements.

To underline your professionalism, make sure your digital portfolio includes a page that highlights some key information about your professional background. You don’t want to make this into a copy of your résumé (although linking to your resume from this page can be handy), but you do want to give potential employers or clients a sense of your background.

To strike the right balance, consider including things like:

  • Where and what you’ve studied
  • Companies you’ve worked with or for
  • Any areas of e-learning specialization, such as creating K-12 education or training for the pharmaceutical industry
  • Any professional certifications 
  • Any awards or honors for your work

Another thing to include is any professional endorsements or reviews of your work. If you don’t have any yet, ask a trusted colleague or happy client to write a short recommendation of you and your work. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Share your comments here

Popular posts from this blog

How much do apps matter in Instructional Design?

By
https://www.aura.com/learn/social-media-privacy-risks This week in my graduate course we discussed social media tools - Web 2.0 - that are useful in learning environments. My disclosure is that I typically don't use social media for personal use, and this makes it a bigger jump to think about using it for learning purposes. The irony is that I enrolled in this elective class because I am intrigued about using social media for learning environments.  The points I vacillate on are data security and time commitment. With data security I would need to ensure that learners' data, user profiles, etc. are protected. This isn't the same thing if it's higher education and the university is using an LMS. FERPA and a contract protect student data and how it's used. With free social media apps there's more risk to a learner's content. I'm still exploring these tools to determine if there are settings to protects our learner's identities and content. One thing th...
1 comment
Read more

Knowledge Management and your social media network

By
 When you think about your social media networks, is it your go-to for staying in the know (is that term even used any more?). As part of my graduate studies my peers and I are examining these concepts. Specifically, we want to know if your social media network has developed into a level of knowledge where you can find the resources you need. Is it the first place you look when you want to know more about your topic of interest? The first social media networks I followed were health-related. What I liked about them is how dynamic and current they were. Previously I was referring to a few websites, but soon lost interest because the content didn't update very frequently. In addition, if the site moderator didn't keep the conversation moving it wasn't motivating to check in on it because there wasn't new input.  My focus now is to find an opportunity in instructional design. This is where knowledge management for this community is important to me. Members in these communi...
1 comment
Read more

Schedule a weekly blog entry

By
  As a graduate student of Instructional Design I'm taking a class in using Web 2.0 social media tools. My first thought was "how am I going to fit one more thing into my weekly to-do list?" I'm juggling graduate school, fulltime work, a side gig (though only about 8-10 hours per week), and wanting to add a fitness routine to my schedule (I haven't been successful -- yet. Tomorrow is another day!). However, the idea of using social media tools in a learning environment is something that motivates me to learn more about. Although I'm taking it slow in adopting all of the tools shared in my graduate class, I am getting used to blogging. It occurred to me tonight as I work on homework: the key is being consistent. When I realized that I only need to commit about 15 minutes per week (minimum) to blogging I recognized that this is something I can manage. This helped me de-stress and see that blogging isn't distracting me from my other tasks but its giving me an...
1 comment
Read more