Your final practicum assignment is to design an online portfolio to summarize your practicum experience and also to highlight the work you have done in the practicum and in the MMC program thus far, your other professional experiences or examples of your work, your personal and professional brand, etc.
You may use any online website or portfolio building tool you wish to use (e.g., wordpress.com, wix.com, weebly.com). The online portfolio should have at least three tabs or sections, as described below. You may include other sections or tabs on the site as you wish, and you are certainly encouraged to keep this portfolio as you move forward in your professional career. You can always add tabs after the practicum course is complete (if/as you wish). You can also modify the names/headings of the sections below on your ePortfolio page. The titles below are meant to be descriptive, but you can provide a more unique or creative name if/as you wish.
About Me
The About Me page is designed to give you space to introduce yourself, your educational and professional background including your MMC track (strategic communication management or multimedia journalism), your professional goals, how your ePortfolio is organized, and any other relevant information you may choose to share.
My Practicum Experience
In this section, you should summarize your practicum experience and also answer some questions that will help connect your practicum experience to your course work. First, there should be a paragraph or so that introduces your practicum, i.e., the organization and/or department you are working for (include links if/as appropriate) and your role within the organization or department. Describe the kind of work you have been doing on a day-to-day, weekly and/or monthly basis.
Management Analysis
There should be a Management Analysis heading or section where you draw upon concepts or theories of management and communication that you learned in the MMC program, which seem to apply to your workplace. If it is impossible to determine a theoretical approach in your situation, what management theory/model should be used and why? What are your ideas for the organization/department’s enhancement of management of its employees and/or communication?
Applied Learning or Critical Thinking
Finally, there should be a section on Applied Learning or Critical Thinking, where you evaluate the use or non-use by your organization or department of the following three elements: a) research b) ethical approaches c) strategic approaches. Feel free to make comparisons to coursework or lessons learned in program courses if/when applicable. In this section, you also should provide an assessment of the performance of your department or the organization as a whole (focusing on communications and/or management). What recommendations would you make to senior management for improvements and/or enhancements, and why? Please be specific and provide examples when possible.
Examples of Your Work
In this section, please provide examples of your work that you did in your practicum and/or in other courses or experiences you had during your MMC program. You can insert links to blogs or web content you wrote or created, upload documents, etc. If it is not clear what work you did or if you only did a portion of the work shown, please make that clear. You may also include work from other internships or work experiences here, but you may want to do that after you complete the JOUR 777 course or somehow specify which work came from your practicum or other MMC program-related experiences and which work came from somewhere else. If you have questions about what should go here or in other areas of your ePortfolio, please feel free to ask.
The format for these ePorfolios is being adapted from the USC Connect Graduation with Leadership Distinction (GLD) ePortfolio assignment and content guide. Please see the links below for examples of GLD ePortfolios from all disciplines, followed by some sites that were designed specifically by undergraduate mass communications majors. Their guidelines and the sections you see on the example sites below differ from what is described above, but these examples might help give you some ideas. You might even recognize one famous face among the SJMC students/alumni who created the content at the links below. Feel free to draw on examples of other successful ePortfolios you may be familiar with as well. As long as it has the content outlined above, which will help us evaluate your JOUR 777 practicum experience and what you have learned in the MMC program overall, the format, design and other specific content decisions are up to you.
Examples of GLD ePortfolios from all disciplines:
Examples from UofSC SJMC MMC students:
ePortfolios Due
The ePortfolios are typically due on the last day of classes during the semester in which you are enrolled in JOUR 777. The instructor will provide a specific due date once you are enrolled in the course.