Today was the first meeting of the LaGuardia ePortfolio Capstone research team. The purpose of the research group is to help develop a list of best practices for capstone courses at LaGuardia. I am fairly comfortable working with ePortfolio because I was part of the original research team and helped to flesh out some of the technical solutions that were needed to move the project forward. I was honored to be asked to participate in this new research effort. While we will be looking at capstone courses from LaGuardia as a whole, I think that many of the issues that we will be investigating in this research will also directly help me improve some of the course work within the New Media program.
It is my belief that capstone courses within any major or program should reinforce the most important concepts and skills critical to that discipline. Students engaged in a capstone level course should be fully able to demonstrate a predefined level of expertise in their given field. Within a community college setting like LaGuardia, the purpose of the capstone course takes on a special significance. In this type of ground level academic setting, the focus of these courses should be to assist the student in refining existing talents as they prepare for entering the workforce or transfer to a 4 year institution.
This is the approach that I take when teaching the New Media Technology capstone course, New Media Project Lab (CIM160). A large component of the course is focused on getting the student to reflect on their skills and professional interest. The idea behind this approach is to help the student define the best path for their new career. The New Media Project lab is structured to make sure that students, during their 2 years of New Media instruction, have covered and fully understand key digital concepts that will be required by potential employers. The work assignments are crafted to force the student to display their skill and contemplate where their future path should take them (based upon an honest assessment of their skills and digital portfolio).
The meeting was productive. We got off to a good start by identifying a number of areas that needed to be defined before further work could be accomplished in developing capstone “best practices”. Some of the questions that the research team has identified as important were:
- What is the relationship between the discipline and the capstone?
- Does the discipline radically change the shape of a capstone?
- How can our capstone courses prepare students for a global market?
- How do we decide what courses should be defined as capstones?
- How do we decide what material should be covered in the capstone course?
- Are capstone courses geared towards transfer different than those geared towards workforce transition?
- What course sequencing issues should we be concerned about?
- What is the relationship between ePortfolio and capstone courses?
- How will changes in capstone courses affect earlier courses in the sequence?
- Will this force new competencies to be stressed in courses earlier?
- Should there be a studio hour attached to the capstone (similar to eportfolio)?
The team will be meeting over the next semester to investigate many of these questions. It will be interesting to see where the research and facts take us.