During my partnership with the University of Texas we developed a program to help students showcase their skills and prepare to enter the workforce by building an ePortfolio program and eLearning curriculum to maximize their outcomes and opportunities after college. This program we implemented to achieve several key goals including:

• Students would build ePortfolios to consolidate their learning and projects to aid in future job applications post graduation.

• Students should develop a new skillset that will make them more valuable to future employers.

• Students should feel confident in what it means to deploy these skills in the context of a business, not just within the college ecosystem.

After conducting a needs analysis by inviting beta tester students to attempt to create their portfolios, we found a number of areas that would be hurdles to student success in meeting the goals:

• Students feel overwhelmed with all of the options available to them when building a website and are unsure where to start.

• Students do not really know anything about how websites work or what makes a good or bad design.

• While adult college students can be self-directed in areas they are familiar with, our testers showed that they needed more initial guidance in this unfamiliar space in order to get started.

When building the ePortfolio program itself, accessibility and awareness were key. We needed the program to allow students to fill in a template and get live in a day or develop real skills that could make them more competitive in the hiring market. We also needed to drive awareness of the program to students around campus. To accomplish these I covered a multitude of

• Designed the full workflow from marketing to sign up to website launch and worked directly with multiple departments including dev, billing, branding, and support to create a seamless experiences for students who sign up for the program.
• Developed multiple marketing campaigns including print flyers, email marketing and digital screen ads to encourage sign ups and increase engagement with actively participating students.
• Met with stakeholders in the UT system to plan additional initiatives and areas to roll out the solution.
• Authored and created a full eLearning experience including self paced video learning, knowledge assessment, and practical project.

Given the diverse backgrounds and needs of students participating in the ePortfolio program we decided to adopt a few different learning modalities for our training:

• I created a self-paced eLearning module to teach students the foundations of how websites function and the types of tools available in the market. This training also covered design best practices and the basics of SEO.

• Upon completing the module, students were required to take an online assessment to determine how well they retained the information presented. A grade of 75% was required to pass.

• I developed an experiential learning project that tasked students with creating a website for a fake business. I delivered all of the content and instruction they needed to start but gave them the freedom to design it how they liked. Upon review, our team gave them feedback to force them to use more complex features of the platform.

During the duration of our partnership we saw consistent growth in the adoption of the ePortfolio program. This program drove a number of successes for both students and the CMS platform I worked with. Our biggest accomplishments included:

• 2000 students joined our ePortfolio program including 200+ students using their website for a summer internship portfolio.

• Generated $650k in software license revenue for the SaaS company I was working for.

• Students who completed our eLearning training would go on to create their own ePortfolio that pushed the design into new areas beyond the basic template we provide, demonstrating skill mastery.