Facilitating Reflection on Year Abroad Learning - Digital Media and Portfolio Module

Everyone who works on Year Abroad matters knows what a transformational experience it can be. Students themselves, however, often seem unaware of what benefits they have gained or cannot articulate them. I developed the Year Abroad Portfolio module mainly with the aim of enabling deeper reflection on students’ year abroad learning experience, not after they return, but as they are going through the year. Through this module students have a framework to reflect on what they have learned from their experiences as they are going through these events, such as their greatest triumph of the year, or their worst day, and why. The tasks in the module challenge them to explore unfamiliar digital media such as writing a blog, creating a website or an online magazine, using video or animation, facilitating the development of new skills in the digital area also. A second aim is to relate personal learning during Year Abroad to future (professional) life, such as writing or talking about a time they learned from a mistake. A further aim of the module is to capture information for future students going abroad using tasks that require presenting us and informing us about their location. In my presentation I will walk you through the tasks of the portfolio module, which I piloted with UCC students and which has now been rolled out as a digital badge. In some cases students have far exceeded expectations and I will show some of the best examples of student work in my presentation, elaborate on my experience of how it has worked, as well as the background and concept of the module, risks (e.g. privacy issues), benefits (e.g. discovering talents) and feedback. The module was created for language students but can be applied in any context.