Dean's Council Meeting

Quinnipiac University || May 2017

During the Spring 2017 semester, I was fortunate enough to have a specialized job position created for me at the University: an ePortfolio Peer Catalyst (EPC). Like a peer catalyst (PC), I acted as an active liaison between the students of the PS*300: Compassion Training course and their professor, Thomas Pruzinsky. However, unlike typical PCs, I contributed my specialization with ePortfolio integration so it could be piloted as a core, structural element for this specific course. Students were asked to create a project similar to an integrative capstone as they built an ePortfolio that reflected how they would instill compassion into their own individual professional fields in the long-run. Given the incredible success of students in this course and their ability to make their learning and reflection visible, Professor Pruzinsky and I were invited to present at the Dean's Council meeting at the end of the semester about student performance in the course and how the ePortfolio provided them a highly structured, yet completely individualized space for students to showcase their reflective growth as future compassionate achievers. What was the most valuabe aspect of this experience was not only supporting my claims regarding the power of the ePortfolio in higher education with our course's most recent success, but also presenting the ePortfolio's importance to academic leaders from across our Universty. Presenting to deans from each of our University's schools allowed me to help initiate Quinnipiac's ePortfolio initiative and help them to do the same in their own individual schools campus-wide.

The Prezi presentation below was presented to the Dean's Council. The "dandelion" visual and metaphor that is used throughout the presentation was coined by me during one of me and Professor Pruzinsky's weekly meetings to discuss the course and the students' progress. Being the English major I was, I used a metaphor to describe how the course works. When you blow a dandelion, its many graceful particles and seeds disseminate and replant themselves wherever the wind takes them. Likewise, throughout the progress of this course, our students will learn how they can take their psychological and scientific knowledge of compassion into their own individual fields. Like free-flying dandelion seeds, they will plant themselves as ambassadors and catalysts of compassion into the lives that they touch through their future occupations.