Assessment

As you know, BYU is anxiously engaged in the process of assessment.  To that end, each course that you take will have COURSE-LEVEL LEARNING OUTCOMES which are directly tied to PROGRAM-LEVEL LEARNING OUTCOMES which are directly tied to THE AIMS OF A BYU EDUCATION.  In other words, our hope is that the things you learn in class will help you achieve a some goals we have set for you before you graduate.  These goals will in turn further the University's objectives.

                                                                                                                                  
For example:

In this class, TMA 115, the COURSE LEVEL LEARNING OUTCOMES are:

1. Critical Tools: To equip students with a set of critical tools that will aid them in their practical work.
2. Solid Foundation: To establish a solid foundation for students as they prepare to take higher-level critical studies course, particularly Dramatic Literature (TMA 395-396-397) and Contemporary Performance Practices (TMA 401).
3. Participation in Society: To provide students a stronger understanding of how the world around them is constructed and how they might better participate in, resist, and/or affect that world.

Taken together, these CLLOs support one primary PROGRAM-LEVEL LEARNING OUTCOME:

1. Core Concepts: Students will demonstarte a comprehension of the core concepts, processes, history, and theory of performance.

Finally, this core concept is linked directly to the BYU AIMS of:

1. Human Knowledge
2. Thinking Soundly
3. Life-long Learning

                                                                                                             

In order to know if we have met these goals, TMA faculty annually reviews work drawn from a variety of classes in the program and discusses how well we think we are doing.  From this assessment process, we identify areas where we can improve and we make concrete plans for change.

This is the basic process behind new classes that you see on the books, the selection of particular plays for our season, forum topics, new assignments in existing classes, and more.

We are asking for you help in providing the work that we can review.  The artifacts that you post in this ePortfolio will be used by the faculty in our annual assessment cycle.  It can also be the first posts of the digital portfolio that you use for the rest of your career.  

Creating an ePortfolio

For the final in TMA 115, your job is to create the template for an ePortfolio that you can use to house the good work you do during your time at BYU.  You are free to make your own choices about:

1. The blog hosting site (Blogger, WordPress, Drupal)
2. The blog design and format
3. The name of the blog
4. The artifacts you upload now (and later)
5. Who will have access to the blog

As this portfolio might be of use to you for your entire career, we recommend that you be professional in your choices.  We also recommend that you make the blog access completely public.  If you are going to use these as portfolios, they will need to be public anyway.  Knowing that anyone can see what you post will also make you extra-accountable for what you create.  And it can be used as a social networking tool--we hope you can follow each others' blogs and comment on each others' work as a means towards more collaboration and interdisciplinary work. 

You are required to:

1. Have in place a clear technique for organizing your artifacts according to the PROGRAM-LEVEL LEARNING OUTCOMES.  We recommend that you tag your posts with labels of the PLLOs.  Create a gadget in your sidebar to provide easy access to these labels.   
2. Make the blog public, or share the blog address with the TMA faculty so that they can review your portfolio throughout your time at BYU.
3. Keep the blog updated with carefully selected artifacts.
4. Tag these artifacts with 1-2 labels drawn from the PLLOs.
5. Contextualize the artifacts with enough information so we get as complete a picture of the work as possible.

We anticipate that you will take it upon yourself to learn how to create a blog, if you don't yet know how to do this.  We will provide some basic training in-class, but expect you to do most of the work on your own.  The internets are full of instructions and tutorials.  Each of you also has at least one friend who has a blog and can help you out.  If worse comes to worst, call your little sister and she can show you how.  

Artifacts

What should I archive?

I have created a page for each of the PROGRAM LEVEL LEARNING OUTCOMES.  If you go to that page, you'll find the outcome itself and some examples of possible works to archive.  We recommend that you save work from across your BYU career so that you (and we) can see your progress.

Example Artifact: "Capstone"

This was my capstone project.  From pre-production work to the final performance, I spent about 8765.81 hours working to develop the piece.  The production required me to collaborate with about 20 colleagues across the year's time.  The work was obviously co-created, but a shared process was a central emphasis of the work.  This was a recording of the aftermath of the production (for which no video exists).  3 July 2009.