TESU portfolio tips

[davewill]

... FYI, it sounds like TESU is tightening their PLA requirements, thus making it extremely difficult for teen/traditional age students to qualify unless they are VERY strong in a subject and able to prove how and why they learned it, plus how they have put it into practice.

It would be much harder for someone who merely studied a subject to write a successful portfolio. They would have to go into much more detail on everything. One example portfolio from the book was trying to get credit for a theater production the person had participated in. The narrative was quite involved because she had to tie all of the learning objectives into the one experience.

I was able to simply describe various projects I had designed, spending a little time explaining my process and what solutions I considered and why I made the choices I did and how they worked out. My validation letters were chosen so that they could specifically address the same projects I used in my narrative.

If a test is available, I think it's the easier way to go usually. For instance, I did intro to programming at Saylor simply because it was absurdly cheap and only took an couple of hours of my time to get my testing journey started. However, I also could have just waited and used the same portfolio i used for the programming courses on it.

I also could have banged out the portfolio faster. Like tesu-acct-student, I had to struggle with not knowing how much was enough and procrastinated and fiddled with it longer than I should have.