The MDE capstone course is planned to be your final course in the MDE program. It should be culmination of your work in the program. The two main activities planned for this course: the e-portfolio and the research project.

In both cases, we believe that it is important that you start planning for those activities early in the program. To help you accomplish this, we have made available a set of resources, which we have organized as a wiki - The MDE Capstone Wiki. In this wiki you will find guidelines to work on both deliverables, as well as examples that illustrate what was accomplished by other students.

In the case of the e-portfolio, as you will notice, the e-portfolio requires you to display several pieces of your work completed throughout the program. This is one of the aspects that actually requires you to start planning early. In many cases, students have doubts about what they should display and what they should do if they have unfortunately not kept back-ups of their assignments. Here are some answers to most common questions related to this topic:

Do I need to display ALL my work?
No. You don't have to display all your work. We advise you to display SAMPLES of your work, which can demonstrate your competecy as a distance educator. To help you decide what to display, it is suggested that you consult the rubric for e-portfolios and the MDE assessment plan, where several of the major competencies to

What can I do if I have not backed-up my work?
We urge you to be careful in backing up your work throughout the program. In case, you have had problems backing up your work here are things that you should do before getting desperate or asking for help to WebTycho support.

1. Assess how much material you still have: List courses, and make a list of assignments that you have for each course.
2. Consider major competencies and see what is missing.
3. Search for courses in your class list and in your list of archived classes. Recover anything possible there.
4. Make a list of the courses from which you believe assignments are necessary. If these are more than two years old, your situation might be a bit more difficult.
5. If possible contact the faculty member with whom you had that class and ask if he or she has a copy of the specific assignment. They are not required to keep copies, so ask gently and accept whatever answer they give you.
6. Look for printed versions of what you did, and consider scanning them.
   
7. If these were group deliverables, consider contacting group members for copies.
8. If none of the above works, make the list of what you need, with the information about the course (name and number and term) and contact your program director (Stella Porto). You will need the approval of the PD to be able to ask for support from WebTycho support. Have in mind that WebTycho support does not appreciate such requests. Think of the number of students they have to work with, so depending on how old your course is, you might simply end up not having access to the material.