Each weekly portfolio is to be no more than 4 pages long. The portfolio shows your development of understanding during the unit. Naturally, this will make the portfolio different for everyone. Each student's background, education, current and past work experiences is what makes it different. Each student's personal researches will be different.What you need to do is to give yourself enough time to reflect and show how you have thought and come to grips with the ideas that address the learning outcomes of the unit. The amount of time you should be allocating to the unit is 12 to 16 hours per week (which includes writing the portfolio). So there should be a fair bit of time for you to make the reflections and reach a depth of insight that will make the portfolio meaningful. With each week's portfolio that you submit you do not include the writing that you made for a prior week. Instead you use the same portfolio template using only the section for the week you are writing about. In other words each week's portfolio is a reflection upon that week. You should however, revisit the whole of the unit learning outcomes each week.The portfolio for any previous week is a reflection of your insights and thoughts for that week. Over the duration of the unit you will find that there is a development and change of your ideas as you study the material. You will then have opportunity at the end of the unit to consolidate everything and show how you have gained the insights that the unit is seeking to provide. At the end of the unit you should review your weekly portfolios and consolidate them into a single submission. You should make a personal reflection in this submission. This is the assessment that gets marked in detail.
It is to your benefit to have the personal discipline to make sure that you do not get behind. If you are allocating 12 or 16 hours per week for the unit then there is plenty of time for the portfolio. If you find that one week you slip then ok, but the unit is fundamentally planned so that you need to allocate 12 to 16 hours each week. Two hours lost in one week means that you need to do 14 to 18 hours the next! The unit is straight forward, but there are lots of web sites to visit and material to download. The text books are only part of the story and you won't be able to do the unit with just the text books. Unfortunately, much of the material is written from a North American perspective. You will need to consider other industry sectors and also to be able to translate the learning outcomes into an Australian or other cultural perspective. Therefore, you will need to download other files and visit web sites to be able to gather the material you need in your portfolio. There are no bonus points for getting the weekly portfolio perfect from the first week but marks will be awarded for timely submission (as per the schedule) and for content that generally addresses the tasks for weekly portfolios listed above. Understanding and familiarity will only develop over time. As you prepare the portfolios' each week and keep revisiting the learning outcomes and adding the unit material then you will gain insights required. Unless you do that on a weekly basis you won't have the appropriate perspective to make the journey and reach the destination by the end of the unit.