AAEEBL Indianapolis: Keynote, Plenaries & Sessions

Driving?

Park in North Street Parking Garage. Parking passes available at registration.

Hine Hall is connected to the North Street Garage by a sunbaked skywalk which goes over a two-lane side road, Blake Street.

Walking? 

Fastest option: Walk in through the Blake Street, side entrance, into Hine Hall, up the stairs to the second floor: turn left, through the glass doors. The ePortfolio Studio is on your left.

Avoid stairs: Use the North Street Parking Garage elevator -or- the North Street covered entrance [enter, turn left, walk through the glass doors, by the Post Office, to the elevator. On the second floor, exit left, take the first left, and walk straight [100 yards] to the Institute for Engaged Learning.

SLIDE DECKS: 

AAEEBL WORKSHOP WEDNESDAY ePortfolio CLASS VISIT slide deck.pptx

HANDOUTS: IUI ePortfolio Taxonomy, The LEAP Challenge, Eight Essential Elements of a High-Impact Practice, 4-Circles-of-Integration Worksheet23-assessment-institute/

Abstract: WIX website Templates can be a vital tool for easy integration of ePortfolio in a curriculum or course setting. However, learning how to design, build, and share them are often the very barriers that prevent faculty and students from getting started. Recent innovations in template creation have allowed ePortfolio experts from IU Indianapolis, Tara Callahan and Olivia Cannon,  to address this challenge by leveraging Wix Studio to create customizable, professional-quality templates for free.

This workshop will guide participants through the full template process, from conceptualizing a structure, to building a design, and converting that template into a shareable template for faculty and students to use immediately. This session will also cover practical coaching strategies for helping instructors and students adopt templates effectively using  best practices and metacognition.

This is accessible for faculty at any level, to build any sort of ePortfolio to support ePortfolio efforts on your campus. This tool is an easy way to build your repertoire and toolkit on your campus, regardless of the amount of ePortfolio programming you currently have.

Dr. Megan Mize is the Director of ePortfolios and Digital Initiatives in the Center for Undergraduate Education at Old Dominion University, where she has led institution-wide efforts advancing reflective, integrative, and high-impact learning practices since 2015. Her work focuses on ePortfolio pedagogy, multimodal composition, digital literacies, reflective learning, and the institutional infrastructures that support meaningful implementation at scale.

At ODU, Dr. Mize has contributed to major initiatives including the University’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), General Education reform, and the Mellon-funded Monarch Humanities Internship Academy (MHIA). She regularly collaborates across academic and administrative units to support faculty development, experiential learning, assessment, and student-centered digital learning practices.

Her scholarship explores ePortfolio labor, digital resilience, reflective pedagogy, and multimodal composing practices. Her work has appeared in The AAEEBL ePortfolio Review (AePR), Peitho, and Field Guide, and she is co-author of the recently published North American ePortfolio Labor Mapping Phase 1 Report.

Resources

Keynote slides

For years, our Honors College lacked a common curriculum, leaving student experiences fragmented. Within 24 months, we successfully implemented a required Senior ePortfolio for every graduating honors student. This presentation focuses on the process and strategies used to transform ePortfolios into high-value assets.

A key shift was moving away from linear tracking. We found that requiring semesterly updates felt like a chore, so we pivoted to a retrospective model in which seniors reexamine their fresh year personal statements and journey maps, curate signature experiences, and showcase emerging expertise through artifacts connecting classroom learning and professional competencies.

The Honors College carves out time for seniors to revisit, finalize, and polish their ePortfolios in a 0/1 credit-hour course. An asynchronous Canvas course provides structure for three showcases that challenge students to reflect on who they were, who they are, and who they are becoming. Each showcase includes at least one artifact and a reflection connecting that experience to their professional goals.

To sustain this at scale, we implemented a Near-Peer Feedback Model. By hiring students/alumni as TAs, we provided relatable guidance that helped students move beyond surface-level descriptions and helped faculty manage workload. 

We reframed the ePortfolio as a tool for students to sculpt their professional identities.

LINK to HANDOUT on EMERGING EXPERTISE https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PEZcNyhakXMG1doGX6k4HrL-NQuQVWmK/view?usp=sharing

Abstract: The undergraduate Health Administration Senior Capstone at IU Indianapolis required a final reflective paper summarizing students’ achievement of program competencies. The intention was in alignment with Donald Schön’s claim that “reflection-in-action” is central to professional learning, and the statement attributed to John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.” However, students’ reflective papers yielded uneven, often superficial work, as students had little prior experience with structured reflection and struggled to recall earlier learning.

To address this, faculty replaced the paper with an ePortfolio, introducing ePortfolio work in a 200-level course, so students could curate artifacts and reflections throughout the program. Through a collaboration with the ePortfolio Studio, program faculty worked with a Studio staff member to develop a program-wide template using open source platform Wix, aligning student and faculty needs with effective ePortfolio design.

The template now scaffolds reflection across core courses and key experiences, enabling students to document and demonstrate competencies over time, a concept promoted by Kathleen Blake Yancey’s observations that reflection is the connective tissue of learning. Our new ePortfolio anchored reflective approach promotes deeper engagement, supports early identification of career skills, and makes learning outcomes more visible.

Initial integration began in 2023, with the template launched in summer 2025. Ongoing collaboration focuses on refining the ePortfolio experience to better support targeted learning outcomes and real-world application.

Pablo Avila is the Associate Director of The Center for Teaching and Learning at LaGuardia Community College in The City University of New York. His work involves supporting college-wide ePortfolio implementations and the use of instructional technology tools that help faculty advance their teaching across disciplines. He co-designs and co-facilitates professional development seminars where faculty strengthen their teaching practices. Pablo is also a doctoral student in the Higher and Postsecondary Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the teaching experiences of part-time instructors who teach developmental education courses in mathematics at community colleges. 

Decades of student affairs research indicate that extracurricular student life generates significant growth, development, and learning, but assessing that learning has focused either on whether participating in specific programming elicited desired outcomes, or on broad cohort-level correlations with attributes after graduation. Decades of researchers have called for authentic assessment of participating in student life, aligned with institutional learning outcomes.

Eportfolio implementations are, on the other hand, usually launched in academic affairs, and while some efforts have been made at documenting extracurricular experiences, these efforts rarely involve thorough and meaningful eportfolio pedagogy and assessment.

At Pacific University, students in the School of Pharmacy prepare structured assessment portfolios that incorporate reflections and evidence for leadership, self-awareness, advocacy, and professionalism from any of their experiences inside or outside of the classroom. They also prepare showcase portfolios for sharing with clinical educators and prospective employers, including authentic evidence of their unique professional identities. Student leaders use the portfolio platform to plan, review, and reflect on the events they plan, and these reflections can serve as evidence in both assessment and showcase portfolios.

Effective eportfolio practice can help integrate extracurricular learning with academic goals, and extracurricular life represents a promising growth area for eportfolio implementations.

MEET THE SPEAKER: Andrew Longhofer works in student development and assessment in the School of Pharmacy at Pacific University near Portland, OR. In this role, he has provided strategic direction for the Personal and Professional Development course sequence, the School's portfolio-based assessment of professional skills and attitudes, and student governance and student organizations within the School. He started working with eportfolios during his master's program as a graduate assistant supporting internships for academic credit and undergraduate research. He is also a PhD student in Higher Education Leadership at Colorado State University, studying student participation in shared governance and learning outcomes assessment in student life.

AAEEBL MEMBERS ONLY! Join us for drinks and second floor access at the Vonnegut Museum & Library.

*If you registered for AAEEBL 2026, you're an AAEEBL member now!

Abstract: Driving student engagement and success requires the intentional integration of high-impact practices (HIPs) across undergraduate curricula. This integration should be thoughtfully scaffolded throughout the student experience, emphasizing quality, evidence-based design, and alignment with established best practices rather than simple adoption. 

Equally important is scaling HIPs to ensure equitable access for all students within each major. To maintain effectiveness, these practices must be clearly aligned with defined learning outcomes and supported by ongoing assessment and continuous improvement efforts. 

In parallel, the integration of ePortfolios across the curriculum provides a cohesive structure for documenting and reflecting on student learning. ePortfolios enable students to capture their academic growth, articulate their skills and aspirations, and demonstrate competencies in meaningful ways. 

Together, these strategies strengthen student learning, enhance career readiness, and better prepare graduates for success in a dynamic and evolving workforce.

Visit Aimee's faculty page 

Visit Charity's faculty page

TBA: LINK TO AAEEBL Conversation Materials from Aimee & Charity's conversation

LINK TO ePORTFOLIO FACULTY INSTITUTE featuring faculty by cohort, these include links to student sample.

Slide Deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/193f49Kt1l6qmzTyJrZYhx_q5bP3ZsyJO/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=105339125786973974266&rtpof=true&sd=true

Abstract: In The Ohio State University Honors program students use a multiyear ePortfolio workbook to gather, reflect on, and synthesize learning experiences throughout their undergraduate years. Honors students participate in one of 16 college-based Honors programs, requiring a workbook with flexibility for a multitude of student pathways. In the first two years of implementing the workbook, a key goal was to incorporate career-focused reflections and connections to career readiness.

In Year 1 we worked with Career Services staff in our College of Arts and Sciences to develop a template to engage first-year students in developmentally appropriate career activities: concurrently, we developed a separate template to facilitate self-assessment and mapping learning examples to career competencies using the NACE framework. In Year 2 we have extended our collaboration with Career Services professionals across multiple colleges and offices across campus to expand the career-focused sections of the workbook.

Our collaboration with Career Services colleagues has provided critical insights to the workbook development process. For example, we recognized the need to balance more centralized reflection and integration of learning with discipline-specific career support that is better facilitated within the colleges. Moving forward, we are developing programming and other supports to facilitate sustained engagement with the Honors ePortfolio.

LinkedIn Post: Michael Peck, Salsabil Qaddoura, and John Salata are proving that ePortfolios do not have to be plain to be powerful. From GitHub, to creative design choices, to digital storytelling, this session is all about student agency, fresh platforms, and the kind of portfolio work that lets students show who they are while giving faculty new ways to support creativity with purpose.

Abstract: As ePortfolios become more widely adopted across higher education, institutions often rely on standardized platforms and templates that prioritize consistency over creativity. This session challenges that norm by centering student-driven innovation in both platform selection and design. Led by Michael Peck, this presentation explores how students move beyond prescribed systems to create ePortfolios that more authentically represent their identities, goals, and disciplinary interests.

Students will share their experiences developing nontraditional ePortfolios. One student [now alumnus] leveraged GitHub and static site generators to build a professional portfolio that integrates technical projects and reflective writing. This GitHub space emphasizes his work experience, opinionated articles, and personal projects using the Hugo framework to make the development fast and simple. Another student incorporated flash-style video elements into a digital humanities project, an approach that earned a campus award for creative activity. 

Together, these examples illustrate the value of student agency in shaping ePortfolio form and function. Attendees will consider how flexible approaches to platforms and design can foster deeper engagement, creativity, and ownership. This session invites educators to rethink constraints, affirm student voice, and embrace more expansive definitions of what an ePortfolio can be and can achieve.

Preservice elementary teachers often produce strong lesson plans, but too rarely do they document the learning journey that makes their design decisions defensible, equitable, and transferable. This session shares a capstone model from an IU Indianapolis elementary science methods course in which candidates co-create with 4th-grade learners to identify community-connected science interests, then design a culturally responsive, inquiry-based lesson aligned to standards and anchored by a 3D-printed artifact showcased in a public STEM event.

AAEEBL’s call asks for “what works” and “glimmers of hope.” The “glimmer” here is a next iteration: transforming the capstone into an ePortfolio-driven evidence ecosystem where candidates curate AI-supported drafts, design iterations, student feedback from co-creation conversations, assessment plans, and critical reflection into a cohesive professional narrative. The goal is to align authentic performance with career readiness competencies, especially Technology (ethical tool selection and productivity) and Equity + Inclusion (anti-oppressive, community-accountable design), so candidates graduate with artifacts that speak to hiring committees and to the learners they serve.

GRANT RELATED Abstract: This session shares a real-world case of how a funded initiative evolved into a scalable, evidence-based model through the strategic use of ePortfolios. Grounded in the Accessible Innovation Hub project, funded by the Institute for Arts and Humanities, this work addresses a critical gap in STEM teacher preparation by integrating assistive technologies and artificial intelligence into inclusive instructional design. 

At the center of this model is the use of ePortfolios as both a learning and research tool. Pre-service teachers engage in structured, practice-based experiences and document their growth through curated artifacts, reflections, and applied projects. These ePortfolios serve multiple purposes: supporting metacognition, demonstrating competency development, and generating evidence of impact. 

This session focuses specifically on how initial funding was leveraged to secure and position additional funding opportunities. Participants will learn how ePortfolio data, student artifacts, and documented outcomes were used to tell a compelling story of impact, align with broader institutional and federal priorities, and expand the project’s reach.

Attendees will explore practical strategies for:

• Designing ePortfolios that produce meaningful, fundable evidence 

• Using student artifacts and reflections as data for grant writing and reporting 

• Aligning ePortfolio outcomes with funding priorities in AI, accessibility, and inclusive education 

Abstract: This interactive session explores the intentional integration of an ePortfolio across an undergraduate public health degree as a high‑impact practice for documenting academic progress, professional preparation, and the development of critical thinking. We describe how the ePortfolio is scaffolded across a sequence of topical, career‑focused courses and culminates as the final deliverable in the public health capstone. Rather than functioning solely as a repository of coursework, the ePortfolio serves as a reflective space where students curate meaningful academic projects, community‑engaged and volunteer experiences, and personal insights that collectively illustrate growth over time.

We demonstrate how this longitudinal approach strengthens reflective practice, deepens awareness of emerging skills and competencies, and helps students identify evolving areas of interest that inform post‑graduation decision‑making. Attention is given to the evolution of our ePortfolio template and its intentional design, which connects academic artifacts with structured reflection to support career exploration and professional identity formation. Student examples will illustrate how the ePortfolio cultivates critical thinking and personal growth. We conclude by sharing lessons learned and inviting dialogue on how ePortfolios may be adapted across disciplines to increase student engagement and make implicit learning more visible.

Abstract: Many universities promote ePortfolio adoption without offering sustained, individualized support for students developing and revising their work. At the same time, institutions that do maintain ePortfolio support centers are increasingly vulnerable to budget reductions and staffing constraints. In response to these pressures, three centers at IU Indianapolis—the ePortfolio Studio, the Idea Garden, and the University Writing Center—have developed a collaborative model that cross-trains student consultants, faculty, and staff to expand ePortfolio support across campus. These centers provide accessible, distributed support through multiple locations and modalities, drawing on faculty/student/staff shared expertise in writing, digital literacy, and reflective practice. 

The ePortfolio Studio was modeled on Old Dominions ePortfolio support center. Megan Mize, ODU’s Director of ePortfolios and Digital Initiatives, observation that “students need guided, iterative conversations about their learning artifacts, not just platforms to store them.” Stanford University’s ePortfolio guru, Helen Chen, also emphasizes that “ePortfolios become meaningful when institutions invest in the human infrastructure that supports reflection and connection.” By embedding ePortfolio support within existing learning environments, IU Indianapolis extends both reach and impact without requiring a single centralized unit.

Presenters Zachary Snyder, Lynn Jettpace, and members of the ePortfolio team will share practical strategies for building cross-campus partnerships, training consultants, and integrating ePortfolio pedagogy into writing and learning support spaces.