AAEEBL Indy Program & Keynotes

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.

Get Matched for a Free Consultation with Somone Who Shares Your ePortfolio Passion [Limit 10]

More to come. The goal is to provide you with pre-conference access to talk about the challenges you are facing with ePortfolio initiatives. You pitch your challenge in the CPF. We will work to match you with someone who shares your interest who will listen and help you talk through possibilities. 

This is also a time for you to meet with industry partners [in person or on Zoom] to talk through platform and technical opportunities. 

Consultants

Pablo Avila, Emily Thompson, Debbie Oesch-Minor

Industry Consultations

TBA

Debbie Oesch-Minor

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.

Attendees will find a range of dining options within a 15-minute walk of IU Indianapolis and the Hampton Inn. Along Indiana Avenue and near the Canal, casual options such as Naf Naf Grill and Ali’i Poke offer quick meals, while nearby sit-down restaurants such as High Velocity and Conner’s Kitchen + Bar provide convenient evening dining. A short walk into downtown opens access to well-known Indianapolis restaurants including St. Elmo Steak House, Harry & Izzy’s, and The Capital Grille, all of which offer reliable evening hours. For groups with varied food preferences, The Garage Food Hall features multiple vendors in a single location with a slightly longer walk time. 

Very Close (0.3–0.6 miles | ~10 min walk)

Naf Naf Grill

• Hours: Closes at 10:00 p.m. daily

• Cuisine: Middle Eastern (fast-casual)

• Link: https://nafnafgrill.com

Ali’i Poke

• Hours: Closes at 9:00 p.m.

• Cuisine: Hawaiian poke bowls

• Link: https://aliipoke.com

Blaze Pizza (Indiana Ave)

• Hours: typically late evening (varies by day

• Cuisine: Fast-casual pizza

• Link: https://www.blazepizza.com

Canal / Hotel Area (~0.8 miles | 8–12 min walk)

High Velocity (JW Marriott)

• Hours: Dinner service

• Cuisine: American bar & grill

• Link: https://www.highvelocityindy.com

Conner’s Kitchen + Bar

• Hours: Dinner service

• Cuisine: American

• Link: https://www.connerskitchenbar.com

Downtown Core (~1.0 miles | 12–15 min walk)

St. Elmo Steak House

• Hours: Tues–Thurs 4–10 p.m.

• Cuisine: Steakhouse (iconic Indianapolis)

• Link: https://www.stelmos.com

Harry & Izzy’s

• Hours: Dinner service

• Cuisine: American grill

• Link: https://www.harryandizzys.com

Ruth’s Chris Steak House

• Hours: Dinner service

• Cuisine: Steakhouse

• Link: https://www.ruthschris.com

The Capital Grille

• Hours: Weekdays 10 p.m.

• Cuisine: Upscale American / steakhouse

• Link: https://www.thecapitalgrille.com

Buca di Beppo

• Hours: Weekdays 10:30 p.m.

• Cuisine: Italian (group-friendly)

• Link: https://www.bucadibeppo.com

BRU Burger Bar

• Hours: Dinner hours; typically open into evening

• Cuisine: Burgers / casual American

• Link: https://www.bruburgerbar.com

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.

How do you move from a digital scrapbook to a transformative capstone? 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 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 freshman 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 show their professional identity rather than just telling their story.

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. 

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.

In our 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 (naceweb.org). 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.  

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Abstract

Abstract

Panel Moderator: Michael Peck, IU Bloomington, MS, Public Health/ Epidemiology doctoral student

John Salata, IU Indianapolis, Infomatics alumni: GitHub

Salsabil Qaddoura, IU Indianapolis, Law in Liberal Arts major: Wordpress

Abstract

Ruth Lilly Auditorium & Lower Level Lobby

University Library, IU Indianapolis