AAEEBL Symposium Program

This keynote session uses my W131 ePortfolio, Legal, Not Always Just, as a student case study to challenge the assumption that student ownership and curricular structure are opposing forces. My ePortfolio examines wrongful conviction and justice reform through a film review of The Central Park Five, an immersion experience connected to the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit and exoneree Kristine Bunch, a formal argument about compensation laws for wrongfully convicted individuals and a final reflection on my growth as a writer, researcher, and public scholar.

Through this project, I learned that ownership does not emerge from a lack of structure. It emerges when a course is intentionally designed, pedagogically rigorous and transparent enough for students to take meaningful intellectual risks. In W131, scaffolded assignments, early ePortfolio models, metacognitive reflection, peer review, revision, source synthesis and multimodal composition helped turn personal choice into academic inquiry. The ePortfolio became more than a place to submit assignments; it became the central infrastructure through which I could see my thinking develop over time.

In this session, I will argue that student agency is most powerful when supported by a thoughtful curriculum. ePortfolios do not represent “less teaching.” Rather, when integrated intentionally, they can become high-impact pedagogy that helps students connect communication, critical thinking, creativity, reflection and public engagement.

Reflection is an integral part of learning, and ePortfolios give students a place to capture that thinking and make it visible. The quality and impact of reflection, however, depend heavily on the prompts we use. In this workshop, we will share practical strategies for designing effective reflective prompts featuring two reflection frameworks. The first framework considers six domains of reflection identified by the Taxonomy of Reflective Inquiry (TORI) recently developed by Digication. The second is a widely cited framework that identifies four categories of reflective writing in teaching and learning contexts. Intentionally aligning the domain and reflection category results in specific, targeted reflection. We will also address the complexities of AI, discussing ways to promote authentic student reflection while cautiously using AI as a tool for prompt design. Attendees will be guided through a step-by-step process to draft and test a reflective prompt resulting in an effective, AI-resilient outcome that can maximize the impact of ePortfolios.

"What happens when students from eleven different schools — Business, Art, Informatics, Health Sciences, and Education, among others — all engage with ePortfolios in the same semester? This session presents findings from a quasi-experimental pre-post survey across 53 courses at Indiana University, Indianapolis.

The study addressed three research questions. First, does ePortfolio integration produce measurable improvements in technology comfort and reduce the participation barriers students report at course entry? Second, does prior ePortfolio experience moderate learning outcomes, or does course participation equalize students regardless of prior exposure? Third, does disciplinary culture shape how much students benefit and in what ways?

The findings are consistent, significant, and in several cases counterintuitive. Technology comfort improved significantly across all schools, participation barriers declined by 13 to 28 percentage points, and professional web presence intent nearly tripled. Students with no prior ePortfolio experience and those with extensive exposure arrived at markedly different starting points but converged completely on every post-course outcome measure. This is evidence that ePortfolio courses function as an equity-enhancing equalizer. Finally, at the disciplinary level, Herron Art students, who entered with the lowest technology comfort, showed the largest gains by semester's end, while Kelley Business students exhibited a ceiling effect."

SkillsCommons (www.skillscommons.org) was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor to become the national repository of open educational resources for workforce development innovations produced by the $1.9 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants.   SkillsCommons has continued to provide these services for subsequent grants as well.  Open educational practices, the “know-how”  openly shared, can be successfully captured with ePortfolios.  ePortfolios enable the innovators to tell their stories of why, how, and when their (re)designed their courses or certificate/credential programs to prepare students for the workplace.

SkillsCommons crafted different types of ePortfolios for capturing open educational practices and the workshop-presentation will review examples and strategies for creating them. The session will present video ePortfolios for community college leaders presenting their strategies for partnering with industries and strategies for adding career advising into the program content.  The session will also demonstrate ePortfolio templates that have been created for the Ohio Association for Community Colleges with MERLOT’s Content Builder tool (free to MERLOT members and it’s free to become a MERLOT member) that have been used to create course and program ePortfolios that are openly shared to scale innovative workforce development courses and programs.

Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) has a student enrolment of approximately 40,000 students and has Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) as a compulsory part of the Undergraduate curriculum (since 2009). WIL offerings have been made within the faculties (with some central administrative support), which has resulted in inconsistency in experience and assessments across the University. A proposition to offer an interdisciplinary team-based project WIL to all undergraduates will be implemented from 2027, which will assist with scalability and include consistent structure, experience and assessment for all students. 

Decision-makers have included an ePortfolio as an assessment task, with a consistent platform is to be the assessment centrepiece. The intention will be to allow the students to provide documentation of their learning journey during the experience, but there is also an undercurrent that the implementation of the ePortfolio will save marking time and effort for the academics in charge. 

I am seeking some feedback on the implementation of the ePortfolio to balance the constraints imposed by the institution versus the rich and individual learning for each student which should be inherent in an ePortfolio task. Specifically, advice is sought on: 

• The idea of a double portfolio: a work-in-progress and a curated representation of the learnings from an experience  

• The use of AI to assist with the marking and student learning 

• The nature of the marking criteria for this double approach 

• Any other ‘time-saving’ innovations which don’t curtail the richness and individuality of student feedback. 

Do you have good ideas you want to share with others?  Curious about what publishing about your work would entail?  This session is for you!  Learn about three publications that are devoted to or welcome articles on ePortfolios and the processes they use for submission and publication.

In an era defined by artificial intelligence, digital disruption, and the rapid transformation of higher education, the ePortfolio can no longer be understood merely as a collection tool or an assessment artefact. This keynote argues for a paradigm shift, positioning the ePortfolio as a dynamic ecosystem of resilience: a living, learner-centred environment that nurtures adaptability, identity formation, reflective practice, and lifelong learning.

Drawing on original research and the insights developed in her co-edited book on resilience and ePortfolios, Prof. Mpho-Entle Modise interrogates what truly works in ePortfolio practice and why, moving beyond surface-level implementation to examine the deeper conditions under which ePortfolios cultivate resilient learners.

Attendees are invited to reconceive ePortfolios as evolving spaces where learners author their futures and institutions affirm their commitment to equity, access and meaningful learning. Across global higher education landscapes, the real question is no longer how we implement ePortfolios but whether our institutions are brave enough to let learners truly own their futures.

What does it mean for first-generation students to thrive in college? Reflection is central to thriving, transforming student experiences into deeper learning and growth. To explore this, we brought together a cohort of first-generation students through a collaboration between the Pathways ePortfolio program and Bucknell’s THRIVE initiative, a campus-wide effort to improve student experience. Over a semester, students used ePortfolios to reflect on their experiences, responding to weekly prompts based on the four pillars of THRIVE: needs, belonging, resources and growth.

This session illustrates one of the many ways ePortfolios can serve as digital tools to enhance student success. We will dive deeply into one student’s shared portfolio to illustrate what thriving looks like for a first-generation Bucknellian, highlighting both barriers and support systems. 

We will share the weekly reflective prompts and explore how to use ePortfolios to bring forward student voice. Together, we will consider how this approach can inform campus efforts to promote student success through the pillars of needs, belonging, resources and growth.

As generative AI increasingly shapes writing classrooms, educators face a pressing challenge: how to respond to AI-mediated composing without reducing reflection to polished but hollow performances of learning. This session positions ePortfolio practices as a productive counterweight by foregrounding process, context, and decision-making over time rather than isolated textual products.

Drawing on portfolio pedagogies that privilege context, revision, and student agency, the session examines how ePortfolios invite students to situate writing within lived experience, artifacts, and iterative development. Participants will engage with adaptable prompts and structures that shift reflection from generalized self-assessment (“what I learned”) to situated narrative (“what choices I made,” “what constraints I navigated,” “what tools shaped my process,” and “what I would do differently”).

Through guided analysis and discussion, attendees will consider how these approaches translate across disciplines, modalities, and levels. The session also invites reflection on authorship and accountability in AI-mediated environments, positioning student voice not as the absence of AI, but as something constructed through context, constraint, and intentionality. Attendees will leave with practical prompts and design strategies to support transparent, reflective, and agentive student work.

In our Honors and Scholars Center, we coordinate a multiyear ePortfolio workbook for students in 16 Honors programs housed in colleges across campus. To foster sustained engagement with ePortfolio, we are developing an ecosystem of support that reaches students traversing a multitude of pathways through their undergraduate programs. The ePortfolio workbook, designed in collaboration with campus partners, aligns with the courses and activities in which Honors students are likely to participate. In addition, our support system builds on existing structures in our General Education program and incorporates partnerships with Colleges; outreach to Instructors; co-curricular and extracurricular programming; and peer mentoring opportunities.

Through our second year of implementation our primary focus has been facilitating first-year engagement with ePortfolio, starting as early as Orientation in the summer before a student’s first semester. These efforts helped us to establish baseline engagement data, and in subsequent years we will continue building connections with first-year students and expanding our ecosystem to the second year and beyond. Ongoing collaborations with the College-based Honors Programs are a key strategy for fostering sustained student engagement with ePortfolio across their undergraduate years. Join us to learn about our approach and exchange strategies with others implementing longitudinal ePortfolios. 

What happens when you take ePortfolio learning directly to students? This session shares an early-stage, practice-based reflection on a new series of direct-to-student ePortfolio workshops.

I’ll briefly share why and how the initiative was developed and how we approached the consultation and planning stage. Then I’ll highlight key insights we gained during the first series of workshops, focusing on student engagement, workshop design, and the challenges of introducing ePortfolios and folio thinking outside of courses. I’ll wrap up by sharing how these insights are shaping the next iteration of workshops.

At Bucknell University, the College of Engineering is leading the way in campus-wide ePortfolio adoption. This session explores how strategies that led to success in engineering can be adapted to expand ePortfolio integration in other disciplines to make student learning visible and promote reflective habits. We will explore two primary pathways of student engagement based on how many courses ePortfolios were included in and the level to which they were utilized. First, we present a case study of a student who experienced scaffolded, rigorous, multi-course ePortfolio integration. We will compare this with students who, inspired by brief ePortfolio exposure, independently created professional "showcase" portfolios. Attendees will view examples of student ePortfolios and faculty assignments and acquire strategies that have a low barrier for integrating reflection and ePortfolios while still offering all opportunities for students to learn disciplinary content.

Education in general and higher education specifically have been under attack and suffered funding loss. At the same time, we are grappling with integration of AI into almost every field. With this backdrop many institutions are also undergoing reform, specifically focused on the general education component of their curriculum. What does this mean for the future of ePortfolio and folio thinking? What can practitioners contribute to support and grow from these changes? How can folio thinking help us navigate change? My session will explore these questions and how curriculum and practice might evolve from a nice to have into an urgent need to have.

The main point is a conversation, but I will provide an example of student driven public reflection that showcases the adaptability of embedding folio thinking in a way that meets the moment we are in.

The Pacific University PharmD curriculum includes a required Personal & Professional Develompent course sequence that spans the entirety of the PharmD curriculum to promote equity, consistency, and structured support. The course series is organized into six longitudinal threads: Academic Success and Student Well-Being; Advocacy; Leadership; Mentorship; Self-Awareness and Self-Presentation; and Practice Readiness and Awareness of Others.

Students maintain a longitudinal portfolio with structured reflections requiring specific, personal narratives demonstrating professional identity formation and evidence of at least two experiences beyond required coursework by graduation for each learning outcome. Faculty assess development in each ACPE-mapped domain using a 5-level rubric (0 = Student; 1 = Pharmacy Student; 2 = Student Pharmacist/APPE-Ready; 3 = Pharmacist/Practice-Ready; 4 = Mentor Pharmacist). 

Student growth is evident across learning outcomes, and we have identified support needs earlier. Students demonstrated progressive advancement toward “Practice-Ready” levels. Structured mentorship improved consistency of advising and normalized discussions of academic performance, career planning, and wellbeing.

Generative AI presents a paradox for student ePortfolios: it can both enhance learning and undermine the very cognitive effort ePortfolios are designed to showcase. Instead of functioning as sites for authentic reflection, they risk becoming collections of polished but intellectually hollow artifacts. Rather than banning AI use, which is unworkable, my strategy, grounded in two decades of teaching and current graduate study, is to guide students into a “zone of productive AI use.” Adopting a process-based approach, I require drafts, notes, and work-in-progress artifacts to scaffold reflection and reduce the last-minute pressure that often leads students to outsource their thinking. I try to persuade students that if AI can produce competent but generic work, the competitive advantage shifts to students who can think critically and engage meaningfully with their own ideas. By presenting concrete examples of productive AI use (e.g., as a thought partner or for revision support) versus harmful use (e.g., submitting AI-generated text with minimal engagement), I show how effective AI usage can cultivate the human capacities that remain indispensable in an AI-saturated world.

This session centers on the design dimension of portfolio work, an aspect that is often underattended in portfolio practice but immediately noticeable to students and audiences alike, as a productive entry point for thinking about the effective use of emerging AI tools. Because design choices related to layout, accessibility, color, and multimodality are frequently unfamiliar practices for students, they create opportunities for AI to function as a scaffold rather than a substitute. Participants will examine how AI assisted design tools can help students articulate constraints, make intentional choices, and reflect on the values embedded in their compositions. By situating AI within the visible and decision focused work of portfolio design, the session demonstrates how ePortfolios can preserve student agency and accountability while supporting learning in new and emerging practices.

Participants in this workshop will consider how AI tools can be incorporated into classroom practice in ways that support student learning in unfamiliar design contexts rather than replacing student decision making. Through adaptable prompts and low stakes portfolio activities, attendees will explore how AI assisted tools related to editing, layout, accessibility, and multimodal composition can help students articulate and reflect on their design choices.

AI has entered portfolio practice, and there are many ways that learners can meaningfully use AI to support the portfolio creation. This session aims to have an open dialogue about how institutions currently navigate the use of AI in portfolios, what support structures are in place (or not), what fears there are and how students and faculty can be supported to navigate this space.