AAEEBL Annual Meeting 2024

The Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) invites educators, practitioners, and scholars to its annual meeting. Over the past few years, the AAEEBL Annual Meeting has focused on various aspects of ePortfolio practice, drawing attention to digital ethics and the ways that ePortfolio implementations can support design justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, mattering, and the well-being of both learners and practitioners. This has been particularly important in the wake of transformative global changes incited by the pandemic and advancements in artificial intelligence.

The Significance of Reflection

Reflection, the cornerstone of effective ePortfolio learning and implementation, is more than a method; it's a mindset also known as "folio thinking." It encourages learners to connect their learning experiences, fostering lifelong learning skills and integrative thinking, habits of mind needed today to address real-world challenges that we are all called to address during our learning careers. Identifying appropriate reflective activities that suit our unique learning contexts, however, can be challenging. 

Recognizing the diverse educational landscapes, this year's AAEEBL Annual Meeting endeavors to aid the ePortfolio community in overcoming the hurdles of finding suitable reflective activities. Our collective mission is to devise a dynamic, openly accessible, and editable Open Educational Resource (OER) to serve as a living and evolving compendium of ePortfolio best practices. Sessions will be curated to focus on various facets of reflection, enabling attendees to contribute to a new publication, the Field Guide to Reflection in ePortfolios. 

Participants will have opportunities to author or co-author frameworks, activities, templates, and rubrics, with the conference culminating in a collaborative draft of the Field Guide that is ready for continued refinement. The draft publication will be edited throughout the rest of the year for a release party tentatively planned during the AAC&U Forum on Digital Learning and Innovation on February 28, 2025.

We are excited to have College Unbound as a co-host of this convening. Together, we will focus both on student reflection practices as well as institutional cultures of reflection. With shared assessment practices and radical strategic planning tools in conversation with student portfolio practices, OER, and peer feedback, College Unbound’s practice of institutional assessment is a cultural model of community care that invites new ways of learning together, learning that will be visible in the Field Guide to Reflection in ePortfolios.

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