Day 1 - 21 July 2022

Resources shared in this session

• Book by Sasha Costanza-Chock: Design Justice

• Article by Amy Collier: Inclusive Design and Design Justice: Strategies to Shape Our Classes and Communities

Transcript for 'Opening Session'

One of the greatest challenges for those leading any new initiative in higher education is ensuring its sustainability and growth over time. This is especially true of ePortfolios. AAC&U’s Institute on ePortfolios is designed for those seeking to instantiate ePortfolios beyond a single course or major and who are pursuing large scale adoptions on their campus.

This panel discussion consists of those from campuses that are participating in this Institute. The panelists will share aspects of the implementation plans they developed for their campuses as well as first-hand accounts of the strategies they employed to enact those plans. Not all strategies go as planned and often the adjustments made to unexpected challenges provide key nuances for success. This session will dive deep into a range of implementation stories to assist attendees as they plan for campus transformation work and attempt to anticipate key challenges that may arise.

Resources shared in this session

• eBook Exploring the Diversity of ePortfolio Practice edited by Lisa Donaldson

• Article 'The 6A ePortfolio Model: Professionalizing Learning in Higher Education' by Miguel (Miko) Nino and Scott Hicks

Transcript for 'Practical Strategies'

Like most care work, ePortfolio labor is gendered and undervalued—when it is noticed at all. We believe that the labor required by students, educators, and administrators to create, develop, implement, support, and evaluate ePortfolios should be visible, sustainable, compensated where appropriate, and counted toward evaluation and advancement.

The 3 presenters will address the invisible components of ePortfolio labor from 3 perspectives—the student, the teacher, the technology—and argue that we (educators, administrators, technologists, etc.) ignore this kind of care work at significant cost, particularly to the already and multiply disenfranchised members of the ePortfolio community.

By identifying the spaces of invisibility and highlighting the potential value within them, the presenters intend to ignite a community-wide discussion regarding who is lifted up by the work that we do and which methods best support that lifting.

Moreover, we insist, attending to this labor involves acknowledging the professionalization of our international, interdisciplinary field of practice by mapping its labor relations.

Finally, we ask participants to contribute—first by taking our field-mapping survey (both online and on-site participants) and then by engaging in a focus-group style discussion (on-site participants) to expand on the composites constructed from the survey.

This discussion aims to invite others to join our call for increasing attention to issues of labor and to add depth to our findings by supplementing the survey with more qualitative data.

Resources shared in this session

• Slides for 'Making Visible the Value of ePortfolio Care Work'

• Folder with all task force resources for the conference

• Survey 'Eportfolio Mapping Project'

• Upcoming Digital Ethics Task Force workshops

Transcript for 'Making Visible the Value of ePortfolio Care Work'

Most ePortfolio advocates would agree that learners should be provided with sample ePortfolios. Indeed, equipping students with models to guide their composing is a well-established teaching method that can increase equity by clarifying how intangible expectations (e.g., “reflective writing”) translate into practice (e.g., what a compelling reflection on an artifact actually looks like). But which ePortfolios are getting promoted as exemplary?

In this presentation, a writing program administrator and a graduate assistant in charge of selecting university-wide model ePortfolios consider this question. Tasked with updating and enhancing the collection of ePortfolios featured on their university website, they consider what criteria they should use in making their selections. Disciplinary variety is a given, since the models must represent their institution’s range of majors and programs, but should they also use identity markers such as race, gender, and nationality to make their choices? Or should the ePortfolios’ “objective” assessment based on the university’s rubric be the primary consideration (“Summative ePortfolio Rubric,” University Writing, 2016)?

The presenters aim to launch a discussion of how to curate sample ePortfolios in a just manner that avoids tokenism, applying the perennial question of inclusive representation in higher education to the logistics of ePortfolio implementation.

Resources shared in this session

• Slides for 'Toward Justice in ePortfolio Models: Who Gets Recognized as Excellent?'

• About the Auburn University ePortfolio project

• Auburn University Writing team

Transcript for 'Towards Justice in ePortfolio Models'

What do we do with bizarre circumstances and findings? After launching our first year of ePortfolios in Fall 2021, we have collected some unusual data sets and turned up “wacky” results from more typical survey feedback.

In this short presentation, I will share how we have pivoted our data collection amidst pressing issues for our 4-year minority-serving institution and higher education today. These issues include a dip in retention rates, low participation in outreach and data collection efforts, and an institutional learning edge with ePortfolios themselves. I will provide some context for our college’s experience with COVID-19 and with ePortfolios. I will then share our major data collection efforts, including a grounded theory coding activity with the ePortfolio Team, retention and completion data, and a comparative sense of belonging questionnaire. Finally, I will offer some of the unusual responses we have attempted in response to usual times.

Throughout I will return to the question of how do we handle unprecedented scenarios with ePortfolio administration and assessment? As a fairly newcomer to ePortfolio administration, I truly invite discussions, feedback, and other stories and experiences to grapple together with the creative and befuddling moment in which we find ourselves.

Resources shared in this session

• Slides for 'Engaging Wacky Data'

• Jamboard for 'Engaging Wacky Data'

• Infographic 'Let's do ePortfolios: A Bloomfield College Story'

Transcript for 'Engaging Wacky Data'

This session will introduce attendees on how a faculty team integrated academic advising as a touch point for ePortfolio engagement from students. In particular, this department-wide ePortfolio initiative has presence from the 100- to 400-level of a student’s academic plan, however, when reflecting on how we could enhance and support student engagement an opportunity was being missed. This oversight was within the academic advising process of the department. As such, the faculty team collaborated with academic advising to formalize a sophomore level touch point that prioritizes time in the advising session to prompt students on their engagement with the ePortfolio.

Resources shared in this session

• Article 'A Case Study in ePortfolio Implementation: A Department-Wide Perspective' by Stephen M. Fallowfield, Mark Urtel, Rachel Swinford, Lisa Angermeier, and Allison S. Plopper

• Article 'Developing Innovative Reflections From Faculty Development: Lessons Learned' by Mark Urtel, Rachel Swinford, Steve Fallowfield, and Lisa Angermeier

Transcript for 'Exploring the Impact of an Advising Touchpoint'

One of the challenges in the implementation of ePortfolios is ensuring that learning and growth that takes place in college is applied and translated to career development. Creating strong connections between higher education curricular and co-curricular learning and career success can be an effective strategy for faculty to promote authentic learning and prepare students for the future. For this reason, a model was developed to allow faculty and administrators to implement ePortfolio programs that make these necessary connections: "The 6A ePortfolio Model."

This model includes five main steps: Acceptance, Assessment, Appraisal, Adaptation, and Application. In addition, a sixth element, Alliance, brings the whole model together as partnerships and collaborations are essential components.

This research-based model will be discussed during this presentation, with the goal of explaining how the model can be adopted by other higher education institutions and the current results of the study. In addition, this presentation will explain how students can follow the model as well, for those institutions planning to implement student-based ePortfolio programs.

Transcript for 'The 6A ePortfolio Model'

We’ll hear from voices across the ePortfolio spectrum: project-oriented ePortfolios, course-based ePortfolios, internship ePortfolios, graduate-program level ePortfolios, and more. Join us as we hear student perspectives then open the chat for Q&A learn more about the opportunities and challenges that emerge with ePortfolios.

The Student Panel features a variety of voices:

• a sophomore fresh out of her first ePortfolio course,

• ePortfolio student ambassadors/consultants,

• doctoral graduates who used ePortfolios as part of their dissertations, and more.

Student Panel Website

Transcript for 'Student Panel'

Just as students benefit from portfolio thinking, we also deserve moments to pause and reflect on our professional values, experiences, and identities. Since the unending challenges that began in Spring 2020, many of us have not yet found the time to pause and consider: What have we learned? How have our values shifted? What experiences shape our stories as professional educators? ePortfolios present us with one such opportunity to do this work.

This 2-hour workshop will focus on professional ePortfolios for faculty, staff, and administrators in higher education with the goal of jumpstarting the ePortfolio process. We will begin by reflecting on our values and experiences as professional educators. Then, we will explore example ePortfolios from professional educators from across the globe. Attendees will leave with two takeaways, a first draft of their professional brand statement and an action plan that begins them on the journey of developing their professional ePortfolio.

Resources shared in this session

• Workshop material for 'Building Your Professional ePortfolio'

• 'Shitty First Drafts' by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

• AePR issue 'Building Bridges: Creating Connections by Building Our ePortfolios', volume 3, issue 1, 2019

• ePortfolio action plan questions

• Digital Ethics Principles in ePortfolios

• Field Guide to ePortfolios

Transcript for 'Building Your Professional Portfolio'

Over four, fast-paced micro-shop sessions, you will use strategies from the Design for Learning Equity framework to design or redesign an ePortfolio assignment. In each 20-minute micro-shop, Kevin Kelly will introduce a variety of potential strategies to achieve specific equity goals. You and your colleagues will then discuss the most relevant strategies to address equity issues in your own classes, and identify at least one strategy that you plan to use after the conference.

The four micro-shops will follow the backward design model, beginning with assessment and ending with the instructions. When it’s all over, you will have completed the first phase of (re)designing an ePortfolio assignment with equity in mind… from back to front. Participants will follow the backward design model to (re)design an ePortfolio assignment with equity in mind.

Resources shared in this session

• Slides for 'Designing a More Equitable ePortfolio Assignment'

• Folder with material for 'Designing a More Equitable ePortfolio Assignment'

• CAST, including UDL Guidelines

• TILT Higher Ed: Transparency in Learning and Teaching

• CEWE Tool: Campus Equity Walkthrough Evaluation Tool

• Timeline of Spring 2020 at John Jay College, an example of 'belonging'

• Kevin's list of image galleries to promote accurate and equitable representation

• Paper 'Student-Faculty Partnerships in Curricula' by Kari Goin Kono and and Sophia Ryker about student engagement with curriculum development

• Todoist app

Transcript for 'Designing a More Equitable ePortfolio Assignment'

In this workshop, we’ll begin with thinking about why we use ePortfolio scoring guides. We’ll then consider several ePortfolio guides, identifying their designs, features, and implications, especially in terms of the very different ways they construct students. We’ll then close with a consideration of the relationship between an ePortfolio assignment and the guide used to assess that ePortfolio, particularly in terms of definitions and expectations.

Resources shared in this session

• St. Olaf ePortfolio values: Web Portfolios: Demonstrating the Coherence of an Individual Major

• Cheryl Emerson and Alex Reid, "Integrative Learning and ePortfolio Networks" in Yancey, Ed., ePortfolio-as-Curriculum

• Jennifer Stonaker, Jenae Druckman Cohn, Russ Carpenter, Helen L. Chen, "Metacognition Across the Curriculum: Building Capstone ePortfolios in Stanford University’s Notation in Science Communication" in Yancey, Ed., ePortfolio-as-Curriculum

• Engage Learning Rubric from Loyola University of Chicago

Transcript for 'ePortfolio Scoring Guides'

Are you new to ePortfolios? ePortfolios are more than just a technology: they imply a process of planning, keeping track of, making sense of, and sharing evidence of learning and performance. Using ePortfolios well requires embracing a set of practices and an understanding of learning called Folio Thinking. Join us for a brief overview and Q&A session including practical pointers to how and where to get started with learning about ePortfolios for your students, faculty, and other stakeholders.

Resource shared in the session: AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force

Transcript for 'ePortfolios 101'

This session will critically examine ePortfolio assignments with an anti-racist lens to investigate ways that practitioners can work against the white supremist systems of assessment and, instead, create a community of care. While ePortfolios can be transformative spaces for students to reflect on and articulate their learning, the public and digital nature of ePortfolios necessitates critical examination of the ethical implications of this high-impact practice. These assignments often ask students to provide personal accounts of learning, visual evidence of experiences, and produce a storyline of their college-going life. However, ePortfolio scholarship has paid little attention to places where these assignments might harm students because they perpetuate systemic racist and classist injustices.

During the session, facilitators will suggest principles for anti-racist assessment design. Then, participants will interrogate sample assignments to better understand the ways that white supremacy is interwoven into many ePortfolio norms. Finally, participants will apply the same lens to their own assignments. This session prioritizes collaboration and application, where participants will work together to critique their own work to co-create a more equitable classroom.

Resources shared in the session:

• Oxford Milestone Assignment #1

• Oxford Milestone Assignment #2 (Revision of #1)

• Anti-racist worksheet

• Article 'Learning in Liminal Spaces: Encountering Indigenous Knowledge and Artworks in Professional Education' by Kim Snepvangers and Jessica Bulger

• Publications by Kim Snepvangers

Transcript for 'Do No Harm, Disrupt the University'

Southern Oregon University is in the midst of a significant transformation of its general education curriculum and seeks to incorporate ePortfolios as a core element. While the ePortfolio has been proposed as a key component of the new curriculum, specific aspects of its design, structure, administration, and assessment are yet to be developed.

To explore best practices in ePortfolio, the Provost recruited a group of faculty and staff to participate in the 2022 AAC&U ePortfolio Institute. As part of this effort, this group decided to look at other institutions to benchmark pedagogical and institutional characteristics related to ePortfolios, including practices and approaches to implementation and assessment. The group listed over 20 different factors and organized them into four categories: institutional characteristics, program characteristics, program oversight, and support channels. As an example of a program characteristic, the scope of an eportfolio can be differentiated at the course, program, major or degree level. These factors and their differentiations have been compiled into a survey which will be sent to ePortfolio leads at over a dozen universities identified for benchmarking.

During the session participants will be invited to provide comments and critiques to improve and promote the matrix.

Resources shared in this session

• ePortfolio Administration Survey

• Benchmarking ePortfolios Survey Results

• University of Arizona ePortfolio Initiative as an example of a purpose driven initiative

• 'LEAP Challenge, Signature Work, and Meaningful Pathways' by AAC&U on one way to define signature assignments

Transcript for 'A Benchmarking Matrix for ePortfolio Programs'

Research has traditionally been recognised and rewarded more than teaching at universities. A key issue is the lack of generally accepted measures of teaching excellence. In response, Fellows of the UNSW Scientia Education Academy Fellows utilised a two-stage Delphi process to delineate the dimensions of effective teaching practice in higher education.

Four consensus dimensions of effective teaching practice were identified, each with associated criteria: teaching and supporting learning; design and development of learning activities and assessment; disciplinary expertise and professional development; and educational leadership. These were operationalized in myEducation Portfolio, to enable academic staff to collect artefacts, reflect upon their teaching practice and curate and demonstrate evidence of achievement in alignment with the dimensions and associated criteria. The resulting dimensions differ from existing standards, including the UK Professional Standards Framework and the Australian University Teaching Criteria and Standards (AUTCAS), yet align well with those frameworks.

myEducation Portfolio is available to all UNSW staff and is incorporated in academic promotion processes at UNSW. Planned future developments include enabling public display of ePortfolios to disseminate best practice and to encourage collaborations within UNSW and externally.

Resources shared in this session

• Feedback survey for myEducation Portfolio

• Article 'Design, Development, and Implementation of an ePortfolio Platform To Enhance Teaching Practice and Reward Teaching Excellence in Higher Education' by Gary Velan and Patsie Polly in AePR, volume 4, issue 1

Transcript for 'myEducation Portfolio'

As part of my work toward dismantling white supremacy I have engaged in group work with colleagues as well as inner (self) work and ePortfolio has been a tool for bringing the work together. I have developed exercises to share with colleagues as well as templates for self reflection and this is something that I can continue to use for my own reflection, but I have also used these for my promotion portfolio. This combined session will provide an opportunity to share and brainstorm and then to come together in person to co-create potential models for continuing this work ourselves and with students.

This ideation session is designed to help participants sort through questions they may have when wanting to include digital ethics in their portfolio work. The AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force developed 13 principles, which is an indicator for how big the field is. This can be rather overwhelming for individual faculty or even a Portfolio Program Office team when there are many demands on their time.

During this session, we will briefly introduce participants to the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principles. Using brainstorming activities, we will work collaboratively on defining potential starting points, resources, and engagement options. We will also consider the people who are essential to successfully including digital ethics in our portfolio practice. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but common themes can be identified.

Participants will have the opportunity to share the material that they want to review taking a digital ethics lens and get started making changes either on their own or in small groups, benefiting from the ideas of other participants.

By the end of the session, participants will have actively engaged with one or more digital ethics principles and identified concrete changes they’d like to make in material that they are working with on a regular basis to then further discuss on their campuses.

Transcript for 'How to Get Started With Digital Ethics'

Underrepresented students are significantly more likely to be placed into remedial or developmental programs when entering college. Traditional remedial programs can increase time to degree, with a corresponding increase in student debt and decrease in graduation rates; remediation can also undermine self-efficacy, contributing to a belief that the student is not ready for college or capable of succeeding in college. Concern over these and other equity impacts led Menlo College in 2019 to redesign the developmental English and math program, with ePortfolios as a central component.

ePortfolios are used to blend subject matter instruction with the development of learning strategies. ePortfolios in these courses incorporate reflective writing to foster metacognitive skills, build a growth mindset, and to promote dialogue around academic anxiety that can normalize learning challenges and boost self-efficacy. Furthermore, ePortfolios enable holistic assessment, allowing students to demonstrate learning in a variety of ways that leverage the cultural capital they have developed through their experience with digital technologies and multimodal communication. Early introduction of portfolios also prepares students to access opportunities such as internships and undergraduate research.

Our presentation will detail how portfolios have been incorporated into developmental courses, discuss challenges, and provide suggestions for design and adoption.

COVID-19 disrupted many of the ways we teach, assess, and innovate. Many educators pivoted their content delivery to online spaces (Schleicher, 2020). However, assessment was put to the test and is potentially immature in transformation and at risk as a result in this changed world. To uncover faculty assessment practices in response to COVID-19 this research sought to explore the opportunities for innovative futures through an affordance and practice lens. We know that “affordances do not simply offer a range of action possibilities; they actively invite certain actions” (Aagaard, 2018). ‘Affordances as actions’ include substitution, innovation as well as taking existing practices and understanding what these affordances can provide for authentic, equivalent learning experiences. By exploring affordances, we are speculating on the future of assessment practices and contributing to pedagogical knowledge and ePortfolio practices. Understanding affordances versus practices in this changed world context creates an opportunity to re-define the concept of ‘affordances’ by applying digital methods and tools, to address the COVID-19-induced issue of authentic experience.

Our co-research has been identifying issues of data, ethics, equity, authenticity, digitalisation, technologies, and practices within the educational shifts that occurred during the pandemic and speculating on the place that ePortfolios might play.

Resources shared in this session

• Book chapter 'Design-Based Research' by Matthew Armstrong, Cade Dopp, and Jesse Welsh

• Article 'Design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments' by Feng Wang and Michael Hannafin

• Blog post 'Camera Obscura: Beyond the lens of user-centered design' by Alexis Lloyd

• Article 'Insights into how academics reframed their assessment during a pandemic: disciplinary variation and assessment as afterthought' by Christine Slade, Gwendolyn Lawrie, Nantana Taptamat, Eleanor Browne, Karen Sheppard& Kelly E. Matthews

Transcript for 'Faculty Assessment Practices'

This ideation session is designed to help participants sort through questions they may have when wanting to include digital ethics in their portfolio work. The AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force developed 13 principles, which is an indicator for how big the field is. This can be rather overwhelming for individual faculty or even a Portfolio Program Office team when there are many demands on their time.

During this session, we will briefly introduce participants to the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principles. Using brainstorming activities, we will work collaboratively on defining potential starting points, resources, and engagement options. We will also consider the people who are essential to successfully including digital ethics in our portfolio practice. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but common themes can be identified.

Participants will have the opportunity to share the material that they want to review taking a digital ethics lens and get started making changes either on their own or in small groups, benefiting from the ideas of other participants.

By the end of the session, participants will have actively engaged with one or more digital ethics principles and identified concrete changes they’d like to make in material that they are working with on a regular basis to then further discuss on their campuses.

Resources shared in this session

• Slides for 'How to Get Started With Digital Ethics' and other AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force resources for AAEEBL 2022

• Padlet 'Digital ethics in your education practice'

• AAEEBL Digital Ethics Principles in ePortfolios

• Students sharing their stories at AAEEBL 2021

• Task Force ePortfolio Mapping Research Survey

• Examples of innovative reflections at IUPUI

Transcript for 'How to Get Started With Digital Ethics'

This is a facilitated workshop. The purpose is to provide insight into and sharing of emerging and ongoing ePortfolio practice(s) during COVID-19 times. In this first session, we will discuss leveraging our strengths and our learnings from the past 2.5 years.

Resources shared in this session

• Re-boot notes and whiteboards, sessions 1 and 2

• Student portfolio example from social and applied sciences

• John Jay College student ePortfolio showcase and recording on TwitchTV

Transcript for 'ePortfolio Re-boot Part 1'