Day 1 - 13 July 2023

Resources

• Jam board 'What do you want to learn at the AAEEBL conference?

• Conneticut College's sample 'meta site'

We have experienced no shortage of change over the last three years, not just in higher education but in society more broadly. Recently, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence has prompted discussions about the best ways to foster authentic assessment and academic integrity. The international ePortfolio community has long explored how meaningful engagement can enable authentic and inclusive learning but how, specifically, do ePortfolio practices enable us to plan for and manage change?

In this session participants will consider how we might leverage ePortfolio practices to create new opportunities for transforming higher education and how those practices can help us to manage institutional knowledge. We will also begin to plan for the inevitable disruptions that our ePortfolio implementations and our institutions will face.

Resources

• Jam board 'Change as/for Learning'

• Durable Skills by America Succeeds

Our conversation will address how offering student voice and choice in ePortfolios affords autonomy, inclusiveness, self-efficacy, and personal growth to our students, which could promote sustained engagement over time. We will use our own experiences and findings over the last 6 years to foster dialogue by engaging the audience in a variety of questions related to student voice and choice.

Resources

• Jam board for 'Elevating and Promoting Student Voice and Choice'

• ePortfolios in Kinesiology at IUPUI

Carleton College is developing a strategic fusion of ePortfolios and student employment to enable students, through careful prompts and scaffolded instructions, to reflect on their student work as it connects to academic and co-curricular experiences  and to design their digital identities, while also providing supervisors with prompts and instructions to give feedback.

Our framework focuses on connecting different dimensions of the student experience (academic, individual, social, civic, creative, analytical, professional) to create a web of reflection that allows students to see connections, articulate skills, and transfer knowledge and skills between different dimensions.

Our pilot focuses on a select group of interns with the goal to embed the ePortfolio into all immersive learning experiences such as internships, research and learning assistantships, and other financially supported opportunities. As student employment is one of the broadest immersive experiences for students outside the classroom, combining this experience with an ePortfolio will make the ePortfolio experience more inclusive and the guidance we are developing a transparent and equitable approach to reflection and to the  development of a digital identity.

Our session will focus on the framework we developed and the scaffolding of prompts and instructions we are developing for students and supervisors.

Resources

Slides for 'EPortfolios and Student Employment'

Practitioners continue to innovate new strategies and practices for ePortfolios. Researchers continue to advance our knowledge around ePortfolios. We need to have this work documented for our field to continue to grow. This session is for those of you who want to learn about publishing opportunities. The AAEEBL ePortfolio Review (AePR) is an online magazine formatted publication with a focus on practice that is published 2 times a year. The International Journal of ePortfolios (IJeP) is published twice a year. 

Come to this session to learn about these publications, learn what they are looking for, share your ideas for writing, and learn how to become involved.

Resources

• AAEEBL ePortfolio Review (AePR)

• International Journal of ePortfolios (IJeP)

• Slides for 'Writing and Publishing' as Google Slides

• Slides for 'Writing and Publishing' as PDF

With greater uptake of ePortfolios across the university, it became important to develop faculty and student guides as part of a larger framework to support folio thinking. We see this as valuable for both faculty and students to deepen their reflective practice.

We began by examining the "why", drawing in student and faculty voices from different programs to develop our thinking. Then, we explored how ePortfolios can support this by documenting the process of skill development, feedback and revision, personal growth, and opportunities for learner agency and autonomy.

EPortfolios are student-centred, with learners choosing the artifacts that represent their learning journey, how they contextualize those experiences, reflect on the process, and their future growth, which promotes engagement and motivation (Tosh, Penny Light, Fleming, & Haywood, 2005). It was important from the beginning to create this alignment so that there could be a common language around the curation of learning artifacts, reflective practice, integration, knowledge transfer, and the development of learner identity.

In this presentation, we will describe the challenges we wanted to address and the tools we developed through this collaboration, including instructor/learner supports, assignment guides, and analytic rubric. We will also discuss some lessons learned and future goals.

Resources

KPU's ePortfolio Advancement Strategic Plan 2022-2025

Resources

Jam board for 'Reflect and Restore'

This session will illustrate the journeys of various teams who are currently participating in the AAC&U Institute on ePortfolios. The teams recently reflected on their experience in the Institute and their future goals by creating a journey map. Teams will be sharing their journey map, which will illustrate their past success and future goals in the Institute. 

Resources

• AAC&U 2023 Institute on ePortfolios

• OER book Building a professional portfolio by Lynne Meade

• Skybridge Skills community

Re-Imagining ePortfolios: ePortfolios as Nesting Dolls

Sophie Carrison, and Debbie Oesch-Minor (IUPUI)

ePortfolios are well-known to document and showcase student learning, but what if ePortfolios are practical tools for other purposes? This 20X20 challenges ePortfolio users to re-imagine the possibilities for ePortfolios use from class projects, capstones, and degree assessment to coordinating teams, committee work, tracking activities for annual reviews, presentations, sharing grant work, and more. How do these ePortfolios differ from websites? Great question, and one that will be explored as part of this short, engaging presentation.

Resources

• Slides 'Re-Imagining ePortfolios' as PPTX

• Slides 'Re-Imagining ePortfolios' as PDF

Have Your Say

Kristina Hoeppner (Catalyst IT), Megan Mize (Old Dominion University), Morgan Gresham (University of South Florida, St. Petersburg), Sarah Zurhellen (Appalachian State University)

Over the last four years, the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force brought together portfolio researchers and practitioners to explore digital ethics in the context of portfolios. Besides establishing and iterating over digital ethics principles and workshopping with community members on their implementation, a research project was established in 2021 to map portfolio work internationally and make the labour involved at institutions using portfolios more visible.

This short presentation will give a brief overview of the efforts of the Task Force in regards to the survey, some anecdotal insight into insights shared by survey participants, and a call to action for participation to Annual Meeting attendees to inform that research.

Resources

• Slides 'Have Your Say'

• North American ePortfolio mapping survey

• Australia / Aotearoa New Zealand ePortfolio mapping survey

• Join the task force - apply by 15 September 2023

Enhancing Authentic Assessment Through ePortfolio at a Dual Mission Institution

Abby Crew and Karla Hardesty (Colorado Mountain College)

Emerging from the AAC&U High Impact Practice Institute in 2022, Colorado Mountain College embarked on a one year pilot program with Digication. Throughout this process we have explored ways to embed authentic assessment throughout the curriculum, from ESL, CTE and across our AA and BA courses. As we pilot new general education assessment reporting processes, we are finding many examples of authentic assessment, some of which are currently captured within and beyond ePortfolio. We culminated our pilot year of ePortfolio with an inaugural student symposium, celebrating the incredible accomplishments of our students at Colorado Mountain College. In many ways students are driving the change for more faculty to adopt ePortfolio. And with new Institutional Student Learning Outcomes, many faculty are excited about the prospect of enabling students to document, capture and reflect on their learning throughout their curricular journey via ePortfolio.

Resources

Slides for 'Enhancing Authentic Assessment'

Transforming Career Services: Leveraging ePortfolios in an Accessible and Inclusive Approach to Career Readiness

Christa Matlack (Bucknell University)

In recent years, there has been a transformation in career services in higher education through the employment of new strategies and techniques to engage students in a more accessible, equitable, and inclusive approach to career readiness. At the Center for Career Advancement at Bucknell, we shifted to a one-to-many approach where career coaches meet the students in their space through the classroom and collaborations with student organizations. One key result of this shift was launching an in-person, half credit course open to students across all three colleges and all class years to delve into topics in career development. Centered around the creation of an ePortfolio, students enrolled in the course engage in learning how to operate in a professional environment, but more importantly, how to develop their own, unique personal narrative.

The ePortfolio provides a flexible platform for students to express themselves and reflective prompts guide students to identify and link curricular and co-curricular experiences that will lay the foundation for the intentional development of a professional, digital identity.

Resources

• Slides for 'Transforming Career Services' as Google Slides

• Slides for 'Transforming Career Services' as PDF

The Deca Dip: How to Re-purpose Your Content 10 Times (or More)

Kristina Hoeppner (Catalyst IT)

Have you ever wondered how you are supposed to squeeze in yet another webinar, yet another committee meeting, yet another report, while also completing all your professional development tasks, look after your team, do research, develop a new course and, and, and, all in the next month? You are not alone! While we may not all have the same challenges, something doesn't change: The day only has 24 hours, but there is work for at least 48.

So what are some strategies to work smarter, not harder? How can you re-purpose one thing you are doing multiple times? Maybe even as much as 10 times? Maybe even more? I'm going to show you some possibilities in this fast paced presentation and want to invite you to think about your own context and how you can re-purpose, remix, and recycle content in new (not boring!) ways with a few little tricks.

Resources

Slides for 'The Deca Dip'

Impact of an Academic Advising Model as an ePortfolio Touch Point

Lisa Angermeier, Mark Urtel, Stephen Fallowfield, and Rachel Swinford (IUPUI)

This session will explore the integration of academic advising as a touch point for ePortfolio engagement for students. This department-wide ePortfolio initiative has presence in 100- to 400-level courses, however, when reflecting on how the team could enhance and support student engagement, an opportunity was being missed. This oversight was within the academic advising process of the department. Therefore, academic advisors formalized a sophomore level touch point that prioritizes time in an advising session to prompt students on their past and future engagement with the ePortfolio.

Digital Self-Identity Part B: Five Additional Student Skills Needed for 2025 and Beyond

Cindy Stevens (Wentworth Institute of Technology)

In a past article, 'Digital Self-Identity: Reflection of Top 10 Skills Needed for 2025 and Beyond,' the top ten skills needed for 2025 and beyond listed by the World Economic Forum’s 2020 report were described (Stevens). Wentworth Institute of Technology’s School of Management award winning student ePortfolios were assessed using a table matrix to determine if those top 10 skills were represented in reflections or artifacts.

The World Economic Forum actually lists 15 skills needed for 2025 and beyond. It is this authors intent to assess the most recent award winning ePortfolios to determine if the remaining five skills can be detected, which include emotional intelligence, persuasion and negotiation, systems analysis and evaluation, troubleshooting and user experience and service orientation. A table matrix will include a review of these student ePortfolios to determine a representation of these life-learning skills.

Cindy's research was published in the Fall/Winter 2022 edition of AePR.

In 2012, Dr Trent Batson in an interview with Mary Grush in Campus Technology said, “Because ePortfolios ‘work’ best in an EBL environment, and since the EBL paradigm is a far stretch from current dominant educational designs, ePortfolio use at scale on campuses will take time”. A decade and global pandemic later, I will identify why it’s time to scale up through centring learning in assessment, and reifying the EBL in AAEEBL (evidence-based learning) in the assessment design process to shift the power imbalance toward trust, justice, equity and the relational as we teach and learn in radical times of change and complexity.

Trent could have said this today as we see exams go back to paper and pen, and fear of cheating reifies academic integrity discourse across education. Are we seeing the dominant educational paradigm of the banking model of education (Freire, 1968) rear its ugly head after the educational turn in the pandemic saw us redirect our practices toward justice, care, and kind pedagogies. Picking up on Trent’s provocative statement in this AAEEBL Annual Batson Lecture I will position ePortfolios and their potential to address the current needs and challenges in education, particularly in the age of AI. As UNESCO posits, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to address some of the biggest challenges in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and accelerate progress towards SDG 4 [the education goal]. In these times of radical change and complexity, we must emphasise problem-posing authentic EBL assessment and relational just pedagogies and not distrust, fear and protectionism as forms of assessment.

About Kathryn Coleman

Dr Kathryn Coleman is an Associate Professor in Visual Arts & Design Education and co-lead of SWISP Lab with Dr Sarah Healy at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research and teaching are positioned in the intersection of art, design, digital, practice, culture, and data. Kate is a neurodivergent, feminist, artist, researcher, and teacher. Her praxis includes taking aspects of her theoretical and practical work as a/r/tographer to consider how artists, artist-teachers, and artist-students use site to create place in digital and physical practice. She is Chief Investigator on ‘The Learning with the Land’, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) project at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and an Academic Convenor for the University of Melbourne, Petascale Campus.

Resources

• Book The Educational Turn: Rethinking the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

• Book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

• Kate's publicationsKate's PhD thesis

• Field Guide to Eportfolio

• Algorithmic Justice League

• UN Women statement: International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexphobia and Transphobia, 17 May 2023

• Blog post 'Predicting the Next Big Thing: 7 Edtech Trends that Will Dominate 2023'

• Report 'Innovating Pedagogy 2023' from the Open University

• Paper 'Radical Education: A pathway for new utopias and reimagining European democracies' by Sérgio Xavier

•  Book Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

• Article 'Walking to Create an Aesthetic and Spiritual Currere' by Rita L. Irwin

• Paper 'The Method of "Currere"' by William Pinar