Day 4 - 20 July 2023

Global change is disrupting education from professional, emotional and generational perspectives. Employers are asking people to work more hours because there are not enough qualified workers. Trauma-informed teaching has become an ubiquitous need for learners of every identity, culture and background. As Gen Z finds its voice, colleges and universities are recruiting larger numbers of older, nontraditional learners, creating a cross-generational combination of lived experiences and new challenges.

The pace of change keeps multiplying. Take technology, for example. Whether you love it, hate it, or don’t know enough about it, recent advances in artificial intelligence have caused educators to take action. The impact of change affects learners and their choices. Each year more students balance their academic work with other obligations and responsibilities like employment and childcare. Students choose hybrid and online courses for both flexibility and cost savings.

In the face of all this change, ePortfolios provide learners with tools to survive. Now more than ever, we must use innovative ePortfolio practices to prepare learners to claim their place in the workforce and the world. Today’s students must become not only more adaptable, skilled professionals but also more intentional, digital citizens. They must understand both how and why they are making choices that affect their future. Together we will explore practical, ePortfolio-based strategies that promote flexibility and equity, that address issues of size and scale, and that support learners where they are.

About Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly, EdD, works with colleges and universities as a consultant to address distance education, educational technology, and organizational challenges. He also teaches online courses in the Department of Equity, Leadership Studies, and Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University, where he also previously served as the Online Teaching and Learning Manager. Kevin is a member of the AAEEBL Board of Directors and the AAEEBL Task Force on Digital Ethics in ePortfolios. His books include Advancing Online Teaching, Going Alt-Ac, and the forthcoming Making Courses Flexible.

Resources

• Slides for 'What AI Prompts Would Darwin Write?' as PDF

• Slides for 'What AI Prompts Would Darwin Write?' as Google slides

Salt Lake Community College has offered ePortfolio with student choice in ePortfolio platform and, later, with a requirement that all students use the same platform. Facilitators collected data on platform experience and will share data on student and faculty preference as well as the equity and justice implications of an open, varied platform approach compared to a single platform model. This presentation will also explore how platform selection can impact open pedagogy practices, like the ability to offer scaffolded, renewable assignments (Baran & AlZoubi, 2021) and foster learning environments where students and educators collaborate in the production of knowledge (Freire, 2018; Jhangiani and Green, 2018). Critical questions that we will examine in the workshop include: 

• How does platform specificity reduce or exacerbate inequities? 

• How can we effectively resource students if offering a range of ePortfolio options? 

• Does an open purpose for ePortfolio, i.e. it works for pedagogy, community-building, assessment, self-discovery, professional profiles, or all of the above, help or hinder student learning and platform selection decisions? 

• If an open purpose is the goal, what pain points need to be anticipated to ensure that inequities aren’t exacerbated based on prior experience with technology and the types of prompts, assignments, and questions? 

References

Baran, E., & AlZoubi, D. (2020). Affordances, challenges, and impact of open pedagogy: Examining

students’ voices. Distance Education. 10.1080/01587919.2020.1757409

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 50th anniversary edition. Bloomsbury Academic, New York

Jhangiani, R. S. & Green, A. (2018). An open athenaeum: Creating an institutional home for open pedagogy. In A. Wesolek, J. Lashley, & A. Langley (Eds.), OER: A field guide for academic librarians. Pacific University Press.

In this conference workshop, we will demonstrate how justice-oriented portfolio designs can enhance Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for students who experience disability, and help instructors move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to meaningful course engagement. We will showcase how students in a disability rights course used ePortfolios to design and create "zines" to reflect on their learning, challenge ableism, and promote disability rights on campus. The workshop will include a didactic presentation followed by a participatory session where attendees will create their own zines in small groups. By the end of the workshop, participants will gain a deeper understanding of how to incorporate UDL principles and foster more inclusive, equitable, and engaging learning environments.

Students need to be prepared for a rapidly changing future in which lifelong learning is an integral part. In order to become successful, being and remaining responsible for one’s own learning is an important condition. We believe that the best way to teach responsibility is by giving students as much ownership as possible over their own learning process: learning to take control themselves in order to learn from it optimally. 

Portflow is a student-led portfolio plug-in for your LMS, in which students can make their developmental progress visible and accountable under their own control, by setting goals, collecting evidence, asking for feedback from teachers, peers, and experts, and creating an assessment file. This results in more authentic assessments of students’ competencies and more inclusive learning opportunities. 

Being able to take ownership and learning to be responsible for one’s own learning is of course not something that happens overnight. It is a learning process that requires adequate scaffolding, customized to the needs of each individual student. That is why, the teacher can always offer the right guidance and reduce it appropriately in Portflow, so that the student learns in his own zone of proximal development. 

AI has the potential to take this to another level. E.g., by providing ongoing personalized support and real-time feedback to students, while they are creating artifacts or evidence of learning for use in their portfolios. Consequently, students can use AI to provide scaffolding in various tasks like creating formative development opportunities, extending learning opportunities, supporting the writing process and engaging in reflective learning. 

Format/design

In this workshop, we will collaboratively discover ways to appeal to the student’s ownership and ultimately their responsibility over their learning process. Participants will act as both students and instructors/coaches. They will create different types of portfolio ‘stubs’ and explore ways in which they can employ AI to help build their portfolios and process feedback. For this purpose, participants will work within Portflow and experience how a student-led way of portfolio-based learning works.

Participants will have to create different types of evidence within their ePortfolios during this session. They will have to use AI to generate feedback on their work, to help them improve their next versions.

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Bucknell University is in early stages of implementing a department-wide ePortfolio initiative. The initiative centers on a new "Lenses on Engineering" course that students enroll in every semester to continually engage in reflective thinking throughout their undergraduate experience. The ECE department’s ePortfolio interest intersects with efforts to adapt Amartya Sen’s capability approach as an alternative framework for engineering education. Using the capabilities approach, success in engineering education is based upon equipping students with the abilities needed to live a life that they value. This stands in contrast to top-down approaches to curriculum design that focus narrowly on students’ mastery of specific content areas.

We are exploring how the implementation of ePortfolios integrated with the capability approach can widen potential engineering pathways, resulting in better retention of underrepresented groups and their ability to bring their whole selves to the discipline. Initial results from individual courses confirm that a single ePortfolio experience leads students to be more reflective thinkers and these habits transfer across engineering courses. In the proposed course sequence, students will use ePortfolios to reflect on their expanded capabilities and the kind of engineer they would like to become. This initiative can serve as a model for other departments across campus to build ePortfolios that better integrate course outcomes, student activities and larger societal themes.

Collaborators for this work: Sarah Appelhans and Alan Cheville

Research indicates that marginalized student populations often struggle with belonging and mattering higher education learning spaces. One of the most impactful ways to create a sense of community and mattering is to get to know students and co-develop curriculum with them. ePortfolios can be scaffolded throughout the semester to help faculty get to know students and better understand what supports and impedes learning. A welcome page assignment accompanied with a pre-term reflection, mid-term reflection, and end-of-term reflection can provide a critical touchpoint between faculty and students throughout the semester. This ensures that students receive multiple opportunities to practice with ePortfolios, curate the ePortfolio in a way that aligns with their academic priorities, and helps professors identify at the mid-term what barriers students are facing.

This mid-term check is especially valuable for collecting feedback from learners who may not finish the semester because it provides context and data to help faculty re-engage students on the edge of withdrawing or dropping out. Participants will also present and share Canvas ePortfolio welcome modules that will be made available for OEP remix and reuse via the Canvas Commons.

To support the launch of a campus-wide ePortfolio rollout, a faculty and staff learning community was established for the 2022-23 academic year at Bucknell University. This learning community provides an opportunity for early practitioners to learn from and support each other while integrating ePortfolios into existing courses and campus activities. The learning community drew strong interest from non-academic staff and Student Life; individuals from these groups accounted for ~75% of participants. As a result of the diversity of participating groups, the thoughtful and visible integration of holistic student experience has emerged as a key component of our ePortfolio initiative. In its first year, this group has helped increase ePortfolios usage across campus as evidenced by growth in the numbers of student ePortfolios and expanding adoption in courses and co-curricular activities.

The learning community is considering the goals and potential structures for our ePortfolio program moving forward based on student feedback as well as examining exemplar programs at other universities. We plan to continue our learning community as a key element of scaling-up local ePortfolio initiatives and are seeking to expand participation from other groups on campus who are working on campus initiatives that promote access.

Collaborator for this work: Alan Cheville

Resource: Handout for 'Building a Strong Foundation'

Join us in discussing opportunities and tools offered through AAC&U: the International Journal of ePortfolio (IJeP) and the research archive, "Publications on ePortfolio: Archives of the Research Landscape" (PEARL). IJeP is a double-blind, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that is freely available online, and PEARL is a searchable compilation of peer-reviewed articles that is designed to support decision-makers, practitioners, and researchers. We will discuss IJeP, including its new website and submission processes, and how you can get involved. We will also explore PEARL's new website and the research behind the archives.

Adoption of a new teaching approach and a new technology tool brings with it great possibilities and simultaneously a multitude of challenges.  No one really likes changes, and in higher education there is often deep attachment to traditional approaches. The team at KPU Teaching and Learning Commons has adopted a multi-pronged approach to build interest and engagement with ePortfolios across the institution. A combination of a co-created vision along with structured and unstructured initiatives, professional development, and promotion have resulted in widespread use for teaching and learning as well as areas such as student support, work integrated learning, and more.

This session will provide an overview of KPU’s journey to date; why we are committed to an ePortfolio initiative,  adoption of the PebblePad Learning Journey system in 2019, a pandemic induced change in roll out plan, visioning, and the many emergent and planned initiatives that have contributed to institutional engagement success.

Resources

• Slides for 'A Multi-Pronged Approach' as PDF

• Slides for 'A Multi-Pronged Approach' as PPTX

This session begins with a brief introduction to Portfolio Assessments at University of Fraser Valley in two different programs. We will connect these examples to literature related to "self-authorship" (Baxter-Magolda, 2001) and draw on career design frameworks in higher education to surface contemporary and 'messy' problems and opportunities when using portfolios.

We will use a strategy of questions and brainstorming to facilitate a conversation about student self-exploration, portfolio platforms and forms of representation, and how portfolio assessment is tied to EDID (equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization) and inclusive education. Through the conversation strategy, participants will be able to share from their own perspectives and hear from others how portfolios are shaping learning at their respective institutions.

Resource: Slides for 'Portfolios for 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.

Resource

• Slides for 'Transforming Career Services' as PDF'

• Slides for 'Transforming Career Services' as Google Slides

Reflecting on Reflection

Candyce Reynolds (Boise State University)

The practice of reflection is at the center of any ePortfolio pedagogy. Reflection allows students to look back, make connections, and plan for the future. Students can upload documentation of their learning but without reflection, an ePortfolio becomes simply an electronic filing cabinet.  This 20 X 20 session will briefly discuss the benefits and challenges with reflection assignments and provide several frameworks to help practitioners create effective reflection prompts and assignments.

Resource: Slides for 'Reflecting on Reflection'

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