Sam Taylor: Stories from a 14-year portfolio evangelist

Kristina Hoeppner 00:05

Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast on portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios into their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner, and I'm delighted to talk with Sam Taylor today.

Kristina Hoeppner 00:30

Sam is a colleague of mine in our office at Catalyst IT Europe in the UK and a long time evangelist of portfolios in education. In our conversation today, we'll be talking about the role of a learning designer supporting portfolio initiatives at organisations. Let's get right into it. Sam, it's wonderful to be talking with you today. Can you please share a little bit about yourself and your professional career?

Sam Taylor 00:58

Oh, wow. Hello. So I have been involved in portfolios for a very long time now. It started way back in 2008. I was part of a team that looked at introducing a way of allowing students to record their professional development as part of their degree programme, and we were looking for a tool to combine all that information that they get from the careers office, from their tutors, from their peers, for work experience. And that's kind of where my journey started. All the way to now, as you say, I'm a colleague of yours at Catalyst, and I'm a Senior eLearning Consultant in the UK office. And I hold regular meetings with our clients that have portfolios, Mahara portfolios with us, but I also do consulting to those who aren't hosted by Catalyst, but offer advice and guidance that way, too. So it started off very early, in my beginning of my career as a Learning Technologist, and now I'm a consultant and I get to talk to lots of different people about the use of Mahara. So it's quite exciting.

Kristina Hoeppner 02:01

Do you mainly work with academic institutions or do you also support organisations that are outside of that formal education space?

Sam Taylor 02:11

Pretty much to date has all been academic institution. So it's either as part of a university or college or apprenticeship providers. So very much educational rather than training, vocational training.

Kristina Hoeppner 02:25

Have you seen over the years that there's been an uptake of portfolios besides the learning management system that everybody has?

Sam Taylor 02:34

Yeah, so we have a lot of inquiries about the the use of portfolios for assessment, especially when it comes to like practical degrees, being able to show - students being able to demonstrate their skills, get feedback from their peers, get feedback from their tutors, and then from their mentors, but also potentially externally from their employer of their work experience

Kristina Hoeppner 02:58

Kind of going back a little bit to your starting days because I think really 2008 was also when, when I got more or less into ePortfolios, just in a different country than yours, not too far in Luxembourg. And so it's really fantastic to kind of go back with you to those early days. Do you remember what sort of portfolios you asked students to create? Was that more learning portfolios or portfolios for assessment? I remember that Solent University or Southampton Solent University at that point did quite a bit in regards to employability.

Sam Taylor 03:35

So it was at Southampton Solent University. And it was when I was working with Roger Emery and the wonderful Dr. Barbara Lee, looking at, again, about professional development. But it wasn't just about portfolios for assessment that it was actually useful. It was about being able to marry the two together to talk about systems being interoperable, so connected with the IT systems, but it's also connecting all the different areas of your learning. So Solent's mission was to not only produce graduates who were academically aware, but also socially aware, professionally aware, so the employability skills as well as demonstrating that they could look at like their subject area and present they understood this subject area. So some examples of portfolios actually came out of it. 

So like I said, we started off purely looking at giving every student a space to record personal development and make a plan for what they need to do. So where are the gaps? How can I fill it? And then fill them and record that they filled them. But looking at or how can this be part of an assessment? Some of the really good examples are the Architectural Technology students, so the students that are becoming architects and technologists. They, upon graduating, need to be able to produce a portfolio to show examples of work that they've done. They need to show all the certifications they've received, all the ideas and examples of projects that they've been part of. 

The programme lead thought, 'Well, why am I getting them to do it in their final year? Let's get them doing it in their first year,' and by the time they graduate, they've gone through the portfolio process. They know how to compile it, they've done it all in Mahara. They know, okay, well, that testimony is a bit old, I'm gonna get a new one. And they get into the practice of asking for feedback from clients, asking for feedback from people, presenting themselves as a professional before they've even left their final year so that when they do leave, and they have to apply for certified membership, they've got a portfolio of evidence to show that they meet the criteria as a graduate, but also they have all those skills that they've picked up along the way about compiling, reflecting, and presenting themselves to an external audience. So when it comes to building their own website, or anything that you want to get their business up and running, they've got all those skills already, which they grew from using Mahara, which was a safe environment within Solent, rather than any of these free to use platforms outside.

Kristina Hoeppner 05:47

Yeah. Those transferable skills are very important. 

Sam Taylor 05:50

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So some other examples of really good portfolio use were the PR and communication students. So these students, in their second year, were creating Mahara portfolios, which they were then going to send out to potential employers asking for a placement. So they use it to build their CV, they use it to build examples of work that they've done already. And they actually sent them out to businesses say, 'Hey, look at me for 2, 3, 4 weeks during the summer because, you know, a) I need this for my degree' because Solent was very keen on trying to give students real life skills in real life experiences working in industry, but also a way to say, 'Look, this is what I can do. These are digital skills, I have, look what I can do already, I can bring this to your organisation.' I think and this is way back, you know, when you know, social media and digital marketing, were in the sort of early stages. So having really creative students who could go in and create a really funky skins, you know, they're actually able to go in and make their own skins to get their portfolio, their own, you know, kind of like brand and identity really, really good skills to present to externals. And these students then took these skills on again, like the other students, once they graduated, they knew about building portfolios, they knew about picking all their good bits of work to present and to design web pages for an external audience.

Kristina Hoeppner 07:10

Sam, throughout your career, you've always been in a support role, be that to academic organisations and now also add catalyst. Are there any questions that you are constantly being asked by the organisations that you work with, either from the staff perspective, or from the student perspective?

Sam Taylor 07:31

There's always two things that come up quite regularly in conversation with them. And it's always either around integration for assessment, or it's about creating a workflow that's easy for students to follow between compiling their portfolios, getting feedback, and then presenting it for assessment. So those are the two things of the workflow. And every university and college is different as well with their requirements. So my colleague Jasmin always talks about universities and colleges being hand knit: everyone's created and they've got their own culture and ways of doing things. 

And the beauty about Mahara is that you can design a workflow that fits for them. There's so many different ways of doing it. And if you can't, you can get it built. You can pay for it to be done. So for example, recently, I did some work with Griffith College, in Dublin, Ireland, and we identified an area which they didn't, there was no functionality in there. So it's the ability to create a template and push a template out to a group. I can't remember which bit it was exactly, but we introduced them to yourselves and you created the functionality, and there it was. I can't remember exactly what it was. I have to go and look at my notes again, but...

Kristina Hoeppner 08:44

It was to be able to set up a Smart Evidence competency portfolio in the group so that it could be copied directly to the students, and the matrix, that overview page, was immediately attached.

Sam Taylor 08:58

That was it because you could already send templates because DCU paid for that. And they wanted to be able to push templates out that had the Smart Evidence already attached. So that was it. Exactly. Yeah. So it's wonderful when you talk to each of the clients because they you know, they have an idea what they want to do. They present you their map their dream workflow, and you try and make it fit, and nine times out of 10 it does. And then with the assessment side, if it's either just using Mahara to submit to a group for feedback or integrating it with another LMS, and that's the other thing that they're always interested in, you know, so 'Can my students submit to select, for example, Moodle? Can I use Turnitin, or Ouriginal or any of the other plagiarism prevention tools?' So it's all these questions that come up, and it mostly is down to assessment.

Kristina Hoeppner 09:39

So it's quite a lot on the technical side then that you're giving support?

Sam Taylor 09:43

Yes. Yep. 

Kristina Hoeppner 09:44

Have you then observed any particular trends in portfolio work because you've now been involved in portfolios for 14 years?

Sam Taylor 09:55

Gosh, yes [laughing].

Kristina Hoeppner 09:57

Can't believe it, right? In your work with many different organisations and in your own experience at different organisations, supporting your own learners and also supporting faculty and staff, have you observed any trends or are things coming back that might have been important a few years ago or are there new things that people are wanting to try now with portfolios?

Sam Taylor 10:26

Not that I've seen. I think mostly the people that I've been talking to, it's about, 'Okay, this is phase one. We've now finished phase one. It kind of worked. We want to make it better. How can we simplify? How can we make it more streamlined? How can we lock down areas?' because I remember you did a fantastic talk many years ago about you know, portfolios are not - don't think of them as templates. Think of it as scaffolding. We don't want to template them. We want to scaffold it. Scaffold the learning, scaffold the story, scaffold, scaffold, rather than force people down a particular route. 

And I think, certainly from a university point of view, they want to be able to focus the portfolio use for their own particular area. And I don't think they realise, you know, there's so many opportunities for expression in presenting information back. So as a learner, 'Okay, I'm being forced down this route, I have to add text after this.' But obviously, now that you can let students decide how they want to present themselves, so they can say, 'Okay, well, I don't want to do text, I'd rather do a video or I've created a little animation here, I want to present that way.' I think looking at maybe the assessment policies, it needs to look at Universal Design for Learning: do students need to have to keep typing? Can they present however they wish in areas that they feel confident and comfortable with, or an area that they you know, they feel that they want to express themselves? 

So in the day, it was this portfolio was like, it's digital, it's digital, it's presented ourselves with lots of different media, and then it turned into a, you know, a virtual, an online workbook where they just fill in sections, but now I want to kind of bring back the well, you know, they're meant to be visual. Make them visual. Don't just put text and maybe an image, and give people choice of how they want to respond.

Kristina Hoeppner 12:07

What have you observed in the organisations you've worked with in terms of supporting students exactly with that in creating portfolios that incorporate multimedia elements that are not just text or long essays online?

Sam Taylor 12:24

So part of my role at Catalyst is I have a number of clients who I meet with regularly. And this is Mahara users, non-Mahara users. So people that use like Moodle or Tōtara, and it's becoming more and more evident that they are promoting digital skills for students. So the whole DigCompEdu framework about digital learning for teachers, teachers are now looking at me, 'Well, okay, I'm increasing my digital skills. I'm getting more confident with creating digital objects. I need to start doing this more with my students because they need these skills as well to thrive in the workplace.' So when we do look at their VLE [virtual learning environment] reviews and looking at other things, I see oh, there's a whole area about student digital skills and digital literacy. This is really, really good because it never used to be there. So it's now been recognised that students are having extra support with digital skills. 

I think what is missing is being able to allow students to share back, 'Well, I have the skills already and have these other skills. Let me present it back to you what I can do.' So I remember there all these initiatives about digital champs, the student champs and students supporting staff and each other, and I think maybe ePortfolios could be filling that gap that they need to be able to have a way of being able to present those skills back. There's definitely a big, big difference with promoting the use of digital skills at university level, definitely, that I've seen anyway. 

I would like to talk about group work. So group work is something that I haven't seen much off recently, which really surprises me because when I left Solent and I joined Cranfield University, based at the Defence Academy, there when I started, there was very little Mahara use at all. It was on a box somewhere under a desk because nobody really had that know how to implement it. And when I joined, I was like, 'Oh, we have Mahara, but no one's using it? Let me change that.' And I worked with Aurélie Soulier to promote that and others, and the one thing that the Defence Academy and students on these postgraduate defence and security courses wanted were ways of getting group work to work properly. So before it used to be the group portfolios would be physical binders with like separate sections and a different student worked on a section, and it just looked like five individual pieces of work shoved together. We want some unity. We want it to look like a group produced portfolio not just you do that, but you do that, but we want one voice, one look and feel. 

So group portfolios really, really took off at the Defence Academy, especially with their systems engineering students. They used it for their project work, and it was really really exciting because they were creating these really cool little robots out of Lego and shooting at targets. And there's different elements and areas to look at. And this is where portfolios, physical ones and digital ones work really well, especially with Mahara as well as with their collections that you could have a page for each phase of the project, what worked, what didn't work, and collaboratively, they could work together on updating those pages and building and compiling this portfolio, which are then made available to each of the other groups to look back on after the presentation stage at the end. So they can all see and feedback and have a look at outside of the assessment phase, they can go back and look and just enjoy seeing how the other groups got on and how they actually got to their outcomes. You know, I want to see more group portfolios,

Kristina Hoeppner 15:36

We have to look if we can find that portfolio example because I can so remember the pictures of them kind of on the floor with building the bridges and putting the robots across. 

Sam Taylor 15:48

Yeah [laughing].

Kristina Hoeppner 15:48

And then summarising what they had done reflecting on the work. Yeah. Let's see if that is still somewhere available online.

Sam Taylor 15:55

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a video from Moodlemoot 2016 somewhere, I'll have to find it.

Kristina Hoeppner 16:02

We'll definitely link any of the resources in the episode notes so that people can follow up on them. Sam, you mentioned that you'd like to see more group work and collaboration happening. And that's definitely an area that has not been as explored, as you correctly said, and there are definitely great possibilities of doing that. Is there anything else that you'd like to be able to do with portfolios that you can't just yet do?

Sam Taylor 16:36

It might be because I haven't explored it properly yet. It might already be there in Mahara. But I want to be able to do more with the dashboard and have different bespoke dashboards for different types of users in there. So for example, you can create an account for an external who may be assessing some students and you have to physically go in and set their dashboard for them and then give them their credentials. It would be really, really nice to have a way of having like different dashboards depending on kind of like your role in the platform. If you are an assessor and you do have portfolios sent to you for review, it would be really good if that block was already sort of there and the dashboards are sort of focused around what you are meant to do. 

But then again, it's the whole beauty of Mahara because that okay, you are there using Mahara for that purpose. But there's no reason why I can't then go and create a portfolio for myself for my own professional development. It's something that I need to think more about, but I think definitely having the option of having a focus per different roles would be something that it could be looked into in future or something I need to plan on paper first.

Kristina Hoeppner 17:41

I think it's really that balance between flexibility and guidance. So that scaffolding again that we often talk about that in the beginning stages of portfolios, you might give more of a template or guidance around what should go in and then over time, you lessen than that, and you might only give them a rough structure. And same thing with the dashboards, you can have a better experience by saying, 'Okay, this is what you need to focus on,' and then they can still explore the rest.

Sam Taylor 18:12

Yeah, yeah, talking about again, templating and scaffolding. I remember, in both my previous roles as a Learning Technologist at Cranfield and at Solent, when lecturers did come to me for advice about how to present portfolio based work to their learners and how to get their learners to use Mahara, you know, when thinking about learning design, I'd say 'Right, you've got a number of options available to you. You can give them a blank canvas and a checklist and say, right, I want to see all these things evidence, get your students to go away and decide how they want them to do it. You can create like a template, so just put a number of blocks in there and just say that this block, this area here is where you upload your evidence, you can easily upload text or you can delete it and add another block. Or you can be really, really sort of specific and just lock everything down so they can't change anything.' And I think I was really surprised actually, I really thought most of the lectures would go for the locked down, you know, version, but a lot of them took the middle, and that's why I was so pleased that DCU did fund the block that you were able to change that you can just drag any block, the placeholder was just fantastic. And I wish it was there when I was, you know, wrestling university. 

What I would always say to lecturers is like, 'Okay, well, what is it you want your students to do?' Because I don't want it to be like a wiki situation where there was a time where every academic would come running to me saying, 'Sam, can I have a wiki in my course?' I'm like, 'Why?' 'Oh, because apparently I need it.' Iit's like, 'No, tell me what you want your students to do and I'll support you what to do.' It's exactly the same when Mahara was being rolled out across both institutions that 'Oh, I need to use Mahara.' It's like 'Why? What do you want them to do?' And then I said, 'Okay, let's discuss it and then decide about how you want to introduce it to your students.' So drip feed activities throughout the term and they can go in and update their portfolio rather than give them their information towards the end and say, 'Right? You've got to produce his portfolio' because as you and I both know portfolios are created over time, they're not like an essay, you could knock out in five hours before a deadline.

Kristina Hoeppner 20:11

That leads us actually really nicely into the quick answer round. I hope you're ready for the quick questions there. Which three words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Sam Taylor 20:23

So my three words are 'involved', 'time', and 'growth'. So you have to spend time on your portfolio. You can't just leave it, and time and timeline you can join it together because it is a representation of your time on that project. It's meant to show the journey. 'Involved' because you have to put effort into it, you can't just do the bare minimum. And also 'growth' is because at the end you can see what you've done over that time.

Kristina Hoeppner 20:53

Fantastic set of three words there. Thank you. Sam, you had a second list of words to share. Do you want to tell us about them?

Sam Taylor 21:02

Oh yeah. When I was thinking about my words, it's like, 'Well, okay, I've got some verbs that I would like to share as well. So I have four. So I have 'compiling', 'reflecting', 'presenting', and also 'transforming' because I feel the portfolio process is very transformative for an individual, if done correctly.

Kristina Hoeppner 21:19

Thank you so much for that bonus list. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Sam Taylor 21:29

Right. So this one, I have two things that I think they should do themselves so involves actually having to use Mahara themselves, okay? So the first one is they have to have go creating a professional portfolio, an 'About me' portfolio just so they can understand the features that are in there and what they can actually do. Also, the second thing is that they have to have a go at creating a presentation or project portfolio as well. So they can understand two of the many ways that you can use Mahara to create a CV portfolio and create a project presentation because then they really understand what goes into it. So when they're advising, supporting students, they know exactly what terminology to use, and what to expect and how long things take. So definitely try before they start advising on how best to use it.

Kristina Hoeppner 22:15

That then goes into the third question, what advice do you have for portfolio authors, be that students or professionals using it outside of an educational context?

Sam Taylor 22:27

Do not leave it to the last minute. It's meant to capture your journey. It's not meant to be a... How can you reflect and grow if you're just thinking about the then, you know, then, the here and now you need to be able to look back and show that you have changed over time using it. So whether it's a project and it's nothing personal, it's purely what you can observe. You need to record as you're doing it because you know, memories fade. I can't remember what I did yesterday. So if I'd recorded stuff every day, it's good to look back on and so yeah, do not leave it to the last minute. Do it as and when you can. So little and often rather than everything at the end.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:06

Thank you so much for sharing some of your insights from having worked with portfolios now for well over a decade, Sam. Now over to our listeners, what do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? 

This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Sam Taylor today. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find links to resources that she shared and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the ePortfolio platform Mahuta. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.