Edd Bolton: SmartEvidence and competency portfolios

Kristina Hoeppner 00:05

Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more, for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with 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. Today I'm speaking with Edd Bolton. Edd has been a learning technologist at Solent University in Southampton on the south coast of the UK since 2016. He holds a Master's degree in Visual Communication and a PgCert in Academic Practice. I got to know Edd through Roger Emery, his manager at Solent University, a few years ago. Thank you, Edd, for taking the time today to talk about your love for portfolios and all things SmartEvidence. 

Edd Bolton 00:56

Thank you for inviting me. 

Kristina Hoeppner 00:58

Edd, what did your journey to supporting portfolios at Solent look like?

Edd Bolton 01:03

Prior to coming to Solent, I have worked in portfolios - quite a bit actually - on a different platform. But the idea of portfolios essentially has been the same. And it was working with nursing degrees. So nursing students. They would have to provide evidence that they were meeting standards of professional practice as well as academic practice. So I found that a lot of work that I've been doing has been merging the academic with professional standards. So nurses would have to go out and practice, and they would perform activities that would represent what they do in their day to day work - drawing blood, for example. Not only would they have to know the academic part of it, but they'd have to show that they were able to do it in practice, and they would then get signed off. Through signing off, we'd have to collect all those evidence. They would also have to reflect on how that process went. So they would write maybe a blog or a journal article or something like that then went alongside it, the whole cumulative process of reflecting, and development, and building up a portfolio - that's how I moved in to it in my previous role. 

And then when moving to Solent, I took it on because I had the experience, you know, I just had to learn the Mahara platform itself. But essentially what I was being asked to do and asked to support was similar in this whole - we have a lot of professional degrees at Solent and it was a case of just collecting evidence, showcasing that they're able to meet standards. And that's pretty much how we've moved forward it since.

Kristina Hoeppner 02:29

Do I understand it correctly then that for the professions already at your previous workplace to Solent University that portfolios were an integral part because they could show that journey and also showcase and document in a way also the competencies that somebody had gained? 

Edd Bolton 02:49

Yes, that essentially, that was a point. I remember talking to nurse academics, and I was given the physical portfolio that they initially had. It was a ring binder, I would say probably 10 centimeters thick, of this contents that they had to produce. And it was all just full of these essayed reflections and signatures and things like that. And they would hand the whole thing in. When we moved to the electronic portfolio that was all sort of digitised. To sell it was very, very easy [laughs] - was a case of that you now no longer need to carry this ring binder with you everywhere you go, you've always got this digital portfolio, and it can be shared with you and the academic at the same time. So the academic could sort of feedback on things in real time, as it were. They would look at it at sort of key points and give feedback. There wasn't a case of handing in and there was previously a big handing in process. They would go look through and they'll be handed back. And that sort of interim time when they didn't have the portfolios with them, they'd have to sort of collect their paperwork elsewhere, and they wouldn't be getting feedback on that. So it was a slower process. It was definitely sold to the nursing team, who - generally I found that nursing and healthcare are very, sort of, looking forward for benefits in educational technology. They tend to be very receptive of this.

Kristina Hoeppner 04:00

You could definitely convince the nurse educators and the academics very quickly, but what about the students? Did they take on the electronic portfolio with ease or did they need quite a bit of support? Or how did you actually scaffold the move from the paper based portfolio to the electronic portfolio then?

Edd Bolton 04:22

There was a considerable amount of support. I, as a learning technologist there as well, would have gone into classroom sessions where we did introduce the whole platform to them. In the introduction process, there are two major things that I wanted to get across. The first bit was the concept of portfolios. And the crucial bit that I tried to differentiate between let's say, writing an essay or producing a single piece of work, is the fact that it's reflective and cyclical. And the second part was sort of the creation, the curation part. So as I said, the students were required to do sort of reflective blogs against their professional practice, so they would have to get all the sign-offs. Then they would have to curate the best parts that they would then submit as part of the assignment. 

As I said, the portfolio was both academic and professional standard. So you had the professional standard bit, which was the signing off. And the academic part was the reflective process of how they're developing as a person, how they're engaging with the academic content. And that would be partly blogs. And they would have to write it up, get a section where they would pull it all together. But they would have to cite all these blogs. So the curation part was crucial in that you're not just giving them everything. And then you're collecting all this evidence. And then you're showcasing the best bits, the bits you need to meet the academic requirements. 

So when I was in the session with them that was the key bit that I had to try and get over because we had loads of support materials, in terms of the videos that would show them the nuts and bolts of 'this is how you enter evidence' and 'this is how you bring it into your portfolio'. But I think the crucial part was the getting the concept across to them. Students of nursing would definitely need a lot of support because we had a wide age range of students coming from lots of different backgrounds. So we couldn't make assumptions regarding their digital literacies. So we would have to put on support and continued support regarding the nuts and bolts as it were of how you would click and get the things into the platform. 

I did run interviews at the time to get feedback from those students. And to help us benefit from how that could go. We used that to help us simplify how we showcased how to get the information in. And in my present role at Solent, I'm less student facing. I'm more sort of helping with the sort of, directly with the academics and the the architecture and you know, plugins that we put into the system. And we have colleagues who do the similar sort of thing with sort of health and social care and other sports science related degrees, and they will be doing very much the nuts and bolts in the support part. But I have created the video help materials, and I do a whole video induction to Mahara and the portfolio systems. And I go through the whole scenario of the nuts and bolts of how you click into it, but that is prefaced with this whole concept of curation. That's how I define it different from let's say, an essay or something like that, a single piece of work.

Kristina Hoeppner 07:12

I know that the nurses here in Aotearoa New Zealand that work with portfolios for their competency standards often use a template because they are very busy and therefore with a template, they can just focus on the content. Whereas of course, if we had design students or English majors, we might not use a template with them because then the design of the portfolio itself - where they place content, how they place content on it, whether they use multimedia or not - is important. Do you also work with templates, sometimes, especially for those very structured portfolios which a competency portfolio might be?

Edd Bolton 07:53

I'm nodding along as you're saying all those things. We heavily use templates. When I came to Solent I found that was the best way of helping ease in the process for the students. As you said, those students who are getting professional qualifications are more interested in the learning, the development, and collecting the evidence, not so much on the aesthetics of the portfolio. So we heavily template all of them. So we will have academics come to us and say, 'Is a portfolio what we need as part of our assessment?' And I'll talk through the learning journey of the student and then we'll make recommendations based on that. From that, if a portfolio is appropriate, I would generally recommend for those less creative degrees that they would be designed as a template. It's much easier for the students. I will work with the academics, depending how much support they need, because some of them happily just go away and go, 'Okay, I'm gonna build the template', and then they go into it. And I have, in other cases, built templates for them, and I will build in the instructions with them. So the academics say 'this is the academic content they need to cover' and I will sort of embed videos into it and text based instructions or PDF downloads that they can have, and that will just tell them what they're required to do. So we've got a number of portfolios, some of them require sort of signatures, some of them require reflective pieces. We will try and segment the portfolio up. In Mahara, you have pages within the collection. We will have sections and the sections will pre-define what they're required to do. So if they do a SWOT analysis, we'll be saying this section's on the SWOT analysis, and here's the area what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to reflect them, things like that.

Kristina Hoeppner 09:23

That's a very good approach I think, for scaffolding the portfolios because that's how we can guide the learners along the way for filling it out because curating your own learning evidence is not necessarily something that they might have learned before.

Edd Bolton 09:39

No, I definitely think that's in part of the support that I give, that's, that's the area that I feel has to do most because some students it's a case of 'why am I not giving you everything? This is everything I've learned, I want to, you to see everything that I've done', and I think this is part of how students sort of reflect on their work and identify how they're progressing as a person. There are certain key parts of that learning journey that are more valuable. As a student, if you're able to see that in yourself, it helps you identify you as a reflective practitioner. As a person, you have a better understanding of yourself and how you learn. So I think that curation part is crucial.

Kristina Hoeppner 10:18

Edd, you've told us that you use a competency portfolio quite a bit at Solent University

Edd Bolton 10:24

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner 10:25

... but Solent has a much longer history of portfolio use. What other sort of portfolios do you use then besides those two at Solent? And why does Solent University actually place such an high importance on portfolios?

Edd Bolton 10:40

I'll answer the second part first. The reason why Solent University puts a high emphasis on portfolios is because of the nature of the degrees we run here. They generally tend to be vocational professional practice ones. In the UK, there is a big push for apprenticeship degrees. it's a new thing that's coming, I'd say, over the last five years, where students can come from a variety of different methods. And through an apprenticeship scheme from their workplace, they come into the university, and will do a degree. Now as part of these apprenticeship workplaces, they're heavily structured in terms of the professional standards requirement. 

And we have these things called 'knowledge, skills, behaviours' that the student has to exhibit. And it's part of a professional standards framework from whomever. So for example, we have a chartered managers degree apprenticeship. So this is a business studies degree, and they will have a framework. There is also a sports and exercise therapy, a degree, that will have a similar type of framework. And there's always knowledge, skills and behaviours. We use the competency based frameworks built into Mahara to help with the evidencing of that because we can place on the front of the portfolio 'these are the skills, the knowledge skills, behaviours you need', and they'll be written out in text so the students can see them. As the student gets the evidence that they need to showcase that, they will then make the connection between that area that they're required to provide the personal standard against and the evidence, and then the tutor will then sort of mark it off as whether or not that meets the competency or doesn't yet and what they need to do. And they've got the reflective process within that and the feedback. Sorry, what was the first part of the question?

Kristina Hoeppner 12:17

That was more around what types of portfolios you're creating.

Edd Bolton 12:22

Oh, the types of portfolios. The two primary areas of portfolios that we'd have is sort of, the more traditional creative ones, where the student sort of makes a mini website. So architecture would be an example of one that would have to create a showcase of their work. And they would design that by themselves. They would use that maybe as a job interview aspect, so they would have all their work pulled together. And the other major section would be, as I said, the professional standard stuff that we've talked in much depth. So those are the two main areas.

Kristina Hoeppner 12:51

You've talked about standards already quite a bit, so might as well get to the part of SmartEvidence that you've been dying to tell me and...

Edd Bolton 12:58

Yes [laughs]

Kristina Hoeppner 13:00

...and to update me on because we've - gosh - it's already been almost no, two, two and a half, three years, maybe that we've talked about SmartEvidence last and what could be done and things that you like about it and things that what we got to include? So do you want to catch me up on where you're standing by things these days?

Edd Bolton 13:20

Yeah. The things I love about SmartEvidence, as I alluded to before, is the ability to tie the professional standard to the evidence. That makes it really easy and simple for the student to see where they're at. So they've got this matrix of criteria that they have to meet, and they can come back, continue to their portfolio and see which bits they're missing, essentially. So they will then collect the evidence that relates to it, assign it to that standard, and then ask the tutor to verify whether or not they've met that standard through that evidence. I think that's a very powerful feature, and my favourite feature, I would say, as part of portfolios [laughs] because of degree apprenticeships so neatly fit into this professional standards. They're just tying straight in.

I remember the first time we did this, that I had to write JSON files. It was a case of me having to write this all out in code and then upload it and we've seen those developments in that, you know, now it's sort of a WYSIWYG function. So you can just type in the competencies which are much, much quicker and sub competency, and how they will relate to one another. It's main, been easier therefore to utilise this functionality. We're just seeing more of it being used and more widespread. Originally when I first talked to you, I think it was just one degree that was sort of trialing it. Now we have about three or four different areas who are using it regularly. The chartered managers degree apprenticeship have been using it, I think, almost since we first launched it and they've just gone off and they now do it, it's now part of the work. You know, the students have to do the degree part of their work and they had to do the framework and they have to present that framework to the professional body as well as the academics and it has to meet that standard. So they have actually present it to a professional body for marking. It's become more embedded.

Kristina Hoeppner 14:57

Of course, with SmartEvidence, you immediately have that built in structure

Edd Bolton 15:01

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner 15:01

... which again, goes towards the scaffolding and the template-ising of the portfolio making it even easier because the academic already has all of that built in...

Edd Bolton 15:12

Yes. 

Kristina Hoeppner 15:13

...done by your team, right?

Edd Bolton 15:14

Yes, either by my team or by the academics themselves. It's very, very structured. And I think the students see the fact that it's very clear, 'I need to meet all these standards.' You know, one bit of evidence can relate to multiple lots of standards, you know, we explained that to them. And in terms of scaffolding, if you see a gap in the framework, then you know that's an area that you need to find evidence for. There's no ambiguity about what I need to do because the standard's there.

Kristina Hoeppner 15:38

Do you know if that visual overview of the matrix page that you mentioned, helps the students have a quick overview of where they're at in their portfolio because typically, we have the the many, many pages that students create and the evidence they put in and the reflections, but what SmartEvidence wants to achieve is that with just one glance at that first page of the portfolio, you actually see where you're at - how many of the standards you've already achieved, how many are still in progress, and also how many you might have to add a bit more evidence, or you might be missing a reflection or things like that. Do you feel that has been helping?

Edd Bolton 16:15

Yes, it has been. We've definitely showcased the sort of visual element of it. So if you imagine the matrix - if you look down, the left hand column would be all the standards and across the top, you'd have all the pages. You have a gray circle that would represent there's nothing there. Then there would be a blue doughnut that would say, 'I as a student, believe that I have got a bit of evidence, and I want the tutor to look at it.' So they would signpost they could see instantly. We've had, have some portfolios that have become very, very large, and there's a bit of scrolling involved. But generally, we have found that they get a little sort of symbol to represent that they have submitted evidence. And then once the tutor is marked it, they'll either turn it to orange, so that means they partially submitted or green that then means that they fully met the standard. Sometimes you just don't use the amber. Definitely we found that that visual sort of overview made it much simpler for the students to see what they need to produce.

Kristina Hoeppner 17:06

With all the functionality that is already there in SmartEvidence, I'm pretty sure that there might be something that you feel like... you'd like to be able to do, but it can't just yet fully or maybe even in a different area of portfolio work. Does something come to mind?

Edd Bolton 17:23

This is feedback that I've got from academics. I's dependent on the degree that we're working with, and they'll always have something they would like to do it. So I remember biomedical sciences tutors said they would like to release competencies on a year by year basis. So students would have their portfolios throughout the whole degree, but they don't necessarily want to give them the year three competencies in year one. So one thing they were thinking of was to have the competencies expand as they went through the degrees. Other bit of feedback would be that you could relate the competency framework directly to the piece of evidence rather than the page, it would help. So the tutor would just click on that, it would bring up the evidence and then they could assess it. It is a bit of management at the moment, so when the students have the template and they have the pages with the evidence on it, we tend to try and make it so that tends to be one or two bits of evidence on that page to make it clearer to the academic who's marking it feeding back to say 'this is the bit of evidence we're you're looking at.' Those are the two areas that I'd see development in the future.

Kristina Hoeppner 18:20

That is certainly feedback that we've already put into a proposal, and I'll make sure to link to that as well in the episode notes because maybe there is the possibility at some point that a number of organisations can come together to co-fund the further development of SmartEvidence, especially when there're so many universities that do have these apprenticeship degrees where working with competencies is just commonplace.

Edd Bolton 18:48

Yeah, I'm happy for anyone to contact me or to share their experience because it's always great to see how other institutions are using SmartEvidence to get ideas because it's not just the technology you have in place. It's the process of what you ask the students and the academics to do, and just seeing the innovative ideas that are out there will help. It may not always be a technical fix, it might just be a process fix. It might be a 'oh, if you think about it in this way, then it makes it easier for the students to do' and those sorts of ideas. When we've had Mahara meet-ups, it's always great to hear of other people and how they're doing things because it's so inspiring to see what they can do with the features they've got.

Kristina Hoeppner 19:28

It would be lovely to start those Mahara hui up again in person 

Edd Bolton 19:32

Yep.

Kristina Hoeppner 19:32

... and workshop with you. Edd, that already takes us to the end of our session today. So I'd like to ask you three questions that I ask everybody else. And the first one is - which words do you use to describe portfolio work to your learners and also to your faculty?

Edd Bolton 19:51

You've given me up to three, so I have actually written down three [laughs]. So I'd say three words would be cyclical, reflective, and curation.

Kristina Hoeppner 19:59

What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Edd Bolton 20:06

My major tip would be to talk with their academics and embed the portfolio as part of the whole degree. This is a developmental process. So I would ask them to sort of think about how the student is moving through the degree and how the portfolio is a continual touch point in their personal/professional development, and whether or not you're focusing more academic or more on the personal side of how they're developing as a person that's up to you. But it's a key tenet that runs through a degree, I think that's where it becomes the most powerful.

Kristina Hoeppner 20:35

Looking at the other side of the coin, what advice do you have for portfolio authors or learners and students in general?

Edd Bolton 20:43

I suppose for students, it would be think of it as a habit that'll develop as part of this. You've got your degree that you're developing, you need to think about yourself as a person and who you want to be in the workplace. And continuing having habitual sort of reflection on that creation of evidence really helps with when you finish the degree and you've sort of got the certificates and you think 'oh, what have I actually done', then you've got this collection of materials about how you've developed as a person that you can sit there go, 'okay, this is the person I am now. And these are the skills that I've developed, not just a certificate I've got,' and you can refer back to it. It's always easy. Make notes, always make notes [laughs], you know, use the portfolio to collate those notes. But it's always easier to refer back to notes and all sorts that will spark memories about what you were doing in your degree, rather than just the degree qualification in the end.

Kristina Hoeppner 21:35

That's what I also really liked about the portfolios because you can actually see the evidence. Through the reflection, you'll remember what you had been doing, rather than just getting the certificate at the end because that doesn't really tell your story. 

Edd Bolton 21:47

No, no, it doesn't, no.

Kristina Hoeppner 21:48

So Edd, it was really wonderful to have had the opportunity to talk with you today. Your enthusiasm for creating professional portfolios that are progressive, that go through an entire degree, and that are also well scaffolded to make it easy for the students who do need to follow a particular competency framework, to structure that using a portfolio and then embedding that fully in a degree, it was wonderful to see that. So thank you for sharing. 

Edd Bolton 22:22

Oh, thanks very much having me on. It was a lovely chat. 

Kristina Hoeppner 22:25

Now over to our listeners: what do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Edd Bolton. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources 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 portfolio platform Mahara. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you listen again and tell a colleague so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.