Kate Mitchell: Deliberate and programmatic design

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 Kate Mitchell. Kate is a learning designer at the University of Melbourne in Australia and the co founder of TELedvisors, a community of practice for educational designers. She holds a master's degree in education.

A quick disclaimer up front: University of Melbourne does not use Mahara, but a different technology to create portfolios.

While this podcast is published by the Mahara team, I do not want to limit conversations to guests who use Mahara as their portfolio platform of choice. Our podcast looks particularly at pedagogical and implementation questions that can be applied to various technologies. I'm excited to talk with members of the wider portfolio community because portfolios are so much more than their specific technical implementation, and we can learn from each other.

Therefore, I'm looking forward to my chat with you today, Kate, as you and your colleagues are taking a fresh look at establishing portfolios and supporting students and staff with them at your institution. Thank you, Kate, for making time to talk with me today.

Kate Mitchell 01:34

Thank you so much, Kristina. It's great to be here with you.

Kristina Hoeppner 01:37

Kate, you are very active in your local community in Melbourne as well as online, and I'm sure that many of our listeners have interacted with you already. What else do you want to share about your professional learning and career journey or personal journey?

Kate Mitchell 01:53

Had a bit of a winding journey, which I think is pretty common for a lot of learning designers or educational designers. I started off training in film and television. And then I was doing a lot of educational projects and then fell into TAFE teaching and then was working at a school supporting all of their media and decided that I was earning terrible money [laughs]; so being trained to be a secondary teacher. All of that altogether as a freelance media author, secondary teacher, TAFE teacher, which is vocational education, all of that I use in my learning design, and I really love the fact that I can bring all of those sides of myself into learning design.

I think I've really become interested, especially lately, in how do we broaden the field of learning design and open it up where other people understand it better and understand that design and learning design is really about solving problems. It's not about making stuff look pretty. It's about actually understanding and analysing a problem and trying out different solutions and iterating around that. And so a lot of the work that I'm doing at the moment, where I'm really lucky enough to work in ePortfolios, is where I'm actually trying out different things and bringing in other tools and techniques from things like UX design and service design and just design thinking and other tools and making up things and just testing things out because especially when we're working in ePortfolios, which I'm lucky enough to do at the moment, there really isn't that kind of playbook in the same way that we have in learning design. With typical learning design, where we've often got standard instructional design methodologies or models that we can refer to. And ePortfolios are still... there's some out there where people have built things, but it's still quite freeform. So it's a good chance to really experiment.

Kristina Hoeppner 03:41

You've been able to dip your toes into so many different things, which I think is really helping in your position as well because you know the field and you have a lot of context. So how did you actually get started with portfolios? What sparked your interest there?

Kate Mitchell 03:56

I think it would have been in my first role in a similar area but in higher ed, which was back in 2011. My first job was as a blended learning training coordinator, and we had an ePortfolio technology that I was supporting. But also I think prior to that, my background is that I've grown up writing zines - fanzines and personal zines - then moved into blogs and journals. And then as a teacher, I've also had to develop my own portfolios for professional accreditation and getting registered.

So, I kind of have a bit of a personal history with narrative, diary, journalising kind of tools and methodologies anyway. So I think coming into working in higher education, where we were then supporting people with ePortfolios, it just seemed like a natural fit for me, and I could see where there were those real parallels between my own journey and what we're doing with teaching staff. So I think that's really helped to shape my practice and probably just makes me really passionate about ePortfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner 05:05

We've certainly heard at the Eportfolio Forum 2022, but also at previous ones, that it helps to create your own portfolio to have that personal experience with portfolios in order to tell it to others and in order to also engage others in the practice, right?

Kate Mitchell 05:23

It does. I haven't been as good at that. I've been trying to do my CMALT portfolio, which is, CMALT for those who aren't aware is essentially an accreditation programme for educational technologists in the UK, a bit similar to HEA which is a Higher Education Academy certification. So in those sorts of certifications, you're developing your portfolio that demonstrate that you're good as a professional in that field. I really want to get that done, but I'm sure lots of people can relate that - it's a little bit like... being a builder on your own house. Everybody else's stuff gets done, and yours is always [laughs] the thing that kind of gets left till the end and is a little bit half finished. But I think it's really important that we at least get to try and practice what we preach and have that experience coming to it as an individual working through that portfolio process.

Kristina Hoeppner 06:15

That is a wonderful analogy that lots of us can relate to very well in the portfolio world. Kate, since you are involved in ePortfolios Australia on the committee, you also have a series of working sessions for practitioners, which you now named PARE sessions. Do you want to just talk a little bit about those because I think that's a wonderful idea to engage the community.

Kate Mitchell 06:41

Yeah, sure. The PARE sessions are based on essentially the 'shut up and write' idea, which I've been a part of in the past. I've done 'shut up and write's, when I had to do my master's, I found them really useful. And I did some as well with other people for CMALT progress, and that was great for sharing practice and just having dedicated writing time with an accountability buddy.

So basically, you get Pomodoro 25 minutes on the clock silent writing time. In the PARE case, it's about working on your portfolio, although, obviously, if you were to come with something else in mind or something that is semi related to ePortfolios, nobody's going to be looking too closely at what you're doing. But it's really a chance to carve out time for ePortfolio practice, either to work on your own portfolio or to work on things that you might want to work with for students if you're a teaching staff member or support staff member. Or some people might work on research that's related to ePortfolios or just come because it's nice to be around the community.

I'd encourage everybody to come along. They're usually virtual, and they run at different time zones. So I think we're planning to have them a little bit more frequently, once a month in 2023.

Kristina Hoeppner 07:55

I really like the new name that ePortfolios Australia came up with it, PARE, which stands for plan, act, reflect, and ePortfolio. So that it really captures what is happening in those sessions. Let's actually go back to why I wanted to talk to you today because at the Eportfolio Forum 2022 you and colleagues of yours, talked quite a bit about what you've already mentioned earlier, the learning design, design thinking, how you approach other activities as a learning designer into the world of portfolios. In that peer reviewed short paper, you talk about deliberate and programmatic ePortfolio design. Could you please summarise the main points of this concept? Because I think some people might not yet be very familiar with it.

Kate Mitchell 08:43

Yeah, sure. Obviously, ePortfolios have a long history, and people like Eynon and Gambino have done a lot of research into what works for ePortfolios. And as part of their work, they really found that there are benefits, but the real benefits come when ePortfolio practice is done longitudinally, which generally means that especially if we're talking about in higher education, and we're trying to encourage students in portfolio practice or learners in portfolio practice, really the benefits are going to come from applying across a programme. So from orientation to graduation and having those touch points. We've all found that the challenges [laughs] with ePortfolios if they are only used one and done in a course or programme, often they don't stay.

So in my experience, I found that it's really hard to get traction with ePortfolios and get sustained practice because they are quite a bit of work both in terms of changing your underpinning teaching practice and teaching philosophy, there's quite a bit of a shift in how you think about teaching, but also in terms of the complexity sometimes with the software involved and learning new tools and figuring out new ways of working. When there's that kind of learning curve involved and change in practice involved, you really want to get the most out of that by having some kind of habitual practice.

If it's just a one and done often, especially students will tend to get a bit frustrated because they can't really see the benefit or understand why they're using it. They don't get that return on investment. They don't get to build up a repository of work or of evidence that they can then reuse later and see how they've changed and grown over time. And so it's really then hard to make a case for 'why have we spent all this time and effort learning new things if we can't really see the payoff?'

Here in my current role at the University of Melbourne we're really trying to build a programmatic approach for that reason, mostly just because we feel like that has the most success in terms of learning benefits for students, but also in terms of sustainability with ePortfolio practice and in terms of sustained practice. Otherwise, we find that people tend to get a bit frustrated and then drop off. We really want to make sure people have a good experience. That's been, I guess, a bit of the evidence and my experience and working with Shari (Bowker) and Jo (Elliott), they've had similar experiences and have similar anecdotes. We really are trying to base it on an evidence base and look at how do we do that?

I think the hard part is that when we talk programmatically, we know that in higher education, it's often hard to make that change, and it involves really working across a group, a teaching team, a group of people, finding people who can come together is really hard. A lot of times we work individually or in silos and breaking that down can be hard. We also know that it can take quite a bit of time, and there are also lots of other factors involved.

For me and for Shari and Jo, we're really interested in, I guess, showing that this is a challenge, and if we want to do ePortfolios, well, we need to be thinking about it, but also hopefully trying to build not just a framework around that, but some actionable strategies on how to start implementing. So I think that's something that's really missing at the moment in this space. And if we can find ways of building programmatic approaches and doing learning design a bit more differently, then hopefully, that gives people a pathway through and doesn't make that task so daunting.

Kristina Hoeppner 12:08

That's a huge package of work. Kind of changing how you think about portfolios and going away from that as you mentioned 'one and done' approach and really put it through the entire study programme and then encourage students to become those lifelong learners and continue with their portfolio later on so that they become those reflective practitioners. In your work then you're using two tools that I've kind of do want to point out of it, and one of them is TPACK and the other one is UX tools.

So we are coming back to the UX side of things in a bit. For TPACK that is technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge as defined by Matt Koehler and Punya Mishra. I will link to a keynote that I watched from them in 2008, which is a fantastic video, I find, in order to explain what TPACK is, using the technology in a super effective way. But I'm getting sidetracked there, that'll all be in the show notes. Kind of you're advocating for TPACK say that it is needed for effectively designing for, implementing, and supporting ePortfolio based practices. How can that be achieved then, Kate, what would you suggest?

Kate Mitchell 13:23

[laughs] That's such a big question, and it's something that I don't know if Shari and Jo and I have the answer to yet. That's part of why we want to research in that space and that's going to be something that hopefully we continue doing for the next couple of years. I think that it's really recognising the complexity of ePortfolio practice and the labour involved. And that's where I will give a call out to the work that the Digital Ethics Task Force that you are part of along with Christine Slade and Megan Mize in the United States and other people have been doing is unpack the labour involved in ePortfolio work both from a teaching and student perspective.

This is where Shari and Jo and I have had lots of chats about where have we found challenges when we're trying to implement ePortfolios within our institutions and more broadly across our professional lives. What we've found is that sometimes people will come to us and think, 'oh, I want to implement ePortfolios' without understanding - what does that actually mean? 

So there's a piece then of trying to unpack 'Okay, well, what do you trying to actually do or get students to do? What does that mean? Is that actually a relevant portfolio practice to begin with?' And then from that, 'What kind of teaching philosophy might you have underpinning that,' you know? Does that come from a point that is compatible or complementary to ePortfolio practices because with ePortfolios really, we're trying to not that we're not always trying to put the student at the centre of learning, I think most of us are trying to do that anyway, but with ePortfolio practice, it's very much trying to come back to a lot, do that iteration. So whether that's getting students to go through a reflective cycle or whether it's getting students to come back and review past work and reuse it and remix it or whether it's about trying to do progressive feedback, that is assessment for learning rather than at the end of the period. So trying to move towards formative and progressive assessment and progressive feedback and iterative feedback.

So there's a lot of that kind of cyclical process involved in ePortfolio practice. And because of that, and because of the complexity in ePortfolios, really, you need to understand the underpinning teaching philosophy of ePortfolios that pedagogical knowledge as well as then the technological knowledge in terms of how can we then implement that with various technologies, some of which might be dedicated ePortfolios, but some of it might be other tools. And then obviously, there's a piece around content knowledge, which is both subject matter and discipline based as well as a bit broader, including, how might we bring in formal learning experiences in? Experiences that are beyond the curriculum. How do we line up with our teaching practices in the discipline to a relevant reflection framework, for example?

So some disciplines are really going to find that Kolb's reflective cycles are better than, say, Dewey or someone else. So everybody has their own slant and finds that certain ePortfolio practices are going to fit better for their own discipline and have an understanding of how ePortfolio practices are going to look for their discipline because obviously, reflection and evidence are going to look a bit differently depending on what discipline you're in. I think that's where TPACK is a really good framework for just encapsulating the myriad of complexities in ePortfolio practice and ePortfolio implementation that people don't always necessarily understand, and it's something that is probably a little bit different to how when we're doing other things, like if you're implementing a new learning management system, most people understand what a learning management system is. You don't really have to explain it. But if you're coming to an ePortfolio tool, people don't necessarily even know what to do with it or what its purpose is unless they've got some existing knowledge about what ePortfolios are as a pedagogy and as a practice.

So it's a really different approach that you kind of have to take when you're going through that with people. That's where I think TPACK has - it doesn't always fit every context, but I think when we talk about ePortfolios, it has some real benefits in starting to show those nuances in what we're talking about.

Kristina Hoeppner 17:25

Portfolio practice is not a one size fits all approach, but you do need to look at the specific context for which you're creating the portfolio and what the purpose of the portfolio is then. We've kind of looked a bit at the pedagogical content and also a little bit at the technological side. Now, the second aspect that comes out in your work around the deliberate and programmatic ePortfolio design is, of course, the design side of things. How do you design the activities? Do you have any recommendations how you can go about that with a portfolio and maybe also want to share a couple of the cool tools that you have been using to do that?

Kate Mitchell 18:07

Yeah, and I'm happy to share some examples or some links. I really just like to steal from everywhere [laughs]. So I found that through my work at University of Melbourne, it's been a really good chance for me to try out different design thinking tools and incorporate UX tools. 

One thing that I found really useful for me in my own portfolio practice, especially because we're trying to encourage teaching staff to come in with more than one subject and to be thinking programmatically, I started to really look at what tools can we use to actually map that journey.

So I've been using journey maps, UX journey maps, or they get called different things, experience maps. I've kind of I guess, just modified it for my own purposes. But essentially, with those you're looking at what are those key touch points or experiences that you're trying to build throughout that journey? And in which case, when we're talking about a journey for higher education, it's usually that orientation at the start to graduation and post graduation at the end. And so it's a good chance to then look at, 'Okay, well, where do we want to get to?' So not just looking at well, where a learner's going to be at the end of a subject or at the end of a course, but at the end of the programme, and, you know, what are they working towards say that a graduate portfolio, is that a portfolio for employers, is it a portfolio for registration? What's that angle? You know, how does it all come together? And then okay, well, if that's where they need to get to, where can we start to embed good points where they're progressing towards that where are those key touch points and where do they make most sense in the programme? Often that might be 'Okay, is there a placement or a work integrated learning opportunity,' that's a really good chance to take leading out of the institution and bring it back in, as well as demonstrate evidence practically. So that's often a key touch point.

Other touch points might be Capstone subjects, where they're bringing things together, often with peers or just demonstrating how everything they've learned through the programme so far comes together professionally, as well as then other touch points around orientation, and how do we scaffold things like reflective practice using the technology so that students or learners don't feel just thrown in the deep end, building up small points of assessment, building up opportunities to maybe reflect in smaller ways or own their own learning in different ways. So it could be about taking study notes or reflecting on how what they've learned is relevant to the real world, or it can just be even just collecting up things that they've been doing and putting them in a repository for later. You know, it doesn't always have to be formal assessment, it can be a mixture of different things.

Using UX design is really useful for that, in at least have those conversations with teaching staff about what does this mean? Because often they're thinking very much in their subject and not thinking more broadly about how does this subject relate to the programme? And what's the end goal for students? And how do we then make that explicit for students so that they actually understand what you're trying to get at and what the value is, and they can start to see the return on investment and feel like it's worthwhile.

Kristina Hoeppner 21:10

Are your faculty members on board with that approach? And those that you've tried this with - because you did mention that here, it's still early in your research, what have you found so far?

Kate Mitchell 21:20

it's been mixed, generally where we've had people come in for a couple of subjects already, you know, we don't always use it with all subjects or with all teaching staff, but ones where they're already thinking a couple of subjects and thinking about the ePortfolios more broadly, we found that it's actually been really beneficial, and they've really gotten it, and they've been really excited about it, and started to take those tools themselves and use them for their own purposes. Often what's happened is that we've worked on building ePortfolios into one or two subjects, and they've gotten really excited, and then they've started to get other people on board, and they've started to make a plan for complete curriculum renewal, which is pretty amazing.

So we've got a couple of teaching staff who obviously, they're quite innovative and keen people, they work at a point where they oversee a number of subjects and are in some position of leadership for the programme. They recognise it's a three year plan, because obviously, to just change the information that's housed in different systems and especially if you've got professional accreditation standards with professional bodies that you have to get signed off, there's all of those workflows that have to happen all of those processes. But they're looking to implement ePortfolios across and changing their assessment and completely overhauling their curriculum, which is pretty amazing. It feels really nice to see all that happening and know that people are really on board.

Kristina Hoeppner 22:42

That sure it is; yes. I'll definitely follow your work on PARE and I want to chat again once you have more experience and maybe have gone through one or two years of implementing that with your faculty and your students and seeing how it has changed their practice then. So Kate, you've been involved in the portfolio community now for well over a decade. Have you observed any trends over the years that maybe are coming back now or that we've well left behind us?

Kate Mitchell 23:11

EPortfolios are a weird beast [laughs], if I could say that, because they are so niche, and I don't know if they're ever going to become mainstream in the same way that other things do. But that's okay because we're such die hard converts that I think everybody just keeps flying the flag. But I think that with the pandemic, just the way that primary and secondary teaching has changed to more enquiry based model and portfolio based approaches and given the current context in the way that people's work has been reshaped and redesigned, people aren't going to keep the same job for 20 years, like they may have done previously.

So there's all of these kinds of catalysing factors now, in terms of how we need to and want to support learners or students in their professional journey and need to be thinking about how we do that flexibly and do that in ways that support people in demonstrating their skills, as well as hopefully building their own personal narratives, which is where I get really excited about ePortfolios. It seems like the trend now is that ePortfolios are maybe, a bit better place to get a little bit more traction within education because of all of these other things happening, particularly at the moment there is a push towards more authentic assessment, I found. Whether that will equate to ePortfolios getting used across the board, I don't know, but I think that certainly people are seeing the benefits and using it a bit more, or at the very least taking some of the approaches because you know, we can't kind of keep using the same standard exams and essays, especially in the current climate where if an AI tool is getting sophisticated enough to write an essay that looks passable, you've really got to look at other means of assessing learners in their skills and what they've learned and recognising that. 

What I have seen that's been really interesting as a trend at the Eportfolio Forum over the last few years has been that in the research space, we've really seen a shift from what was implementation at a technology level and studies that reflected that and studies that reflected 'did students like it or not' towards more research around well, how is it supporting learning? How do we do it better? What's the underpinning theory? So there's been a real shift around trying to broaden the field and that maturation of the research field in Australia. That's really exciting to me to see how the research space has really evolved as well.

Kristina Hoeppner 25:52

We are coming towards the end of our session today. So the same three questions for you that I'm asking everybody else so that we can come up with some collective knowledge of what people think. Which words do you use to describe ePortfolio work?

Kate Mitchell 26:09

Challenging. Rewarding. Complex.

Kristina Hoeppner 26:13

As learning designer, what tip do you have other learning designers, lecturers, faculty, instructors who create portfolio activities?

Kate Mitchell 26:21

I think when you're creating portfolio activities, it's really important to just go back to basics, start small, don't worry about the technology, think more about what will be of benefit to students in terms of their reflective practice, or what the end goal is that you're trying to get them towards. And think about, you know, is there a reflection framework that might be relevant to you that you can use as a base? And think about how do we take students through that portfolio cycle, so that reflective cycle or that cycle of curation, reflection - collection, reflection, curation, and presentation, and whether that's once through our subject or a course, or whether it's done multiple times at smaller scales, but that's a really good process to come back to as a way to just really think about where are those touch points gonna be even in a small scale, but it doesn't have to always be about building a whole portfolio, it can just really be about what are the good techniques that we should be training students in so that they have those real reflection and lifelong learning skills and can start to curate their own journey.

Kristina Hoeppner 27:31

Last but not least, what advice do you have for portfolio authors, your students, learners, but actually also staff that are creating portfolios for their professional lives?

Kate Mitchell 27:42

Well, I think to start, don't get too hung up on the format or having it look nice because you've always got chances to remix it, it's really just about getting in there and doing it and experimenting and finding time to carve out regular time and, you know, not worrying too much about what it looks like. Also come along to the PARE sessions that ePortfolios Australia runs so that you can be around like minded people. 

I don't know if I can give too much advice to authors because in the end, that journey is going to look a little bit different for everybody. For me, I probably should be telling myself more things and eating my own dog food, if that makes sense. But I think it's really just about keeping in mind, you know, what's valuable for you to come back to? You know, even just a quick note can be useful to remember something or you know, capture an experience or recollect and note take. It can be open in terms of what you produce. And it doesn't always have to be something amazing, suitable for an end audience, it can just be for you.

Kristina Hoeppner 28:48

Which I think does reflect how you can use portfolios in many different ways because a portfolio doesn't always have to be shared with somebody else, you can just keep it for yourself.

Kate, it was so wonderful to talk with you today, and, of course, our listeners won't be able to see you, but you've been smiling through this entire session, which also shows me how enthusiastic you are about portfolios, how much you're in the practice, both now for your CMALT portfolio and through other professional portfolios and also supporting everybody at Uni of Melbourne and beyond those institutional boundaries through all the work that you do on a volunteer basis. I'd really, really love to hear how you want to make it more than just a one point assessment or one point engagement and have that deliberate design in there in the programmatic approach. So thank you very much.

Kate Mitchell 29:43

Thank you so much, Kristina. I'm really excited about all the work we've been doing. I think this space is just going to keep growing. Everybody in the ePortfolio space has been doing it a long time. So we're not necessarily expecting it to all happen overnight. I think we're all in it because we love it. I would really encourage anyone who's new to ePortfolios really reach out to your support people in your institutions, also reach out to ePortfolios Australia. They're really a great like minded community, and we're open to having new people come along to those PARE sessions and to webinars and to the Forum. If you're not sure just go and find someone who's already doing it because you can bet that they will be more than happy to support you and talk your ear off, I'm afraid [laughs]. Once you get us started, we probably won't stop. I really love talking with you and I'm excited to be able to do more things and also to look out for the podcast and what you're doing in this space, Kristina, so thanks for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner 30:41

Thank you and thank you also for this incredible bonus tip. Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice?

This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Kate Mitchell. 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'll listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share and engage.