Mark Glynn: Take a programmatic approach to assessment with portfolios

Unknown: 0:05

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 education and professional development services. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today I'm speaking with Dr Mark Glynn, who drum roll, please, is now also working for Catalyst in our European office. Welcome to the team, Mark.

Mark Glynn: 0:39

Thanks, Kristina. It's great to join the team. Absolutely super.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:43

It's really, really awesome to have you on the team, even though we are not going to be able to interact on a daily basis, but it's fantastic to have all your knowledge, insight, and experience. So by the time this interview airs, you will have completed your first three months of working with our clients and communities with a focus on educational technology. Can you tell us a little bit about what you have been doing before you joined Catalyst and also what your focus is with us?

Mark Glynn: 1:12

Yeah, sure, I'll be delighted. I'm a chemist by trade. My PhD is in chemistry, and indeed, I spent some time working in the pharmaceutical industry, good few years before making a transition into the education sector. While there I was lecturing chemistry and more and more got into using technology to help me teach technology enabled and technology enhanced teaching, well before it was fashionable, let's just say. In the very, very early days of Moodle, I was involved with using, I think it was Moodle 1.2, if I remember rightly...

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:45

Oh wow.

Mark Glynn: 1:46

Yes, a long time ago, and there's a reason why I have these gray hairs. So it's how I started getting into the technology side of teaching, and my boss at the time, head the department, "I could give you some teaching hours. but I would prefer if you teach your colleagues how to use technology the way you do." And slowly but surely that took over my role, and I had less and less teaching students and more teaching my colleagues. When that role finished, I worked for an umbrella body, working across the country with all of our equivalent of New Zealand Polytechnic, what we now call technological universities. And after doing that for five years, I settled down, for want of a better expression. I settled down in one institution and was Head of the Teaching and Learning Unit in DCU where we use Moodle and of course, we use Mahara as well amongst other learning technologies. So that's a quick whirlwind tour of what amounted to 20 years in higher education. And most recently, I worked for Ernst & Young, and I was their director, their higher education lead in what they called a Director of Transformation Architecture, which sounds fierce fancy, but what it actually involved was helping organisations transform and in particular, the projects that I worked with, were connected to digital transformation.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:03

So what are you doing now with us?

Mark Glynn: 3:05

Just recently joined Catalyst, as you said, I will be three months there by the time this airs. Spoiler alert, I'm only three weeks here at the moment, but what I'm doing now is I'm Head of Business Development for the EU and also with responsibility for the Middle East and for Africa. So the job basically entails trying to expand our markets to build new clients, but also build our relationships with our existing clients and build the services and expand the services that we offer. Sort of a dual functional role in that keep the current clients happy and get more clients to make happy.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:39

And of course, also spread the word about all the wonderful open source technologies that we are working with.

Mark Glynn: 3:45

That's just my meaning of life. That's what I'll be doing all the time any way.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:50

I did get to know you when you were at Dublin City University, when Lisa Donaldson at the time contacted me and we've had some conversations and then I also had the opportunity to meet you in person a few years ago. Mark, how did you get involved with portfolios?

Mark Glynn: 4:06

My first experience of portfolios was actually as a student. When I went back after doing my PhD, I went back to do a Master's in eLearning, and the ePortfolio was the cornerstone of the programme. So that was my first exposure to it. We used a variety of tools to do that, to showcase our achievements and indeed to build this capstone module of the portfolio, but then when I started to help within Dublin City University or DCU, as you may hear me call it, we were doing an awful lot to try and improve the teaching and learning experience of students but also take a programmatic approach to assessment because we were looking particularly at building, the name varies from institution to institution and region to region, but building the critical skills for the students, so not just their discipline expertise, but also building their critical thinking, their communication skills, and all sorts of other skills like that, and we wanted the portfolio to be the vehicle to do this.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:06

Is that then also why you continue to advocate for portfolios because the portfolio doesn't just focus on one particular class or a course, but has these overarching benefits?

Mark Glynn: 5:16

Yes, 100% it is. We made the decision with the amazing foresight of the then president, Professor Brian MacGraith, that every student should have an ePortfolio, and that we should do this to develop these skills for students, and we had targeted six particular skills. And again, I appreciate they are called different things in different regions and different institutions, but the name that we had given them was graduate attributes, and we hung the graduate attributes on the ePortfolio. And this is how, as I say, we're going to drive them forward throughout the university and embed them within the various different programmes

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:53

That is fantastic because also, I'd just that we had. like to remind everybody or if you're new to the podcast, you might not have seen it, but the very first episode actually, of'Create. Share. Engage.' was with Lisa Donaldson, who told us a lot about that initial journey of going from zero to 6,000 students and just about six weeks.

Mark Glynn: 6:14

It was amazing. When I try to ascribe it to people I still - to this day - don't think I do it justice of how much impact we made or how much change we made in a very short space of time. And in some programmes it was very successful, in others not so successful. But to turn it around in such speed was incredible. Working with Lisa was superb, and indeed the entire Teaching Enhancement Unit, which is the name of the unit within DCU, was an absolute superb experience. And without having champions like Lisa in there, there's no way the programme would have been as successful as it is because in my opinion, you can have super technology platforms, whether it's Mahara, Moodle, or whatever platform, whatever technology you decide to use, but humans need to be at the centre for it to be successful. For any transformation project to be successful, humans have to be put at the centre. Lisa was driving that forward, to such an extend, all the time concentrating on the student experience, and when we met resistance from the staff, which we would, resistance to change is always inevitable in any organisation, particularly when people's experience 'Well, I've been doing this for years, why should I change? Why do I need an ePortfolio?' Or even those that were advocates of a portfolio, 'Why do I need Mahara? I've been fine using this Word document, I've been fine using a PowerPoint, I've been fine using WordPress.' And you could insert whatever technology you like in there. So we did meet an awful lot of resistance to change, but because we kept humans at the centre and essentially let the technology be invisible, it made the project the success that it was.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:51

What I really love about your implementation is also that you became members of the community and not just the Mahara community, but really the worldwide portfolio community by sponsoring events, running an unconference, also publishing ebooks where your present how lecturers at DCU, but also in other countries, are working with portfolios, in particular around assessment. That has really driven the community forward and has influenced all of our thinking. So it's fantastic to see that you're sharing that learning from what you have been doing more widely to help others along their way as well.

Mark Glynn: 8:31

Thank you for that comment, Kristina, but for me, we learned just as much. When we were sharing our experience, it's not that we were given away to family silver where we were telling people, this is what we do, and you just follow us and it's fine. We learned so much from that. The feedback we got from the community, the reassurance we got from the community because we shared, and I drove this home within the team, it's good to share the bad things as well as the good thing. It doesn't always work out straight away. And you learn more, I think you learn more from failure along the way. So where we were sharing our experience with others, it wasn't a boast, it wasn't to say DCU are the best, and they're leaders in X, Y, and Z, although I'd always welcomed any praise, but I have to be 100% honest, that wasn't our drive for doing it. Our drive was to learn from others and putting yourself out there was, which is what we did with the various communities, to help us do that. There's the other driver, of course, and this is where my love for Mahara and Moodle also comes in: the open source nature of it, for me, it's public money in the higher education institutions. It's public funding that keeps us in our jobs, and it's for education of the society as well as just our individual students. So the money should go back to the centre, the learning should go back to the centre and back to society. So that's why we wanted to share as much as we could, as often as we could.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:52

Thank you Mark for mentioning that, and that is actually a really, really good segue over to what we wanted to talk about more in today's episode because you've held a number of leadership positions in your career, including in DCU and Ernst & Young. So let's take a look at portfolio implementations more from that strategic organisational level where you have been operating. Why would a university or at a tertiary or higher education institution wants to support portfolio practice and get involved with other organisations learning about the practice?

Mark Glynn: 10:27

Really good questions, and I'm gonna break it in two if you don't mind, Kristina. The first part of it is why should you do portfolios? And then the second part, I'll kind of twist your question, if you don't mind, why should you do an institutional wide portfolio approach? And it's important why I said, that, and I'll come back to that one now in a second. But why should you do portfolios? Because it's an excellent way to have an authentic assessment for students. It's an excellent way for students to document their learning. I know I'm guilty of and I'm sure everybody that listens to this podcast is guilty of is, can they remember everything they've done? Can they remember all their learning that they had within their time in college, within their course, no matter how long it was? I got to the end of my four years, my undergrad, or my three years at the PhD, when I got to the end of the various different courses that I've done, and I forgot so much that I learned. Not that I forgot to learn, I had forgotten all about it, because I'm just focused on doing the next thing, getting on to the next stage, passing the next semester. An ePortfolio helps you document and reflect that, if embedded properly within the curriculum. But also, it helps you scaffold your learning. So the learning experience from module one can be used as the foundation for module two and indeed the foundation again for the foundation for module three and four, if it's done at a programmatic approach. When I was explaining this to my daughter there recently, I was trying to put in a language that she would understand that wasn't educational focused language. And the way I looked at it is, it was like going into a supermarket. And if you compare your learning experiences going into a supermarket to do a food shop, right? I know, bear with me, it was a bit of a wacky explanation to my daughter, but you can come into this shop and the first aisle you come to is to bakery and yes, my, the lovely freshly baked bread and you just you know, you're gonna have a great experience. The baker, the person that's in charge of that aisle, really does everything to make the experience so welcoming and so inviting and enticing to come in. And then you get to the second aisle. No bread, no lovely smell, just frozen food, very cold, and you're walking up the aisle getting your milk and getting your frozen chips and everything else to go with it. And then you go to a completely different experience where you're buying your biscuits and your cereals and everything else, but they are completely separate experiences. You may have a great experience in the first aisle, then by the time you get to the second aisle, it may be a bit cruddy, maybe it's cold, I'm not enjoying this, the food is too high priced. And then you move on to the third aisle, which is somebody else's in charge of that section. And they have a different experience yet again, putting their own slant on it. By the time you get to the till, maybe have different products that you can't use all on the same till, that you need to get different things weighted. It's not a conjoined experience. What the user remembers, and again, if we're using this as an analogy to a student, they remember the worst experience that they had, they remember the dirty aisle, or they remember,'Oh god, that scanner didn't work there and I got ripped off,' and they forget to love the experience of coming in and smelling the fresh bread as they came in and the totally disconnected experience that they have. What I think ePortfolios can do if done right, if they can connect each one of them, they can make sure the experience, the look, the feel, everything about it can be consistent. And they can say, 'Right. Well, I've got my bread. So now what do I do, I need to get my filler for the bread. And after I get my fillers for the bread, well I need to get my drinks to have' and everything is connected the whole way along. By the time to get to the end, they have an entire meal in their basket, or entire week's worth of shopping in a basket which makes sense to them. To me, that's where the ePortfolio can have that structure and can be used in every single section of the course and can just be something, not quite like a comfort blanket for a student, but something that they're familiar with as they go throughout their learning journey. That's what makes the supermarket analogy of they have a consistent experience, they can use their app as they're going along, they're building up points as they're going along, they're tracking up all the stuff they're getting. all the bargains, buy two for the price of one, buy one frozen food and you also get some bread and you get a drink for half price or whatever the case would be because they're all connected together. And it's that connection within the curriculum, I think, that gives the students a better learning experience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:45

And also being able to tell their learning story then across everything that they have done.

Mark Glynn: 14:50

Yes, yes, and they can personalise it as well. And again, this is where I continue the example because you can pick some food in aisle one and some food in aisle two, and somebody else comes in and takes something different from each aisle. So they're personalising it. Again, so personalising their pathway through using the ePortfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:09

What a wonderful way of explaining portfolios and how they are useful for you with that everyday analogy. Thank you, Mark. Now for the second point that you had said you wanted to talk about, the implementation of an institution based portfolio platform.

Mark Glynn: 15:24

So yeah, I think this is really important to mention. I was blessed with a brilliant team within the Teaching Enhancement Unit. Superb individuals, we mentioned Lisa, she was just one of the few people on the team that were star performers. But we supported over 2,000 staff and 18,000 students trying to roll out this ePortfolio solution, and we had five faculties, numerous programmes within each faculty. The situation we walked into was we had some people using a PowerPoint, that's no exaggeration,asking students to generate an ePortfolio on a PowerPoint file. Others were using Microsoft OneNote. Others were using Google Drive, Google folders. Others had a hard copy of a portfolio. Some are using WordPress. And then there was a variety of other different platforms that were available that lecturers, individual lecturers, again, this isn't even consistency across a programme. There was variety within the programme. And as a unit of three people, we were expected to support everybody. When something went wrong, the lecturer would say, 'Well, I'm not a technologist. I know engineering, how am I meant to know how to use WordPress?' or'I know biology or I know business, how am I meant to know how to use Google Drive?' So we were expected to support them all to the same level of standard, just to be clear. So straight away that was impractical, completely impractical for us to do. Then you add in the element of cost where each individual faculty or school or indeed break it down to lecturer, say, 'Oh well, no you have to support me with ePortfolio, and I need Teaching and Learning funding to pay for the license for each one of the students.' So we were paying for a WordPress instance over here, and we are paying for a different WordPress instance over in another faculty because they wanted it look and feel and branded a certain way and paying for Google Drive storage and also we had video storage somewhere else. It was just an absolute nightmare. Then we had lecturers going on their own completely, didn't even tell us what they were doing. We won't mention them because some of the platforms they'd signed up to had all sorts of data protection issues and everything where we discovered them, they had to be shut down straight away. We had so much diversity, and I'm always a huge advocate for diversity, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to managing learning platforms and rolling it out to the volume of students that we did, you need to draw the line somewhere. And I know it's to have a platform that can be used across all disciplines, regardless of what the discipline is. After a review process of what our options were, we chose Mahara and inevitably you're gonna have people say, 'Oh well, Mahara doesn't do this, Mahara doesn't do that,' and whatever the other platform does, they would boast about. But when you balance up everything, Mahara was the clear winner in terms of functionality, in terms of practicality, and also in terms of the versatility that it would give us across each one of the programmes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:15

I think it is important to note that it's not just the students that are in that equation of creating portfolios, but that it is also the lecturers or any other educators and also the learning designers, your staff or academic technologies departments, depending on the country where you are and what these units are called, because as you said, you were then expected to support everything but might not in some cases even have the access to that site, especially if it was not one that DCU hosted itself or where you had the administration permission there.

Mark Glynn: 18:48

I would pride myself on knowing quite a lot of technologies and knowing a diverse array of technologies, but I was getting lecturers coming up to me saying, 'Well, I'm using X platform,' I've never bloody heard of that. 'Oh, you need to support us and tell us how it works [Kristina laughs]. I have 50 students coming in on Monday and you need to tell us how and write me up on instruction manual for it.' Again, as I said, when we investigated various platforms, we found accessibility issues, data protection issues, and we immediately had to tell the lecturer, 'No, you just cannot use it, no matter how shiny it looks. You just can't use it for a variety of reasons,' which is why we said, we had to have a solution for them and say,'Okay, you can't use this, but you can use X,' and X was Mahara for us. And a thought we drove home was that every single student would have a portfolio, an ePortfolio account, and have an ePortfolio platform.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:37

That support and also looking at digital ethics, accessibility, usability, UDL principles, and so on is important so that they can be assured that they are following data protection regulations and are not just in the Wild West.

Mark Glynn: 19:52

This is what I love about Mahara is you can see the journey that it as a platform has come on in the interface has improved, the accessibility has improved over the years, and the usability has improved over the years. I'm purposely bringing out those points because that's been built on by the community. That's been built on and provided and driven by the community. Obviously, there's funds required for this, it doesn't happen for nothing, but I was delighted that this year could play a part in that, and improved the platform for the entire community, which is great.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:25

Yeah, and that is always fantastic to see, once a new feature goes into production at an organisation that had wanted it and then see the improvements that are being made, the workflows that are smoother for students and therefore really make sure that it worked and that it is worthwhile having created that feature and having gone into all the work surrounding it because of course, Lisa and other members of your team had thought long and hard about, 'Well, what do we actually want?' and then came to us and then we've reframed it slightly, we gave it well neutral term, because initially, one of the functionalities that DCU wanted is the what is now called the'Placeholder' block where a template can be created with blocks on it, so that students can put their content in, but that the template creator doesn't decide on the media type, so that students could decide whether it's text, image, video or anything else. And so initially, of course, in nice Irish magician fashion [Mark laughs], this was supposed to be called the 'Magic' block, but yes, we kind of called it more austerely 'Placeholder', and that's been absolutely wonderful to use. And I'm making regular use of that functionality when creating templates to ensure that students can still be creative, even though they have a structure provided in their template.

Mark Glynn: 21:46

Yeah, that's a great example, and just so you know, to give you a laugh, there's still documentation floating around DCU, where it's called the 'Magic' block [Kristina laughs]. But that's neither here nor there. But just going back to your previous point very early on where you mentioned the community and the benefit of the community, that example of the'Magic' block, the 'Placeholder' block, was great because we thought about it long and hard and thinking that this is what's needed. But then we got feedback from yourselves and indeed, from other Mahara users who said,'Actually, no, it should have this or should have that or this shouldn't be here, and that should be there instead.' And that to me really made the project so much more enjoyable because you knew at the end of it all, and what I was saying earlier on, we put ourselves out there as leaders for things, but we also learned along the entire way, and along our entire journey. It was great. We use the power and the knowledge and the experience of the community to build something lovely, albeit we were in the driver's seat, we were getting input and feedback along the way from other users in the community.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:44

That's the power of collaboration. Mark, you already mentioned that you were in particular interested in the programmatic approach to assessment and using portfolios not just in individual classes, but really across entire programmes. What are the reasons for that, besides creating that lifelong portfolio for students at the end?

Mark Glynn: 23:07

Obviously, lifelong learning portfolio was great, allowing the student to showcase, and in my case, remember the various different bits and pieces that you learned, but that connection helps people build and learn where they can connect one module to another. The connect'That's what he meant. And now I can see this is how he is using X, Y, and Z,' that what I affectionately call the 'Aha moment,' 'Aha, yeah, I get it.' You know, that is driven and helped by ePortfolios, but also to allow students to demonstrate their learning, not just in that module or piecemeal function, but to demonstrate the application of their learning. I think it's an incredibly powerful tool. In today's world, in the modern time, where we're talking about academic integrity, I think a programmatic approach is a way to combat that because you're empowering students with their own learning, you're empowering students with their own direction on their portfolio and creativity, as you said earlier on, and they're less likely to cheat. Now, I'm not saying it eliminates cheating, but they're less likely to cheat. And also, it's harder. For example, if you're asking them to build on it, and build, have reflection one, reflection two, and reflection three, and they must be connected to one another, it's harder to use artificial intelligence to get that or indeed, when it initially started way back when, we were worried about essay mills and those sorts of third-party providers of content. When you use reflections, personalised reflections, it's that little bit harder to use third-party sources to cheat. Again, not impossible, but that little bit harder. And for me, we focused on why people cheat for a variety of reasons. I think pressure is one of the reasons why students cheat. Opportunity is another and indeed rationalisation,'Well, of course, everybody's doing it. That's why I'm doing it.' But if we can reduce any of those elements, I think we will improve the academic integrity of our programmes. I think ePortfolios are key for doing that because it gives the student the rationalisation that this is the right thing to do. But it also makes it harder for them, reduces the amount of opportunity they have for plagiarism when the assessments are connected across the modules. So that's why I think ePortfolios are really important to have at a programmatic approach. It also means somebody somewhere has to look at the assessment, the assessment journey that students go on across their programme because quite a lot of programmes are guilty of taking that modular approach, and there's no connection whatsoever. And there's a huge complaint of students being over assessed in particular modules, and ePortfolio helps minimise that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:39

How does that then work, say we have a university where all the students have portfolios or almost all the students have portfolios, it is used in a programmatic approach for assessment purposes, would that increase the workload for all the assessors, for the teaching assistants, for the lecturers because the portfolio is not something that can be automatically assessed, like a multiple choice test, but would require somebody reading it? What's your view on that in terms of workload for educators when there are lots of students in classes that create portfolios?

Mark Glynn: 26:15

So there's a number of approaches to take, and again, just varies from discipline to discipline, and indeed, your class size. Peer assessment is a great way and an incredibly valuable tool. The programme that I was involved in the Masters when I was a student, peer assessment was a key part of that. We learned from one another. I was looking at, for example, Kristina's portfolios, 'Oh, I like the way she's done that, oh, that's how she did it.' So then I started learning from that and trying to make my own slant on it. And yeah, I see the reflection that she's after, right, and that makes sense to me, and I was able to see how to then restructure my content to write it better and to restructure on my own. So peer learning and peer assessment can be done with the portfolios really well and really easily. And also, you can actually assess two learning outcomes with the one assessment phase. For example, with reflection, it's quite possible that you are eliminating a number of assessments. So therefore reducing the correction. I do take your point that it's hard to automate the correction of it, but it can be and if you use, say, for example, structured rubrics and various other different approaches, you can streamline the workload associated with it. But I would be a big big advocate of peer assessment, annotated across structured self assessments as well to help scaffold their And then the last thing I would say is, I would use the learning. ePortfolio as a tool, as a nearly like an appendix to an assessment where you could be asking students to do an oral presentation on what they are doing. And again, a big drive from DCU, but also universities in Australia as well, the name just escaped me. So I apologise in advance to my Australian colleagues. But they helped us from putting ourselves out there in the community. And talking about some of the academic integrity work that we were doing. We had contact from a lady, and I don't use that term lightly. She genuinely was an absolute lady. Danielle Logan was her name. We shared experiences, and we drove out an interactive oral assessment approach to help tackle academic integrity and the ePortfolio was the key too for that because they had to showcase all their learning in the ePortfolio and then speak about it, in for want of a better experience an interview style chat, conversation with the lecturers. That was done at scale with a large number of students and proven incredibly successfully. And for the documentation associated with this podcast, I will share you a link to that as well, just in case this tests are interested. So there's a variety of ways you can approach this, but again, once you're scaffolding it all on good teaching and learning foundations, everything else after that will work relatively smoothly.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:44

Is it Danielle Logan-Fleming from Griffith University?

Mark Glynn: 28:49

Yes, that's the one. That's the one. Yeah, Danielle was incredibly generous with her time and the support that she gave my colleagues in rolling out interactive oral assessment, and in turn, what we have done is helped other institutions showcase, similar to what we do with the ePortfolio, showcase the work that we've done to try learn from others and hopefully support others in their journey in improving the assessment process.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:12

What I'm hearing also Mark from you on this example is that the students reflected and then had a presentation at the end. So they didn't necessarily present their entire portfolio or talk about their entire portfolio, but took it to a meta level and worked all of the things in that they have learned in order to have a presentation at the end.

Mark Glynn: 29:34

You just made it sound an awful lot more concise than I did, but that's exactly what I meant. Yeah. And so we got that. You got it perfect[laughs]

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:40

Great. So what are some ways of how educators can be supported when they are considering using portfolios because of course, it is quite a big shift from say writing an essay or repurposing a multiple choice test, updating that , but putting that into the learning management system or into the assessment platform versus now we actually need to structure the assessments so that they built on top of each other, maybe incorporate feedback, incorporate peer feedback, have multiple cycles of feedback so that the students can hear from each other, put different timings in because of course, if everybody gets the same deadline, there will not be any interaction. So what are some ways of how these wonderful educators considering portfolios can be supported?

Mark Glynn: 30:29

Technology is an enabler. Mahara is a super

enabler and Moodle: 30:32

super enabler, but that's all it is. Fundamentally, you have to have sound pedagogy underlying it all. That's what people forget. Staff will come or indeed, some management will come and say,'Yeah, we need to introduce an ePortfolio here. And they think of it in terms of the technology. So you need to run workshops or develop screencasts on how to do X, Y, and Z, how to perform this function, that function, the other function. Where it works really well is when the technology isn't visible, where it just happens, and where the time and effort really needs to go into is the pedagogy and the pedagogical support for somebody because we forget that lecturers are engineers, are chemists, are whatever their lecture discipline is, they're a champion, they're incredibly intelligent individuals in their own discipline, but not necessarily in teaching and learning, definitely not in the technology side of things. But we need to have that time and that headspace to give them that teaching and learning support. And then the technology comes in the background. 'How am I going to do that?' 'Well actually, just make sure, Mahara can do this, this, and this, or use this button or this feature, and so on and so forth. But they need to have that underlying support and understanding of the pedagogy that goes behind it. What makes good teaching and learning because that inevitably leads to good student experience. Well, we hope it leads to good student experiences, student learning experience, which I think is crucial.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:57

Yeah, and in Ireland, you have Eportfolio Ireland, the community network that does support all organisations and brings you together to create resources, like the 'Holy Grail of ePortfolio rubrics' that just contains all the things that you've talked about earlier, when trying to get started that there is something already to take a look at and to build upon.

Mark Glynn: 32:21

Yeah, exactly. It's not about everybody starting from scratch and doing like, I have never seen what anybody else has done before. You will always get people having that'not invented here' syndrome, you know, 'Now that wouldn't work here. That wouldn't work for me. I'm an engineer. That wouldn't work for me, I'm a chemist. It works for you. It's fine for biologists, but won't work for me as a chemist. And that's why you strip it back to the pedagogy, to the foundations of teaching. What do you want to do? We'll teach you how to do that, no problem. And actually the great tool, the best tool for that is an ePortfolio. And we go from there.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:53

When talking to ePortfolio enthusiasts, of course, we all know portfolios solve so many problems, they help students learn better, they set them up for a career where they do need to be these reflective practitioners. Then my question, though, is why aren't more people using it? Do we need to approach things differently in working with organisations or what do you think is happening?

Mark Glynn: 33:17

There's a couple of things. One, ePortfolios are not always implemented well, which is a problem. Now, I'm not saying that on the technology side of things, I'm saying within the curriculum, they're not necessarily implemented consistently well. That comes from people not having the pedagogical support that's needed to design the assessment appropriately. And they're doing it in a piecemeal function as in this module and that module and that module, and they'll never meet as opposed to have a concerted programmatic approach to assessment. So there's the pedagogical angle. And then there's the technology challenge. I would apply this to any platform, so not being specific about Mahara. But technology is evolving so much, so quickly, it's hard to keep up the pace. But if we look at trying to capture student experience and student learning, one of the biggest challenges any platform will have is the diversity of technology available to students now and how quickly it evolving. The biggest challenge of my time was video. Video was a great tool for capturing a student's experience. For example, if you're doing an apprenticeship in bar management, you just take out a video on somebody's recording, you're making a cocktail, or if you're a nurse and you want to show your experience of how to wash hands properly or how to do an aseptic technique properly, whip out your iPhone and get your friend to hold the camera and just take the video and load it up to your ePortfolio. But the problem is is that the students have much better mobile phones than we ever had. And they will have produced these minimum 4K videos, which is fine when you have one student, but when you have 200 students uploading 4K videos at three or four times or even five or six times a semester for a portfolio assessment, institutions need to recognise that that takes storage and that storage costs money. So where it fails is institutions don't realise that to put in a platform across the university that will satisfy the needs of all these different programmes takes investment. It can't just be magic dope out of the air. We need to look at how we can do that better, how we can, as I said, it's not our fault of any particularly portfolio platform, it's a consequence of the students having the technology in their hands 24/7 in their mobile phones. We need to think mobile and think in the way of a student, what is that going to result as an institution, what is that going to result in for me, and what it does result in is they need to invest in the infrastructure required to manage portfolio submission.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:46

So what would you then like to be able to do with portfolios that you currently can't just yet fully do? Maybe limit it to one or two things?

Mark Glynn: 35:54

Yeah, how long have you got in this podcast[Kristina laughs]? I think it's really powerful being able to track the assessment of a student and lock down and this is where Mahara really excels itself, it can lock down a student's submission, stop from changing it or altering it after the assessment date. And indeed, great strides have been done to make that even process that little bit more flexible. But for me, what would make it better, going back to the point that I just said, make it more mobile friendly that the video as they capture it on the Mahara app goes straight to YouTube. And then the YouTube link is what's embedded in the ePortfolio. It needs to be seamless to do it. When we were in DCU, we had a video based admission assessment, and it took the student 15 clicks on their mobile phone from start to finish for everything from start recording to stop recording to submit it to Moodle, which is the learning management system. We managed to streamline that 15 clicks to six clicks by modifying various different plugins. Students still found that difficult, and students still run into mistakes. But every click is an opportunity for a mistake to be made. So we need to as a technology provider need to reduce the amount of clicks and make it as seamless as possible for people to do. We need to think in the student's view. We can't think in the institution's view, we can't think in the lecturer's view, we need to think in the student's view. How are they going to use it? How are they going to engage with it? So therefore, how do we need to design it?

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:26

Mark, is there anything else that you'd like to mention before we are getting to our quick answer round?

Mark Glynn: 37:33

Yes, I'll finish off by what I started with, which is how we shared stuff, how we shared our experience good and bad, I would encourage our listeners to do exactly the same. Don't be afraid to share it, don't be afraid to boast about the work that you've done. What you think is normal, what you think is just average, actually probably isn't. So put yourself out there, go on a conference, try publish a paper in the area. You don't have to just research in your discipline, you can research in teaching and learning and publish papers, high ranking journal papers, let me tell you are available. And you know, you're gonna be getting credit for the great work that you're doing. So publish your work, share your work, share the good and the bad because I think you'll learn from both.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:16

Learning by doing.

Mark Glynn: 38:17

And learning by failing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:19

Yeah, use a portfolio approach because that's what the reflection is about, not just that showcase all the best stuff in there, but also that learning portfolio and reflection and reflecting on the development over time. Now, the last three questions for you, Mark, before you can enjoy your

late evening over in Ireland: 38:37

Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?

Mark Glynn: 38:43

Reflect and actually that was the name we call the portfolio platform in DCU was'Reflect'. So 'reflect' would be one of my key words and'showcase'. Yeah, that would be reflect on my learning and showcase my experience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:59

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

Mark Glynn: 39:06

Oh, similar to my last point there about the student experience, put yourself in the students' shoes. Try to capture it from their point of view and always, always, always drive with the pedagogy and the teaching and learning. Don't drive by the technology, by the latest shiny toy.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:23

Thank you for that and for that wonderful reminder that it is about the students, that it is about their learning and not for us to be able to use the latest gadget, even though that can be fun to figure out how it might be useful.

Mark Glynn: 39:36

Oh, it's great fun, and I love doing it myself.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:39

Maybe we might need to schedule some sessions there then. So last question for you then: what advice do you have for portfolio authors or learners creating portfolios?

Mark Glynn: 39:49

Every one of us can be a learner, every day's a school day as the saying goes, so I think everybody should be a portfolio author in that respect. I would say tagging is a good idea, filing is a good idea because if you're doing regular reflections, and I would encourage you to do this, they don't have to be long essays or tomes that you're writing, could even be a two-minute video recording or audio recording, but try tag them so you can find them again the next time. You will forget all the excellent stuff that you've done, whether you're talking about six months later, 10 months later, 10 years later. So tagging them to help you find them again, so having a good filing system in that respect. I think that would be an advice, I think, would be invaluable.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:31

That's where I really love the 'Create via tags' functionality that we have for Mahara pages, because of course, yes, you can be organised, you can tag things, but then how to discover all that content and make it visible? By using tags, you can actually set up your pages immediately with all the content that has been tagged with one or more tags in Mahara and then selectively take things out because you might still not want to display all of the things with a particular tag, but still need to curate. And so that's what I really like about this probably one of the unknown features in Mahara that though is quite powerful.

Mark Glynn: 41:09

We had a lot of staff use that feature when we were doing the Advanced HE Fellowships. We set up a scheme within DCU to support staff in attaining their fellowships at various different levels, Associate right up to Principal Fellow. As part of it, we encouraged them to write their reflections on a regular basis, but tag them with the word'fellowship'. So then when it came back to the end and the final submission, the firstly pressed fellowship tag and created the pages and followed it through. And like you said, then they filtered that accordingly and removed some of the stuff they didn't think was relevant, but it enabled them to package it up really, really easily because they had used tagging functionality. So it's something I would definitely recommend.

Kristina Hoeppner: 41:51

Thanks that you have been making use of that feature so well. Thanks for sharing that, Mark. I'd like to thank you so much for making time to speak with me and share what you have learned over the years, especially on that strategic programmatic level of implementing portfolios in higher education. Thank you, Mark.

Mark Glynn: 42:09

It was my pleasure.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:11

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Mark Glynn. 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.