Kristina Hoeppner: 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 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. I'd like to welcome Fellow Chartered Accountant Jonathan Murphy, who is Head of the Apprenticeship Department at Griffith College in Ireland. It's good to catch up, Jonathan.

Jonathan Murphy: 0:39

Good morning. Kristina. It's a great opportunity to catch up and for you to hear about how we're using the ePortfolio in Griffith College.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:47

A few weeks ago, we heard from Derrin Kent at The Development Manager about degree apprenticeships in the UK. Now we have the chance to learn more about them from the perspective of Ireland, and in particular, also in your case, of course, the academic provider side of things. Before we do so though, Jonathan, what does your role encompass at Griffith College?

Jonathan Murphy: 1:11

I'm Head of the Apprenticeship Department, and I'm responsible for managing the teams of subject matter experts who develop new national apprenticeship programmes for the College. So to date I have been responsible for the successful management and development of a two-year Advanced Healthcare Assistant Practitioner apprenticeship, which is a NFQ level six higher certificate, and a three-year Bar Manager apprenticeship, which is NFQ level seven, a primary degree in bar management.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:41

Congratulations. Jonathan.

Jonathan Murphy: 1:43

Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:44

Those are quite different things, nursing and also bar management. So it's fantastic to see the breadth that these degree apprenticeships can go into.

Jonathan Murphy: 1:54

Yes, it's two different subject matters. So we had different subject matter expert teams developing the actual content and the material for the programmes, but I was overall, sort of the puppeteer, pulling the strings [laughs], making sure everybody stayed on line and putting in all the QA and writing all the QQI documents to have the programmes validated; also then designing how it was going to be delivered, what systems we needed for the delivery of the programmes. The subject matter experts were great at writing the learning outcomes and the indicative content, but they weren't great then when it comes to all the logistics and the other bits, which is where I came in, and I managed all that of the programmes and how that was going to work, the number of semesters a year and the number of weeks and the number of days they had to come into the classroom, and then how we're going to split the work between face-to-face, the learning management system, and then we come to it, the ePortfolio, how that came into the picture. On the bar management, we have 100, and we have 50 on the healthcare assistant one. We have particular problems here in Ireland with the healthcare assistant one due to the sector difficulties of being very short on staff, which is a common problem across Europe with healthcare staff. There's a huge shortage of both nurses and healthcare assistants. That then leads to difficulty recruiting numbers for that programme. If employers are short staffed, they find it then difficult to let people off roster to attend the programme, and also then when you're looking for mentors, we want the mentors to be nurses or social care workers, there's a shortage of those. That makes it then difficult for that. Whereas with the bar manager, it's much easier. There's mentors there. We developed a micro-credential for workplace mentoring so we could train the people in the bars to be mentors, to give them those mentorship skills because that sector never had it before. That was one of the things we identified they would need help with. But there are mentors available, and there's lots of people who want to train up because once they have that three-year bar manager qualification, they can go anywhere in the world. They can go to America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia because they'll be very well qualified to run a bar; that includes all the things like finance, marketing, HR, then obviously all the bar parts, the food and beverage, merchandising, event management, all that kind of thing. So they're really well equipped to run the bar at the end of the three years. That was the idea that we wanted people at the end to be able to run a bar for somebody or be an efficient bar manager in an organisation or be able to start out on their own. There was all the area, too, of introducing the whole social cultural changes going on in Ireland, hooking into your community and trying to work with your community to get events and get involved, looking at how your community around you is changing. You know, do you need to introduce international foods because you've got a big international community around you? Because in Ireland, things are changing rapidly. People need to be looking much broader than just their little business. You're no longer staying busy with just pulling pints[laughs]. Unless you're in a very tourist area, you might get away with it, but generally you don't. You generally have to have the food, you have the coffees, you have to have non alcoholic drinks because, of course, there's very strict regime here about drinking and driving, as it should be. So you need to be looking at all those areas of how you can generate business without alcohol, basically (laughs).

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:04

That's quite the range of skills that your students are learning and also lots of context and research they can put into. We are definitely going to come back to that because now that also makes so much more sense to me where your interest, especially also in SmartEvidence comes in. But Jonathan, how did you actually get interested in using portfolios with your students?

Jonathan Murphy: 5:27

Ah, how did I get interested? Well, when I was developing these apprenticeship programmes, it's a joint delivery between an employer and an academic provider, right? And we're the academic provider as Griffith College, and then you have the employers on the other side, and you have the workplace mentors. Apprenticeships are all about trying to integrate the experiential learning and the social learning that's available in the workplace with an academic programme and trying to bring the two of those pieces together. Obviously, your employer is remote from you, and the workplace mentor is not a staff member of the college, and they're remote from you. You want the learner to actually do learning in the workplace. So we were designing the programme, so we said, 'Right, how are we going to do this?' We worked out all the learning outcomes for every module, then we divided them between which learning outcomes we wanted achieved and assessed in the workplace and which was we wanted achieved and assessed classroom based. That gave us a structure then. We said, 'Right, we have all this work we need done in the workplace. How are we going to manage that? How are we going to know that that's been done? How are we going to ask our learners to evidence what's happened in this remote workplace, and how are we going to integrate the workplace mentors into the whole learning process?' We also had the challenge that Griffith College systems are geared for registered learners, and workplace mentors are not registered learners. So how do you incorporate a non-registered learner into the system, and how do you get to work? So it was during the COVID era that we were developing these and certainly from the healthcare point of view, you couldn't have paper moving around between locations because of COVID and handling of it. I therefore needed a paperless methodology for evidencing the work in the workplace. That was where I was coming from, and I needed a method for getting the workplace mentors who were not registered learners of the College, so I needed to get them involved. I went and researched and researched and researched. I came across Moodle competencies. I had a look at those. I decided that wasn't going to give me the functionality I needed. I just kept looking and researching. I deliver a level nine Workplace Learning Module, which is all about learning organisations, work-based learning, and work-integrated learning. I had been doing a lot of research for that as well because I was developing that module. I came across ePortfolios. I looked at ePortfolios, I read the documents on it. Itwas really interesting because the pedagogy of portfolios is really good. When I looked at it, it was giving me the functionality I needed. It was giving me a paperless solution. It was going to allow me to create a structured portfolio that I could give to a learner and say,'Right, you need to do all these things.' What we were able to do then was we're able to do a structured portfolio, and in that portfolio there's a page for each learning outcome, and on the page for that learning outcome is a brief or an ask, and the ask is related to what they're doing in their workplace. So in the case of healthcare, it might be 'Write a reflection on how you dealt with a care recipient with dementia' or it might be 'Reflect on a situation where you changed a wound dressing,' all to do with what they're doing, but it's related to the learning outcome. We gave them choices. That'd be UDL, that we'd have a choice of three things they could choose for each learning outcome that they could do. Because I was able to have two different logins. I was able to have the login from Moodle for all our students, but I was also able to have an external login for the mentors, which meant that I could get the mentors onto the system without affecting the college systems, which also was really important. The learners could share their portfolio with their mentor and their module leaders - module leaders are lecturers - share their portfolios with them. I worked out that you could then use the annotation blocks to get the feedback system going, and that both the module leader and the workplace manager could leave the feedback with the learner, which would mean then the learner would get timely feedback if the learner kept pace and kept doing the learning outcomes as they were supposed to. So it was giving me that and then it also gave me the submission groups. If a portfolio is complete, how can we be sure that's not changed between the time the lecturer goes to mark it and we didn't want it changing? So it gave me that functionality as well that I could get all the portfolios submitted to submission groups, and they're locked up, and then they can't be changed. So now the module leader can go in and mark it with the confidence the thing isn't going to change, and then you can release it back to them. Then they can have that evidence that I thought was really nice for the learner, that they would end up at the end of the programme with, in the case of healthcare, 14 portfolios, which shows clearly their skill set and their competency and their abilities. If they wanted to show that to a prospective employer or to somebody that it would be very clear as to how good or bad they were by showing those. That's what we said to all the learners. I said to them, 'You really need to put a lot of effort in here because this is your showcase. This is you demonstrating what you can do.' In the case of healthcare, we're able to have clinical skills that were signed off by their mentor. So then if somebody was disputing whether they were competent to do a skill, they could just go to the portfolio and say, 'Look, there you go. There's the skill, there's the feedback I got from my mentor, and my mentor signed it off, and my mentor was a nurse, and there's her PIN number.' It ticked so many boxes that we, with the apprenticeship programmes, could then manage the workplace learning. We could dictate as to what we wanted to be done in the workplace, and then the learners can put their evidence up. They can receive their feedback in there, and then it can be assessed from there. It really covered an awful lot of other bases. It was a journey.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:48

It definitely sounds like it, and yes, it covers lots of bases. So let's maybe recap a few of those because we have three different stakeholders in there. We've got the students, the apprentices, who are also studying for the degree. We have you and your team from the academic side and also from the organisation side. And then we also have the apprenticeship organisations that are providing the mentors. Your students create a portfolio for their apprenticeship, which they share with the mentor and also with you, and there they collect their evidence and reflections over the work that they are doing in order to gain skills and then have those skills signed off.

Jonathan Murphy: 11:33

They don't create the portfolio. We create the portfolio. Students populate the portfolio. Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:38

You're working with a template...

Jonathan Murphy: 11:40

That's right.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:40

... so that they already get the structure of the portfolio with all the instructions in there of what they are expected to do.

Jonathan Murphy: 11:47

Correct. Yeah, on each page we use the instructions, and in those instructions, which are locked and they can't change them, is the ask or the brief. Then they're given a block in which to put their answer. Their answer can be in the form of many different types of form. It can be a link to a video, it can be a Word document, it could be PDF, it could be an image. It can be whatever they want to put in as their response to the ask. We have one of those for each module on the programme. Generally have to do two of those per semester. One of the things we found as well was, they were all leaving it to the very end to do them, and that's a huge workload for the mentor at the end. So we then created timetables, and we mapped those into how the lecture or the module leader was delivering the programme. If they delivered X, Y, and Z in the first two weeks, well then the ePortfolio ask would come in on the third week. They would then be doing the thing based on knowledge or theory that they would have got in the previous couple of weeks. Then we created the timetable of when those must be completed, and we have somebody who's tracking those all the time, trying to keep everybody going. If a mentor just has to review one or two, they can do it during a coffee break, five minutes, go in, sit down, maybe with the apprentice, talk through it, and give the feedback and sign it off. But if you leave it all at the end, you could end up with, you know, half a dozen things to look at. That can be very time consuming. We're trying to get across the message to the apprentices that,'Look you need to be respectful of your mentor because they're giving their time free to you to help you develop. So you need to respect that and keep ticking this along and every week, maybe spending five minutes with them, you know, going through and reviewing the work.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:19

So how does that scaffolding work for your students? Have you seen an improvement then in them also creating the evidence and their reflections in a timely manner so that it's not all left to the very last second?

Jonathan Murphy: 13:32

What we found is that over the programme, it improves vastly. Our external examiner has said it's amazing the difference in people at the beginning and the end, both in the skills and their academic skills, their academic writing, their referencing, we teach them all of that as well. But in the beginning, I have to say it is a Mount Everest for them to climb because most of our students are not IT savvy. They struggle with the technology. We have to do repeated trainings with them to get them to the point where they can get in and then go into the block and add their evidence, put the annotation blocks on the page in the correct place and that kind of thing. It's not simple and straightforward from that point of view. It needs a lot of training. And the same for the workplace mentors, they need training. And the same for our lecturers, they need the training as well. As I said to you, at the beginning, we didn't have timetables for the completion of those learning outcomes, but we learned after the first two groups went through, we learned[laughs] our lesson the hard way. Basically, I do up a timetable for each semester as to when those learning outcomes needs to be completed over the 14-week period. The lecturers are used to delivering an academic programme in a traditional way, but to get them to realise that actually the ePortfolio is an integral part of their delivery, they need to be looking in at it all the time, they need to be leaving comments. What we do is we use the annotation block for the workplace mentor feedback, and we use the comment box for the module leader feedback, so we know who's given the feedback, and we don't have to go trawling through to see who's given the feedback. We know who's giving the feedback. We're trying to get the module leaders to go in and give feedback into the ePortfolios and for them to bring things that are in the ePortfolio into the classroom and discuss them. Get people to say, 'Oh, I was in looking at your ePortfolio, and that was a really good piece you did on such and such. Do you mind if we share that with the group?' Most people will say,'Yes.' So then you can get them to put it up on the screen. You can create a discussion around that. That gives a whole shared learning part as well. It's getting the minds of the module leaders to change that actually, no, this is not something over there. This is something I need to bring in and use it as part of my delivery. I keep on referring back and forth because that was the whole idea it was the two would come together as a whole. That way you give them the theory, they go and practice it, they get the experiential learning in the workplace, they put their evidence up there, and then it comes back into the classroom, and they get the shared learning. That was my thinking of how the cycle should work. It's hard when people are in a mindset, 'Oh, I come in and I deliver my day's lecture and I go home.' No, no, no, no. That's not the way this works [laughs]. You gotta do a lot more. You got to be going in and looking at the portfolios, and the portfolios will tell you how somebody's getting on. If you go in and look at the standard of what people are putting up in the portfolios, you very quickly get a view of how somebody is doing. If you see that somebody's struggling when you're delivering your lectures, you need to work with them, or you need to take them aside and give them a little bit of extra attention to help them or find out they got a learning difficulty and get them into learning support. The portfolios are actually a very good way of seeing how a person's doing. Also, if you look at the progression, that's what the external examiner said,'I look at the progression of people over time,' that standard of what they're putting up on the portfolio. And she said,'It's amazing how you can actually see they come in in the beginning, it's quite weak, not great, but by the end, it's vastly improved.' Also, what we found is that an engaged workplace mentor who's giving good feedback is worth the weight in gold. The experience that somebody will have of the programme is much, much better. Whereas if somebody's just saying, 'Oh yeah, that meets the learning outcome,' they're not really giving good feedback. They're not really engaging. The experience of that learner, unfortunately, is less. That's a challenge for us to see how we can try and improve that. The mentors are very difficult to get hold of because there tend to be the nurses in the organisation. There's always a crisis or something they have to attend to. Even organising extra sessions for the mentors, you find only a couple of them come. You really see the difference in the learner. Learner is really switched on. They're engaged. Even in their evaluations, they are much happier with the programme than other people who are not. Those are the kind of little things. The great thing is that the ePortfolio is bringing all this up to the fore that you can see it. It's all laid out there in front of you, which is good.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:40

You mentioned that your external assessor told you that they can see the progression of the students. Have you also checked in with your students whether they can see their own progression when they look back at the early portfolios that they have done versus the ones done much later?

Jonathan Murphy: 17:56

Basically, what we've done is we've checked back with them about the programme in total, rather than specifically the portfolios, and they all have said they have really grown and developed. We had to revalidate the programme last year, and the comments that came back were, 'The programme's given me a voice. I'm heard in the workplace. I am respected in the workplace now.' That, to me, was amazing. They said that to the panel. We weren't present at those. They were saying, you know, 'We've really got a lot out.' There's a good number of people who are going to now go on and do further studies in either nursing or social care. So obviously, we made an impression. We made a difference for them. Certainly, when you talk to them, you can see how animated they are, how switched on they are. It's amazing. If you're just doing informal talking to them, it's incredible. And a lot of them have got new jobs and done well. But for the external examiner, who's looking at it, you know, with a fresh pair of eyes and is saying to you, 'Yes, there's a big difference in the people in the beginning and the end,' I think that's really the validation for me that we're actually getting it right. We do a lot of work, too. We get the library to come in because we have an online library, and they show them how to search the library, and they also then give them the academic writing skills, the referencing skills, the details about plagiarism and all of that. That works really well. So we try and do that in year one, year two, and year three [laughs]. Do sessions on that to just build those skills as well.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:15

That's wonderfully all encompassing. When we talked earlier, Jonathan, and you had already alluded to some of the functionalities that you're using in Mahara, like the annotations and the comments. For those that are not familiar with them, the annotations belong to the SmartEvidence functionality of how we can track competencies within a portfolio and also map portfolio content that is on the page to a particular competency. That was also one functionality that we enhanced for you so that you can actually set up all of these templates without an additional step for the students. How well does the portfolio based on those competencies work for you and also for the students and the mentors? Does it help them to know exactly what competencies the students have already gained and which ones are still outstanding? Or is there anything missing that would be good to have in that context?

Jonathan Murphy: 20:13

I don't think there's anything missing. The way we do it is we give the workplace mentors the full programme and all the handbooks, and the handbooks have all the learning outcomes, all the Indicative content, the assessments and the marking rubrics. They get all of that. In the beginning, when we designed the programmes, we split the learning outcomes between the workplace and the ones that need to be achieved through the classroom learning. Then in SmartEvidence, we create a SmartEvidence piece for each module, and we put those learning outcomes into that structure, the ones that are in the workplace. So that gives us the structure of the learning outcomes for a module that we want to be achieved in the workplace. We create a group, and we then put all the people that are in a cohort into that group. We then create the portfolio in that group and attach it to that SmartEvidence grid. We make a page for each learning outcome, and on that page we put in the instructions, we put in a block for them to put in their evidence, and we might put in image blocks, or we might put in other types of blocks, depending on how we want them to respond. And that all goes into a collection. So now you have the collection which is attached to the SmartEvidence, and you have the grid then comes up on the collection as the first page, you've got the links to each individual learning outcome page, and on that page is the what they're asked to do. From that group, that collection gets pushed to all the learners that are members of that group. That's how we get the structured portfolio template out to each learner. We build it in the group, push it to all the members of the group, they then get their own instance of that. They then have to share that with the stakeholders, which is the module leader, their workplace mentor. We have a thing called Academic Success Coach as well. It's a role, really, that's a bridge between the workplace and the classroom, and they're chasing to make sure they complete these learning outcomes. They deal with any difficulties between the mentor, the employer, and the apprentice that might occur, and then the admin staff, they tend to share the portfolio with as well. Once they put their evidence onto the page, they go back to the grid and click on the grey dot and put in the annotation block. In that we just ask them to simply say, 'I have uploaded my evidence, which I believe meets the learning outcome.' And they then need to go and talk to their mentor and say, 'I put my evidence up for this learning outcome.' The mentor will be aware of that because they will have seen all the portfolios as well. The mentor then look at the portfolio, they then leave their feedback, and then decide, does it need more work or is it okay? We're only asking them to say, 'Is it okay in their opinion,' we're not asking to grade it or mark it or do anything. We're just asking to say, 'In your opinion, does that meet the learning outcome? If it doesn't, then you need to give them the feedback and ask them to do more work.' This is where a really engaged mentor comes in because a really engaged mentor will tend to ask for more work to be done[laughs] because they're helping the person grow and develop, and they're pointing them in the right direction. They can do that as the iteration, as many times they like, before they sign it off. When the whole thing is signed off, we have all the green ticks on the grid, it then gets pushed through to a submission group and locked up until the module leader goes in and marks it. It's a very good system because for the purpose of apprenticeships, we don't want freelancing portfolios. You can use that for something else and it has an application. But for the apprenticeships, we want to have a structured portfolio with a defined set of learning outcomes that we want them to put evidence up for. They can put that evidence up whichever way they want. If somebody's got dyslexia and they struggle to get things down on paper, we say, 'Well, just speak it, put it in an oral recording up of your answer or your response.' We're quite happy with that. We're not fixed then on how the person responds to the ask, but they must respond to the ask.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:43

It does help take away some of the load from the students, too, in your case, where you do want to have a very structured response and also need certain elements to be present in the portfolio, to give them that template on hand in order to make that first step to enter the portfolio data easier.

Jonathan Murphy: 24:00

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:01

The portfolios seem to be working also for degree apprenticeships in Ireland, not just in the UK.

Jonathan Murphy: 24:07

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:08

Could you also already persuade some other departments at Griffith to start using portfolios?

Jonathan Murphy: 24:15

We have one other department, which is a pharmaceutical course. It's a master's programme. What they were doing was they've about 200 students, and they're breaking them down into groups of three, and then each semester, they were giving the group a project to research and work on. They have to present that to the whole group at the end of the semester, right? So they were doing this all manually and what have you. When they heard me talking about ePortfolios[laughs] and groups and communities of practice and all these things that you can do, wonderful things that are in this box, and we have it here in Griffith, they said, 'Yeah, this is a really good idea.' What they've done now is they set up all their groups in Mahara, and then they allow them to work away, and it's freelanced, so there's no format, but they know what the project is. But the portfolio they can do what they like, right? So they can do images, videos, whatever. That's what I would call a freelance portfolio. They then do their piece. Every other group has to be able to see their piece at the end. Great thing is in Mahara, what can you do? You just go share, share, share, and all the things can be shared so their peers can leave feedback on the project, and then the project gets presented to the whole group, which means everybody's getting this massive amount of shared learning. Because you think about it, there's X number of groups, and they're all doing working on a different project, and they're all coming back and presenting it, you're now getting a huge learning. You're getting all that peer interaction within the group and the peer interaction with the wider group going on. One thing they didn't tell me they wanted to do, and they're doing is, they want to score the presentations at the end, and then whoever gets the highest score gets a prize. So they're doing that at the moment through Moodle, but it's something that is worth thinking about. What I liked is that the way they're using the groups in Mahara and they're really expanding it out. I'd love to - though resources are an issue - but I would love to expand the use of Mahara in Griffith College to include structured induction programmes for different groups of staff, for faculty administrators, for programme directors, for heads of departments, whereby you put in the standards, you put in all the training they need to cover or somebody new coming into the organisation, and you then get them to put their evidence that they've actually done that and achieved that into a portfolio. It would then allow you to ensure that people cover all the things they need to cover on their induction programme. That's another area I'd like to get into.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:26

The induction is a really, really nice idea because that also gets them using some of the tools they will have. You can make it a fun activity for them and also get to know them a little bit better by how they are talking about themselves, how they are talking about their role, with reflecting on what they have learned, how they can bring in themselves.

Jonathan Murphy: 26:46

Yes, and also, too, is if you have those occupational profiles defined in the standards, if you have somebody who is, say, a faculty administrator and wants to aspire to become a programme director, what you can just say,'Right, there's the portfolio for programme director. Those are the skills you need to now get. You have X, Y, and Z. You're missing these ones, A, B, C, so you go off and get A, B, C, and then we can talk about you getting a role as programme director.' And the same if you got a programme director who wants to become a faculty head, you can do exactly the same,'Here's the faculty head occupational profile, and you've got X. You need to get the other bits.' In my workplace learning module I teach, that's what I'm saying to people, in an L&D department, if you want to really become a learning organisation, you should be creating occupational profiles for every role. And then you could use the ePortfolio to manage people achieving those and people evidencing it. So that when they go to HR, they can say, 'Look, here's my portfolio. My manager has signed off on all my bits and pieces, and I've got all these skills now, so I'm now ready for that role. So please consider me for the next job.' You could then create within an organisation really good succession planning. You could create evidence of what people can do and not do within their portfolios, and HR be able to look in on those. I think that for that, it'd be really good. The other thing, too, was we're now under pressure from QQI to ensure that all lecturers do CPD training. That's another area I wanted to look at in Griffith was actually creating a portfolio for every lecturer where they could record all their CPD training.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:14

That's now pretty easy because we do have the CPD functionality directly in Mahara where they can start recording all the hours.

Jonathan Murphy: 28:22

Yes, so it's a matter now getting that up and running though, and just working out the logistics now to fit into the organisation. That's very much on my radar. The thing too is if we could get them using portfolios, then it would make it easier for them to start understanding the benefits of ePortfolios for their academic programmes and how they could actually use them better in their academic programmes. That was also part of my thought process if your getting them using the system, I think would be very good. I think a lot of people are afraid of ePortfolios. They don't really understand what they can do and the benefits of them. You can tell them till the cows come home, but until they actually get in there and do some work on it and suddenly realise, 'Oh, wow, this is really good. I can have my journal there. I could do this. I can keep a record.' One of the things I was saying to the guys in the bar I said,'You know, when you're on holidays and you see a nice bar, take a photograph, put it up on a portfolio page of your own so that you have it there when you're doing your final project. You know, you've got bar designs, you've got cocktail menus, you've got food menus. Just take photographs on your phone, put them up on pages, stack it up there so you have all your info, and you can store it all in there.' The other thing then, which I haven't been successful in, is creating a community of practice. I'd love to be able to create a community practice amongst the mentors. I do believe that the ePortfolio can accommodate that. So that's another goal [laughs] I'm trying to work on. When you think about all of that, the ePortfolio really is an incredible piece of software and a package that meets so many needs. It is an investment. There's no doubt about it. There's investment in time and resources and money and everything. But I firmly believe, going forward with much more virtual learning to be going on, an ePortfolio would be a great way of recording people's achievements that they're doing through virtual learning, get them to put stuff up on an ePortfolio. Now everybody can see the work they're doing. So you know somebody progressing, even though you don't necessarily have face-to-face contact with them on a regular basis, but if the portfolio is going up and subject matter experts are reviewing it, it's a really good additional tool to support that technology learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:18

Also what you said earlier, Jonathan, about encouraging your lecturers to create their portfolio so they have a better understanding of how they might want to use it in their academic programmes, I think also goes back to your ideas of experiential learning and also social constructivist learning and incorporating Universal Design for Learning principles in order to make the practice of using portfolios not this foreign thing that sits to the side, but that can be fully integrated because the lecturers understand what is involved, how they should be asking the questions of their learners, in order to not just get summaries of the learning evidence, but also those true reflections and helping them make connections, helping them tell the stories of their learners, and therefore then see how they can also progress.

Jonathan Murphy: 31:07

Absolutely. There's a lot of pressure coming on now for colleges to make sure that the programmes they're delivering are actually related to roles in industry and in the workplace, and not have these programmes that are designed for academics to deliver, but they're actually targeted at a particular sector. In order to do that, you really need your graduate to have, they're now called graduate attributes. And the only way you're going to have that, I believe, is that you take on board work-integrated learning, and you work with that sector and employers in the sector and get them to input to the programme, and you design a work-integrated piece as part of their programme. You either do it over consistent period of time, where you do it over a six-month block or something on the programme, or you arrange employers that the guys can work in the summer in the organisations, but you then give them structured portfolios of standards that you

want them to achieve: 31:59

Communications, their team working, their interpersonal relations, all of those skills they need for the workplace. Yes, they get all the academic knowledge and the subject knowledge, but it's no good if they can't interact with other people, they can't operate within a workplace, they can't compromise, they haven't got empathy with others. They need to build all of that. So a good work-integrated learning for a sector can combine all of those skills and you could put all of those into a portfolio and make that part of your programme that they need to complete portfolio as well as complete the programme. Now you've got a perfect marriage, I would have said made in heaven [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:35

Yeah. That's where the degree apprenticeships are so nice because they do combine that academic rigour and the researching and knowledge acquisition with that very practical work-integrated learning in order to also know well, how can I or how should I apply what I have learned in theory and really learn that early on so that they can develop those skills and competencies in order to succeed in their chosen profession then later on.

Jonathan Murphy: 33:02

Yes, and it also helps them, I believe, join up the learning. So, you know, you teach them communications, but communications comes into everything. They want to use communications when they go to do a clinical skill. So you're building that in there. You're asking them when they're doing the clinical skill, to also do the communication space, and that's part of that. Then you got the understanding the understanding of the body, which is your anatomy and physiology. You're getting them to bring that into the clinical skill they're doing, and they're thinking about the skin, they're thinking about skin integrity, they are thinking about all these. By using the portfolio and cleverly making sure that you're drawing all the learning in together. So every time they do something, they have to be bringing in the content of maybe three or four modules. It doesn't mean you just do a module and that's it, you forget about it. You're actually constantly using the knowledge from that throughout the programme, and you're building, building, building as you go through, and the portfolio allows you to do that, which is brilliant. Having that work-integrated bit, make sure that that does happen. When you ask them to do reflection, you're expecting them to reflect on their communication skills, their personality skills when they were doing it, and their actual skill of doing the skill. It's really good from that point of view.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:07

It's very holistic learning that is contextualised, telling the stories, and also allows for that transfer of knowledge from one area into another, so that we are not compartmentalising so much.

Jonathan Murphy: 34:19

Yes. The challenge for us now is - now we've got that under our belt - is to work out what I would call integrated assessments. We've blocked it out module by module, but actually we now realise that SmartEvidence and everything can work differently. So we could maybe give them a case study and the case study in a semester could cover both modules in that semester, and it would be better because it might be, you know, in the case of looking after somebody, might encompass a load of things, but it wouldn't be meeting a load of different standards in there, which you can have set up. That's our next challenge, because we believe that would be a better way to go than we're doing at the minute. Get them to write up the decent case which covers a good number of standards.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:59

You now pretty much need your holiday break to re-energise and then be able to tackle all of those projects in the next academic year to make progress on them and see what you could report on next year to us.

Jonathan Murphy: 35:13

Absolutely. I mean, there's never a dull moment [laughs]. There's always something to be doing. I found it an exciting challenge. I really enjoyed working on this particular project and working on Mahara and the ePortfolio. I'd be the college champion. It's really, really interesting. And what you can continue to keep adding to it and improving how you use it, as I say, all the other alternative uses that the college could benefit from, I think, is really important.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:39

Jonathan, you've given us so much to think about and had so many ideas also, where portfolios can be used differently at the college level, at the university and higher education level in general. So I'd like to ask you three last questions if you are still up for them.

Jonathan Murphy: 35:56

Yeah. Go for it[laughs]

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:58

Yeah? What words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Jonathan Murphy: 36:03

I would have said creating reflective learners, creating your community of practice, and showcasing your skill set.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:09

Awesome. I can see those.

Jonathan Murphy: 36:11

Yeah [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:12

In all what you have said today, those are very present there. Thank you for them. You've already given us a lot of ideas, but do you have one tip for learning designers or other educators who create portfolio activities that you'd like to share as one of your final tips for them?

Jonathan Murphy: 36:30

I think that one would be design activities for learners that are directly related to the standard or learning outcome that you desire to have them, and that these activities must be related to what the learners are doing in the workplace because that way, you'll get engagement from the learner because they're not having to do something particularly new. They're doing it in the workplace. They're recording or evidencing that activity in the workplace. People then will do it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:56

Now on the other side, what tip do you have for your learners, students, and apprentices?

Jonathan Murphy: 37:03

What I would say to all our learners is put the effort in, develop your ePortfolio to showcase and evidence what you can do because I really think that's absolutely key, and then work closely with your workplace mentor. Take control of your own learning is the other one we keep pushing. You need to take control of your own learning. Actively seek feedback from all the stakeholders who you're sharing your portfolio with, and that'll help you grow and develop your skill set and then develop yourself as a reflective practitioner and learner because that will then allow you to carry your learning on way beyond the end of the programme, and you become a lifelong learner. If you keep on using reflection, you can keep on learning. It's an easy way of continuing your learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:45

That's a very nice summary tip. So thank you so much, Jonathan, for sharing all your thinking - well, not even all your thinking, just a small part of your thinking and enthusiasm for portfolios, helping your students participate in activities, be engaged in their learning, reflect on it, and then also become professionals that have learned how to reflect, how to be reflective practitioners, and then can succeed in their careers. Thank you so much.

Jonathan Murphy: 38:13

No problem at all [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:15

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