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. Today, I'm speaking with recently minted Professor Dr Cathy Elliott, who was on the podcast last May because back then, we said we'd check in on her portfolio progress the following year. It was her first time using portfolios, and she was still getting results from her students. Now we could finally make this happen. Welcome back, Cathy.

Cathy Elliott: 0:50

Hello. Thanks for having me back.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:52

Nice talking to you again, and we are not going to rehash the last episode because I'll make sure, I'll put a link into the episode notes since it was fantastic, actually, just having met you last year for the first time during our interview. Before we go into what you have been up to with portfolios since, has anything changed in your role at University College London, which we'll be abbreviating as UCL, since we last talked Cathy?

Cathy Elliott: 1:18

When we talked, I was just going into a leadership position. So I've taken on the role of Vice Dean (Education), which means that I am leading on education for the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at UCL, which is quite big. So I believe it's about 1,000 staff and 7,000 students across eight academic departments. That's quite a chunky job, and I'm trying to think about how we give those students in those eight social scientific departments the best possible education.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:45

Oh, fantastic. That's really a huge role that you're having there. So it's fantastic, though, that you can also still teach, right?

Cathy Elliott: 1:52

Yeah. So I've got one module a year, which is my same module that we talked about last time, which is my 'Politics of nature' module. I'm still using the portfolio assessment for that, and that is brilliant. People in leadership roles often don't have the time to teach. You know, I've seen the diaries of some of the people that I work with, and it just would be impossible. It's really important to me, actually, because when I'm talking to other people about how to teach and what to do and what students think, having that little laboratory of my own class of my own, it's quite a small class, it's only 40, but my own students and my own experiences means I feel that I can talk with a little bit more authority and a little bit more knowledge and experience about the coalface. I am actually an active educator alongside the people that I'm working with. When it came to thinking about portfolios for the whole faculty that was obviously extremely helpful because I knew what it was to work with that assessment methodology in a classroom and with a group of students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:45

That way, you can also still continue working with your students, implement the things that you're talking about in your leadership position, and see also how that works on the other end.

Cathy Elliott: 2:56

Don't tell anyone, just between you and me, it's still my favourite part of the job, being in the classroom with students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:01

Cathy, you've just mentioned that you continue to work with portfolios, which I'm, of course, really, really excited about because we could convert yet another educator over to using portfolios after you've had a really, really good start last year in one of your political science classes. Can you please catch us up on what has happened since for you in the area of portfolios?

Cathy Elliott: 3:23

Obviously, I've still carried on with my class and that has gone just as well this year as it did the previous year. Haven't made that many changes, really. I really, really like what we were doing, and that has worked really well. But what's cool about being in this Vice Dean job is other people have noticed what I'm doing. I am able to talk to people at often quite senior levels as directors of education in departments and also other people around the university about the work that I'm doing, and it's created quite a lot of intrigue. We've had various little developments. In my own Department of Political Science, a colleague of mine and I, who both teach on environmental politics modules, so Fergus, who may be coming on the pod, I think, at a later date, we have been thinking about how we make portfolio work for the rest of our department as part of our approach to diversifying assessment within the department as a whole. So we are trying to advocate to other colleagues to use portfolio on the basis that really if you use a portfolio, you can do anything you want, right? So if you want students to write essays, you can still do it, but you can do it within a portfolio. But you can do so much else as well, which is fun. We've worked together to put a library of resources for our colleagues, including examples and instructions for how to use Mahara, just all sorts of PDFs for students, PDFs for staff, just helping people try and get to grips with that method. We also sat on a panel and tried to persuade our colleagues to use this method, and we brought some students in, and we talked to our colleagues about using the portfolio as a kind of tool for civic activism, so how you can use portfolio to speak to external audiences, to think about persuasion, think about activism, to think about how to change the world, which is really Fergus thing, but lots of my students are engaged in that too, because we're thinking about nature, which is clearly under threat right now. That was really fun, and by the end of that session, we had hands going up of people that wanted to use portfolios and wanted to get into it. We've had lots of assessment changes coming through to do that in our department. So Fergus and I gave each other a clumsy high five at the end of that [laughs]. And then we've also got people from around the faculty also taking on so. We've got lots of individual modules here and there that are starting to take them on. And we've had lots of nice comments from external examiners. We've had lots of nice comments from students and from colleagues, all from history of art to archaeology, anthropology, different people are using these tools, but the most exciting is going to be our geography undergraduate degree. Our Director of Education Geography is actually really inspirational character. He has been very worried for a long time now that students are coming to university, they want a degree ,and they want a grade, and they've lost sight of that joy and excitement of learning and wanting to be geographers, wanting to think about the discipline. So he wants to challenge that and take the emphasis away from thinking about marks, particularly in the first year, and help students think about their skills, their capabilities, their dispositions, the core knowledge of the discipline. And so what they have done as a whole team in a very large geography department is they've completely redesigned their first year. In the UK system, we normally organise ourselves into 15 or 30 credit modules. They've got rid of that, and they've got two 60 credit modules for their whole first year. So it's very, very big modules, and the students won't know they're doing a module at all. All they'll know is they're doing term one and term two. They're in classes. They're being taught by different people. They're with their same cohort all the time. And 'cause it's geography, they're doing fun stuff. They're going on field trips, they're going out and about. And what the assessment is, is they gotta have portfolio that runs across the whole year with just two summative assessment points, so end of term one, end of term two, which will map onto these 60 credit modules, but that's totally hidden from the students. All they know is they've got to hand in stuff at the end of term one and the end of term two. thing. They're doing all that kind of stuff on skills. How do you give a presentation? How do you express yourself? How do you make a podcast? How do you make a video? All that kind of skills based stuff, rather than hiding that in the extracurricular and the academic advice centre, induction week, they're doing that curricular work as part of these big modules, and they're being assessed on it as they go along.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:36

Oh my gosh.

Cathy Elliott: 7:37

It's cool, isn't it, right?

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:38

That is so, so cool.

Cathy Elliott: 7:41

So it's going to start this year, so fingers crossed everything goes well, but we're very excited about, you know, it's not me, really. All credit goes to Jan Axmacher in our Geography Department, who's really masterminded this, and most importantly, brought the colleagues along because this is going to require a lot of team teaching, it's going to require a lot of working together, and it's not necessarily the culture that we're used to. It's an amazing thing that he's done already, before we've even started.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:03

This will tick so many boxes, Cathy. I mean, not just to think about the portfolio, but I'm sure you're going to tell me very shortly of how that fits in, but even already just thinking about everything holistically and building transferable skills so that students don't even get into that thinking of 'Here's one box, here's the next box, how do I transfer those things between the boxes?' But already just think entirely with the context in mind.

Cathy Elliott: 8:30

It's amazing bringing it all together, and we really think it will help us on things like awarding gaps. We have some students come to university who already have all these study skills, and then we have other students, who are often the ones from the less advantaged backgrounds, one way or another, who are coming in, and we support them quite well in all sorts of ways, but it's bitty, and they often have to sign up themselves for the support, whereas here everybody will get that information. For another thing that I'm writing, I've been looking into what are the root causes of awarding gaps? We don't actually know. There's lots of different reasons, but things that really come out from the literature are study skills, hidden curriculum, and belonging. We're hoping that this first year structure will really address all of those things, including the belonging piece. That if you're with your cohort every time you go to class, you're never meeting all these different people, and it's overwhelming, you're just with your geography cohort all the way through. We're hoping that will really enable people to think, 'Yeah, I belong here, right? This is for me. This has been put on with me in mind. This is catering to the needs that I have as a student. This is enabling me to learn, and I can make friends. We're doing stuff that's going to enable us to make friends' because you don't make friends by small talk over a glass of wine, right? We can, but much more likely you're going to make friends if you're both trying to figure out problem together or play a game, something like that. They've thought very, very hard about it, and I think it's going to really make a difference.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:44

It certainly sounds amazing and will be good to follow along and see how they are going about it then in reality and what the students also think about it.

Cathy Elliott: 9:53

Yeah, definitely looking forward to that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:55

How are portfolios going to be used in that before we come back to your political science part?

Cathy Elliott: 10:01

All of the assessment will be done for the whole of the two 60 credit modules by portfolio. They will have one portfolio for the whole year with two points of assessment, and they will learn to do everything. They'll sit a timed exam, right? I'm not a big fan of timed exams, but students need to learn how to do them. So they'll sit a timed, invigilated exam, they'll write an essay, they'll do podcasts, they'll do video, they'll do statistical work, they'll do mapping, they'll do field trip notes, they'll do all sorts of different things, and they will be assessed in a continuous way using the portfolio. They will get feedback, but none of it will be given a numerical mark. The students will be working with their personal tutor to look at the work that they're doing and get really intensive feedback on it from somebody who knows them and will give them feedback on their whole first year so they can get a sense of how they're progressing. All of that will be formative. Lots and lots of feedback, lots and lots of advice. They're allowed to improve it, make it better, develop it. And then at two points in the year, they will be able to hand in the work that they think is best, and then that will be marked again by the personal tutor who will give a numerical mark. That's the thing that goes into the system. But we're trying to take the focus off that numerical mark and really focus on the formative, continuous feedback. That's how portfolios fit in. And we think the work that we've done in these individual modules on portfolio assessment really gave us the idea to think about it a bit bigger and do that as a kind of whole integrated programmatic work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:23

That's really awesome because that is what a lot of people these days do talk about when they talk about portfolios and how to integrate them into a learning programme, is that it should get in on a programmatic level so that you have the programmatic design of everything and also programmatic assessment in order to know how the assessment flows and that all the gels together as part of that. So it's good to see that this is being started in that first year of the geography degree.

Cathy Elliott: 11:52

Yeah, it's gonna be fun [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:54

We have to get you back onto the podcast or your colleague and check back in the year after the summer holidays how it has gone there[laughs].

Cathy Elliott: 12:02

Definitely. Yeah. And I imagine there will be teething problems. So at the moment, we're very excited by it. We're already having a little bit of trouble, sort of persuading everybody. Not in the Geography Department, so Jan did an amazing piece of work getting everybody on board within the department, but persuading people in other parts of the university that need to sign off the paperwork for these things. You probably know, UK universities - to make changes like this, you have to go through a number of committees and things. There's quite a lot of skepticism because I think the assessment methodology of portfolios is still not well understood. So one of the questions that we're getting back is, 'How can you just have two points of assessment for their first year? That's very high stakes, the students will be very afraid to hand in one piece of work that's worth half of their first year. What if it goes wrong?' We're having to put quite a lot of effort into explaining to people, no, it can't go wrong, right? Because they've already been given lots of small, low stakes pieces of work. They've had feedback on it, they've worked on it, they've developed it, they've shared it with other people, and the point where you hand it in is always unimportant. All that it is is a selection process about 'What do I think my best work is so I best work is, so I can hand that in.' It's not at all about a high stakes, single assessment where you have to stress and work for weeks and weeks and weeks and be terrified. It's much lower stakes and much sort of less threatening to students. Actually handing something in when you've already had feedback on it, not only is that less frightening, it mirrors much more what everybody else does. The idea that I would write a journal article and send it in without anybody else ever having read it, it's just [laughs... You know, you wouldn't do it, right? You get feedback, but you get feedback before the scary parts, not after [laughs]. We hope that students as well will read the feedback as a result because they're trying to still make the work better. So there will be teething problems. So it would be really nice to - for you to have a chat with Jan next year or maybe we could do double act or something, and we can figure out what went wrong and how we would do it differently next time. But yeah, we're very hopeful that it will be an improvement on what we have now, which is lots and lots of assessments, often does feel quite high stakes to students because they're doing all their teaching, you talk a little bit about the assessment, then you have your essay due on the last day of term, and up until that point, you may have just had a lecture about how to write an essay, but you haven't really put that into practice and had that feedback. It's a shift in the way we think about assessment, I think.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:09

How many students are you expecting to participate in that first year?

Cathy Elliott: 14:13

My guess is it's more than 100 but less than 200. I can email you straight afterwards and tell you the exact number.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:19

That's not a small number of students.

Cathy Elliott: 14:21

It's a big number.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:22

Especially if you're thinking about individualised feedback from the tutors and really gearing it towards what the students have written. That will be so important to look at how that pans out over the year, how they are dealing with that, how they can manage that workload, both on the student side, producing the portfolio, reflecting on a regular basis, but then also on the tutor side, giving that feedback to so many students.

Cathy Elliott: 14:49

Yeah, this is the genius idea of having the personal tutor giving the feedback because every personal tutor has 15 students. That's not so onerous. You can do a tutor group with 15 or you can do individual office hours with each of 15 students more than once a term. One of the complaints we get at UCL about personal tutoring is students say, 'I never see my personal tutor. I don't know them very well. They don't teach me. When I do go and see them, it's that awkward conversation because neither of us knows what to say.' Actually having this structure around the personal tutoring relationship, again, it speaks to the belonging idea that they will have this quite intense relationship with the personal tutor because they're working together on this, getting their work better and developing their skills, but it also means that workload of marking is spread out across the teaching team, and they will get that iterative feedback from the same person rather than again, when they're writing essays, they might get feedback from eight different tutors, none of which is connected. Again, the students are always horrified when this happens, but it's not unusual for students to get contradictory feedback from two different people, right? So they'll hand in two different essays, two different markers will mark it, they might have a different preference as to how certain things are presented or arguments are made. They'll give contradictory feedback, and then students are totally confused and they lose trust in the system. Whereas having that personal tutor giving the feedback over time and showing them where they're getting better and where things still need work, that's one of the parts of the system which is so brilliant, but also is one of the points where maybe it could go wrong. So let's see.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:12

That approach is also good because a lot of times these days, we hear about cheating with AI and AI is writing text, and when you have that tutor that consistently looks at the writing over time, they get to know the voice of the students. They get to know what they are thinking, how they are presenting themselves, how they are writing so that that could potentially be of a lesser concern then because you have such a small group to look at, and the students are not passed on from one tutor to the next who simply doesn't know what they had written before or how they have developed also over the semester.

Cathy Elliott: 16:46

I'm glad you mentioned AI, actually. So I have a couple of things to say about that. So the first is, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We try not to think about students cheating because I don't think that's what students think they're doing when they use AI. It's very, very rare. So I think there has been some research on this. Very, very few students are producing text generated entirely by AI and then handing that in. Our own research at UCL using sort of small change makers projects and things, seems to suggest that that's even lower at a university like UCL. Our students tend to be there to learn. I mean, we have quite high entry requirements anyway, which is a whole other story that we can talk about, but our students very, very unusual for them to do that unless they have lost trust in the system, which I think has happened in certain pockets from the interviews that we've done, or often there's a very sad story because they're desperate, they're fighting against a lot of different circumstances, they need to hand this in, they panic. We try not to frame students in that way as people that cheat because, I think, they are members of our academic learning community, and we're all working together. What we would like to do is think about how we're all using AI, because it's a skill that's new to all of us, and we all need to learn. One of the things we can do with portfolio assessment is really think about study skills and think about what are good uses of AI, what are useful uses of AI, and where is it not so useful? And also, we're social scientists, right? Where might we want to critique AI? Let's say students are using AI to do a search of sources to generate bibliographies. If they're doing that, and it's that in the open, and we can talk about it because everything's formative, and we're not framing it as students cheating, then we can sort of say to them, 'Okay, you've generated a list of sources here. Have you noticed anything in common about all these sources because AI tends to generate a lot of references that are by white men. Who else is writing in this area? Are there other perspectives?' Have they missed that? Why might they have missed it? What is it about AI that produces these biases? Where do they come from? How can we challenge them? So actually enabling students right at that early stage to think critically about what AI does and also their own use of AI, it's really, really useful. Then you can also say at that point, 'AI has done a reasonable job here, but have you also thought about the other things you could do, like there's a living librarian that you could talk to? Do you know how to use Google Scholar? Do you know how to look in the bibliography of your textbook?' All these different possible things that they could do. It is definitely a response to AI that what we're doing, but it is trying to get a little bit beyond the cheat framing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:07

Out of how many students?

Cathy Elliott: 19:07

Forty, which was very interesting. One of them, I And I thought, 'Oh, well, that's interesting. I hadn't predicted But then the other thing I did this year, the one little think, had used it a bit too much and that was an opportunity modification that I made in my own class on AI, was I said to for us to have a conversation about that, which was good. The students, 'You can use AI as much or as little as you like, other one had used it in an inappropriate way to find some entirely up to you. I'm open to it. The only thing I ask is in your self reflective essay when you hand your portfolio in,' and you can hear all about that on the previous episode of the podcast, I added a question to that. It said, 'If you've used sources, was a reasonably small portion of the work that they'd AI, tell me how you've used it and what you think the strengths done, but the others, they didn't use it, but they did write about it. They wrote these long essays about how because and weaknesses of that were, how, what does it help you do? portfolio work is creative and autonomous because they knew who they were writing for, they were writing for me and the rest of the class, and they knew those people would read it. Because What was kind of annoying about it? Just reflect on the use of they were doing work which was personal, they felt that using AI would be totally inappropriate and they didn't want to and that AI would kind of steal their voice and steal AI. If you don't use AI, you don't have to write anything their creativity if they tried to use it. that at all.' So I might actually write a blog or here, but I would actually really welcome your reflection something just about like that experience of how do you steer students away from using AI when it's inappropriate? Because if on why you didn't use it if you fancy writing something for me.' there's one thing I do think it's inappropriate, it's like using AI to do creative work. I do not want to read the detective novels that AI is going to produce. Never want to read that [laughs]. So actually having that conversation with Only two students said they'd used AI at all... students at that age has actually been really, really useful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:54

What I'd like is that you ask them the question because that really gives you those answers, and the answers from the students are really, I think, the ones that we do look forward to, that they realise it's my voice, it's my reflection, I'm representing myself. And yes, the AI can polish that conversation, can polish the text of what they are writing, but it might not be in their voice and so that they also consciously make that decision of not using it for that task. It really is cool.

Cathy Elliott: 21:28

It's really cool, right? It's also treating students as our partners rather than the people that are always under suspicion. We're trying to think together about whether AI would be appropriate or not. And AI is changing all the time. They know before us what AI can and can't do. Having that open channel of communication through the portfolio assessment in a really practical way, not at an abstract level, but in a really practical 'I tried to do this, and it worked or it didn't work,' is very, very nice for keeping that kind of channel of communication open, and then we know what they're doing, and we can advise them to stay clear of the stuff that's going to get them in a bother.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:57

Yeah, and I think you mentioned it last time, I'm just trying to find it in the transcript, actually, that students have agency, that they are also part of the environment, and for you also that partner that you're not saying, 'No, you're bad,' any of those, making those judgment calls because you have people from so many different backgrounds, and if they feel they can be themselves there, that they belong, coming back to that point that you've made earlier, that they are welcome and that their opinions are heard and also valued, then there is probably also less likely the inclination to use a tool for something that they should be doing themselves and only really use it to the degree that enhances things for them rather than doing the entire work for them.

Cathy Elliott: 22:44

Yeah exactly. These students can do such a better job because they're coming to it with the joy and delight of knowing that both me, but also their classmates, are going to really enjoy and relish reading it, because it's not just the same identical essay that you've read 100 times this year and last year and the year before.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:59

Cathy, I wanted to backtrack a little bit because we've about the exciting new geography programme where you're using a programmatic approach to the entire design of the course and also to the assessment. But prior to that, you did mention that you had a panel that also included students, where you talked about the portfolios and where you got people excited...

Cathy Elliott: 23:23

Oh, yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:23

... and you also received feedback from your colleagues. Can you share a bit about what your students thought about that portfolio work that they had done besides the things you've already mentioned?

Cathy Elliott: 23:36

Yeah. So that was a really fun panel. We were talking really specifically about using portfolios as a kind of civic activism tool. It was actually just one student because it was outside of term time. It was a student who had taken both Fergus' class and my class. The classes run in the same term. So the students that did both classes, unfortunately, we are not as well organised as geography, so we don't have the single portfolio that they can contribute to for both classes. They were using a portfolio for both classes. So they really got into that sort of the whole philosophy of portfolio work because those few students that took both were doing two portfolios. We had a really great student who came along and talked about the ways in which she'd use that portfolio to think about herself, not so much as a student, but as an activist and a citizen. She was an international student. She'd come to London, and she'd taken these two environmental politics modules. So mine is about nature and Fergus' class is about climate justice. Those are things that overlap a lot, but actually are quite different in practice. Now, what was the work that she'd done? So she'd done things like very personal projects, like growing a little plant and taking a photograph of every week and talking about like how it was growing and developing and linking that to the module readings for the week. That was something very personal about her own growth as a person coming to an awareness or her relationships and entanglements with the natural world. But then for Fergus' class, she'd also done things like policy memos for her portfolio and argumentative pieces arguing for particular ways of thinking about climate justice. The argument she made was that on both a personal level and a more public level, writing to a more public audience, she was able to conceptualise herself more as a citizen, so less as a student in an individualistic way, looking for a particular mark and getting a degree and then finishing, and then maybe going off and working in climate justice because they've got this commodity, the degree at the end of it, but actually the process of learning being something that enabled her to become the person that she wanted to be, which is an activist and a citizen. We saw that quite a lot in a variety of our portfolios. So she was just one example. We had a student who wrote a letter to a newspaper to talk about the way that Gypsy Roma people were being treated in his local community. We had a student who wrote a letter to the director of Kew Gardens, asking them to decolonise their collection. We had a student who wrote a speculative, futuristic piece thinking about what UCL would look like if we rewilded it and allowed wild flowers and things to grow, which I did send to the Provost, but I don't know whether he read it. All these different students trying to envisage a better future through the portfolio work. And so yeah, that was what we were trying to communicate to the group of colleagues who were quite excited by it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:03

That's so fantastic. And also seeing the many different pieces of evidence that your students collected and the different media they used for it. You also mentioned that you got feedback from your colleagues who were listening to the panel and who heard about what you and Fergus were doing and what Jan was thinking about for the geography programme. What got them excited about the portfolio most? Was there anything that stood out?

Cathy Elliott: 26:28

Hearing from students is really powerful. We all want our students to enjoy our class, right? And we all want them to learn, and I think hearing directly from students that, yeah, this is something that was really meaningful, and hearing that student draw effortlessly on ideas and theory from the modules in order to express herself in front of an audience of academics, which was probably a little bit intimidating for her. I think she was nervous. I think that was really impressive, and it made them think, 'Oh, I have students exactly the same as Cathy's and Fergus', right? They're often the exact same people, but they're not doing that for me. Why not? Maybe I'll have some of what they're having.' I think it was a little bit of that. But I think there's something that I say quite often, which I think speaks to people. One of the perennial bugbears that we have at UCL and in the British system more generally, is you want to make a change to your assessment, it takes forever. You've got to fill in a long form, and it goes up the committee, and it progresses to the different levels, and then it comes back down, and it's two years by the time you're allowed to implement the change that you first thought of. It's cumbersome, and you know, as someone in a kind of leadership role, I see much more clearly now what I didn't see before, which is what the reasons are for that and all the things that have gone wrong, which have meant that we do it that way[laughs]. But that said, it is frustrating. So the thing that I say to people is, if you call your assessment a portfolio, you can do whatever you like. If let's say, you decide, oh, one year, I really like students, to make a video, you can do a video, put it on the portfolio, put an essay on the portfolio. What geography do? Put a timed exam on the portfolio. You can do whatever you want. So it gives you that flexibility to flex with the students in the year that you've got and the interest that they have, and it also gives you the flexibility to give them a little bit of agency over it and negotiate themselves what they'd like to be learning and what they'd like to be doing. That really pricks people's ears up. Also, one of those worries is,'Oh, maybe not all my students will want to do a poster.' Some students aren't very artistic. For 90% it might be wonderful and for 10% it might be miserable. Because it's a portfolio, if it's imperative that they do a poster, you can make them do it. If it's not imperative, you just think it would be nice, you can say, 'You can either do a poster or you can do something else.' And so you can give students that choice and that agency as well. You can be much more innovative without all the kind of fears that sometimes come along with that innovation.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:39

Thanks for that tip there, Cathy. I think a number of people can appreciate it and probably start thinking what that might look like in their own context if they can make use of that idea. Is there anything else you'd like to share about the work that you had done to make portfolios stick more in your study programme and help your colleagues get a start with it?

Cathy Elliott: 29:01

It's often a slow process. I started off with just this one colleague who was really interested, and we were both doing it together. That was nice, and I think people looked at us and saw us having a good time and enjoying it and sort of wanted on the bandwagon. It started very, very small, and I think from that, things can ripple out because people talk to each other. It doesn't have to be a big bang like the Geography Department did where we're all doing portfolios now and that's it. The only other thing that I thought I might mention is I've just written a thing about anonymous marking, which has been on my mind.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:29

I've heard about ungrading, but I've not yet heard about anonymous marking. I mean, I know that marking can be done so that you don't see the student name. Is that something different?

Cathy Elliott: 29:40

Ah, so in the UK, almost everybody is involved in anonymous marking. This is just a standard thing. So there was a student campaign in 2008 called'Mark my words, not my name' that has been taken up in a quite widespread way, and I think, it's partly because it's easy. Students hand in their work and it is anonymised, so you don't know whose work you're marking. That can be exams, essays, anything, podcasts, whatever. There's often a lot of arguments. You know, if you do want to do a podcast, people say, 'but won't I recognise the student's voice?' Then people decide that they don't want to do it. One of the objections to the work I'm doing with the portfolio has often been, but you can't make it anonymous, which is true. If you're going to give a lot of formative feedback, if the work is going to be very personal, if students are including audio and often photographs [laughs], I mean, occasionally I might come across one where they haven't come to me for as much feedback, but honestly, pretty much, I know who everybody's portfolio is when I mark it, even if it could be anonymised within Mahara, which it can, actually. My external examiner sort of said,'You know, I'm not sure about this.' I thought, mhh, yeah, maybe it's a trade off because I've heard about these studies that show that students from disadvantaged backgrounds, racialised students, minoritised students sometimes do better if the person who's marking their work doesn't know who they are. And I've heard about that study of orchestral editions where you put a screen up and then no one knows who's playing the cello, and so then you get more women in orchestras because you don't get the bias from the judges. So I'd heard of both studies, I better look into this. What I discovered was there's almost no evidence that anonymous marking makes any difference to awarding gaps, whether that's gender, race, disability. There have been studies on this, some of them quite big, some of them time series. There is almost no evidence at all. So I thought, oh, that's very reassuring, actually [laughs], that anonymous marking doesn't help eradicate awarding gaps, although students think it might. There's a nice study by Winstone and Pitt where they ask students when they've had work marked, both anonymously and personally, which of those felt fairer, although in a kind of abstract sense, there was this campaign saying, 'We want anonymous marking.' In practice, they actually don't feel that the anonymous marking was particularly fairer. It doesn't even necessarily generate trust in the system. I found that quite reassuring. the things that really do seem to work, like feedback, making the hidden curriculum explicit, which we were talking about before, belonging, which we were talking about before. Anonymous marking actually works against all those things. And actually what you want is a much more relational approach where you are working with students to figure out what does good work look like? Do we agree with each other about what good work looks like? I know this is heretical, but am I as a teacher, am I always right or might you have a point where you'd say to me, 'I think, no, I think, you know, I should be allowed to use the first person or whatever it is.' What I've advocated for in this article, which hopefully will be coming out, means a much more relational approach to marking, which is the kind of antithesis of anonymous marking, but which, I think, on the basis of my own practice and of the studies that have been done, seems to be much more likely to eradicate those awarding gaps.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:41

That is interesting, and I'd love to read the article. Now, Cathy, the last three questions for you. The first one is, which words do you use to describe portfolio work? Last time you had an alliteration: creative, collaborative, and continuous. Do you want to share any other three words, or do you want to keep them or some of them?

Cathy Elliott: 33:07

So I'll definitely keep those. They're good, but I've been thinking about this. I was pleased with myself with the alliteration. So I've got more [both laugh]. So I've got F's this time. I want people this time to focus on fun, flexible, and feedback.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:19

Awesome. Those work really well together. Thank you for them. What tip do you now have for learning designers or educators who create portfolio activities after your one year of exploring them yourself?

Cathy Elliott: 33:32

Oh, two years now.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:33

Of course because we talked at the end of your course, yes, of course.

Cathy Elliott: 33:37

That's it. Yeah. I mean, I think the piece of advice that really seems to hit is that thing that I said before, but I say again, if you are calling it a portfolio, you can do what you like. You can be innovative, you can be creative, you can do all sorts of different things with your students. You can flex as you go along, and you won't run foul of any kind of university systems because you've said you're doing a portfolio that's what you're doing. I would definitely bear that in mind if you're one of the people that gets frustrated that you're not able to innovate within term.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:04

And we are coming back to alliteration. It fits into that tip as well. Now, what advice do you have for portfolio authors, for your students?

Cathy Elliott: 34:13

Advice that I always give them, I probably said something similar last year. It really is true is start early and work often. One of the best portfolios that I have last year was a student who I knew every Saturday morning - so we have the class on Friday afternoon, everyone goes home, thinks about it overnight, and then every Saturday morning, he spent two or three hours working on his portfolio. It meant that every week there was something. He always shared it with the class immediately after he'd written it, which meant sometimes it was a bit rough, but it meant he was getting feedback straight away, early, and it wasn't a big rush right at the end of term. He was working on it, he was getting the feedback. He was going back and improving things, and it just makes your life easier. So many students have said to me,'This saved my Christmas because I didn't have to be working on my assessment for your class over the holidays. I'd already done it during the term like you made us do it.' Just keep going with it. Don't leave it all to the last minute. Don't let's be faking your week one entry after the end of term. You're just storing up trouble for future you [both laugh].

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:10

Thanks so much for that piece of advice. Cathy, I really appreciate that we could meet for a second time, and I actually also already look for the third time next year then when I'm sure we'll make time to catch up again and see what you have been up to then a couple years into your position as Vice Dean (Education) of the faculty, a year after the geography programme has gone live, and yet another year with your students in political sciences there. So thank you so much for having made time on the first day back after your holiday, and have a good start into the academic year then.

Cathy Elliott: 35:46

You could not be more welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:49

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