Kristina Hoeppner 00:05

Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on the 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. 

Kristina Hoeppner 00:28

Today I'm speaking with Dr Andrea Ghoneim who lives in Austria and is currently eDeveloper - Digital Teaching Services at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business). I had the chance to meet Andrea a few years ago at a Mahara Hui in Vienna, after we had connected around 2015, I would say, because entry was researcher on a European Union project. She has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience with portfolios over the years and has also been a researcher and lecturer at Donau-Universität Krems (Danube University Krems), which can look back at a very long and important history of portfolio research in Austria with Dr Peter Baumgartner, Dr Klaus Himpsl-Gutermann, Andrea herself, and many others.

Kristina Hoeppner 01:18

Andrea, last time, we walked through snow in Vienna, and today via talking with oceans between us. It's so wonderful to have time to catch up with you.

Andrea Ghoneim 01:29

Yeah, it's very nice. Thank you for having me. I'm happy at least that we can meet via the distance.

Kristina Hoeppner 01:36

Thanks to technology [laughs]. Andrea, can you please share a bit more about your professional interests?

Andrea Ghoneim 01:42

My professional interests are mainly teaching and learning and the support of teaching and learning with technology. I'm actually rooted in literature studies. I did literature studies, German literature, at university, but I had a big component of media inside my studies and inside my qualification works. Later on, I was teaching not only but also German as a foreign language, and very soon I became the lady who always did like literature and the world wide web, language teaching and the world wide web, language learning and the world wide web. So this brought me always closer to media. And finally via a detour in Egypt, in Cairo, to Danube University in Krems.

Kristina Hoeppner 02:33

What actually made you interested in researching portfolios, using it with your students?

Andrea Ghoneim 02:40

I came back from being university lecturer in Egypt to Austria and then I worked in a standardised tests for German as a foreign language at the ÖSD. I actually enjoyed very much these tests because they were already based on communicative abilities, so on competencies. This was only later on the case, but still, they were tests. So of course, like you do a little bit of teaching to the test, and in the end, the students are tested. Even if it's basing on competencies, I had the feeling that this cannot be everything. I resigned from the very nice testing company and looked for another job, and then I came across this job at Danube University, and they were looking for someone working with ePortfolios. So I started researching, and the concept struck me [laughs] and I was like, 'Okay, this is the way of assessment I want to do not this test based assessment.' And yeah, very happily, I've worked for several years in the field of ePortfolio, not only assessment, but ePortfolio teaching, ePortfolio learning. Yeah, I was very happy.

Kristina Hoeppner 03:55

Well, now that also explains how you became part of the European Union funded project ATS 2020, which combined portfolios and assessment. So just before we delve into some of those details, this was a huge European Union project with 250 schools, approximately 1,000 teachers, 10,000 students in 10 countries of the Union in the pilot year of 2016-2017. What was the aim of the project and then how did portfolios support that goal, Andrea?

Andrea Ghoneim 04:32

We had before that, you mentioned it already, a project called EUfolio, EU Classroom ePortfolios, and there we worked mainly with the implementation of ePortfolios in schools and not as many schools as they had in ATS 2020, but it already showed that the effects especially on learners, but of course, also on teachers, because at that time, it meant a fundamental change in teaching culture that showed this big effects, but rather in a not so measurable way. 

Andrea Ghoneim 05:07

The European Union said, like, 'we want to challenge this idea.' And we got the chance to apply for a large scale project, which was at ATS 2020, which wanted to show that assessment of transversal skills, skills that go beyond just one subject in school, can be done very well with the help of a new assessment approach. And this assessment approach as the technology accompanying needs more or less the ePortfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner 05:42

With this massive project, I mean, wrangling 250 schools and then all the teachers and students, how did the team go about recruiting the schools? Was there an open call, were they all already interested in portfolios, or was the concept basically very new to them?

Andrea Ghoneim 06:02

Partly, these were schools that were already participating in the project EUfolio. So this also shows like, once they got acquainted with the concept, they liked very much to do more with that. But the main thing was really that there were national calls of all the project partners. I remember that my colleague said that sometimes they even had to close the calls earlier because, obviously, like really many schools wanted to participate and wanted to see how they can have more motivation on the one hand, and like a different style of assessment on the other hand.

Kristina Hoeppner 06:43

For the project itself, I remember that you experimented quite a bit with a number of different platforms. And the teachers were very involved in experimenting with portfolios. How did you go about bringing the concept of portfolios close to them, so that they knew how it differed and how it meshed with the transversal skills that you wanted them to know and incorporate?

Andrea Ghoneim 07:13

During the work with the EUFolio, we already had come up with a definition of ePortfolios, which was like a little bit broken down standard definition. We said "ePortfolios are student owned, dynamic digital workspaces, where a student can capture their learning and their ideas, and that they can access their collections of work, reflect on their learning, share it, set goals, seek feedback, and showcase their learning and achievements." I think already the definition shows quite well, that it does not only mean to have a digital collection of artefacts, that it goes far beyond that. Teachers both liked this idea, especially of the feedback as part of the learning process., but they were also very interested in seeing how this can be supported by digital tools.

Kristina Hoeppner 08:18

Because you were at the university, did you then research the effects that this transformation had at the school or what was the aim of the research that you conducted?

Andrea Ghoneim 08:30

We mainly took care of classifying the process of implementation of tools, which were not only the ePortfolio tools, but also were assessment tools that had to be brought in place because the European Union wanted to have a quantitative evaluation of this. It was a large scale policy experimentation. So there had to be a quantitative evaluation as well. And of course, we were taking care also of the reporting of the work with all these tools. The experimentation itself was a different work package and was carried out by Slovenian partners, specialised in educational testing.

Kristina Hoeppner 09:17

You've already mentioned the EU portfolio project that was the predecessor to ATS 2020. Do you remember when that started because I think it might have been around 2012 or 2013?

Andrea Ghoneim 09:32

It was 2013. I remember because I started my job at Danube University with this project. EUfolio was headed by colleagues from Ireland, especially like a learning agency, H2, and the Irish Ministry of Education. And there were also like a lot of international colleagues on board, and actually ePortfolios were rather new for most of the project partners, and at that time also ePortfolios were not that popular. As I did more research, I found out that around 2008, there was like a peak of publication and implementations, and then it kind of had gone a little bit down. And with the help of Klaus Himpsl-Gutermann, I tried to do research also why some of the initiatives did not continue. This was really like a new start over in the work with ePortfolios, and it was not the EUfolio project only, but it was kind of a new trend, that working with ePortfolios is something that really should be tried out again and be brought to a new level.

Kristina Hoeppner 10:51

I also remember that there was quite a bit community around it. You had set up national communities of practice where people then could get together and discuss portfolios themselves.

Andrea Ghoneim 11:03

There was another rather big project, which was called Europortfolio, which aimed at making a network of ePortfolio practitioners across Europe, but actually even beyond Europe. We had associated members from New Zealand, of course [laughs], from the United States, from Canada. Unfortunately, you hardly find any traces. We are still people in lose contact, and we will invite each other to conferences sometimes, but this big network that you can just Google and you find an expert close to you, unfortunately, is not existing any more.

Kristina Hoeppner 11:43

Why do you think there was this decline in portfolio use after that initial rise in the late 2000s, but then early 2010s a bit of decline? Right now, I think portfolios are coming back a bit more in different iterations, of course. But why do you think that happened, you mentioned that you and Klaus had looked or tried to look into that a bit and see what the reasons might have been?

Andrea Ghoneim 12:14

It's not easy to explain it. If you talk to people, you get rather answers [laughs] than via scientific publications. Obviously, the problem is that portfolios are a lot of work. The people who do it, they first get totally motivated and into it, and then they get a little bit tired of it, maybe. I mean, like still believing in all the benefits it has, but there is not the power to carry it for a lifelong way that you should be with your portfolio.

Andrea Ghoneim 12:53

I think it's also maybe for the technical infrastructure, and I don't mean with the technical infrastructure, only software and the hosting of the software, but also all the people around it to have to maintain. It's costly, even if not too costly, and so I think the larger scale implementations might be also fading away if there is no more project money to fund it additionally.

Kristina Hoeppner 13:23

That's what we unfortunately often see with those externally funded projects that everything goes really well and everybody's enthusiastic while the project is going, but then once the funding stops, the institution where the project had been established, often doesn't have that additional resource in order to keep staff or continue with the practice so that there's lots of knowledge then in a way lost as well.

Kristina Hoeppner 13:51

Andrea, you mentioned that some of the teachers had already been in that first project, Europortfolio project, before ATS 2020. Did you have any inkling of whether they were doing differently than schools that came new to portfolios as part of the follow-on project?

Andrea Ghoneim 14:09

Partly, but actually, our project ATS 2020 also provided, just as EUfolio, quite large scale and fundamentally well thought over teacher training concept. Because of the teacher training, the teachers became quite well acquainted both with ePortfolios and with the way of assessing transversal skills with ePortfolios. It was really not too bad to onboard the new teachers and also that partly we had new partners. I would say within the first project year, we reached quite the shared knowledge.

Kristina Hoeppner 14:51

If you were to summarise the outcomes of the ATS 2020 project and what was achieved In regards to assessment with portfolios, what would the top one or top two things be that after so many years are still in your mind where you say, 'This is where we contributed fundamentally to the portfolio work' that is also still going on?

Andrea Ghoneim 15:21

I would say that the learning model that was developed within the project ATS 2020, I mean, for this, I must give a big shout out to the project leaders from the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute, namely Anastasia Economou; this learning model really gave the learners a sense of ownership that is also given by the ePortfolio. So it was like really working hand in hand.

Andrea Ghoneim 15:50

The learning model started with assessment of prior knowledge. Teachers had to be trained first to pose the right questions, to help students to assess their prior knowledge because just starting a subject and then seeing what do you know already with 10, 11, 12-year old students would not be possible. And then also, the next step was that on this basis, you set your learning goals actually yourself, which sounds almost esoteric [laughs] without the help of the teacher.

Andrea Ghoneim 16:08

It was hard work for the teachers, but our project teachers were so happy because they said that the students developed such a sense of ownership for their learning. It continued, like this learner centred way that students even should develop strategies themselves on how to reach their learning goals, and then evaluate themselves. I remember a student's testimonial, I think he was also from Cyprus, and he said that with this way, he feels equipped to tackle all the problems in his life, which is actually true, because if you are in a situation where you feel you still have to develop something, you must ask yourself, 'Okay, what do I bring already with me, what do I know already, and how will I reach my goal?' During this process, you have at least two companions, namely your teacher, and the ePortfolio is also a wonderful thing.

Kristina Hoeppner 17:23

Yeah. That leads very well into the lifelong learning because of course, that's what we want to achieve with the transfer of skills and transfer of knowledge that students can take what they have learned in one area and apply it in another. 

Kristina Hoeppner 17:37

So Andrea, we've talked quite a bit about ATS 2020 and the prior project for that, which was now already quite a while ago, but looking at things more recently, you contributed to the white Paper 'Digital assessment in higher education: Perspectives of a European community of practice' that was published in German in September 2021, but also in English in November of last year 2022. In that paper, you're not just co-editor of the entire white paper, but also author of the section on ePortfolios along with Elena Brinkmann, Sophie Domann, Silvia Fath-Keiser, Max Tietz, and Jutta Papenbrock. What were your findings for higher education in regards to portfolio practice in the areas that you looked at?

Andrea Ghoneim 18:32

I first want to express that I'm very grateful to WU, to the Vienna University of Economics and Business, that I was able to be part of this working group because we at WU at the moment don't have ePortfolios in the focus of our assessment strategies. But first of all, it gives me hope that ePortfolios still remain in the portfolio that we have at WU, and second of all, we had findings that really show that this is an assessment that puts not only the learner in the focus, but also the skills. Portfolios are quite an ideal tool to put your skills in a showcase and thus fulfill assessment rules, especially of qualitative assessment.

Kristina Hoeppner 19:22

When you did research for that white paper and also as part of your research at Danube University and then bringing ATS 2020 together, have you seen any differences between the portfolio practice at the school level, so at the compulsory school level, versus higher education?

Andrea Ghoneim 19:46

It really rather depends on the examples. With regard to the tools, I must say that I'm really fond of Mahara [laughs] because it gives a lot of opportunities also from the aesthetical point of view because you can really make nice collections that look like websites that you can also share really with the world wide web, which is both for students in the school important. Let's say they make a portfolio about a theatre project or something, they might be really proud to show it to a broader audience. But it's also important for university students because they could turn an assessment portfolio on a certain level, even into a career portfolio or at least in a portfolio, when they are looking for a job, really demonstrate the skills not only to themselves, to peers, or to the teacher, but really to a broader audience. 

Andrea Ghoneim 20:47

However, besides Mahara, I have experiences with doing ePortfolios also on the basis of Office 365. This was done in the framework of the project ATS 2020. It needed more design done by the teacher because the design options for the students in an Office 365 classroom are smaller, even though they of course might be more familiar with the tools so that are on display. 

Andrea Ghoneim 21:18

To come back to the white paper 'Digital assessment in higher education', I was quite intrigued about the portfolios in ILIAS that were shown to us by Elena Brinkmann, who did this ePortfolio assessment, as far as I remember, with medical students. They looked also beautiful, both from the viewpoint of aesthetics, and it looks like also the students develop the sense of ownership even though these portfolios were rather confined to the learning management system, which is ILIAS. However, the portfolios in ILIAS were mainly assessment portfolios. So this is also something that you should not only differentiate portfolios by, in which tool you do it, for which purpose you do it, but also the type of portfolio you create.

Kristina Hoeppner 22:13

Mhh. Definitely. What do you think can be done to continue the practice of portfolios in a lifelong and lifewide fashion?

Andrea Ghoneim 22:23

I think what is really missing is a technical space provided by a government or an institution that has kind of a government status. There were some governments trying. I remember in Canada, that was in Manitoba, a career portfolio, mainly for migrants, that there was a colleague working with that. There's still a guideline for how younger people can do their career portfolios, but I don't see a space where they could do it. 

Andrea Ghoneim 22:57

So I find that this space would make life much easier both for the lifelong learner, but also for all these different institutions that the lifelong learner might go to. If I imagine that I could have the same ePortfolio that I had in school and later on, I go to university, of course, I will open my new view, I will open a new collection, and later on, and maybe on my own, but I assemble my achievement, my artefacts, and contextualise them in a different way in order to apply for a job or in order to maybe also I feel like 'Okay, I'm happy with my job, but what's this all? What could I want to achieve?' Like I want to set myself new aims. So it would be wonderful to have a space that can stay with me for my learning life.

Kristina Hoeppner 23:56

Yeah, we've had some of those examples, right? You mentioned the Manitoba Career Portfolio. There's also mahara.at, the Mahara instance that was sponsored by Danube University where lots of different organisations in Austria could connect to. In New Zealand, we have MyPortfolio.school.nz for school students, and in Switzerland, there is SWITCHportfolio, which also allows the Swiss institutions of higher education that are using SWITCH as service partner to use a portfolio. 

Kristina Hoeppner 24:33

Well, we've heard a lot about portfolios from you today telling also the story of what is happening in Austria as well as other parts of the European Union, we touched on what students at the school level can do, and also how portfolios can be used at the tertiary or higher education level. So Andrea, I'd like to close and ask you three questions so that we can put your answers into the pool have all the collective knowledge there from the community. 

Kristina Hoeppner 25:06

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

Andrea Ghoneim 25:12

I'm glad that you posted this question beforehand because otherwise I could not answer now because too many words would come to my mind. After reflecting long time I decided for 'create, curate, and communicate'.

Kristina Hoeppner 25:28

Oh, wonderful three C words [laughs].

Andrea Ghoneim 25:30

Yeah [laughs]. I think 'create' because doing an ePortfolio is really a creative process, and I think this is also something even if you don't think much about purposes, an ePortfolio should be in everyone's hands because it's the normal complement to what you had as a notebook in school and on digital times. In your notebook, you would create things. 

Andrea Ghoneim 25:53

However, later on, you must 'curate' these things because you want to pick artefacts. You want to show the best things you achieved, and this is also something to learn that you cannot keep everything. This is the curation aspect, and also, the second aspect of curation would be for me to contextualise things. In an exhibition, I will not just put the picture and not write a name or like an explanation text to it. For me, it also contains a little bit this explaining towards reflection, which would be another word I would have chosen if I could choose more. 

Andrea Ghoneim 26:34

'Communicate' can be also the reflection, but could be also like to talk with a peer, to talk with my teacher, to talk with a mentor.

Kristina Hoeppner 26:45

Now Andrea, what tip do you have for learning designers, instructors, lecturers, or teachers? What would be your top tip there?

Andrea Ghoneim 26:55

EPortfolio work should be negotiated work. But as far as I got it from friends, during the COVID time, every teacher would tell the students, 'Make a portfolio.' They would not negotiate, and they would not tell too much what they mean by portfolio. So I think still, the teacher should define outcomes, even if this is only a basis for negotiation, and even if the student should pick the outcomes him or herself, the teacher has to bring the basis for the creation not only define outcomes, but also that he or she should suggest tasks and also suggest strategies. So more or less a teacher should manage the process, or at least facilitate the process. And also, of course, to suggest the basis of assessment.

Kristina Hoeppner 27:49

I love that idea of negotiation because we often here talked about scaffolding portfolio practice, which you kind of put in there in that negotiation that the teacher doesn't just say 'Create a portfolio' but also provides some guidance yet on the other hand, also gives students the freedom to make their own decisions and therefore decide how they want to create their portfolio. Because you mentioned earlier that the portfolio is the students' that it's a reflection of their own person. Thank you for that tip.

Kristina Hoeppner 28:19

And now a tip for the students or any portfolio author, no matter their age. What tip do you have for them?

28:29

What I see, I also made ePortfolios with students at Danube University, especially in the beginning, they are very motivated, and they collect everything: Put things in context. I think it happens to you and to me also, sometimes. We do a search, and we find things on the web, and we cram our hard disks or whichever devices with things found here, things out there. If later on you look at them, you can hardly make sense of them. While if you put something in an ePortfolio and you put some notes on the side, like 'Okay, I found this podcast and especially the end of the podcast struck me because I found three very important keywords' and you name them, then you will really listen to it again. While if you just find let's say a link to a podcast, 10 years later, no one knows whether you were curious enough just to click on it.

Kristina Hoeppner 29:29

That is a very good point and a really nice distinction between just having an archive and everything that you have ever done versus that curation and making curated content available to yourself or also to an audience so that they actually know what was going on in your mind. Thank you so much for that tip, Andrea.

Andrea Ghoneim 29:52

Yeah, I would like to add, some people also like if you do the curation, maybe you lack this letter of intent that can be a very valuable part of an ePortfolio. Not everyone does it, but it should be actually part of the work with ePortfolios. So if your collection gets too big, at least then it should be the time to write a letter of intent to write about this ePortfolio view at least because this might also help you clear your mind and select what should be part of this selection and why.

Kristina Hoeppner 30:26

Yeah so that there is always the goal or the reason or the intent of why you created it. That is a wonderful tip. Thank you so much. That was a rich session with you, and it was wonderful to catch up with you again, Andrea. I really enjoyed hearing a bit more of the story from ATS 2020 and also the prior portfolio projects, you were involved in through European Union funding, and then also go briefly into the higher education area. I do also hope that you'll soon be able to take up portfolios in your current position and can see how they might fit in with economics and business students.

Andrea Ghoneim 31:10

Yeah, this will be very interesting challenge, and I'm looking forward. I think that anyway, like as the ePortfolios always go up again in research, they must come back because they are the natural companion to any learning management system.

Kristina Hoeppner 31:28

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