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. My guest today is Associate Professor Dr Fergus Green from University College London, abbreviated UCL. There he teaches in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy. Welcome to the podcast, Fergus.

Fergus Green: 0:44

Thank you for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:46

If UCL rings a bell with our listeners and also your name, Fergus, they are not mistaken. Recently, Professor Dr Cathy Elliott joined me on the podcast for a second time and mentioned that you teach a class that some of her students are taking. Can you please tell me some more about yourself and your role at UCL?

Fergus Green: 1:06

I grew up in Australia, and I practised law in Australia for a few years. I trained as a lawyer and worked as an environmental and climate change and energy lawyer for a few years. I then moved to London about 12 years ago to do graduate study in political theory. I joined UCL about three years ago in September 2021, and I'm now an Associate Professor, as you mentioned. Basically, I research and teach mainly on areas around climate change and transition to low carbon societies. I draw on my training in law and policy, as well as in political theory and political economy. So I try and tackle questions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Some of the things that I work on include the climate motivated governance of fossil fuels, so thinking about how to transition away from fossil fuels and also about the idea of a just transition away from fossil fuels that brings people with it, that doesn't leave people in communities behind who work in the industries that need to transition.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:11

That is quite important work that you're doing, and coincidentally, one of your colleagues, learning designer, Irina Niculescu, who told me just the other day that she was working with you also on the module for portfolios, she's going to hold a workshop, actually, also on the same day that this episode goes live for us in New Zealand on 'Working

together for change: 2:32

Digital education meets the climate and nature emergencies'. That's also quite nice to see that your topic also encompasses other areas of the university and that you're working together on this very important topic.

Fergus Green: 2:46

Yeah, absolutely, and I'll talk in a minute about my module, and that actually very much is about that intersection of climate and environment, bringing in the digital education with the portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:56

Fergus, how did you actually come to work with portfolios? Did everything come back to Cathy?

Fergus Green: 3:02

Pretty much it did. Where it started is that I started teaching a new module in autumn 2022 called'Environmental and climate justice'. This was a module that I proposed and developed. Basically about half of the module is about climate change, and the other half, the first half, is about a range of different environmental challenges and their impacts on human beings and communities. So thinking about environmentally mediated social injustices if you will. So we look at things like air pollution, consumption, waste, energy production, and agriculture. So I was teaching this subject. I was enjoying it. I think my students were really enjoying it, but I had a really interesting, let's say, experience with the assessment. I wasn't doing portfolios in this first year. I gave the students two assessments. One was really successful, the other one less so. The first assessment, which was a 1,000-word piece of work that they had to submit, was basically a format that I created, called an'Environmental Justice Analysis', or EJA. Essentially, this was quite a structured form of assessment in that it had to consist of three parts. It had to consist of a diagnosis of an environmental injustice, combining empirical analysis with appeals to normative principles and theories of justice. The second part had to involve an analysis of the causes of that environmental injustice, both the proximate and the structural causes. And then the third part, the students have to propose a solution or a response strategy and not just how things ought to be, but also a realistic strategy for how to move from where we are to that desirable solution. So it was a very structured approach, but the students had a lot of freedom to choose the particular topic that they wrote about and whatever the case study might be and this broad topic within the environment and climate issues. That went down really well. So the students did really great work. I really enjoy reading these pieces of work, and it was an all round good experience. This was about halfway through term that that was due, and then fast forward to the end of term, and they had a 2,000-word traditional format essay. I gave them a choice of, I think, five topics, one each from the last five weeks of term, essentially. This was not such a great experience. Marking these was a bit of a burden, I have to say. And I think the students enjoyed it less. They seemed to engage with it less, and the quality of their work was lower. You know, this really translated to a seven point lower average score on the essays compared with the Environmental Justice Analysis. That's a lot. That was one experience I had teaching that module. And at the same time as I was doing that Cathy Elliott was teaching portfolios for the first time on her new module,'Politics of nature'. I was really interested in this experiment, essentially, that she was running, and I would have frequent conversations with her about that and became quite interested and curious. And then I think it was really when we were marking our, in my case, my essays at the end and in her case the portfolios that really sealed the deal. When I was, you know, trudging through these essays, and I asked Cathy how it was going marking her portfolios, she said, 'these portfolios were a joy to mark.' That was the point at which I thought, yep, I want what she's having. It was at that point that I decided I was going to switch to portfolios. The one other thing I'll just mention as to how the portfolios came about was that I designed the portfolio - I mean, I drew a lot on Cathy's own materials and her mentorship, really throughout this. And I also worked with three of my students. We did something called a ChangeMakers project, which is basically a programme that UCL runs where staff work with students on an initiative to improve some aspect of their educational experience. In my case, it was the assessment of my module, and we basically ran us through a series of workshops. I would give them things to read and think about, and then we would come together and work together on designing the portfolio assessment task. You know, the assessment criteria, the approach to feedback, and so on, and crucially, something we also did was we developed a series of prompts, like ideas, basically, that students could use to get their imagination going for all 10 weeks of the module. These were sort of the main things we developed together in this ChangeMakers project. By the end of that, I was ready to roll it out, and so I changed my assessment for the autumn 2023 session, and that was the first time I used portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:29

That is absolutely fantastic that you also involved your students into the portfolio creation process so that they had more of a stake in it and also could help make the experience better for future students that are taking the course.

Fergus Green: 7:44

Yeah, exactly.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:46

Fergus, could you figure out what the difference was between the first assessment that you had and the second assessment that didn't go so well? Did you take some of those elements then also into your portfolio work?

Fergus Green: 7:58

Yeah, that's right. What I took away from the experience about what worked well with the Environmental Justice Analysis is that the students had quite a bit of freedom to pursue the topics that they were interested in. That, I think, is really the essence of the portfolio. That was the first and most important lesson. I think the second lesson, and something that I would really emphasise, is that the Environmental Justice Analysis, as I explained, was quite a structured piece of work. It's a bit like jazz, right? Freedom with constraints. I took very seriously the need to have some constraints or at least some scaffolding, particularly for students who are perhaps a bit shyer about fully embracing the creativity and the potential of portfolios. I continued to teach the Environmental Justice Analysis as a core framework for engaging with each of the topics, and I would encourage the students if they were a bit stuck in thinking about their portfolio to do an Environmental Justice Analysis or a part of one as part of their final assessment. Just to explain how it worked, I would set an expectation that students would work, on average, on their portfolio, doing about 300 to 400 words a week, but I wouldn't police that. Ultimately, what they had to submit was 2,500 words of their best work plus a response of about 500 words to a covering questionnaire where I asked them about their experience on the module and make the case for the work that they were submitting. They were given quite a lot of freedom, but again, I would encourage students to submit as a default something of at least 1,000 words so that they had a little bit more space that you need a slightly longer format to fulfil some of the criteria. And I also mentioned the sort of default option of doing an Environmental Justice Analysis for at least part of the assessment. A number of students did that. They actually did an Environmental Justice Analysis, but certainly not everyone. I come back to that freedom, but with some structures there, particularly for those who need it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:47

I love the analogy that you gave us: 'It's a little bit like jazz' because you're right thinking about that music, there is a lot of structure, but then you also have these wonderful improvisations included that really bring it together and to make it the piece that it then turns out and every time it is very different. Every single performance is so different,

Fergus Green: 10:08

Exactly right? I've always admired jazz musicians. It's not my favourite genre, I'm more of a classical musician myself, but I have some friends who are jazz musicians. I'm always in awe of that ability to bring something new every time, yet you can't just do anything, right? You've got to work within these constraints, and so I'm always really in awe of great jazz musicians.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:28

If we're staying with that analogy then, you already told us a bit about what your students include in their portfolio, that they are essentially writing something every single week, but they could also do a bigger piece with the Environmental Justice Analysis, what are some other components of the portfolio? Do they also and here comes the jazz analogy, play off each other? Does somebody start and then another person goes into the portfolio and provides a comment or feedback and then the students take that learning further.

Fergus Green: 10:57

I very much encourage students to seek feedback from each other, as well as from me. There are a few ways in which I do that. I scheduled every three or four weeks a portfolio check in where I just give them a few minutes at the start of a seminar in pairs or groups of three to just talk with others about what they're doing in their portfolio. I've had some of my students say to me that they found that really interesting and useful and got ideas from each other. That I think also lowers the barriers to them seeking slightly more formal feedback, and we have a mechanism for that where you can go into the other students' portfolio if they give permission and read that and provide peer feedback. As an additional incentive, and this is another technique I learned from Cathy, which is to incentivise that by saying that anyone who provides thoughtful feedback to another student can then seek an additional feedback from me. Everyone's entitled to seek feedback once, but then they can seek an additional one if they also provide feedback to others. It does encourage that, but each student ultimately retains authority over who they give access to over their portfolios. We did see at least one joint performance last year, and this was actually a podcast. So two of my students decided that they wanted to explore one of the themes from the module through a podcast and basically interviewed each other and had a discussion about the topic over a podcast, and then we discussed, okay, well, then how does that count within the word limits and things like that? That was an interesting experience and a good example of where the students did really bounce off one another.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:26

What rule did you then find how to deal with that multimedia content of the students? Because that was my

next question then going to be: 12:32

if they are doing a lot of writing, what about the media elements? Do they also put images in or videos? And now that you've mentioned the podcast, how did you deal with that? Is there something that others might also interested in knowing how you've been able to bring that into the regular word limit or find a good equivalent for?

Fergus Green: 12:51

I guess there's two issues there. One is the technical incorporation of the multimedia into the portfolio program and then the second is the word limit, departmental, administrative constraints. With regard to the first issue, that's their problem, because the Mahara program that we use allows for multimedia content, so students can upload sound recordings, like the podcast, video recordings, as well as of course images and of course text. So that really allows for that multimedia usage and creativity, and that's very easy. In terms of the word limit, I'm trying to remember exactly what we decided, but I think basically the thought was it wouldn't be fair to them, really, to count the number of words in the podcast because obviously they're going to be more words in a podcast. You'd express yourself more concisely if you're writing an essay, right? I think what I got them to do was to write an accompanying reflective piece on the podcast, and we counted the overall package in a way that to me seemed reasonable and proportionate to the amount of work that they did. So there was no rigid rule. We came to an agreement on how many words this would count for.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:56

Fantastic. So Fergus, now that you've used portfolios for a whole academic year and prior to that, have seen them with Cathy, did you then notice anything different in your students' learning or their interaction or the assessments overall?

Fergus Green: 14:14

The difference was marked. The difference between particularly the essays in the students' engagement and the quality of their work and ultimately their grades was really different from the traditional format essay to the portfolios. Really on all those dimensions, it was quite a different experience for them and for me marking them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:33

It's good to hear also that you're enjoying that experience. Fergus, your students pretty much write or add to their portfolio on a weekly basis, but they don't necessarily share all of those entries with other students.

Fergus Green: 14:49

That's right. They do have quite a lot of freedom, and some of my students told me, you know, a couple told me that they didn't really do much in the portfolio for most of the year, and they reflected on that in their assessment. And one or two said to me that they would prefer it if they were kind of held to account a little bit more regularly, as it were. So I've been thinking about whether I would do that, and I think, the answer I've come up with is no, I won't [laughs] because the whole point of portfolios is to give students that freedom. I mean, I certainly wouldn't consider asking them to turn something in every week or even every fortnight because then you take away that freedom. One thing that could work is maybe making the submission and feedback of some formative work compulsory by, say, week six or something like that. I think some of those students who maybe were skiving off a little bit would, perhaps, in hindsight, have benefited from that discipline. You know, on the other hand, some students are not ready to submit formative work in week five or six, but they're working away on their portfolios on a larger piece of work. You know, ultimately, I've decided to leave it, but perhaps try and encourage submission a bit earlier for feedback and use a sort of more of a nudge approach, rather than mandating that intermediate check-in.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:59

It's good to see that you're actually also wanting to create those self directed learners.

Fergus Green: 16:03

That's right, and that's ultimately what it comes down to. And most students embrace that. And you know, might take them two or three weeks to get going, but then they get into the hang of it and really value that. What I come back to is that I'm reluctant to mess with that aspect, and I think that's really important.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:19

What are your plans for this academic year? Because we are recording this session right before you're starting your term, and of course, by the time the interview goes live, you will have already been teaching for, I think, a little over a month? Are you going to make any changes, or are you pretty much keeping everything as it is?

Fergus Green: 16:38

Yeah, pretty much keeping everything as it is. I mean, there was no real reason to change anything. I'm keeping it the same.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:44

Fergus, how many students are actually, typically, in your class?

Fergus Green: 16:48

About 30 last year. I'm expecting the same again this year.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:52

That's also a good size number for them to really get to know each other, engage with each other, and then have that confidence that they know who is going to give them feedback from their peer side.

Fergus Green: 17:03

That's right, yeah. So that ends up being a lecture and then two seminars. So two seminars, about 15 students each, so it's a good size.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:10

Fergus, what would you like to be able to do with portfolios that you currently can't?

Fergus Green: 17:15

I thought about this, and I don't think there is really anything that I would want to be able to do with a bit, but I think probably it's a better question for my students. So it made me think that this is a question I should ask them. You know, what do they wish that they could do with portfolios that they can't? It's something that I'll ask them this year.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:32

That would be interesting to do your co-design again now that you've done the portfolios for one year, invite your students back in for the ChangeMaker project that they liked best about it or some aspects that they might want to change.

Fergus Green: 17:45

The ChangeMakers project is quite a big undertaking, but certainly, the spirit of that is something I very much try to collect. So we have ongoing surveys about early in the term, mid term, and at the end of the term where I collect that information using a Menti survey. And obviously informally, I'm very much encouraging students to come to office hours at least once in the first half of term, and ideally more. I'm getting that feedback from them informally as well.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:10

Yes, it does not always have to be a formal project, just a chat in the hallway might be sufficient. Fergus, is there anything else that you would like to mention that we haven't covered off yet?

Fergus Green: 18:22

The only other thing I'll mention is how those of us who use portfolios can help other staff who might be curious or interested in using portfolios. I mean, I very much benefited from having Cathy's expertise and support when I went down this path, and then between the two of us, we encouraged another group of people, and this year, we're really pleased that of what we're aware at least three of our colleagues are going to be teaching ePortfolios using Mahara for the first time. So that'll be five of us now in the department and a number of others in our faculty as well, the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, and the other departments are also taking out ePortfolios. I would encourage lecturers who use it to think about how they can support others to do it. And I think sort of two things there. One is kind of highlighting the benefits for the lecturers, so coming back to what I was saying earlier about just how much more pleasurable it is to mark work that the students have put a lot of effort into and really thought about. That's a much better experience for them. I think also just kind of making it easy for them. So one of the aspects of this ChangeMakers project that I didn't mention is that we also produced the materials for the assessment for my module, you know, the instructions for the students, the feedback, pro forma form, the marking criteria, the questionnaire. But we also then make generic versions of those, deleted some of the details, and I've read an additional memo for staff. We put that on our staff SharePoint, and it's now become part of a larger project called the assessment library, but basically just reduces the start-up costs for people who want to adopt ePortfolios. We've given them all those resources and then people have adapted them, obviously, and then we've got some technical support as well to help people with an induction kind of session and other kind of supportive resources to start. So if you encourage them, get them interested, and then lower the barriers to them switching their assessment mode, we've certainly found that that's been really helpful in encouraging others to take up portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:18

I think we can employ your analogy here as well because with the resources, you're providing a structure, you're providing ideas of what can be done. But then because every course is different, everybody has the freedom to then change it. But in general, you have the structure available, and therefore, as you say, nobody has to start from scratch trying to figure it out, but benefit from the learning that you and Cathy and next year, many others will have had.

Fergus Green: 20:43

Yeah, that's right.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:44

That already, Fergus, takes us to our last three questions. Are you ready for them?

Fergus Green: 20:49

I'm ready.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:50

Which words or short phrases actually as well, if you like, do you use to describe portfolio work?

Fergus Green: 20:56

So I'm going to slightly cheat on this one. I asked my students...

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:00

Awesome.

Fergus Green: 21:00

... to do one of these word clouds. So I went back and looked at their word cloud that they did when I asked them to describe their portfolio assessment, and the top three words were creative, different, and flexible.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:14

Fantastic. You have the overlap with Cathy in 'flexible'. That was also one of her words this year. What tip do you now have for learning designers or lecturers who create portfolio activities?

Fergus Green: 21:31

I come back to this combination of freedom and scaffolding. So obviously the approach inherently allows a lot of freedom, but I think it's really important to have some of that scaffolding. So that's things like the peer-to-peer regular check-ins, options for peer-to-peer feedback, feedback from me, encouraging them to come to office hours, the weekly prompts for each topic, just to get their ideas flowing and then have some default assignments, in my case, it was the Environmental Justice Analysis. I think this kind of scaffolding helps to bring out the creativity, ultimately, that the students value.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:59

Thank you. Now, last question for you, what advice do you have for portfolio authors, for your students?

Fergus Green: 22:06

Two pieces of advice: take risks and then seek feedback from your peers and the lecturer. So I think that the portfolio approach really allows you to the freedom to push yourself, take a risk, pursue something that you wouldn't have otherwise pursued or in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise, do it using a medium that you otherwise wouldn't have used, but that you may be curious about. Just try it and give it a go, and then use the fact that there are opportunities for feedback to then check-in with the lecturer. All of the students who sought feedback from me did significantly better on their final submission in terms of their grade than what they initially provided. I would just encourage them to be bold and take risks, but do seek that feedback from the lecturer, and I think that's a really powerful combination in terms of getting the most out of the experience and getting a grade that they're satisfied with.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:57

It definitely sounds like one. And thank you so much for sharing that final tip with us. I really appreciate, Fergus, that you've taken the time to chat with me so that I could learn how your initial curiosity by seeing what a lecturer next to you in the same department does and how much more they enjoy their assessments, how that spark of curiosity resulted in you rethinking your own assessments, rethinking your own course, and bringing that flexibility and also creativity in for your students, at the same time also supporting them in becoming learners that direct their own work and that hopefully will continue in that vein, also in other courses now that there's more and more at UCL that are going to work with portfolios. Thank you for your time.

Fergus Green: 23:47

My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:50

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