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'd like to tell you a bit about my recent trip to the Northern hemisphere where I've had the chance to meet a lot of community members in many different countries and listen to how they use portfolios, what they'd like to be able to do with Mahara, and where there are areas for us to have more conversations on how to create an experience for learners and educators alike to work more easily with portfolios. I started off my trip in the San Francisco Bay Area where I met five of my podcast interviees in person. Amongst them was Dr Leticia Britos Cavagnaro from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, commonly known as d.school. She's the creator of the reflection bot Riff. Riff is one of the artificial intelligence experiments that she has running. I think there's a potential for really tight integration with portfolio tools because Riff makes it easy to step through a reflective framework such as 'What? So what? Now what?' Instead of staying in the 'What?' phase, which is summarising a learning event as that is the easiest of the three phases, students are encouraged through continuous questioning from the AI to actually voice their opinions and get deeper into the reflection. I'm grateful to Leticia to hear my feedback after having experimented with Riff myself, and I also now have a better understanding of where she's coming from with her experiment. Riff has now been available since about April of last year, 2023, and its availability and further development depend on what those that have been exploring it want to do with it going forward, and also whether that means that the tool can be turned into a product. To that effect, Leticia sent a survey to everyone who has an account, and I'm eager to learn about the results because I think it would be wonderful if we had it available for everyone using portfolios and could also integrate it more tightly with Mahara. Now, the second reason for my visit in the Bay Area was the first ever AAEEBL ePortfolio Retreat that Dr Helen Chen from Stanford University, Christina Mayes from Dominican University of California, and I organised, with the support of several other people. We held the event on Christina's campus at Dominican in San Rafael, and it was the perfect setting, I think, for our one day event on Friday when students didn't have classes. Imagine driving through Silicon Valley with its multi-lane freeways and concrete everywhere. As soon as you then cross the Golden Gate Bridge, the scenery opens up and little towns take over. Sure there's still the freeway, but it actually turns more into a highway and there are fewer cars- maybe we also just didn't hit rush hour. When we then drove through pretty sleepy San Rafael and ended up on the hill of the beautiful campus of Dominican University of California, amidst a redwood forest away from the hassle and bustle of the city, it was a spectacular site and an amazing setting for our retreat. So Dominican University has the Fletcher Jones ePortfolio Lab in the Mary B. Marcy Student Success Center, and it's a fantastic open space where students can learn, collaborate, and also seek support. In the first part of the Retreat, we learned how Dominican uses portfolios in many different areas to encourage students to tell their learning stories and learning journeys, talk about themselves, their aspirations, and also goals. We then ventured outside and held a session in an outdoor classroom where tree stumps formed the seats. The fragrance of the redwood trees, wood chips on the ground, and nearby flowers provided a very different learning setting from the air conditioned indoors. Members of the AAEEBL community shared how they have been using portfolios successfully for their classes. You can find some of those stories shared here, right on the podcast, for example, by Dr Helen Chen, Dr Kevin Kelly, and Dr Ricardo Elizalde. I'll make sure to link them in the episode notes of course. I also enjoyed meeting a few AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force members in person. So shout out to my fellow task force members, Christina Mayes, Dr Kevin Kelly, and Dr Ricardo Elizalde. But speaking of the podcast the day before the AAEEBL Retreat, Christina had organised for me to speak with three students and a staff member who turned out is also a student at Dominican, and record their portfolio stories. That makes five interviews from Dominican as I had already talked with a former student a little while ago. I will air these interviews in the new year as a mini series and look forward to sharing their stories. The students all started to create their portfolio at the beginning of their studies and then really kept up with it, received support from the portfolio lab's mentors, which were both students and staff, and are proud of what they can showcase about themselves. I'm very grateful to Christina for scheduling these interviews and to her students, of course, for being so open about their learning journeys, giving me the chance to share their stories with all of you. Now after a quick scenic drive in the Marin Headlands to the Battery for a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge that I enjoy every time I'm there, it was already time to say goodbye and head to my next stop, which was Mérida in México, where MoodleMoot Global was held. Together with a number of colleagues who had flown in from our various offices, we talked about Moodle and Mahara. The tight integration between both is important because many universities use portfolios for assessment purposes, and thus having an easy way to access the portfolio from within the LMS is crucial, I find. For Moodle, we have the Mahara Assignment Submission plugin, which makes it possible to submit portfolios via the assignment activity. That allows educators to use their regular grading tools and for all grades to be stored in the Moodle gradebook. For other LMSs, the integration is also possible, of course, via LTI, which stands for Learning Tools Interoperability. There, the grade is stored in Mahara and sent to the LMS gradebook. With a more native integration into Moodle, we can take advantage of more granular and more powerful grading tools, including a rubric and also the grading workflows that the Moodle community knows really well. The Moot was actually also a chance for me to speak with a few clients and community members whom I hadn't seen in several years, as well as talk with Mahara Business Partners. I'm also very thankful to three of my colleagues, two native speakers of Spanish and one who speaks it fluently, for their support as my Spanish is still very limited. When I did want to give it a good go in a restaurant, all my mobile app learning did not really help. I immediately started speaking in French, and no matter what Spanish just did not want to roll off my tongue at all. Thankfully, the waiter, who was proficient in several languages, switched instantly, and my drink and food order continued in French without a single word of Spanish heard. MoodleMoot Global was very well organised by the Moodle HQ team, and I had the chance to learn about other integrations, plugins and the AI subsystem, which allows administrators to plug in different artificial intelligence tools to have more control over which ones they want to make available. After four days of MoodleMoot Global, which also included the Partner Day for us Moodle Partners, I boarded an early flight to proceed on my trip and go to Europe for the following four weeks. That also meant, unfortunately, to leave the warm weather and daily sunshine behind and trade it in for grey November skies, high potentials of rain and even a few days of light snowfall. My schedule for the next four weeks was tightly packed and included a lot of train rides that were typically between two and seven hours, spending lots of time packing and unpacking and packing again of my suitcase and carrying it up and down stairs. I experienced the good, the bad, and also the ugly of physical accessibility of train stations, city sidewalks, cobblestone streets and accommodation providers' buildings first hand. That's another story though and not one for today. The purpose of my long stay in Europe was to meet with our clients in the Mahara community and talk with them about their use of Mahara. I'd like to thank everybody who's made time for me to visit and learn about their portfolio work and ideas. Pretty much all tertiary or higher education institutions have champions who do amazing work with portfolios. That did not come to them easily for the most part, but they spent many hours thinking about the design of the portfolio, how they wanted to introduce it, and also what the purpose was for their students. These champions are incredibly important to spark the interest of others in portfolios. However, the whole portfolio work should not and cannot rest on their shoulders alone. They need adequate, long-term support structures within their organisations and also the support from the institutional management. In Germany, for example, many portfolio implementations are the product of time bound project funding, of which much actually runs out next year in 2025. Then the future of the staff who support these projects is unclear, especially if there is no follow-on project, as the institutions often do not have the funds to establish permanent positions to continue with the good work that had begun as part of these projects. This is not the way to create sustainable practice and implement portfolios programmatically within study programmes and across an institution. At other institutions, learning and teaching support teams have portfolios in their remit, but are often not given sufficient time to support educators in implementing portfolios and work with them on portfolio strategy. Portfolio support does take time as it comes with transformational change of both teaching and learning, and thus should be well considered. This is not to say that it shouldn't be attempted because it's too difficult. All I'm really saying is that it should be well considered and well supported to benefit students and staff. In that regard, I loved learning about a few projects that did exactly that. At Université de Lorraine in the project Pléiades, and there specifically in the work package'Trajectoires' (trajectories), researchers and educators explored the use of portfolios for reflection and tracking of competencies at a large scale with lots of students. Amongst the outcomes of the programme are a series of templates to help educators scaffold the portfolio use of their students. You can find the templates linked in the episode notes. Université de Lorraine partners together with Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes on the ESUP Portail, an offering for French institutions of higher education to have IT services outsourced and managed more efficiently. Their starting offer is Mahara. Another example is project DiKuLe - Digitale Kulturen der Lehre entwickeln, which is roughly translated 'develop digital cultures in teaching' at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg in Bavaria. They created a planning and decision aid to help educators decide whether portfolios are a good fit for them and then to help with the implementation of portfolios. The aid is currently available in German, and the team hinted at also publishing an English version in 2025. The planning aid is a comprehensive tool to plan details of the implementation of portfolios in a course. It can be expanded by questions that also cover an entire study programme to get to a programmatic approach for using portfolios. Since the planning aid is published under the Creative Commons license ByAttribution and Share-Alike by the author team of Martina Osterrieder, Dr Martin Sticht, Cordula Schwiderski, and Hannah Brodel, anybody can extend the framework, customise it to their local requirements and share it again. The meetings and events I attended were also an opportunity for me to share what our team has been working on, in particular the results of our usability interviews with community members and their feedback. Our business analyst Rob Hill had compiled the feedback and dove into the inner workings of Mahara to critically examine its current information architecture to identify areas that should and frankly, also have to be improved for a better experience by portfolio authors and educators, as well as ease of use. The proposed new interface for Mahara takes current usage of the web into account, as well as other website products our community is likely to use and thus familiar with. The wireframes and the yet to be published, initial designs by our graphic designer Evonne Cheng, found great approval amongst those that have seen them and confirm that we are on the right track. I link to the wireframes in the episode notes, we'll publish the designs early next year, and we invite everyone to provide more feedback in our usability forum or via email if preferred. One item that had come up frequently in Europe is the need for a Mahara instance to which alumni could export their portfolios. Data privacy regulations and IT guidelines that the institutions of higher education need to adhere to don't really allow them to keep data from people that are not officially affiliated with their institution any more. This will be something to revisit next year and talk more about. There were feature ideas and also some issues that we discussed and a few live troubleshooting sessions, which are definitely easier to do in person when the site administrator and server administrator are available right away. It's also always satisfying to show someone a feature in Mahara that instantly improves what they've been looking for to do for a long time, but didn't necessarily have the words to search for. Now what am I taking away from this trip? Well, I was reaffirmed that seeing current clients, prospective clients, and members of the wider portfolio community in person is incredibly valuable because questions and ideas surface that may not otherwise be discussed during an online meeting. It's possible to have more incidental conversations and laugh together, as well as have a bit of fun rather than just purely stick to an agenda. I'm also taking away a number of ideas to share with my team and ponder on what we might want to discuss more deeply or where we need a bit more information. Our plans have been met with approval, which is reassuring to know that we are on the right track. Last but not least, it is wonderful to experience the enthusiasm for portfolios and to see the demand for them as an important tool, not just for students, but also beyond formal education. While often still a niche tool, the portfolio does have its place, and together with the community, we'll nudge it along to establish it more prominently within learning ecosystems. That requires all of us to put our heads together and share strategies that work, continue to collect examples of good use, either isolated use in one class as well as organisation wide, and to share these ideas widely, including in this podcast and in other places. I leave you with a few fun facts of my 51-day journey around the world. So if I missed any of your emails, that'll be due to moving from one place to another quite quickly. I participated in two community events, three conferences and two Mahara events. Altogether, I attended 15 meetings, of which the shortest was two hours and the longest about eight and a half. I am super stoked that I had the chance to meet 16 of my podcast guests in person, of which I had interviewed five directly on my trip. I also gave two interviews. All of that in between 10 flights, 16 train trips, two road trips, countless bus, tram, and underground rides, and one suitcase sacrifice to the cobblestones of Europe. Last but not least, I could visit the tallest indoor waterfall of the world at Changi Airport in Singapore before the last two flights back to Aotearoa, where I then weighted the haul of chocolate, gummy bears, other lollies, and stationary items for friends and colleagues, which amounted to seven kilograms. No wonder that my suitcase weight was maxed out. Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice or want to share with others? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' 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 on the 15th of January 2025. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, engage, and have a wonderful festive holiday season.