Kristina Hoeppner: 0:04

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 Professor Dr Margarete Imhof, Franziska Ohl, and Sebastian Laube from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany. They work in the Institute for Psychology, and there specifically in the Department of Psychology in Education. That is the interface between psychology and teacher education. I met them in November of last year, 2024, at a get together of universities in the state of Rheinland-Palantine that use Mahara and wanted to learn more about their portfolio project at their university. Thank you so much, Margarete, Franziska, and Sebastian for sharing your work with our community.

Franziska Ohl: 1:09

Thank you for having us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:10

Since there are three of you, we do need introductions. Margarete, let's start with you as the longest serving academic member of our interview panel today. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do?

Margarete Imhof: 1:25

By training, I am a teacher for secondary education. I'm also trained as a school psychologist, and I have been working in teacher education at several universities since 1990, I think, it's been a while[laughs]. I've gone through several stages in that, and major projects that I have pursued in different places were actually portfolio projects, just because I've found that there's so many loose ends in the teaching profession, so many impressions, so many bodies of knowledge, of literature that you have to integrate that it's hard to keep track of what you're actually doing. It's hard to understand where are the most important impacts on your work and on your personality. So this is what led me towards the search for portfolio work. I don't think I've always called it portfolio, but now I have a name for it, and I'm glad I found it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:23

Do you then remember when you were actually introduced to portfolios, Margarete?

Margarete Imhof: 2:29

Actually, that was early in my school psychology training when we were studying the cases that we had to treat or that we had to work with. When we went through all our notes, when we tried to select the tipping points of a case, this was a process in which we used all the documents, in which we tried to integrate all the different perspectives, in which we also shared our notes and perspectives in a team. I found this very helpful to have all the not only the notes, but the gadgets, the tests, sometimes even the audio recordings, in front of us to discuss productively what we were going to do in a specific case, how we are going to proceed in this counseling situation. I was quite impressed how helpful it was to have a full range of information at hand.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:23

That's fantastic that you pulled everything together and created a bit of a collaborative portfolio then by the sounds of it.

Margarete Imhof: 3:29

The team was three of us, three school psychologists. We had a great supervisor, and he had really a talent to monitor and to supervise the team effort. So that was really a very good beginning to understand why it's so valuable to not only collect information, contrast and compare information, but to share information.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:54

We'll come back to some of that because in your brief bio on the university website, I also read that your main research topics currently are listening and feedback in portfolios, so we'll touch base on that later on once we've also heard from Franziska and Sebastian of what they are doing at the university and how they were introduced to portfolios. Thank you, Margarete. Sebastian, let's continue with you. What is your role at the university, and how did you get introduced to portfolios, please?

Sebastian Laube: 4:28

I studied psychology at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz. Since I enjoyed university so much, I decided to stick around and now work here as a research assistant, particularly on the feedback portfolio project. Apart from the portfolio and everything related to it, I'm very interested in generative artificial intelligence, specifically AI literacy. In the project, I focus a lot on creating templates for student in Mahara and have also developed a video series introducing Mahara, covering the impact of feedback and its implementation. Each semester, I introduce students to the use of Mahara and provide a brief orientation, and of course, I also use Mahara in my own teaching to facilitate reflection processes and feedback. That's basically what I do, and I absolutely love it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:27

Do I have that correct that since you studied psychology at the University, that pretty much from the start of your university studies, or somewhere around about that time, you've been also using a portfolio yourself?

Sebastian Laube: 5:41

Actually, not. I first came across portfolio through the job posting of the job I'm doing right now, which prompted me to read up on it. I think that's a bit of a shame because my first thought when I roughly understood what portfolio is and what you can do with it, was, why didn't I have this opportunity as a student?

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:02

And so the three of you and some other colleagues of yours are going to change that for future generations of students.

Sebastian Laube: 6:10

That's the plan.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:11

Now, Franziska, what is your role at the university, and how were you introduce to portfolios?

Franziska Ohl: 6:19

I'm a research assistant in the Department of Psychology in Education for almost four years now, and as well as Sebastian, working in the feedback portfolio project, and besides teaching, I'm currently writing my doctoral thesis on teacher competencies and their development in student teacher competencies. I studied educational research and educational psychology, and I have always been interested in higher education. However, my academic research degree never focused on that, but mainly on school education. It was actually quite the same, like Sebastian said, I was introduced to portfolio through the job advertisement. I knew I had to apply. I'm very happy to be involved since.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:01

Let's look a bit deeper into that because you are all on the feedback portfolio project at Uni Mainz, what is that all about? Was that also the first time that you've explored portfolios with your students in your department? Franziska, why don't we start with you?

Franziska Ohl: 7:19

The special characteristics of our project lies in the feedback component. It is supposed to be included in the portfolio work. However, we see it as a great challenge to implement feedback cycles, sustainability, to collect and refer back to learning outcomes for student teachers and to use the feedback portfolio. So they never used that before. We see it now as a part of professional development. The reason why we saw Mahara as a good platform for it was as it prioritised data security and allows users to share their work, but in a very independent way. That's why we use Mahara for the project, and we are very happy to have that as portfolio, but the main component was feedback in first place.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:05

Margarete, does that go back to your research in that area, in the area of feedback portfolios and listening?

Margarete Imhof: 8:13

Yeah. I think one important aspect in that whole project is also to empower students to ask for feedback, to experience the autonomy to actually ask for feedback that seems to be or to become useful for them. Students or learners usually get tons of feedback if you count teacher comments, if you count grades, if you count whatever certificates you can take home. But the main difference that we are trying to make here is that to understand that feedback is nothing that comes from an authority telling you how well you have done, that feedback is something that is integral part of the learning process, that you ask for feedback, or that you might even ask for help how to digest and work with a feedback and also the challenge for the teacher to look more closely, not only at the product that a student or a learner puts on your table, but also to understand and comment on the process. This is why we really want to redefine feedback in education and make it a point that feedback is not only something that you give after the fact, but to emphasise and to explore how feedback can become a driver for learning during the process and give autonomy to the learner. This is why we feel that the portfolio is a very good instrument to capture all these elements that we need.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:46

How do you then support your students in asking for that feedback? Do you give them some guidelines on hand how to ask for feedback, and then also to other students how to respond to it or to educators how to respond to that feedback, or how does that work for you and your project?

Franziska Ohl: 10:05

In the first semester, they have a lecture about feedback and how to give and how to receive it, and that's where there's the starting point of becoming involved in feedback and what feedback means because it's not just giving grades, but getting involved with another and talk about your progress and what you're done right and where you need to get more information and stuff like that. We start with that at the very beginning of their studies, and then we try to implement it during different courses and get on hand with Mahala all the time again.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:40

So you are taking a programmatic or holistic approach of having the portfolio not just in one course, but embedded into multiple courses so that students get the exposure to it throughout their studies.

Margarete Imhof: 10:54

Yeah, totally. Ideally, we are even trying not only to implement portfolio across different semesters or across different seminars, we also encourage students - we haven't got there yet fully - but the idea is to encourage students also to use the portfolio documentation during their internships, so that when they come back to the university courses that they can draw on the resources that they have collected and reflected on during their four or six weeks of internship so that they have a better chance to connect their studies at the university and their observations, reflections, experience, lived experience during the internships and different types of schools. We find that even though we try to create an environment in which feedback is considered and modeled as a productive, constructive part of education or study, students still need to learn the confidence to trust the process. Some are faster and others are slower to learn this or to develop that trust, and some understand that how they can interact with each other and give each other feedback. And some still hold on to themselves or prefer to ask the teacher. Because it's a strong image, the teacher knows it, the teacher is the one who gives the final grades, and the teacher's feedback is considered relevant. This is part of the process that we are trying to implement, and this is no less than a change of culture.

Franziska Ohl: 12:33

And it's just not our department what is working on portfolio. We try to motivate different lecturers to also use portfolio in their courses. So we work in Educational Sciences in three sub areas in Germany, and we try to combine them through this project, which is not always that easy, but we try.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:54

Somebody does need to make the start to make that cultural change and to introduce change, to show that something can be done differently. So that sounds like your project is on a good trajectory there, introducing students to their portfolio work and feedback giving and also receiving right at the start of their studies and then carrying through that practice throughout. Do you can also incorporate those feedback strategies into your templates because Sebastian mentioned earlier that he is primarily responsible for creating templates and rolling them out to the students. So I'd like to learn more about how you use the templates and how they also support the students in their learning and in the feedback giving and receiving.

Sebastian Laube: 13:48

We basically use templates to give students a framework at first so they can orient themselves. I think it makes starting with portfolio much easier if they've at least seen what a portfolio can look like and how different blocks can be implemented. In my own seminar, I use a template that includes questions for self reflection, some exercises, of course, also exercises for peer feedback, and even some podcasts I've produced for each session so the students can prepare for the session. We work on these templates for at least 10 minutes each session. So we go deep into it. The Mahara portfolio provides a pretty good structure for my seminar, helping the students retain their key thoughts and reflections. However, template is not designed to work as a fixed framework, so students can, of course, add or remove elements as they see fit.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:52

I love that part because for many years I've been saying a template should be an invitation to start somewhere so more like the frame of a house where you do have the windows and you have the door and you have the main structure, but whatever goes on inside, whether you paint your walls white or whether you put a wall in or leave it open plan, or any of those things, should be up to the person actually moving into that building so that they can personalise it and really also make it their own.

Sebastian Laube: 15:23

Yeah, that's basically the idea. I give an idea where the door or the windows can be, but how the students use the portfolio is entirely up to them. The portfolio is also not graded at the end. They don't have to show it to me at all. It's their own house, it's their windows, it's their garden. It's purely for their professional development as teachers and serves also as a platform for peer feedback, where I don't have to be involved. I can be involved if I'm asked to, but I don't have to. My experience, especially for students who are new to Mahara, it's much easier to get started when they don't have to start with a blank page. In some sessions, we use it more than 10 minutes, but 10 minutes is my minimum for using Mahara in the session, and I think it's important to have the continuity to do it every session and work on the portfolio. So it's not a good idea to have it used sporadically.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:30

Franziska and Margarete, what is your experience? Do you also use the same templates or similar templates that Sebastian created? Or are you doing something slightly different with your students?

Margarete Imhof: 16:42

I'm definitely using templates. I can say that Sebastian's templates are definitely much more sophisticated. Mine are more rough [Margarete and Kristina laugh]. Mine are more rough. It's more like give them food for thought, give them an idea of what could be an interesting question. Just today, one of the questions I asked them, write a letter to one of your teachers and say thank you for your feedback way back when they were in secondary education. This is a very rough template. The template is basically write a letter, and this is what the student did and asked me to comment on his letter to his teacher in the past, and this opens with a very rough frame. This opens a conversation. This opens communication between myself and that student, that stimulates self reflection, and that helps him understand where he wants to go with his own teacher personality once he is basically a step further in his professional life. It's different types of templates, but I know that a blank page can scare people. So at least a minimum of what I would call a template has proved to be useful.

Franziska Ohl: 17:56

Franziska, do you also use templates? I actually don't work in the teacher training. So I don't work with student teachers, but I prepare templates for other lecturers who are interested but don't have time to familiarise themselves with the platform. However, I don't have deep insight into the feedback loops.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:15

The templates that you create for other lecturers, what are the requirements?

Franziska Ohl: 18:20

Normally, they just want to have a structure for the course. They give me some sort of input of information that has to go into the template, and then I am very free in the design. There's actually not really strong limitations I have in the templates. Then we talk about how they feel with it, if they are happy with the design, and everybody can change up their templates if they want to. So that's very nice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:50

And the templates can I then imagine that you do include the task description so that the task and everything that the students need to do is within the portfolio, rather than needing to go back and switch back to the LMS all the time, and then you put placeholders onto the pages so that students know here some sort of information is required, but it's entirely up to them, whether they write text, upload a file, or create an audio or video file. How does that work for you? Sebastian, since you are the...

Margarete Imhof: 19:26

... master of templates...

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:28

... what's your experience?

Sebastian Laube: 19:30

What you described is actually what my templates look like. I use placeholders, I use the task bar and a lot of other things. I partly put things, which are normally in learning management systems, like podcasts that I use, I also implement them in the portfolio, in the template, so the students have for each session a good framework so they don't have to go somewhere else and have many places to go. They can just go on Mahara, watch the podcast, write down their reflections, and go from there.

Franziska Ohl: 20:09

I feel like it depends on what course the portfolio is used for because if there is a submission at the end of the course, it slightly looks different.

Sebastian Laube: 20:19

What I think is the best thing why we use templates, is that to meet the specific requirements of course and to provide a fitting framework. Franziska's courses are different to mine, so you can change that in the template and make it fit.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:37

Yeah and that also shows how you are flexibly using the portfolio because you have what we often call a learning portfolio or developmental portfolio, which nobody besides the student really needs to see or should be seeing or only the students invite others in to receive that feedback. And then, when it comes to the assessment part of their learning, they transform that into something else. But it is not necessarily that initial portfolio that the students keep for themselves.

Margarete Imhof: 21:05

Yeah, totally, you were trying to pull apart the different goals that teachers might have with portfolio. And I think the key element, if you are using portfolio as a teacher, you have a clear idea of where you want to go, and you have to have full transparency for the students so that they understand what exactly this is supposed to be good for. Portfolio is so many different things to different people. You really have to make clear what's the function of the portfolio and the portfolio process in my course. Then you have a better chance that students will buy this and will get involved in the process.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:44

Which leads us nicely into the next question

that I wanted to ask you: 21:47

What do your students think about the portfolio?

Sebastian Laube: 21:52

As part of the project we've held several retreats with students to ask them about their acceptance and the added value of the use of Mahara. Overall, most students are interested and think it's a cool thing they haven't seen before and so on. However, they prefer to see Mahara used consistently across courses and not just sporadically. So it should not feel like additional work. This is actually a thing where we are still working on to convince instructors, train them in Mahara, secure a commitment from university leadership. What I found very interesting is that when you ask students from higher semesters or already graduated teachers about Mahara, they often say they wish they'd had the portfolio in hindsight. Fresh students are generally interested, but much more skeptical.

Franziska Ohl: 22:51

Our students are eager to use it during the courses, but often forget about it when they go home or if it's not implemented in the course. And I feel like that's because we do have parallel structures in learning systems and that confuses the students. So we know that portfolio work, how we do it, is not for everybody, but we see it as a help for structure and structure giving. The ones who are eager to get involved, get feedback, want to be in contact with each other, and we want to give these students the space to work with feedback and to work with the portfolio. Margarete, maybe you want to share some anecdote.

Margarete Imhof: 23:35

Thank you, Franziska, for reminding me that only yesterday I met a student who is now teaching at a local high school, and she was beaming all over the face, and she said she was so happy to meet me by chance because she wanted to share the story of her portfolio work in school, how grateful she was that she was introduced in my course to the portfolio because she's now teaching English and geography. She says it's so helpful to communicate with students. It's so helpful to communicate also with parents, to demonstrate what has been learned, how the students went about to do their assignments, where their strong points are and where there's room for improvement. She said it's so good. We don't need to argue, we don't need to go back and forth. We have everything here, and we are in this ongoing conversation about what are we learning, how are we learning, and how can we support each other to learn?

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:32

I think that also shows nicely that oftentimes the portfolio work, the things the students had gone through, they only realize it in hindsight that it has actually been helpful. In my opinion, it's really good what Sebastian said he did in his classes that it's kind of forming a bit of a habit for the students by working on the portfolio consistently every week, not necessarily for it to be handed in or for somebody else to see or for the lecturer to see, but really for the students to get into the habit of reflecting on a regular basis with the targeted questions that are in the template so that it's not just a recounting, a summarising of their experiences, but really digging deeper into what did I learn and what do I want to do next.

Margarete Imhof: 25:17

Yeah, the challenge for us teachers is to help students realise the benefits of that work. First of all, they probably don't even have the goal to dig deeper. Their goal may just be to pass that course. But the idea is, what can we do to show them the benefits of taking this extra step, of thinking a bit longer, a bit more deeply? It's also a learning journey for us teachers when we introduce portfolio in our courses.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:46

Have you tried a few strategies on making those benefits more transparent or more understood by the students? Do you have some things that have worked for you?

Margarete Imhof: 25:57

First of all, I think it's important to realise portfolio is not a panacea. It's not a one size fits all thing. I've had some instances when students ask me for feedback on their assignments. Then I gave them my feedback, I gave them some ideas of how to improve on what they have had turned in previously, and some understand the idea. Some continue to work and edit and revise their products. And these are rare cases, but these are the cases where I have a strong feeling that I've had an impact, that we had a real conversation and not just a teacher student conversation. So encouraging students to react to the feedback and showing the willingness that you're not done because you have shared your comments, but showing your willingness to look at the same thing once again. It's, of course, a matter of time, but since, out of a large lecture class of 300 maybe 10 catch on, it's doable. It would be very hard if all 300 in an introduction to psych(ology) class would engage in that cycle. That would be impossible. So you have to take one by one, step by step, day by day, student by student, and hope that the impact multiplies.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:13

Which is then, I guess, also the challenge for the universities with 300 students, you can't just do that with two teaching assistants or research assistants and supporting that, but there need to be different structures, like peer feedback. But then there also goes back to what you had said earlier, that students don't necessarily trust the peers. They do want that feedback from an authority person rather than from somebody else. So we are coming back to that culture change that needs to be implemented. And so what do you think, if you could write a wish list, would help to make portfolios used more widely at the university, also in other departments or for you to have the support to get all 300 students really using portfolios, and even if you're just looking at that intro to psychology course, and really support them in a way, especially if at least half of them get the benefits of portfolios?

Sebastian Laube: 28:12

I think we need more instructors to take the time to adopt and use Mahara more extensively. Additionally, we need stronger commitment from university leadership to make Mahara a central tool in studies, rather than an isolated initiative. Similar to learning management systems like Moodle, we need the commitment that we use Maha in our courses and that portfolio work is a good thing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:39

Yeah, that is the commitment from management, from administration. Anything else that you would like to maybe say to your university administration or encourage other community members to talk with their administration about?

Margarete Imhof: 28:54

I would put on the wish list that the administration should probably not so much focus on assignments, on tests, on grades, so that we have more space, more time to actually engage in conversation with the students. That we can really have these conversations, that we can say, 'Okay, all the content is available through recordings, through textbooks, through learning management systems. It's all out there.' But what really counts is the interaction, the communication about the content, the discussion about the content. A good university teacher is not a knowledgeable person who kind of talks as if he was reading a sophisticated, learned book. A good university teacher is someone who can take the time and have [laughs] have the patience to work out where the students - where they want to go, how they are working to pursue their goals, and support their learning. This is a different role model of a teacher. So I wish that the administration would be supportive of teachers who are trying to develop this new or slightly different habit of teaching and culture of teaching.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:08

Since we've been talking about the teacher not being the sage on the stage any more, but more the guide on the side or the gardener or any of the other metaphors for a while, I think we'll still be chipping away on that for a while, but every little bit, I think, counts, and have projects like yours that show a different way, that also show that it can work and how it benefits the students and also the lecturers, and making sure that they know that their students are learning and that they can transfer their skills into other areas then. Is there anything that you'd like to be able to do with portfolios, either practice wise or tool wise, that you currently can't? Franziska, does anything come to mind there?

Franziska Ohl: 30:55

We would like to see more targeted feedback with feedback loops that are, on the one hand, more accessible and on the other hand better accepted, both in teacher learning relationships and in peer feedback. And it's more about getting people actually talking with each other, not about the content, but about the different learning paths students are making.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:20

So it is conversation and not being afraid to ask for that feedback and having good strategies of giving good feedback.

Franziska Ohl: 31:29

And also talk about it. It's not about just receiving it, but to implement it, and what do I want to do with that? Is it something I want to keep or is it something that the other person's perspective is not interesting for me. I feel like it's the talking about the feedback. What is it actually about? We talk a lot about content, but not about how did you get there? How do you want to go further? And what are your plans anyway, in becoming a teacher? What is your personality? Who do you want to become? The possibility we have with feedback is to start a culture of failure, to talk about what was not working, to keep on working and learning, and start to talk about, or more about what is not working to become better in what we're doing. It's not just the work for students, but also for us as lecturers to think about what are we doing already very good, but where do we have to improve? We don't get that when we just sit there and look at our desks. We have to get into contact with students and talk about what we are doing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:37

That's very important that we also accepting that for ourselves. Sebastian, is there anything from your side that you would love to be able to do but can't just yet?

Sebastian Laube: 32:47

For giving targeted feedback and also for seeking feedback, it would be helpful if you could tag other users on Mahara. So in comments, like most social media platforms have so that students know they've been addressed and received notification. That would be a cool thing. Besides that, I really like the Mahara Mobile app. I sometimes use it for my own work. When I look at my students in the courses, fewer and fewer of them use laptops, and they often try to do everything on their phones. So perhaps there is room to explore future possibilities here so that you can edit your portfolio from a mobile phone. That would be cool. But overall, I'm very satisfied with Mahara. You can do a lot with it. It does require some effort to get started, but if you're done with the onboarding, it can be real fun.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:45

It's almost like we read your mind when we put our roadmap together because the tagging feature is on that one. That was also on the mind for some other organisations, so you're right on track there. In regards to the Mahara Mobile app, we are also thinking about what changes we can make to it. In general, portfolios can be edited on mobile devices, just not through the app. So the app is really more of an add-on so that you can more easily record video or audio offline when you might not have a good internet connection, but if you are online, portfolios can definitely be edited also on smaller mobile devices so that content can be created also on the fly. Margarete, is there anything on your mind for things in your portfolio practice that you've seen over the years where you think this would be wonderful to have and to be able to do?

Margarete Imhof: 34:40

Basically, the icing on the cake would be to be able to see what kind of presentation portfolios students would produce to present themselves as new teachers, for example, in a school, to parents, to students. I would

love to know a bit more: 34:55

What's the essence of their studies? What are they taking away from here? We are always in the dark. We get a few spotlights here and there, but we are always in the dark, basically. What do they remember? How do they integrate and combine the bodies of knowledge? Or do they leave university after graduation and say, 'Well, thank God, this is behind me, and now up to new horizons and my own thinking and own plans.' I'd love to see how they use what they got here, what they took out of the university course into their professional development. Sometimes I would wish I could open that door a bit and see what happens.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:35

I guess we need a new project for you at the university to look at that showcase portfolio in the last year of the studies of the students, in order to create that, provide them with support, and what that could look like, and then maybe even make it public, or at least semi public, so that you can get that insight.

Margarete Imhof: 35:55

That would be a great format that we could introduce. But this also definitely would need a change of culture without fear of being judged, show what you've done, what you've achieved, where you want to go, how you could condense things?

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:10

Yeah, and that could also be a really nice culmination of all the work that you're doing in the area of the developmental learning portfolio, the giving and receiving of feedback, the building of trust, that the students know they are not judged for what they are writing, but that they really have that community of fellow learners and educators who are supporting them in their studies and in their further professional development and also personal development. Before we get to our quick answer round, is there anything else that we haven't really talked about that you do want to let our listeners know?

Margarete Imhof: 36:47

The only issue, but this is not very specific to portfolio, but the one issue that I would like to raise here is that we need to be careful to not look at portfolio as an instrument or a technique or even of technology. It always has to do with people. It has to do with teacher competences. It has to do with teachers who are able to build this relationship, to create this space for trust, and not only to focus on the content, but also on the shared excitement, on the shared frustration, on the shared joy to make progress. Make sure that you don't forget the human factor.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:25

That's why I really like the term that is being used in the States quite frequently for portfolios, also being a High-Impact Practice, so that it doesn't just focus on the tool or on the pedagogy side of things, but really combines it. It's a practice we need to look at it more holistically because that definitely helps us get away from just looking at the technology side of things. Now for our quick answer round and here, I'd very much like for all three of you to answer these quick questions that we can widen our corpus of what people think about portfolios and also what tips we have because I think they are really, really important to share. First question, and we'll start with Margarete, is, which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Margarete Imhof: 38:17

I will come back to the three R's. Stimulate reflection, build relationships, and round up a team to support you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:25

Wonderful. Thank you. Franziska, what are your three words or short phrases?

Franziska Ohl: 38:30

For me, portfolio work is a collaborative and creative way to impact learning environments of students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:37

Awesome. Sebastian?

Sebastian Laube: 38:39

Portfolio work for me is a stony trail, but with sweet roots at the end.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:47

Oh my gosh. Love a good metaphor here and making that visible. Thank you. Franziska, what tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Franziska Ohl: 39:00

My tip is to break down the steps, to guide learners through the environment, and integrate feedback opportunities and peer feedback, please.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:12

That is very clear. Thank you. Sebastian, what's your tip?

Sebastian Laube: 39:15

Keep it simple.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:17

Margarete?

Margarete Imhof: 39:18

My tip would be, don't impose a portfolio on learners. Have this conversation with the learners. Listen to the learners to understand what exactly the design of the portfolio needs to be for this particular group. Don't try to know it all before you have talked to them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:35

Thank you. And that leads nicely into our last question for today, which is, what advice do you have for portfolio authors or students? Sebastian, why don't you start us off?

Sebastian Laube: 39:47

Keep it going. It's worth it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:50

Margarete?

Margarete Imhof: 39:51

Don't be afraid of errors. Don't be discouraged. Just take your time to find the best way to implement portfolio in to your practice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:01

Wonderful. Thank you, and Franziska for our third tip for our portfolio authors.

Franziska Ohl: 40:07

My advice is that the goal is not to present your skills, but to emphasise how you solve problems or how your progress is going on. Include your reflections and make it visually engaging to keep going.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:21

Thank you so much for that final tip and for all the insight the three of you have given today. I think your work in your project at the university in Mainz does show another side of the portfolio because oftentimes we do talk about a presentation portfolio and a showcase portfolio, using it for employability, but what you've demonstrated really nicely is that portfolio for learning that students don't necessarily have to share with somebody, and also for incorporating those feedback techniques to make them more confident learners to engage in conversations, so that it is not just the portfolio that was put together, almost like an activity where you get a grade or something like that, and then don't look at it any more, but really revisit what had been learned in the past, engage with others in order to have that social learning and work together. So thank you so much to the three of you, Margarete, Franziska, and Sebastian,

Margarete Imhof: 41:19

Thank you for having us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 41:22

Now over to our listeners, what do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Professor Dr Margarete Imhof, Franziska Ohl, and Sebastian Laube. 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 will listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then create, share, and engage.