Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today I'm speaking with Professor Dr Michael Sankey from Charles Darwin University in Australia. He's been a member of the ePortfolios Australia community and quite a few other communities for many years. So I wanted to talk with him to get his perspective on portfolios, in particular also look at the future of them. Welcome to the podcast, Michael, it's so good to have you here.

Michael Sankey: 0:53

Thank you so much, Kristina, for having me.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:55

Many of our community members will know you because you have been a stable figure, especially in the southern hemisphere. Still, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

Michael Sankey: 1:06

Sure. So I've been in higher education for 35 years. Prior to that, I was actually a photographer for 20 years, but over the time, I've emerged into more the multimedia side of things and that got me into instructional design, and then I ended up doing a whole lot of research about that, and I ended up with my doctorate, and all of a sudden I'm working as an academic and directors of units and things like that. That's been quite a fun time to see the whole evolution of my career, but also the evolution of the technologies that have gone along with it. Technically, really, I'm just a specialist now in technology enhanced learning and all the things that go with that. Have enjoyed it a lot. I recently retired and am working semi retired now, bit busier than I wanted to be anyway, that's all right[laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:50

That would be really sad if we lost you immediately to retirement because especially last year, you've given your goodbye keynote at ePortfolios Australia(Eportfolio Forum), where you have been looking back quite a bit at your life, especially in academia, and your portfolio thinking and making some predictions, especially also around AI and how that has been influencing the field lately. So it's good to still have you available and thinking about all of these aspects. Michael, when have you been introduced to portfolios?

Michael Sankey: 2:21

Along with the evolution of technologies, ePortfolios came into my experience just at the very end of when I was being a photographer. So about year 2000 I set up my first website before ePortfolio technologies came along as an online presence, as an online CV for myself. From there, it's evolved through developing HTML pages to then getting ePortfolio softwares and systems up and running. Because we saw the need for that at the time we were getting our students to do a collection of HTML pages and things like that to represent what they were doing. Then, of course, it was really nice that the ePortfolio technologies came along that linked it so nicely with learning management systems and things like that. I was at the very early stages of the ePortfolio movement, was involved with the research projects that were happening out of QUT at the time, and at very early times when Mahara was kicking off and PebblePad were nascent and just coming into being; been fascinating watching that and some of the newer tools and newer techniques that we've had emerging along the way to support that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:26

You mentioned that you've set up your portfolio for yourself, mainly to showcase what you have been working on as a photographer. Was that then also the reason why you started using portfolios with your students once you went into The academic space?

Michael Sankey: 3:40

Yeah, that was the evolution between me leaving photography. I'd done up to my master's study at that point and focusing on instructional design by that stage. So the thought of the internet and representing oneself, one's ideas, one's outputs, in a place that other people could get to without you having to post them a CV and things like that, was very appealing. At that time it was very early use of the internet in schools as well. So we wanted our students to start to experiment with that. When I say students, they were mostly post-graduate education students I was dealing with. How to represent and to create meaningful learning experiences in the online space, part of which, of course, is how you represent yourself and your ideas and reflections and things in that online space. I was getting my students to set up in the very early stages web pages. I was teaching web design and media in the Master's course, getting them to set that up so they could represent their professional self in the space, and then link that professional self to their lesson plans and things like that so they could share them in an open sense.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:46

I think we do need to acknowledge, when you talk about 2000 that at that time, the technology was not what it is these days.

Michael Sankey: 4:55

That's right.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:56

We have written HTML at that time and don everything by hand. So very different and very early on in the world of internet technology. So it's fantastic to see that you had started with your students at that time and made it possible for them to create portfolios online and enter that space.

Michael Sankey: 5:18

That's right. The university I was working at the time, was University of Southern Queensland, UniSQ, they call themselves now, and they were predominantly a distance education institution. In those days, of course, that distance education was packages of readings and books and things like that that were sent out to students. But they were very early on in the internet space. Would have been UniSQ and Charles Sturt (University) and people like that were really pushing quite hard to get into that online space for students as well. So it was a natural consequence that we also looked at ways in which students could use this electronic environment to represent themselves as well.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:53

Why have you stuck with the practice for all these years and continue to advocate for portfolios, Michael?

Michael Sankey: 6:01

I see portfolios as being a great tool to help our students come to a meta understanding of who they are within the space in which they work. As an education student, it's fine to be there in the classroom with your students and things like that, but also want them to reflect on their wins and their losses, and also to provide them an opportunity to build their professional profile. That profile may not be publicly viewable. It could be privately viewable. This is one of the beauties when new portfolios came along that you could have hidden spaces and spaces that people could find very easily through searches and things like that. The ability for ePortfolios to have multiple instances of what you want to represent was really a great innovation for this type of practice. So we wanted our students to link what they were doing to what they were studying, and then once in the workplace, that they could continue that to represent themselves. It's about motivation. It's about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Myself, I mean, as an academic, I want to keep a collection of those things I do, which I think are important to me as a professional, but I also want to keep a collection of things that I find interesting for my own aggrandisement, but also for the aggrandisement of others. Now my ePortfolio has emerged as being both one around my professional practice as an academic but also my emerging practices as I get back into my photographic art and things like that. It's still evolving. It started being a portfolio of my art and photography. It emerged to being more around my academic practice, and now it's kind of going down two different tracks, and it's allowing me to represent myself and to be seen as a holistic person, as a professional and as a practising artist at the same time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:53

That's wonderful to see that combination and also bring that creativity, and especially when you talk about photography, to have those photos and then reflect on them as well. How are you helping your students to get started with their portfolios? Do you then share exemplars with them or give them templates or give them questions on hand? What do you use?

Michael Sankey: 8:14

First of all, we get them to just play with the technology, so to play with linking pages so they can start to see the power of that as opposed to just having a single page CV or a couple of pages of CV, the ability to link to extended bits of information. If I'm a student and I might have a TikTok site or a YouTube site or something like that, how they can simply link on a page, talk about something, link to something else or bring it in, and then talk about it again. You start to see the lights turn on in their heads and think,'Oh, there's some possibilities here for me to represent my ideas differently.' Once we get those lights turned on and they think, 'Oh, yeah,' then we can start to expand in the ways in which we want to see them use it, and that is through representing their learning and to represent their practice. Particularly now in higher education, as we're dealing more with the notion of skills, you know, if you're a nursing student or an architecture student or a business student, we've had for a long time, graduate attributes, but you also now have graduate capabilities and skills that you want your future employer to know about. The more you can link what students are doing in their studies to what those future skills requirements are, and they can start to represent that, that's where they start to make that meta cognitive connection in the brain, 'Oh, okay, this is important. This is important to my career. It's obviously important to the course. Otherwise they wouldn't ask me to do it, but ah, yes, I see the linkages.' Particularly where we can start to get them to link those things to what's happening out there. So it's not just about what they do in their studies, but how they link to examples of what's happening in practice, out in industry, what might be happening in the nursing profession, what might be some of the leading thinking in that space and being able to link to that and bring that into your place of representation is actually very important for them to make those connections. EPortfolio, and of course, web pages do that too, but ePortfolio is doing that particular way because you can keep stuff to yourself if you want to, just my collection for me, but also here's my collection for my future employer to see if need be. And you can swap and match between them or link between them and things like that, which is something that you can't do a course in a standard paper based CV that you might send. We link them to examples of that. So good practice examples from wherever in the world we might find them to provide them, and importantly, in this particular case, it's also the use of multimodal environments. The HTML, the web pages we have in ePortfolios allows them to incorporate other elements into their representations, whether it be a podcast, a short audio, might be a video, might be an image of themselves doing something. If you go through my portfolio, you see quite a few images of me in different scenarios. It's important because the online space, particularly, if all you're presented with is text, can get very boring. You've got a screen in front of you, a white screen with black text on it, and you can just scroll and scroll and scroll. So it's really important to break up that visually to allow people who are viewing that to have a bit more of an experience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:20

Yeah, I find it interesting how you really front the work that the students do by giving them the tools on hand first and say, 'This is what you can do. Here are the technical possibilities. Keep them in mind,' and then you're going into the why you're working with portfolios so that they understand what it means when you talk about, this is a link, or this is how you can make the connection, so that they immediately know, 'Ah, this is how I can do it.' Yes. As we know, not everybody's an extrovert. I mean, I'm bit of an extrovert [both laugh]... Just a little bit.

Michael Sankey: 11:52

... but there are a lot of introverts around, and they don't necessarily like representing themselves out there. But we have found that those introverts that see the purpose in that - introverts will see extroverts as being just out there and fluffy and things like that, not necessarily dive underneath what's there to find that there is some basis to that. Once the introvert can see that there is a purpose to ePortfolio, we then start to see them dabbling a lot more, getting in them, saying to do it because they find a purpose. I've seen some magnificent portfolios by what would be classified as an introvert, but not necessarily out in the public domain, but certainly for them, that's the important thing. The ePortfolio is about me as a professional being able to provide myself with a sense of clarity around what I do and about what I can offer to other people. Particularly in academia, it's all about others. It's about the student, unless you're full time in research, but even then, it's about others and promoting research that will extend humanity. It's providing yourself with that, I suppose, solid foundation which to build. If you don't have that foundation, you start to waver. So it's really good to have that foundation for me. I mean, I've had a portfolio now for 25-30, years. So having that solid foundation gives me a platform to work from.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:15

And it also shows that you have a growth mindset because you see that evolution of how you have done things in the past, where you're at right now.

Michael Sankey: 13:24

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:25

And it makes that learning visible and how you have grown.

Michael Sankey: 13:29

Indeed, the more we can promote that thinking amongst our students, and the more we can provide examples to them of how others have done that to expand their minds in terms of what else they can do. So it's really important to provide a good suite of examples for these students in their particular disciplines. There is no point sending an art student off to a nursing portfolio. We've got to have enough arts portfolios or nursing portfolios to supply a good range of ideas for our students. And that won't all happen from the one institution.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:00

Yeah, and that's very good when you're a member of the community because then you know with whom to get in touch, whom to ask, maybe for a sample portfolio because you might be able to look at a student's private portfolio in a class session with that student or a lecturer going through it, but it would never, ever be publicly available.

Michael Sankey: 14:18

Indeed. When I left UniSQ, I'd had a portfolio for 10-12, years, maybe even longer than that, probably 20 years. And so many people had linked to that portfolio, I couldn't get rid of it [both laugh]. I had to maintain that portfolio in Mahara, which UniSQ was using. And then also I went to university using PebblePad. So then I had two portfolios all of a sudden.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:40

I think you've recreated one of your portfolios in different platforms also...

Michael Sankey: 14:44

Yeah, yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:44

... to explore the tools and then use the one that...

Michael Sankey: 14:47

Yeah, absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:47

... at your current university that was available.

Michael Sankey: 14:50

That's right. Now I have an ePortfolio in PebblePad, but also have my WordPress site, which has probably evolved. Many years ago when I was a Director at UniSQ, I had leadership coach, and they asked me to set up a blog site so I could blog about my leadership and things like that. I got so many blogs happening and so many people connecting that I thought, 'Oh, hang on, there are more people getting to that site than there are getting to my ePortfolio site.' So I then started to emerge my WordPress site as more of my ePortfolio. And once now I've retired, I'm now transitioning most of that practice over to my WordPress site. When I was at Griffith University, that's still an example of how to use ePortfolio at Griffith, so I can't lose that site either.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:30

Your digital footprint is quite large [both laugh]. Michael, do you have a memorable experience with portfolios that you'd be willing to share?

Michael Sankey: 15:41

My most memorable experience is with my students just seeing those lights turn on. At the time I was teaching them in our computer lab how to do it, and I could see that just the light bulbs go off in their heads. It was just amazing to see, 'Oh, wow. This is amazing.' And we're going back quite a few years here, but at that point, it was like a revelation to them this world existed, that they can do this. I mean, in the age of TikTok and things like that, it's not as big a deal, but it is because TikTok is only a very transitory thing. You've put up something that's gone within whatever it is, and it gets lost in that wealth of stuff that's on there. Whereas with an ePortfolio, you've always got something back to link to, and it's that foundation that sits underneath all that I do. I have my ePortfolio site, I have my LinkedIn side. I have what was Twitter, now I'm not on X, but I'm on Bluesky. So I can link to all those other things from my ePortfolio site, but also then the profiles of all those sites, it all points back to my ePortfolio. Once I'm working with my students, and they start to see, obviously, I've taken through some of the things I do and show them what I do. Once they start to see that light go off, it allows us to then get into some really good planning activities around that, even with bits of sticky papers. Where am I seen in this world, and I'm seen on Facebook, I've seen on that. Well, do you want people in the professional sense, to see a Facebook? Oh no, no, I don't want that. So you might not put that there. You might put that somewhere else or not put it in your ePortfolio site. So it's helping them to understand the intricacies of the internet and what some of the downfalls of that are. But once you turn them on to that, those lights just start flashing away like Christmas lights, and you can start to get really excited with them as you start to experiment.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:26

We still see the portfolio then as the aggregator...

Michael Sankey: 17:29

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:30

... where we are pulling all of these different bits and pieces from the sites because, of course, a lot of social media doesn't allow easy embedding, so you might put a link there, or you might want to include a video, but it's actually living on that original site, but you're bringing all of that together in the portfolio so that with whom you are sharing that has one space to go to.

Michael Sankey: 17:50

Yes, that's right. Not only is it allowing for them to have private pages and public pages, but it's also allowing them to have multiple representations of how they want to represent themselves for different audiences, which you can't do necessarily through a standard website without having multiple URLs to go to. So the portfolio allows that multiple representation of yourself to different audiences, which is really important, too.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:14

Yeah, that's very good point, besides the private and the public aspect there that you can tailor the portfolio to the context that you're operating in. Be that for that CV or be that also for an assessment activity. Now Michael, over the last three years and a bit, we've been all looking into working with and trying to figure out what artificial intelligence is, and in particular, of course, generative AI. And last year, as part of your ePortfolios Australia keynote, you made a number of observations of how artificial intelligence impacts portfolios or can impact portfolios. Have you changed your mind a bit on that aspect, or do you still think that there's these many different ways of how AI can be used with portfolios?

Michael Sankey: 19:05

Fundamentally, AI is becoming ubiquitous. So it's everywhere we go. It's everywhere we see things. I mean, on my Facebook side, on my Instagram site, I see AI images all the time. I see on LinkedIn people are using AI images all the time. They're generating text. Most tools have now incorporated some form of artificial intelligence in them. It's part of the role of academia to provide students with a solid understanding of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in terms of the use of AI because, as we know, AI can fantasise. It doesn't always give us the truth, not that necessarily all Academic articles give us the truth, either they give us perspectives. But I won't go there right now. AI in the short term, and if it's for an assignment or something like that, can be used and can be used quite happily. I tend to work towards the University of Sydney's two lane approach in terms of assessment. Because that's where rubber meets the road through assessment. Here's 'Go for it. Knock yourselves out and use AI as much as you want,' or 'Don't use it. We can't allow you to use it in this particular case because you've got to represent something from your head, not from ChatGPT's massive brain.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:15

That's a really nice concept that you're mentioning that Danny Liu and his team developed, and he's recently talked about that in a webinar with Stephen Marshall here from Victoria University. So we'll also have some resources around that then.

Michael Sankey: 20:30

Yeah, cool. Fundamentally though, if we're talking about assessment, we've talked for the last couple of years about ramping up programmatic assessment. That is assessment that goes across a programme or course of study so that you're making linkages between units of study or courses of study that you do along the way to build your degree, and of course, ePortfolio is the natural partner for that to represent those ideas and to see the progression of those ideas. As we link the skills associated with a course of study with the ideas that we're engaging with through that course of study, so the students make that connection. It's important to see that connection build to create a castle, rather than just sand on the ground. In representing that castle, you need to be able to make the linkages. You need to have the mortar that sits in between those bricks and stones, and the mortar is very much your ideas that hold those bigger ideas together. Because as a student, you're pulling ideas from other academics, other researchers, and you're putting your thoughts in between those stones. That's what's helping you build your house. So the ePortfolio is really important for that mortar that sits between them to provide those links. Now ChatGPT is not great at that. No gen AI tool is great at that. It'll pull in the research from other people, but it won't provide the connections that you need to make towards your profession. As we link those skills with the knowledge that's out there and the reflections of those knowledges into your way of constructing yourself as being an emerging psychologist or nurse or whatever it might be, that's when we can start to see the growth in the students, and that's the parts of the things that we want to see assessed. Having said that, programmatic assessment is not an easy thing to achieve because we've got 24 academics wanting to get their piece of the pie into their students. They don't necessarily want to accommodate other academics in that process. What they're selling that minute is the most important thing for that student, and to some degree, that's true, but there needs to be some rethinking of the way in which we do things in higher education. The analogy I have in that or the metaphor I have for that, is climate change. So climate change is with us. Recently, we had some big floods here in Queensland and a cyclone and things come in. Because the sea has risen so much, the houses that sit near the sea are starting to fall into the ocean. And you think, ah, what do I do about that? Well, I can build a wall. I can put a sea wall in, and that will stop the sea for a while. Or I can build my house on high ground. We saw that in Queensland here. There's a town down in the Lockyer Valley, and they had some big floods here back in Toowoomba, back in 2011, and the town was essentially wiped out because of the floods that came down the rivers and things that. I was down there last weekend. All the houses in that town are now up on the hill above the town. So the government bought the land back, and they made land available for the people to build their house on high ground, and they're happily now on high ground above the floods. Another flood happened only a couple of weeks ago. Much as we want to hold on to that stuff that we've held so dear for so many years, the fact is, the water has just risen, and we have to build our house on high ground. So my encouragement to those in higher education is to start to think about what it means to build your house on high ground, not necessary to hold on to that thing that you've held on to so dearly for 30-40 years, maybe. But it's now time to think about what's next. In terms of generative AI, it's everywhere.

Like the two lane model: 23:55

use it, don't use it. But even then, there's no guarantee they can't use it. If I put my piece of assessment through two or three different AI apps, no AI detection tool on this planet will pick it up. The more tools are out there that are emerging every week, the more we have to bite the bullet and build a house on the high ground.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:16

Still also be mindful about where you're building on that higher ground because that entire ground might come with a high wind speed, just thinking about living here in the Wellington region, and might have other problems come with it. Be mindful about where you're building and how you're using it. You had put up six scenarios, really, in which to use AI in portfolios. And so just very briefly because people can look at the details in your presentation. There are lots and lots of use cases there for creation, for the assessment of portfolios, for the validation of portfolios, for personalisation, for the integration, and then also for the innovation. Not everything would have been anything necessarily with a large language model, but could also be around accessibility, improving that, improving the visual aspect.

Michael Sankey: 25:06

Absolutely. With the advent of generative AI, I mean, we had COVID, everybody went online very quickly, and that was the solution for that. Then AI came along and everybody got back into the classroom because that's the solution for that. It's not the solution. I think ePortfolio has transitioned through both those very nicely, actually, and it can provide us a great grounding for the way we represent our knowledges, but also the way in which we pull together those experiences around that programmatic assessment. And I'll repeat, it's not an easy thing, but it's actually so essential in terms of the way forward that we can represent those ideas in such a way that it comes back to the individual. It's about building the individual and building an individual's house, and how we can facilitate the building of that house. It's about working with them and their motivations behind who they are and see themselves as emerging professionals. When I started university way back in the dark ages, I started university because that's what you did. You went to university. I hadn't necessarily made those connections to my profession that I was hoping to make. If we can start very early and particularly through programmatic assessment to help our students see themselves as emerging professionals that gives them a much stronger base to work from, instead of wasting a year or two in studies not fully understanding where they're going. If they can make some decisions early on in their studies, 'Okay, this is probably not where I want to go,' then that gives them the opportunity to look at other things before it's too late. I'm very strong in terms of getting people into ePortfolios from year one, from the very beginning of their studies, so they can start to get that sense of who they are, and if they don't like what they're becoming, they have a chance to do something else. Given that very, very, very solid foundation to start that work with. So they're not meandering around for a couple of years waiting till the third year lecturer decides that an ePortfolio is a good idea in their final year course.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:00

Also because if they are studying early, they get into the practice of reflecting, of getting feedback from fellow students, from lecturers, and therefore develop all of those skills that we do want them to have once they are leaving university.

Michael Sankey: 27:13

Absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:14

... able to practice them for four years or longer, depending on what degree they are going with. It goes hand in hand with the graduate attributes that you had mentioned earlier that we are not having those silos, but also show them how they can transfer their skills and their knowledge and all the insights that they've had.

Michael Sankey: 27:32

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:33

Where do you then think will the portfolio be in the future or what might it look like for you in the future?

Michael Sankey: 27:42

One of the things that AI has brought about, and even before that, so many deep fakes, ePortfolio provides us an opportunity to build one's profile in a safe space, one that's associated with the institution. There needs to be a safe place so that those employers can know that what they're looking at is real and safe.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:04

So that it's also verified in a way?

Michael Sankey: 28:06

Absolutely. It's a verified environment. Exactly right. As an individual, I can set up a WordPress site or any other site and represent myself as anything. If it is an institutional space, and the institution is taking some responsibility for that space, employers can actually feel more satisfied that how the student is representing themselves is actually what they are. I think there is a future for ePortfolios that is around the validated individual, which isn't necessarily what you see on websites. I could make up anything about myself on my WordPress site, no one would know any different. ChatGPT would grab it, and there would be false information out there. But it's not that easy on an ePortfolio site. I don't think they've harvested ePortfolio sites yet.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:48

They would be, the public one.

Michael Sankey: 28:50

The public pages. That's right.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:52

You're raising a really interesting point with the verification of the student so that there's also put - in the past, we've talked about microcredentials, so verifying the skills and making sure that employers also know what it means when they see a badge or a microcredential, and now applying that to the portfolio gives the university also the possibility, but also the opportunity to continue having access to the alumni and giving the alumni that space to continue having their verification available...

Michael Sankey: 29:27

Yeah, yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:27

... in future, and then come back to the university, but also ensure that employers know, yes, this is a real student that you're talking to.

Michael Sankey: 29:35

Indeed. We saw for a number of years recently that universities are moving away from the more traditional ePortfolio sites to things like WordPress, Wix, and things like that. I think that's been a retrograde step. That was happening before generative AI came along and the deep fakes. I think there's now a place for ePortfolio to re emerge as that safe space, the place that can be linked to, which is a verified space. That requires institutions, though, to maintain those spaces and to be very proactive in terms of their alumni. One of the universities I was at used a tool and decided not to use that tool any more, but part of their policy was that once you were a student, you would keep your ePortfolio for life. They then changed the tool. We would have to then change all our stuff over onto another tool or just forget about the fact that you had any portfolio, which is not very fair. So institutions, in the short term can't forget the long term. They need to be true to what they said they were going to do, which some institutions have not been. That's sad, and I think it's symptomatic of the fact that there is so much change in higher education at the moment, particularly amongst management and senior management. The truths that were part of the foundation of that university are lost. But I think we can move forward still, though, if we are asking our students to build in these other sites, I don't know how we could validate that. So I think there is still a place for the tool that is validated by the institution. This is the thought you had in terms of linking that with microcredentials. I mean, you could have a credential from your ePortfolio. Here's my validated page in my ePortfolio, and here's the badge associated with my validated skills in my ePortfolio. Doesn't necessarily have to be a short course. It could be a 'here's my badge, linkable back to my ePortfolio site.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:25

Yeah. I think those linkages would be good to explore more in the future so that we can verify that information more easily and assure the institution, but also the employers, yep, this was actually one of our students.

Michael Sankey: 31:39

That's it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:40

Maybe through that we will be able to resurrect the alumni portfolio because lately, we've seen a decline in organisations even thinking about that because IT says, well, we need to remove them from our single sign on and legal says, well, we can't have them creating content in a space, but the students not really being associated with the institution any more. So there's lots of overlapping conversations to be had.

Michael Sankey: 32:06

Absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:07

Michael, is there anything that you'd like to be able to do with portfolios, but currently can't?

Michael Sankey: 32:13

There's an ePortfolio tool that I've used that doesn't allow for more customisable URLs. I think that's really important for students to be able to customise the URLs to be more personal to them. If ePortfolio vendors would provide some more thoughts around programmatic assessment or tools to help the institution develop programmatic assessment. I don't think there's anybody really other than the institutions themselves, and we see institutions running with that in their own sense. So we see Deakin running with portfolio thinking recently and very well and very good programmatic thinking. CRADLE just brought out a recent article about that, which was excellent. That's the research side of assessment at Deakin. The vendors play an important part here, and I don't think they've been given enough credence in terms of the opportunities. The programmers have the understanding of how the tools work. If they can link that with some work from universities in terms of how programmatic assessment works, I think the two of them could work together to create some really good tools to help with that, the way in which you plan out the curriculum. There's curriculum management tools and things like that, but essentially they just store the data. You need to be able to help create that data. Years ago, we had the LAMS system, the learning activity management system, which came out of Macquarie University. That's old technology now. That was around the planning of a course and things like that. But if there can be some tool to help plan the programme through and the assessments that are going with the programmes, and what things would be appropriate for ePortfolio, what things are appropriate for essays or exams and things like that. There needs to be an expansion of the thinking of the ePortfolios providers to think in terms of, 'okay, here are the other forms of assessment, but here's where we fit ourselves into this and we see ourselves in this programmatic space. We see ourselves as helping our students become emerging professionals. Here are the tools to help you institution to help create that environment for your students.' It's a big ask, and not that easy without some linkages across technology providers and pedagogy providers.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:20

Yeah, it's those linkages and making those connections visible so that you know where to go and how they all fit together. We are coming to the end of our chat today, Michael, and so the last three questions for you are in our quick answer round. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Michael Sankey: 34:43

From an institution's perspective, it's facilitating programmatic assessment. For an individual, it's facilitating the emerging professional, and it's the tool that facilitates it. It's the combination of the academic and the tool that facilitates. It's not just a tool. It's not just the academic. It's having the tool that the academic can use to do that with.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:03

What tip do you then have for learning designers or educators who create portfolio activities?

Michael Sankey: 35:09

Be fully aware of the portfolio practice themselves. I've advocated for a long time that an instructional designer should have their own ePortfolio. There's no point trying to sell it to somebody if they haven't done it themselves. You've got to walk the talk. There's the three words. You've got to walk the talk.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:24

We'll add that as another short phrase. What advice do you then have for portfolio authors, for your students, but also for your staff? You've just mentioned the learning designers.

Michael Sankey: 35:35

Keep it succinct and meaningful. When dealing with a website, having too much text becomes a scroll of death. Particularly on mobile devices, you don't want to be scrolling through screens and screens and screens of information. There was a thought five, six years ago that, yeah, the scroll of death is back because of mobile devices. I think we've moved away from that thought again back to the thought that you can't have everything on one page unless it's linked some way within the page, so advanced navigation within the page. Be mindful of the people you are writing this for. I've reviewed dozens and dozens of CVs of instructional designers, directors, people like that, who are going for other jobs, and the amount of time they just have too much text and try and get everything out in that short space, you'll be succinct in what you say and link to other things. Link to that other evidence. So that's where your ePortfolio becomes really important that you can link to that other evidence. Keep it simple and keep it concise and linkable.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:33

Yeah, and then also curated, so that you're not presenting everybody with all the things that you have done over your 27 years of being a portfolio advocate...

Michael Sankey: 36:42

Absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:43

...but the most salient points there.

Michael Sankey: 36:46

Yeah, that's it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:47

Thank you so much for the chat today, Michael, it's always good hearing from you, learning from you, and seeing what you're currently thinking about in this space, and I look forward to future conversations.

Michael Sankey: 37:01

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Kristina.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:04

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