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 have the pleasure of speaking with four staff of the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, that is the University of Bamberg in Bavaria in Germany. Cordula Schwiderski, Hannah Brodel, Martina Osterrieder, and Dr Martin Sticht came together as part of the project DiKuLe, which is'Digitale Kulturen der Lehre entwicklen' that means they are developing digital cultures in academic teaching. That project focuses on the digital innovation in learning and teaching. That project is funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, the Foundation Innovation in Higher Education until the end of 2025. In today's interview, we are going to focus primarily on how an institution can support lecturers in their portfolio practice. Before we go into the details of that, I would like to know more about you yourselves, what you do at the university. Martina, do you want to get started?

Martina Osterrieder: 1:35

Thank you for the invitation, Kristina. We're glad to be here. I'm a research assistant at the Institute of Educational Sciences at the University of Bamberg. I'm working on the DiKuLe project. My focus in the project is on the didactical support for ePortfolio work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:57

Thank you. Let's continue with Hannah please.

Hannah Brodel: 2:00

Hi. I'm a part of the Centre for University Teaching at the University of Bamberg. We support the faculty in developing and enhancing their teaching skills through professional development, consultation, and innovation in higher education. And I'm also part of the DiKuLe project, and I offer all those services to the DiKuLe participants.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:20

Thank you. Cordola, can you please tell us about yourself and what do you do in the project team?

Cordula Schwiderski: 2:27

I'm a part of the eFolio team, so it's like being a part of the DiKuLe project. I've been working in the field of eLearning since 2005. Since September last year, I've built up a department called Service Point for Media Didactics. We support lecturers to implement and improve digitally supported teaching, for example, with the use of Moodle and Mahara.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:53

Wonderful. Thank you and congratulations on having set up that new service at your university. Martin, the last one in our round today. What do you do?

Martin Sticht: 3:03

I'm research assistant at the Chair for Computer Science for Media Informatics, and I also work on the DiKuLe project. In the project, I'm in charge of technical e portfolio related issues.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:15

Thank you so much. So we have the pedagogy in here, the academics. We also have support staff on the organisational side, on the implementation side, and then, not to forget the technician, so really well rounded portfolio implementation crew. How were you introduced to portfolios, especially looking at the varied backgrounds that you have? Hannah?

Hannah Brodel: 3:39

I learned about portfolios in the context of the project DiKuLe, and I designed and conducted a workshop together with Cordula on topics such as reflection in the writing process. And alongside forms of learning diaries and learning journals, we think that portfolios are a big part of this, and therefore we're talking a lot about ePortfolios to just bring the digital side into it as well.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:00

You've been using portfolios then since 2021, the start of your project, right?

Hannah Brodel: 4:06

Yes, exactly. And I love them ever since. I think they're quite complex, but very many different things you can do with them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:13

Since you've mentioned Cordula just now, let's continue with you.

Cordula Schwiderski: 4:17

My partner studied writing counselling and had to make a portfolio. She told me and showed me what she had to do. That was 2006 and after that, we read a lot about working with portfolios and exchanged our ideas at conferences on academic and creative writing and at the Moodle and Mahara Moots in Germany.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:38

Awesome. So you have a 19-year history to look back at portfolios, on and off, right?

Cordula Schwiderski: 4:44

Yeah, on and off.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:46

Martin, what about you?

Martin Sticht: 4:48

Actually, I got to know portfolios when starting in the DiKuLe project. I didn't know them before.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:56

Thank you. And Martina, last but not least.

Martina Osterrieder: 4:59

I came across portfolio work from the student's viewpoint during project-based lessons at school when I was a pupil. Then I began to explore it from a different angle in my educational science studies at university, there I have a teacher training background. And then I was very happy to meet portfolios again in the DiKuLe project.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:21

Martina, you mentioned that you've gone through teacher training. Was it then a required part to keep a portfolio as part of your studies and practical work?

Martina Osterrieder: 5:32

No, at that point of time, it was not required to work with portfolios. But that has changed now.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:39

Let's take a closer look at the project that you've already mentioned quite a bit, DiKuLe.

Hannah Brodel: 5:44

The focus is to bring the digitalisation into the university in every matter of teaching. So the focus is on teaching, and that is what we started to do within the project. It aims to promote innovation in university teaching in connection with digitalisation in a bundled and centralised and very interdisciplinary manner, on several levels simultaneously, in a transfer oriented and sustainable manner at the University of Bamberg. We're in the last stages, you could say, so we're in the transfer-oriented phase right now. EPortfolios are a big part of this project as well. So we have different parts of the project, and one of them is working with ePortfolios. We developed the eFolio team. So that's the name we gave the ePortfolio system here at the University of Bamberg. We think that they're to be used sensibly as an alternative examination format and teaching tool in various scenarios. Their use is to be trialed and evaluated by way of example. Especially due to recent challenges in the university landscape, we require new and flexible concepts of teaching and also assessment. That is also very important. Therefore, ePortfolios do have a big role. We're seeing e portfolios as a form of reaction to those challenges, namely the expansion of AI at the moment in different fields of science and also teaching. We think especially also interdisciplinary work plays a big role in there, and we think that we can build bridges between science and the professional world by using ePortfolios. We have different ways of testing and assessment that we're trying to work with. We have different digital rooms that different faculties are using, and the fun and also interesting and also maybe challenging, part about DiKuLe is many different disciplines means different ways of working with each other, and we really did a good job at bringing everyone together. And there are many different ways we're now working together. The eFolio team is one of the best examples of that because we're from very different fields, and we just all started to work on this topic, and then it became more and more, and we're now even working with other universities and focusing on the exchange and the transfer of our knowledge and their knowledge, and bringing all of that together.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:56

Congratulations are also in order because your project is going to run out at the end of 2025, but you've been able to secure more project funding for a new project that is going to start a short time before that already.

Hannah Brodel: 8:10

That is true. Yes, we're definitely embarking on a new journey at the University of Bamberg, also including everything that we've learned in the last four years. And we're starting with a project called BaKuLe.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:21

Which everyone can guess, stands for Bamberg Kulturen der Lehre[entwickeln].

Hannah Brodel: 8:26

Yes, exactly. We're definitely focusing on the cultural part and the interdisciplinary work, which is going to be even more important in the future.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:36

Martina, as part of your project, your team has created a planning and decision making guide for use of ePortfolios in academic teaching. Can you give us a little bit of background on that please because that looks to be a very big component where a lot of research and also questioning of your academic teaching staff went into in order to come up with it.

Martina Osterrieder: 9:03

We designed the planning and decision making guide for lecturers, whether they have a background in didactics or not. It aims to support the entire planning process of courses involving ePortfolios. A key goal for us was to encourage educators to align their objectives, methods, and assessment forms, and we wanted to make it easy for lecturers to find a concept that works for them, step by step.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:36

With how many lecturers have you already trialled your guide?

Martina Osterrieder: 9:40

Martin and me, and sometimes also with the support of Hannah and Cordula, we have introductory courses, and we hand them out. Everyone that is interested gets this planning and decision making guide and can work with it. There is a great number of people who already have this planning and decision making guide. It is a bit difficult to say how many people have actually used it because it can be used on its own. So that's how it has been designed, that people can use it on their own.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:13

Which is really nice because then you don't just make it as part of a workshop, but people can also spend more time exploring certain areas that they might not have looked into just yet.

Martina Osterrieder: 10:26

Exactly. So it's possible to make it part of a workshop, but it does not have to be. We all know that lecturers usually don't have a lot of time so they can decide on their own what they need, and we hope that it is structured well. The guide has three main sections. Lecturers start planning their course using guiding questions framed in the first person to simplify things for less experienced teachers. The questions are organised according to learning objectives, assessment forms, and methods for constructive alignment. Throughout this process as the concept is developed, lecturers get practical recommendations. One important point was to allow them to also skip ePortfolio systems if they don't fit their course. If they choose to use ePortfolio systems, the guide provides support to navigate further through planning by addressing questions about assessment and methods that help determine how to structure the portfolio. That way, lecturers can systematically plan their course with ePortfolios by answering questions step by step, like, what kind of portfolio are we using? What content do we expect from participants? Is there any interim feedback, and if so, who gives it? How often? What types of multimedia content work for what purposes? In short, this diagram ties together the technical and the didactic aspects necessary for successfully planning, preparing, and implementing portfolio work in academic courses. It didn't came up on its own. We were building on what was

Martin Sticht: 12:04

We also wanted to establish a link to the already there. The strength that we see in this diagram is that it ties things together. There were a lot of very good checklists that other people designed, and we were reading it, and they were good, but we were seeing some blanks, and we were trying to fill the blank in linking things. We hope that others are also building on that and also work with that to make it better in the end. technical issue which hasn't been there in the other material we have seen. The lecturers should also get an idea of what the portfolio software can be used for, and then they should check for themselves whether it is suitable for the course or if maybe a PDF suffices in which we would not recommend to use the software.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:54

Do you then also provide additional information for some of those questions? So for example, you mentioned, what type of portfolios do you want to use. Do you then also have kind of like an asterisk at the end of it where you can then say,'Okay, now jump here and you can read up on a few of those.' Or are you going to link to some other projects, like Projekt Dreiklang from OTH Amberg-Weiden, who are also creating a lot of resources around portfolio use?

Martin Sticht: 13:23

We collect different resources and instruction material on our so called Virtual Campus. It's a Moodle platform at our university. There we gather this kind of information and also put links to other projects like Dreiklang. We are connected with other experts from different universities in Germany where we are in contact and discuss regularly these issues.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:49

For anybody who does want to adopt the planning guide and decision making guide to their own institution, it has been published under a Creative Commons By Attribution - Share Alike license. Hannah, what sort of feedback have you received from your colleagues?

Hannah Brodel: 14:06

We've received quite a lot of positive feedback so far. Okay, we said overall, it can also be said that it is a very detailed and very comprehensive guide. The reasons why we created this guide was that we wanted to bring two sides together, and therefore it is the technical and the instructional components, and therefore it is very complex, and that is also something we did receive as a feedback. However, Martin also mentioned that we wanted to show the technical opportunities you get, and that is something we've heard a lot from lecturers that they weren't aware of all the different little things you can do, the creative parts that can actually be implemented into a digital portfolio. I think that is what we wanted to combine, and that is also what we received. The first look at the little map, so to speak, is always,'Whoa. This is a lot,' but then the next thing they say is, 'Oh, okay. So if I ask myself this question, I get this idea, and then I can also take a look at what is actually possible.' That is the feedback that we've received. We've already presented the diagram several times during conferences in front of colleagues Germany or Bavarian wide, and the most common feedback is that people would like to use it. I think that is a good starting point. We've also learned that there are many spaces in between that we need to focus on a little more. So there are in between ways etc., and with Margarete Imhoff, we also decided to go one step further and do a workshop at the DiKuLe Symposium at the beginning of April. There, we talked about safe spaces, about bridges that you can use the portfolio for and also maybe door opener. So we were very metaphorically trying to discover what we can actually do with ePortfolios when we think of bringing students a device or tool that can actually help them combine the practical experiences they have while also thinking about their academic work and also combining it with whatever thoughts might also occur in that field they're actually discovering.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:07

Have you also received some new insight that might influence your continuing with portfolios?

Hannah Brodel: 16:13

We had lively discussions. We had three groups, 30 participants, so we did have a lot to talk about, and we focused on problems that everyone came across while working with ePortfolios, but also looked at solutions.

Martina Osterrieder: 16:26

The workshop was with ePortfolio experts and with university teachers, so people who have either a lot of experience in university teaching or in ePortfolio work. We were using design thinking as a method, and the idea was to find innovative strategies to the problems everyone knows. Those innovative ideas might also have systemic consequences if they were implemented. So we were also glad to see those innovative ideas popping up. There are a lot of ideas, if you put such a lot of experts in one room, and I would say it was a very fruitful discussion. It was a very fruitful brainstorming session, and we were also very happy to share, in the end, all those ideas with the community. The ideas can shine back to university teaching. This would be something really great to bring university teaching further, in a sense that reflection can get deeper because that's what we tackled with our workshop.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:28

I could imagine that with Margarete in the workshop, that also the question about feedback came up and was highly discussed and how feedback culture can be developed more, which then would also support the reflection that students can do on their portfolios. Martina, coming back to the guide, once you've introduced it to your teaching staff, and they have been working with it, have you seen a change in them creating portfolio activities or also in improving their portfolio practice?

Martina Osterrieder: 18:02

We haven't studied this scientifically[laughs], but at least we got feedback. That said, we can hypothesise that teachers might feel more confident working with ePortfolios having this guide at hand, If they have clear instructions for getting started, the barrier of getting started might be lowered. Our goal was to lower the barriers to begin ePortfolio work and helping instructors understand what a portfolio really is, also helping them not just focusing on the technical parts or on the didactical parts, but having it all in one right from the start. The barriers are lower. That's what our feeling is, but as I said, we haven't studied it scientifically.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:50

We need to make a start somewhere, and so even just having that anecdotal feedback is very helpful and also shows that that support that you're providing is incredibly important and useful for teaching staff to become more comfortable with the idea of creating portfolios, using portfolios in their lessons. Hannah, you're not promoting one particular type of portfolio in your guide, but you leave the options open for your instructors to decide. What type of portfolios are then typically created at your university?

Hannah Brodel: 19:25

I would say both process and product portfolios are produced at the University of Bamberg. The concepts vary depending on the subject area and the learning objectives. The students use Mahara in teacher education, in computer science, in communication science, psychology, and language acquisition. So quite many different fields. Therefore, what we're doing right now, especially Martina and Martin, is we're trying to focus on the differences as well. We're trying to help those specific needs of the different lecturers to really be able to help all those different objectives and wants in the process.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:02

What are some of those other resources or service offerings that you offer to your campus community, Martin?

Martin Sticht: 20:09

First of all, we offer introductory workshops for students and lecturers, as Martina already mentioned. We do this separately to target their specific needs. We also created an exemplary ePortfolio on cooking. Cooking is a general topic everyone can relate to. We also maintain a course in our Moodle system where we provide material on technical and didactic application fields. Our university also has a Centre for Higher Education where lecturers learn about different reflective forms for learning, which also include portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:41

Martina, is there anything that you personally or you as a team, feel like portfolios are not yet giving you and what you'd like to be able to do with them in the future?

Martina Osterrieder: 20:53

We'd love to give students a chance to support their individual lifelong learning journey by continuously using ePortfolios even after they finish their studies. In some federal states, it's already possible in Germany, in Bavaria, it's not. Supporting students' individual lifelong learning journey would also mean collaborating across different departments and with non academic organisations or companies. Ideally, we would want all lecturers to implement constructive alignment principles as a norm, fostering a university-wide understanding of the benefits of process-oriented learning and assessment. Empirical research shows that active and interactive learning methods significantly influence learning outcomes, and process-oriented feedback is very beneficial, too. EPortfolio work can really enhance these learning concepts. We would also want to highlight the link between didactical and technical aspects to improve academic learning overall. So having an holistic eye on those things. Our goal is to translate these insights into practice and concrete concepts to some extent, but it is also a task that we need to continually advance. There's a lot to do, I'd say [laughs].

Martin Sticht: 22:10

Currently, it is also hard for lecturers who use Mahara for the first time to get familiar with the usage. Then it's sometimes also hard to convince their students to concerning the benefits of electronic portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:22

Yeah, on that hard to use of Mahara that's where our team is working on with the usability changes that we are going to implement in Mahara 2604 so next year.

Martin Sticht: 22:34

We are looking forward to this.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:35

I hope also during the development phase that we might be able to get some feedback from you at some point, once we have made some of the changes and make them available so that you can take a look at them. Martin, you yourself, on behalf of your entire team have already contributed some ideas of how to make certain workflows easier. That feedback is incredibly important to us so that we know better of where people might be struggling a bit more than in other places, so that we can look into them and improve them then as well. I find it really wonderful to have learned more about your planning guide, and of course, it is, as Martina and Hannah already said, very comprehensive, very detailed. I could imagine that it does take quite a bit of time for somebody who wants to walk through every single path and wants to follow every single step, but I can also imagine that one can take it and focus on a particular area, so focus at the start, especially if they haven't worked with portfolios yet, work through that, maybe talk with a colleague about it, get clarity on those items, and then they can speed through some other areas quite quickly, and then get more deeply into one other question again.

Hannah Brodel: 23:44

Yes, we would definitely agree with what you just said. That's what our aim was, to just have something at home or when you have some time to look at it, and to just like, go from one step to the other. And then obviously, if there are questions, reach out to professionals in that field. We're also happy to get in contact with some people who are, like, interested in that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:04

That's then where your eFolio team comes in, that you do provide that support for your lecturers at the university, right?

Hannah Brodel: 24:10

Yes, exactly.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:12

Martina?

Martina Osterrieder: 24:13

We are also very open to feedback concerning the guide. We are looking forward to iterate and to improve it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:20

Now to our last three questions to the four of you. I'd like to start the first one with Martin. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Martin Sticht: 24:32

Creative working.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:33

Wonderful. Thank you. Cordula.

Cordula Schwiderski: 24:36

Collecting, connecting by reflecting.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:39

Oh, nice. Connecting by reflecting. I love that one. Hannah?

Hannah Brodel: 24:44

Variety of learning experiences and technical application possibilities.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:49

Thank you so much. And Martina.

Martina Osterrieder: 24:52

Iteration, reflection, and growth mindsets.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:56

Fantastic. That's a really nice holistic view of all the things you've been doing on your project. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities? Hannah, do you want to start?

Hannah Brodel: 25:11

It's all about keeping the outcome in mind from the start, using constructive alignment to make sure everything fits together. So what students do really leads to something impactful in the end.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:21

Cordula?

Cordula Schwiderski: 25:23

Portfolio work does not usually happen on its own. It needs impulses that make you think and also impulses that appeal to your emotions.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:31

Thank you so much for bringing that motivation into the conversation and also the personal part. Martina?

Martina Osterrieder: 25:40

My tip would be portfolio work is a fantastic way to promote self-directed learning, but especially for less experienced learners, support is crucial, and this means that differentiation and support measures should be part of the plan right from the start, whether they are prompts at key times or learning plans or other supports, there should be something.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:05

That's where your planning guide fits in really well because you give those prompts to your lecturers to think about all of those aspects. And Martin.

Martin Sticht: 26:14

You need time to prepare the usage, and you should never leave the students alone without an instruction to the portfolio system.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:22

What is your advice for portfolio authors, for your students, but maybe also for some of your lecturers who might be creating their own personal portfolios? Martina?

Martina Osterrieder: 26:34

Try different learning approaches to find out what works best for you, and keep track of this learning as this will help you in future endeavours. Engage with other learners and mentors, seek feedback, and also offer constructive and appreciative feedback yourself.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:51

Martin?

Martin Sticht: 26:52

Try it. Be brave. Don't be scared about getting bad marks.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:56

Cordula.

Cordula Schwiderski: 26:57

Be yourself. Be creative. Write down, sometimes just for yourself, what you see, what you feel, what you think about your learnings.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:06

Thank you. And now for the last tip of today over to Hannah.

Hannah Brodel: 27:11

Make this digital space work for you. It's got plenty of opportunities to go deeper in your learning journey.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:19

That's a wonderful last word, summarising a lot of the things that you want to achieve for your students through your lecturers, through them, giving your students these portfolio activities, but then also encouraging them to keep the portfolio beyond the classroom and also engage with it on more of a lifelong learning experience. Thank you so much to the four of you from the portfolio sub project of DiKuLe at the University of Bamberg. I really enjoyed having been taken little bit more into the support mechanisms that you have developed for your lecturers, but that can also be adopted by others at other institutions. So thank you so much for all your work.

Hannah Brodel: 28:03

Thank you also for inviting us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:06

Now over to our listeners: what do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Martina Osterrider, Hannah Brodel, Cordula Schwiderski, and Dr Martin Sticht. 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.