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. In today's episode, I'd like to highlight a few experiences as I've just passed my 15th anniversary at Catalyst. So even though I have been working in the Mahara team now for a while, at times, it still feels like I've only just packed my one suitcase and carry-on in Luxembourg on the 12th of June 2010 and had shipped some boxes prior to that. Then I boarded a plane to Sydney, saw the sunrise at the airport and marvelled at the sun moving across the sky in the other direction. I then finally arrived in Wellington on the 14th of June, on a beautiful autumn afternoon and started work the following day. That afternoon was not one of those blistery, windy, and rainy days that everybody was telling me about, and the landing at the airport couldn't really have been any smoother. I expected the worst, thanks to all of the YouTube videos people had sent me, but really got the best, including a tour of the city on the way to my accommodation for the first week because I took the shuttle bus that made its way through Kilbirnie, Newtown, and up some really steep, winding hill roads before heading into the city centre. Since then, I've been involved in 26 releases of Mahara, worked with countless community members and clients to make Mahara better over time, and not to forget also everyone at Catalyst, who has contributed to Mahara over the years. We do have our core Mahara team, but also work with so many other Catalystas, including eLearning, system administration, business analysis and UX, graphic design, marketing, developers who use other programming languages that are used in some of our support infrastructure, account management and sales, project management, finance, and not to forget legal. We are working with really a lot of people that support us on a daily basis. That has not changed over the last 15 years because a software product is not only the immediate development team, but also a lot of people around it that make it happen and who are also part of the community. Initially, when I started at Catalyst, I also supported Moodle and Koha clients. I had used Moodle in Europe and provided training for it at the university where I had worked. Funnily enough, I did come across Koha and was stoked to learn that Catalyst provided support for that integrated library management system and had core developers on staff. To this date, both communities remain dear to me. So I do have to mention that the Koha community will be back in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington this year for KohaCon, and I look forward to the event in November. Recently, I had the chance to attend MoodleMoot Canada and will also be attending MoodleMoot Global in September. I hope to see some of you there. Over the past 15 years, portfolio practice has grown up in a lot of ways. In the first half of 2010 a large scale project, the Catalyst for Learning project, ran in the U.S. Organisations who participated in that project developed their portfolio strategy, expansion, and also quite a few support measures. In Europe, projects like EUfolio and ATS2020 were funded to implement and establish portfolio practice and also communities of learning. Since then, many institutions have increased their use of portfolios from a course here and there two entire programmes using portfolios or even the entire institution. Just the other day, at Mahara Hui Online, Dr Rob Lowney from Dublin City University shared that about 50% of DCU students engage with portfolios. At Monash University across the Tasman in Australia, Mahara is now set up university wide. Previously, there were a few pockets of portfolio use with Mahara and other tools. On the other hand, we do have to acknowledge that due to budget cuts, fewer learning designers and fewer other third space staff have to support more faculty and a wider range of tools and practices, not always giving them the time to transform traditional assignments into meaningful portfolio activities. They often need to make due with less. That's then where many rely on other community members for support and sharing of resources becomes more and more important. So I've had the chance to have a chat with the German projects Dreiklang and DiKuLe who demonstrate this really wonderfully as all of their resources are Creative Comments licensed. Also the AAEEBL community and ePortfolios Australia offer professional development opportunities. Since 2019, I've been on the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force with wonderful colleagues from North America, Australia, and a few other countries, in which we have developed 10 principles that encompass digital ethics practices to consider when working with portfolios. You can also watch recordings of the webinars that we have held on topics relating to these principles to maybe also get inspired by some of the uses. At the same time at a large number of organisations an institution-wide platforms such as Mahara doesn't exist, but it would allow for an easy integration into the learning management system. That makes using portfolios for assessment more difficult and cumbersome, adding to the workload that educators have. Besides supporting assessment processes, another advantage of having an institution-wide platform is that the institution has more control over securing student and staff data. Data has become a really important commodity in today's time and not only just with the rise of artificial intelligence. Using an institution-provided platform, it is then advertisement free, legal shot have given its stamp of approval for the terms and conditions, and the privacy measures are in place to comply with the institution's policies. That also goes for where the data is stored and who has access to it. Concepts like data sovereignty and data residency enter the conversation, and students, as well as staff should be assured that their content is stored appropriately and also in line with their institution's policies as well as laws of the country in which the institution is located. Check out the resources for this episode, where I point to a recent blog post by my colleague Chris Cormack that gives a good introduction, and not just for those of us living in Aotearoa. Staying with assessment, we also hear learning designers talk more about a programmatic approach to assessment. Programmatic assessment focuses on shifting to assessment for learning instead of doing assessment of learning. It also means giving students feedback, including from multiple assessors, and engaging them in meaningful activities that help them develop competencies over time. Portfolios play a central role in that approach because they can help demonstrate learning, make that learning visible through reflections, and invite feedback from others. Using an institution-provided portfolio platform can facilitate programmatic assessment because assessors can be assigned to portfolios and reports built to see the engagement or where feedback hasn't been given yet, just for a couple of examples. Because we're having more conversations around programmatic assessment, I'd love to organise an online panel conversation on it, its impact and relevance for portfolio practice, and where we as platform providers should do better to support organisations wanting to innovate their teaching and learning practices in that area. So if you'd like to suggest panellists, which could also include you, of course, please let me know. So far, I've been talking about portfolio use in higher education where we have heaps of examples across many different disciplines, starting with the obvious ones, like teaching and nursing, but also going to musicology and forest sciences that Chahira Nouira talked about in her interview. I'm very happy though, that we've also been able to support professionals in their portfolio use beyond formal training and educational offerings. In our team, we support most closely organisations that use portfolios with nurses and pharmacists looking to the world of work. These portfolios look quite different from say, an education student's portfolio or that of a design student. Nurse and pharmacist's portfolio are pretty templated and text-based due to the nature of the work that they do. They are linked to the standards of the profession, and these portfolios do focus on reflection and can include feedback from peers and managers. A few years ago, right before the first lockdown in 2020 actually, I had the chance to present on the nurse portfolios alongside the team at Waitematā District Health Board, which is now Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora (Auckland North and West Waitematā). Having had rolled out Mahara to all nurses just about a year earlier, Janine Quiding, Miriam Laidlaw, and Tabitha Parker had found that nurses thought differently about their PDRP and keeping their portfolio. PDRP stands for Professional Development and Recognition Programme, the programme where registered nurses need to keep a portfolio for three years, which is then reviewed and assessed before they start a new review cycle. So in those portfolios now, once the nurses had shifted to an electronic portfolio using Mahara, the focus shifted from assessment to professional development. Where in the past, there was minimal engagement on their portfolios, they now had conversations. And these conversations didn't always just happen on the portfolio. Most of the time, the conversations were actually between the nurse and the manager or the peer, and then only summaries would have been kept in the portfolio. Not to forget, in the past, many nurses procrastinated updating their portfolios, whereas now, many started early, and their short introductory training sessions were fully booked most of the time. You can find the links to the two presentations that talk about the use of portfolios at Waitematā in the episode notes. Make sure to watch them to see how many portfolio binders they've had left after just about a year, and note that we couldn't actually capture all the portfolios in the 'Before' picture because of where the two big cupboards full of them were located at the district. Since the start of using Mahara in late 2018, the Waitematā team, which has changed over time, has been iterating over the portfolios and the support they provide to the nurses and also the nurse educators. They've streamlined processes with other providers in the region and regularly share their practice. They also feed back what works for them in the portfolios and what they'd like to improve on their platform to us, which results either directly in changes to Mahara or informs our thinking when there is not yet a clear project. It is great to be able to follow their work more closely to help us think about portfolios in those contexts. This use of portfolios by nurses demonstrates how portfolios benefit people outside of formal courses to document, reflect on, and achieve their professional development goals. Now what's in stock for next year? One big focus area for us is the refresh of Mahara to give it a new look. Work on that is actively underway, alongside some other projects that I talked about at Mahara Hui Online. We'll also have the updated roadmap on the website soon. I look forward to many more conversations around Mahara and how we can support our community. I also look forward to connecting with all of you in the wider portfolio community about portfolio practices. There is always something new to learn. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to learn from you. Now over to you. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' Head to our website, podcast.mahara.org, where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT. 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.