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. This episode centres around portfolios as high-impact practice, and so I'm really stoked that my guests today are Dr Amy Cicchino from the University of Central Florida and Brandi Gilbert from Indiana University Indianapolis. I've met both of them through the AAEEBL community at the annual meetings, prior to the pandemic in person and since then online. Amy has also been a member of the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force since 2019 and has been instrumental in getting the Task Force off the ground. Amy, let's start with you. Welcome back to the podcast. With the first time on the podcast, we talked in 2023 about one of our Digital Ethics Principles, which was'Visibility of labour'. But this time, we are going to chat about another passion of yours in education, which is high-impact practices. Can you please share what your current role is?

Amy Cicchino: 1:23

Yeah, thank you so much for having us. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. I'm also lucky enough to direct the University Writing Center there, so a bit of a title change since last time we talked.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:39

Yes. Congratulations on that switch, not just in roles, but also universities earlier this year. Amy, why do you teach with portfolios?

Amy Cicchino: 1:49

I really enjoy portfolios because it's an opportunity for students to tell their stories about learning and to practice some of the metacognitive skills that we know are just so important in meaningful learning and professional development, and so I love portfolios for so many reasons. They're digital, they're student centred, they're reflective, they're creative. So for all of those reasons and the benefits in professional development and assessment, I lean in always to ePortfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:21

Can you please remind me for how long you've actually been using portfolios?

Amy Cicchino: 2:25

I made my first ePortfolio as a graduate student at Florida State University in 2015.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:33

That's a good time away. I think I met you for the first time at Bronx Community College when we had the last pre-pandemic AAEEBL Annual Meeting, which was also the inception point for the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force. Now over to you, Brandi, what do you do at IU Indianapolis?

Brandi Gilbert: 2:54

Hi, thank you for having us. I am the Director of the Life-Health Sciences Internship Program in the Division of Undergraduate Education. So for the long-time ePortfolio people, Indiana University Indianapolis used to be part of IUPUI, so the old school AAEEBL people probably know us from that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:14

Yeah, and you've been the Director for the Internship Program for quite a while now, having been able to really also consistently put portfolios into practice. When did you encounter portfolios for the first time?

Brandi Gilbert: 3:28

I had to consult my own ePortfolio for the actual dates. So looking back, I was teaching a first-year seminar in fall 2010, and it had a portfolio assignment where students printed out and collected things in binders. That was not fun to carry home in multiple canvas bags to do the grading. Fortunately for me, our campus was working on integrating ePortfolios into first-year seminars. So the next year, I was able to switch in fall 2011 and start to use that with my class. I figured this is working, so why can't I use it with our internship programme? They were also doing a project to extend that use past the first-year seminars, so it easily fit into that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:12

How many students typically go through your internship programme creating a portfolio on an annual basis?

Brandi Gilbert: 4:19

Back when we started, it would have been 50 interns per year. Our numbers have since increased to 75, and this year, we have 114 students doing ePortfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:32

That's an amazing number, and that is also really only one area of the university. It's not all internships across because you're only looking at the Life-Health Sciences. Both of you have been involved in the high-impact practices community for a while now. Amy, do you want to briefly summarise for us what are high-impact practices?

Amy Cicchino: 4:57

High-impact practices are a set of educational practices that research has established can really have a transformational impact on student success and learning, and especially for students in historically underserved groups. So when you say high-impact practices, most of us are drawing on the AAC&U's list of high-impact practices, but the scholarship really came out of Kuh and O'Donnell's 2013 work. They created a report on scaling high-impact practices that identified eight characteristics, eight things that make these educational practices high impact. Then in 2021 a group of researchers led by Jillian Kinzie, studied racially minoritised students' HIPs experiences, and they added two more elements. Yeah, the AAC&U list is good, but in the HIPs in the States community, we like to say that those characteristics, those 10 elements of high-impact practices, those are what really matter as we're developing and scaling and assessing HIPs. That's why, starting in 2017, Kuh, O'Donnell, and Schneider have started to add this caveat that HIPs will only achieve their promised impact, "when done well".

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:08

Amy, you mentioned that there are characteristics that identify what a high-impact practices. Can you please let us know what those are?

Amy Cicchino: 6:18

Sure. So again, these are things that when you design high-impact practices, they help fulfill that high impact promise. And so that's high expectation level; significant investments of effort over time; substantial interactions with faculty and peers; experiences with diversity; frequent, timely, and constructive feedback; opportunities for real world application and relevance; public demonstrations of competence; opportunities to reflect and integrate learning; the ability to make a difference for others; and a sense of agency and accomplishment.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:54

Listening to all of these characteristics, it makes sense why then in 2016 ePortfolios were added as the 11th high-impact practice because really it demonstrates all those characteristics that we've just heard. It is engaging, it is public demonstration of knowledge and insights and skills and also feedback, collaboration, and the like and really impactful learning. Why was it so significant for the portfolio community at the time to have portfolios established as high-impact practice? Amy, do you want to continue with that?

Amy Cicchino: 7:36

For those who maybe haven't heard of this moment where ePortfolios were added, there's a great article in IJep, the International Journal of ePortfolios, by Eddie Watson, George Kuh, Terry Rhodes, Tracy Penny Light, and Helen Chen that talk a lot about the importance of this recognition. But I think the ePortfolio community, they existed long before this designation, and so it's really important to recognise that, to recognise the research that I think culminated in the ePortfolio recognition for high-impact practices, and the fact that it kind of codified the important role that ePortfolios play in meaningful educational experiences. I hope that it's significant in giving ePortfolio scholars and practitioners the tools needed to advocate for the resources that they need to develop and lead ePortfolio projects well. I think it can also create a good entry point for why people want to start learning about ePortfolios and practising ePortfolios. There are a lot of universities out there, they want their students to have high-impact practice experience before they graduate, and now ePortfolios become another avenue for achieving that goal.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:54

Do you remember when you got involved in that and why HIPs are so important for your own practice?

Brandi Gilbert: 9:03

I joined the HIPs in the States community, I don't remember the year, but Jerry Daday had recently moved from Western Kentucky University to what was IUPUI, and we started to talk because of his work with engaged learning. He took me to the HIPs in the States Conference, and then we went again the next year. To me, it was a great way to find community outside of just internships or my programme is essentially on campus student employment, and there's some undergraduate research thrown in. So I don't feel like I have just one scholarly home, but HIPs in the States kind of brought that together into one place that I could go to find colleagues who were working together toward these high-impact practices.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:52

Do you remember if there was anything that then made it easier for you to talk about portfolios on campus, since you now had this language of it is a high-impact practice, like other high impact practices?

Brandi Gilbert: 10:07

Our campus did start to really ramp up and make ePortfolio a much more visible part of what we were doing. Prior to that time, it was individual people who were really interested in doing ePortfolios as part of their work, but we started that ePortfolio office, and what is now on our campus, the ePortfolio Studio.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:31

Amy, at that time, I think you were still at Auburn University. Did you see a shift of portfolios having become a HIP?

Amy Cicchino: 10:39

Definitely, I think not only was there greater enthusiasm around ePortfolios, but I think we saw ePortfolios start to be added to strategic plans and quality enhancement plans as part of that larger conversation about HIPs access.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:59

So sometimes naming something and making it part of a framework can be beneficial, so that people have something to point to and then also see it in the bigger picture of where, especially the portfolios, are then situated amongst capstone courses, where we hear a lot of people talk about those work-integrated learning experiences, the feedback, diversity, and all of those areas because, of course, they do not stand on their own, but are really nicely connected and influence each other. Amy in your role that you have, and also the roles that you held at your previous institutions, how do you support your colleagues in implementing HIPs? Do you have a strategy that typically works well for you?

Amy Cicchino: 11:45

Yeah, I think drawing on your point about shared language, creating a shared language around high-impact practices is really important. And in my approach, I really like to start with those 10 characteristics of high-impact practices. So Right, like what makes something high impact? It's not just that we say students are going to create a site, they've created a site, I can check the box, they've all been touched by high-impact practice. But rather, right, how have we designed the ePortfolio curriculum and experience to have students do those things, to invest their time, to interact with peers, to share and demonstrate their competence, to reflect on their learning, to apply it to the real world. How have those characteristics really developed this high-impact learning experience? I always return to those 10 characteristics. I just love them so, so much. I also really just to shamelessly plug the Digital Ethics Principles developed by AAEEBL's Digital Ethics Task Force, I think that that resource, again, can provide really helpful standards in what it means to practice ePortfolios equitably and well. For me, I think, as I'm talking to colleagues about ePortfolios, those conversations have to get beyond the technology. They have to get beyond ePortfolios as a single assignment, really digging into the process, the labour, the system that's going to support a larger commitment to high-impact teaching and learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:15

Brandi, did you and your team also create resources that are around the HIPs in general and how your staff and faculty can work with them?

Brandi Gilbert: 13:27

I can share that with my programme we are often used as an example, so I'm happy to share our ePortfolio prompts, the rubrics we use, assignments we can share that other people can use. So we're definitely used as an example and a resource.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:43

Brandi, can you share one example of a successful portfolio use within your area that illustrates how the teaching and the learning improved when you switched to a portfolio approach or when you incorporated portfolios?

Brandi Gilbert: 14:02

Yeah, I can talk at a campus level, but also my programme because it goes together. So for some background, my program used to have a poster session as our end of year showcase, alongside other units doing similar end of year things for co-curricular programmes, capstones, academic programmes. When the pandemic hit, we all had to go virtual quickly. We were able to do that because many of us were using ePortfolios. So that early online showcase became what is now a website repository of ePortfolios across our campus, sharing student work across experiences and disciplines. At the same time that gave me an excuse to make some much needed changes to the evidence and the artefacts that we want interns to share at the end of the experience. Being able to give students choice in what they share and having it in a mode that allowed multimedia really opened up the possibilities for interns to share authentic evidence of what they learned and contributed to their work beyond just research posters. Our showcase is back in person now, but we're continuing to have them share their ePortfolios on laptops with visitors rotating around the room. Interns share artefacts that they created that are actually used by their internship sites, such as videos or handbooks to train others in the lab on a process or a technique. We've got podcast links to podcasts that our students have produced or social So using ePortfolios saved us as a campus when we needed to pivot media posts they've designed, documents and flyers they've created that are given to patients or to recruit for research, manuscripts they've submitted to journals, and PowerPoint slides that our students are presenting in their lab meetings. quickly, but also now, interns are more excited to share these meaningful examples of the impact of their work. The showcase visitors are more engaged because research posters can be a little intimidating, but when a student is talking like really excited about work that they did, it's much easier to ask them follow-up questions.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:16

I love that you're also emphasising the multimedia components of the portfolios and make sure to include the link to your electronic showcase that's on the IU website, so that everybody can check out some of those examples for themselves and see how rich all of the portfolios are that the students create. Brandi, what support do you, your team, or learning designers give to students creating their portfolios? Do you scaffold the practice?

Brandi Gilbert: 16:50

Yes, very much. It's the only way we all get through this in one piece[laughs]. So we have the students for the entire academic year, which really gives us the opportunity to scaffold from the beginning of fall semester, beginning of their internship, all the way through that showcase. So we have them break up the ePortfolio into small parts throughout the year. They're primarily adding their reflections as they go, and then revisiting those in the spring. For that final artefact, we do a lot of scaffolding. We meet with them at the beginning of spring semester, after they're settled and know what's going on, and help them start to think through how they might select what they want to share, encourage conversations with their internship supervisors - obviously - of you know, how are we going to choose this? And then we have former interns who work with us as student ambassadors, and they're also available as peer mentors, peer consultants to help them with the logistics of getting these things into their ePortfolio, but also just having conversations to help them think through what they might include.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:57

Do you then also have a template available for students who would like to have a bit of structure already established beforehand?

Brandi Gilbert: 18:06

Yes, we have a template, and the IU Indianapolis ePortfolio Studio also helps anyone on campus upload a template into Google Sites, and I believe, they said they can also do Wix now. So they have the ability to help us if we create a template, then they can make it so that it's easily accessible to our students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:29

Fantastic. Amy, do you also have an example of using portfolios within a programme or a course that illustrates how the learning processes have improved since putting a portfolio into place?

Amy Cicchino: 18:46

I'm going to shout out one of my colleagues here at UCF. At UCF, they use ePortfolios a lot. They're embedded pretty much at all levels of student learning in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. But our First-Year Comp(osition) Director, Dr Shane Wood, has just done a stellar job leveraging assessment ePortfolios in our composition series. They have really changed the way that faculty and students talk about the learning outcomes in the programme. They've yielded really impressive assessment data. Those composition students will come into the Center, and I'll hear them talking with their tutors about their favourite learning outcome. They just feel such an immense ownership over the learning goals of the composition programme now. They have smart reflections, they're excited to pull artefacts. It's just really allowed them to drive their learning and that general education required course in a way that I think is so smart and such a good way to validate students while also practicing good assessment.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:50

Do you, Amy, also have examples where portfolios are not just used for assessment on your campus?

Amy Cicchino: 19:58

No, we do also do showcase portfolios at our undergraduate capstone level, at the graduate level. I'll shout out our Writing Center. Our tutors are making showcase ePortfolios this semester as part of their theory of tutoring course requirement. And so not only are they practicing reflection and integrative learning, they're also explaining why tutoring matters to external audiences in their disciplinary community. And so, of course, our Writing and Rhetoric students are talking a lot about writing and communication, and so there's maybe an easier fit there. But we also have tutors who are science majors, who are computer engineers, who want to go to law school. It's really refreshing to see them make that connection between their work in the Writing Center and the work that they'll do in the next stage of their professional development. They're able to do that because they have such a strong foundation of ePortfolio thinking already from the general education course that now when we talk about a showcase ePortfolio, they know what an ePortfolio is. They know how to ePortfolio, and now we get to really just level up their audience and their purpose.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:10

Brandi, have you seen examples of students that started out with an internship portfolio with you and then also continued using it or used it in a slightly different context?

Brandi Gilbert: 21:22

Yeah, I would say our ambassadors, I ask them to keep adding to it, and once they do, I think they realise,'Wow, this is really helpful for me to keep up.' They treat it like aérsume, but with way more context and detail and being able to explain why I chose this particular experience, including more artefacts. They start to share things that they've done as ambassadors, and that's really cool to see.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:53

Which reminds me of the peer mentors that are at Dominican University of California, where students support other students in creating portfolios and especially also in a first-year class, making it a good experience for the students to then also continue with their portfolios. In October 2025, the Assessment Institute was held again at Indiana University, and HIPs in the States is a regular stream within that conference. Brandi, is there anything from that gathering that you'd like to call out in regards to maybe new research or new insight, practices that people have shared around high-impact practices?

Brandi Gilbert: 22:38

One thing I appreciate from this conference is that the different types of HIPs represented are all really different, but they do share those core characteristics, so you can attend any session and still take something away that you can adapt and apply to your work. This year, I feel like the most important thing was having that community and being able to discuss current challenges in higher education that are more than what's just impacting internships and ePortfolios. It's just higher education - it's a little rough right now. I did attend a session by other colleagues from our track leadership, and they were discussing current teaching and learning research topics across HIPs, so being able to come together and talk about some of those challenges, but also talk about something like, what do HIPs look like at two-year universities versus four-year universities? What are the unique challenges? I'll also shout out Amy. She was on a panel that was a helpful discussion about the challenges we're all facing with engaged learning and high-impact practices. I really enjoyed that, I felt less alone afterwards, and also being positioned in a conference that's all about assessment can really help strengthen our general knowledge of assessment or even about how our assessment of ePortfolios and learning can be used at an institutional level.

Amy Cicchino: 24:02

Brandi hit the nail on the head. The goal of that panel, I think, was just to articulate some shared challenges that we're seeing, especially in the United States, around how people perceive higher education, how people want to fund and support higher education, and we see high-impact practices and ePortfolios being a wonderful way to make that case, to make that argument. I'll also say I did attend Debbie Oesch-Minor's ePortfolio session, which was really lovely. Debbie leads the ePortfolio programme at IU Indianapolis. She always just has wonderful student examples to share. And when it comes to, I think, being smart in how you externally communicate your portfolio programme, what it accomplishes, what it does for students, that was a panel where I could be doing more to articulate our impact to external stakeholders at my university.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:00

I find that also nicely shows that by making these things public, it is easier to talk about them, and then you can also more easily make those connections because you have the examples available. You know how somebody implemented something, and then bring that into your own context, together with any of the other HIPs that you might want to integrate.

Amy Cicchino: 25:20

The other thing that I think we see every year at the Assessment Institute are folks who want to, like, get started with portfolios, because they see just what a wonderful way they can externally communicate the experiences that students are already having through other HIPs. And so even if ePortfolios aren't the topic of the presentation, sometimes ePortfolios still come up because the presentation just fits an portfolio model so well. You'll get an ePortfolio enthusiast in the audience, like Brandi or I [laughs], and we'll say, 'Have you tried ePortfolios?'

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:54

The ePortfolio can also be one of an umbrella HIP because you can use it in any of the others, and you can pull things out and represent all of them in a portfolio. Now, before we get into our quick answer round, is there anything that you'd wish everybody knew about portfolios, Amy?

Amy Cicchino: 26:15

I wrote down some thoughts on this document, Brandi and I have, but I'm turning, I'm steering away because this conversation about the Assessment Institute jogged my memory. We are so obsessed with AI right now, and there is a lot of, I think, panicked response that, how will we ever know if students are learning, truly engaging with metacognitive practices? And I feel like the answer is ePortfolios, and we've been doing this already for a really long time. If there's something I wish everyone knew about ePortfolios, I think it can solve some of the ever present and some of the more recent challenges that we're experiencing around teaching and learning. So I think it can help students feel connected to what they're learning. It can help them reflect, it can help them engage in a process of composition and knowledge acquisition, and so I wish people knew that ePortfolios just might be the solution that you are looking for.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:12

That ties in really nicely also into the workshop that Christine Slade and Michael Sankey and I had at Eportfolio Forum just the other week, where we did look at how AI can be used in portfolio practice, in many different scenarios. Because, of course, AI doesn't stop at portfolios, even though portfolios can be an answer, so that there can be mindful integration of AI, but then at other times, also mindful leaving out AI and giving students the space to express themselves and their own experiences without being mediated through a large language model. Brandi, what do you wish everybody knew about portfolios?

Brandi Gilbert: 27:58

I wish they knew that ePortfolios can be an effective way to help students share who they are and what makes them unique. So from my very narrow perspective, I work with many students who are pre-professional, and they all look alike on paper. They all have the same majors, right? The same courses, the same basic volunteer work, shadowing, undergraduate research experiences, but everyone who applies to med school, for example, has that same checklist. An portfolio can help them reflect on all of that and gather evidence of their why. Why did I do these experiences? How did that resonate with me and help them practice explaining that before they even get to the application personal statement or they start to prepare for those interviews. So it's really communicating who they are and what they've done, but why it mattered to them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:54

And not just being a résumé and a person with a name and experiences, but also really being an actual person, a whole person, who bring in the entire personality, and therefore everybody's going to have a different experience. So now to our quick answer round. I'll start with Amy for the first question. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Brandi Gilbert: 29:22

Reflect, curate, and narrate.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:26

Thank you. Brandi, what are your words or phrases?

Brandi Gilbert: 29:29

Show and tell.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:32

Oh, fantastic. Brandi, what tip do you have for learning designers or instructors or directors of an internship programme, such as yours, who create portfolio activities or try to implement portfolios?

Brandi Gilbert: 29:49

Especially for people thinking about implementing, think through the context. Are they coming in with ePortfolios from something else and how you might adapt your existing activities or assignments to tit instead of thinking that you need to create something brand new from scratch.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:04

Amy, what's your most important one you'd like to share?

Amy Cicchino: 30:07

A special thing about ePortfolios is they centre student voices. And so how can students be partners in the creation of ePortfolio programmes and assignments?

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:20

I love that collaborative aspect. Last question for the two of you, Amy, let's start with you. What advice do you have for portfolio authors, for your students?

Amy Cicchino: 30:31

I would say, play, be creative. Have fun with ePortfolios. There are so many times in the education system where we have to fill in a box and fill in a form, and it's very tight and restricted and guided. EPortfolios are so not that because it's such a switch, ePortfolio authors, especially students, can feel really overwhelmed by that process. But I would say, it's okay lean in, right? Like 'trust the process' to draw on a Yancey-ism there. Just have fun with it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:02

Thank you. Brandi, what is your advice?

Brandi Gilbert: 31:06

Very similar to Amy, make it your own and don't be afraid to use your own voice. It doesn't have to be as stiff and formal as a class assignment or research paper. Some of my favourite ePortfolios, if you hadn't told me it was that student writing it, I could still identify this is that student because it sounds so much like them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:27

Thank you so much for both of you, bringing in the personal, bringing in the whole students, and also instructors into the portfolio experience and making it about them. Really appreciate having had the chance to talk with you about your work, and especially in regards to high-impact practices, and look forward to further conversations. Thank you so much.

Amy Cicchino: 31:49

Thank you.

Brandi Gilbert: 31:50

Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:52

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Amy Cicchino and Brandi Gilbert. 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.