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 Debbie Oesch-Minor and Salsabil Qaddoura from Indiana University Indianapolis in the United States. We are recording this interview, which is a little bit longer than usual, just a few days after the new year and are thus off to a good start for 2026 talking about the portfolio practice at IU Indianapolis, and in particular, highlighting the work of Salsabil and what she, as a student, has learned while creating a writing course portfolio. It's always wonderful to chat with you, Debbie, and it's so nice to meet you, Salsabil.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:06

Nice to meet you.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:08

Thank you as always, fabulous to be with you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:10

Let's start with you, Debbie. What do you do at Indiana University Indianapolis, please?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:18

I am a faculty at IU Indianapolis, and my home is in the Department of English and School of Liberal Arts, and my background is in rhetoric and composition, which has been portfolio-rich for almost three decades, but it's very slow to uptake on ePortfolios in many universities. It would seem like a very natural companion to shift from these giant three-ring binders that have a whole bunch of papers in them to a digital format, but many schools have been reluctant, or, I would say, faculty have been reluctant, to make that shift. I first made the shift in 2017 and haven't looked back.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:53

So you don't work with any of the ring binders any more?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:57

I don't, and the other issue is I had to hold them for two years, so my office was just stacked with three-ring binders [laughs], and at the end of two years, then I had to shred them. So that created not just a lot of waste, but a lot of issues. And more recently, I've been invited to work as a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Engaged Learning, where I support faculty using ePortfolios as well as other high-impact practices like project based learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:25

And also, very recently, in the last quarter of 2025, you became the President of AAEEBL, the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning. Congratulations on that new role as well.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 2:40

Thank you so much. It's tremendous honour, and I'm following in the footsteps of many innovators and ground-breaking people, like yourself. I'm so thrilled to have the opportunity to be here with you today.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:53

Thank you, Debbie, you just said you've been working with portfolios then now for about three decades. Do you remember how it all started for you?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 3:04

It probably started when I was a TA.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:06

So, a teaching assistant, right?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 3:08

Yes, a teaching assistant at Morehead State University in a small town called Morehead, Kentucky, and I walked into a classroom, little did I know that I was working with one of the leaders of thought in rhetoric composition, Dr Nancy Peterson, and she was using portfolios, and so students began projects, curated those, and kept them all together. The end of the semester, they would pick two out of three or four writing samples to do a final revision of, they would reflect on this process, and they would turn them all in and a big fat three-ring binder, and that was what I did, probably for the next 15 years with students at three or four different universities. Sometimes the faculty members trade those files, like at Bowling Green State University, we would bring out wagons and our office chairs stacked with 25 binders, and they'd put them in a room, and they'd shuffle them like cards, and we'd come back around and get another 30 or 40 that we would then read over a three-day period, and we would turn them back in so that there was consistency in assessment. I also got to teach at Antioch College, where there was no grades, so I got the portfolios and really spent different time with them, and I also wanted to teach in Writing Across the Curriculum, and at the Ohio State University, I got to work in the Engineering programme with technical writing skills, but we integrated portfolios into a 300-level Writing for Engineering course that focussed on engineering ethics. That was another wonderful way to use those. So my background with the portfolio and reflection and process pedagogy and peer review goes way back, but the technology is pretty new.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:52

Thank you so much for that run down of the many years of working with ring binders [Debbie laughs], but then of making the switch to technology [laughs]. The nice part is with the technology, we can actually look at the portfolios more easily these days, especially when they are public, like Salsabil's, to which we are coming in a bit, making it much easier to share it with people and not giving everybody a workout every single day.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 5:16

And not not hurting so many trees. That was definitely a motivator to cut back on the paper.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:22

Thank you, Debbie. Now Salsabil, you are a student at Indiana University Indianapolis. What are you majoring in, and what other things do you do on campus?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 5:33

I'm a sophomore right now. I'm majoring in Law and Liberal Arts with a minor in Business, and I'm also pursuing a Nonprofit Management Certificate. I'm very passionate about communication. I think no matter what field people pursue, you can still do amazing things for the world, help make the world a better place, as cliché as it sounds, and for me, that's communication. I do journalism. I'm currently the campus editor for the Campus Citizen, which is our only independent student paper on campus. Anything that includes writing, reading, listening to people's stories, communication, that's my thing. And my first semester here, I was honoured to be in Professor Oesch-Minor's class, and so that is why I'm here and have more experience with portfolios than I would have had if I was not.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:17

Thank you. So you encountered portfolios then first in the 2023-2024 academic year, right, when you were a freshman and took Debbie's class?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 6:27

I actually did one portfolio prior to it, but without any guidance, and I didn't have the structure or understand how to make ePortfolios engaging until I was in that course.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:39

Was that also at the university or was that at your high school?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 6:43

No, it was in high school. It was for Indiana High School Journalist of the Year. Funny story. It was supposed to be a collection of every single journalism piece that you created throughout all of your high school experience, and it was for seniors or people that were about to graduate. So my teacher didn't hear about it or didn't let me know about it until eight days before it was due, and you were supposed to have a year in advance to work on it. The platform I was using I was not entirely familiar with, and so two of those days were a weekend, and I couldn't get support on it. So I pretty much had six days to get it done. And I am very thankful that I won Indiana High School Journalist of the Year, but I do not credit it to the quality of the ePortfolio as so much as the content that was in it [Debbie laughs]. I would definitely say when e portfolio started to become better was in Professor Oesch-Minor's class.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:31

Oh, fantastic that you did not shy away from that course and change to a different one because you did not have the most ideal portfolio experience before in high school. Before we get to your portfolio, you do touch on the aspect of support right now, and I do want to briefly look into that area because, of course, that also informs quite a bit of the thinking that Debbie and her team have been doing on how to support students create meaningful and also successful portfolios and therefore enrich their learning. At IU Indianapolis, Debbie, you have the ePortfolio Studio. What is its purpose then? And how do you support your students and faculty in creating and maintaining portfolios?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 8:16

First and foremost, shout out to Susan Khan and Amy Powell, who went before me and very much paved the way. Susan Khan did decades of ground-breaking research and publishing and worked closely with AAEEBL and other high-impact practice groups, and Amy started the Studio. So when she left, I was able to step in. At that point, it primarily supported students, and so students could make an appointment, drop by, and we have television screens where they plug in and display their portfolios, and we can click through and talk to them about the work. The emphasis, though, primarily, is on content, and that's what I really appreciated with Salsabil here saying, it's the content that mattered. I would say that our number one success has been supporting faculty so that faculty are actually doing these interventions in the classroom. The more that we can get faculty to integrate ePortfolios into a course curriculum where students, assignment by assignment, over the course of 10 to 12 weeks, are building out, creating transparency in learning. That's where we're seeing tremendous success. When those faculty members have questions, we encourage them and their students to make appointments with the ePortfolio Studio. When we are beyond capacity, which is often, we have cross trained everyone in the University Writing Center to support ePortfolios as well as writing. This is a tremendous benefit for students because in addition to technical support and comments on composition, the way things are set up, they can also tap into the expertise of our consultants in writing. So shout out to Lynn Jettpace and April Witt for working so closely with us to cross train so that we could expand our consulting crew and beef up our technology side.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:07

Do you then know how many people in the Studio and the Writing Center are involved in the portfolio efforts?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 10:14

Hard to say. Everyone I talk to, I try to bring on board in one way or another [laughs]. In the Studio right now, we're down to two because of some reductions in budgets that have happened in the state of Indiana. And so student employment is one thing that has gone back. But for a time we had six, and so we were very much able to provide support there. I would say the other thing that, I think, is a wonderful service we provide as we visit classes. And we don't want to visit at the beginning of semester and say, 'ePortfolios are wonderful.' We want to visit when people have material to insert into the ePortfolio. So in that class period, students open a platform. We talk about architecture. They build out an architecture for the course, and then they begin populating by taking one assignment they've already completed and putting that into the portfolio, as long as then hitting what we call'ePortfolios on the fives'. So they're going to stick in words, they're going to stick in pictures, they're going to stick in hyperlinks. We're going to show them how to put in files, and we'll talk to them about how to manage the page. In our composition course 131W140 that Salsabil was in, we didn't touch the portfolio until they had a complete paper done. And one of the things we did was talk about how it's different as a white paper than as a digital artefact. But I did the very first day of class warn them what was coming and showed them samples of previous student work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:44

If I go back a bit, the ePortfolio Studio has its own staff, and that's primarily students.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 11:51

Yes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:51

So students supporting other students and also faculty in working with the portfolios. And do I assume correctly as well, that that is also similar in the Writing Center, that they are also student consultants who support portfolio practice and not just faculty or staff?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 12:09

It is. There are four faculty members that are associated with the Writing Center, but primarily they're in administrative roles. A couple of them will meet with students or with other faculty. I myself have workshopped items in the University Writing Center. The students are typically juniors and seniors who have gone through very thorough training, including a course specific to providing feedback and support to college level writing. So they are very much the experts, and they bring that student lens to the support they give. Many of them are graduate students, so they may start as undergraduates and then they pursue graduate studies here, stay on in the Writing Center to provide consulting support. We've had the same phenomenon with the Studio. We've been able to keep some of our grad students in the loop, working with us, but right now, they've all graduated or in their final semesters with residencies, but it is very much of a team effort. But then we're housed in the Institute for Engaged Learning, where there are many other faculty fellows and full time staff that we can call in if we need backup.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:14

Awesome, and so how many students and faculty do you estimate you're reaching with the portfolios through the Studio and the Writing Center?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 13:25

As far as individual consultations, we're probably looking at 200 to 300 a year, not as many as you might think. Where we're really seeing an uptick is course, visitations and faculty who are integrating ePortfolios that we support through an innovation grant. So we have an INvestEd grant that allows us to support faculty members as they're integrating portfolios. So the faculty member goes through series of workshops and trainings, and then they're part of a faculty learning group, as well as attending communities of practice. Through that last year alone, we worked with over 900 students, and many of them then choose to share their work in our ePortfolio showcase. As far as I know, it's the only one of its kind because students built it, students manage it, and students opt in. It is not platform specific, so they can share their work in any platform, and they also provide then a brief abstract. So it functions very much like an academic database. You can search by name, class, subject, keyword, faculty member's name, and other key components like high-impact practice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:38

It is a fantastic resource since it does cover so many different subject areas and showcases how the multimodal portfolios that you're encouraging your students to create, how they are being put together, and what other students can learn from them, and also, because a lot of your portfolios are for assessment purposes, faculty member listening, you can jump into the showcase and search by your discipline. So whether you're in kinesiology or anthropology, and begin to see some students work, hopefully, that are affiliated with that, or if you just have an area of research that you'd like to dive into a little more deeply., you can throw in keywords, pop in a melanoma, and look at all the different research students are doing in labs across campus. Awesome. Since you do mention a student now, let's jump over to Salsabil and talk a bit about your portfolio because you already told us you had your first portfolio experience in high school, but we are going to focus on the one that you did in Debbie's course. Can you please tell us a little bit about the motivation for your portfolio'Legal, not always just'? We'll put a link to the portfolio, which is also part of the showcase, into the episode notes so that everybody can take a look at your portfolio themselves while you are describing it.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 16:08

Yes, thank you so much. So similar to how people treat a thesis where you continue working on the same topic throughout your college experience, I wanted to do that. I think when students first walk into this introductory course and they hear about we are going to be doing an ePortfolio. It's either one of two reactions,'This is good. I don't like the traditional red ink scratching out my whole entire page. This allows me some freedom to explore a topic I'm interested in.' Or some people would be freaking out, 'Now we're incorporating technology with English. This is not what I want to do. I've now, I've tried an essay and put it into an online platform.' With whatever mentality people walk into the class through having these conversations and starting off the course by seeing student examples and then allowing us to slowly go step by step, something about this course was that Professor Oesch-Minor started with telling us that we will not be working on grades in the very beginning. It will reach the point to where we're talking about grades, but in the beginning, it's going to be feedback until you reach a point. It was 'Not yet' or'Yet'. I don't know if you want to jump in on how that works?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 17:10

They have to watch a video with Carol Dweck that talks about 'Yet' and 'Not yet'. And this emerges from Peter Elbow's work in creating evaluation free zones. That early part of the semester, they're turning in work, and I'm just saying 'Yes' or 'Not yet', and they're continuing to build it out. And at that point in the semester, it's very content intensive. I am dictating the reading, and they sit in a room and watch a film with me, and we break it down while we're watching it. We're modelling and thinking very strategically about the way people write, how they write, and I argue that once you write a film review, you understand all the basic tools for writing across genres, but specifically in academic environments. The first challenge that the students have is then writing a film review. But to backtrack a little bit, this is a 'Create your own adventure' course. Students do whatever they want. Some students learn to play guitar. Some students do a ride along with a police officer. Some students do something that lasts an hour. Some students do something that is much more intensive and immersive. It might relate to their profession. I had a student who wanted to learn how to do gory makeup for films, and that took her much longer. I've had students who've gone on diets or gone on fast from their cell phones. We've also had students who interviewed their mother for the first time. This is their opportunity to have a very structured about. This is anchored in Mary Louise Pratt's 'Arts of the contact zone' where we think of things as new contact zones that we're interested in or a familiar contact zone that we want to delve into more deeply.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 18:53

I think the course starting in that way takes away the intimidation factor that I described in the beginning because freedom to do whatever topic you want can be intimidating. So it's kind of like when you first go ice skating and you have the little walkers to ice skate with. That's what the beginning of the course was. We got to get a'Yes' or 'Not yet', keep working, and we'll get to that point. We got to watch that film and talk about it together. We did those things that were step by step, so that when it was time for us to do our own individual projects on topics of our choice, we felt more comfortable doing it, and then we had our little circle time where we talked about our different topics and how it worked for us. So there was always a collaboration piece to it, which I think isn't as common in traditional English courses, and that's what I really appreciated.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:36

From how you're describing things, I'm also getting the sense of the ownership versus authorship area because as students, you have the ownership of deciding your own adventure, deciding on what you really want to because you're invested in it, you're very interested in it, that you are thinking about the topic, maybe not even so much as a true assignment, but really also something you want to explore and therefore invest more into how you're going about learning or enhancing what you already know about the topic.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 20:11

I love that you said that because what I literally preach is that you own your education. Dad was actually a minister. So I use 'preach' in the most evangelical sense. I am doing everything I can to compel students that their success is based on their willingness to take ownership of every class, make every class work for them, and to know that professors are much more open minded than we may appear to be, and that will often give you room to write and explore things that you're passionate about within the boundaries of our disciplines, everything cross germinates. So I love the idea of ownership, and the other thing I've loved is Salsabil's willingness to help me better understand some of the tensions that were going on. And I think one of the things that Salsabil, you've said, is that when faculty give you a ton of structure with assignments and courses, it can feel very restraining, and I definitely do really strict lots of readings, due dates, tons of check, check, your papers must do this and this and this, and at the same time, you're feeling a desire to own it, and you address that in a presentation you did for our faculty a few weeks ago, and I would love if you would share a little bit about that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:25

I think we do need to talk a little bit about Salsabil, what your portfolio is about, before we get too deeply into the analysis of why the portfolio is a good pedagogical tool to use. Tell us a bit what your topic was that you explored further so that we have your context and then can jump into the further discussion.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 21:46

Yeah, so because I said I'm pre law, I'm passionate about that. It's what I want to pursue in the future, I decided I wanted my topic to be aligned with that. I made my title 'Legal, not always just', and I wanted to explore how wrongful convictions impact our criminal justice system. Before I did this course, I did internships with our local prosecutor's office. I talked to some people from the Wrongful Conviction Integrity Unit here, and it became something that was really passionate for me, even though I don't want to pursue criminal law and so this was just an opportunity. Debbie always says, this class is your opportunity to just flag the card that I'm student at a university. Can I please do this? And most of the time they'll say yes, if you walk in with confidence. I decided to do 'Legal, not always just' like Debbie said earlier, the structure of the course, we start with a film review of our own choice. It's not a fun documentary. We can't watch a cartoon. We have to choose a real documentary that is 100% fact based. Given that I was talking about wrongful convictions, I chose Ken Burns' documentary about the Central Park Five. It's an infamous case in New York where there were five wrongfully convicted individuals. They spent time in prison. I started off this section talking about how missed time impacts somebody's life. Going back to the structure of the course, we had certain boxes we need to check, including, how do we start off each paper. We have an abstract, we have our title, and then we set the stage. I said, "It's April 19, 1989. A 28-year old" and I go on. That was the film review. After that, we moved into an immersion experience. So that is where, whatever topic we chose, we have to put ourselves into that situation. I reached out to the local Conviction Integrity Unit at Indianapolis prosecutor's office, and I said,"Can I shadow you for a day?" So I waved my 'IU, I'm a student here. Can I do whatever I want?' flag, and then I got to go for a whole day with this amazing person. We went to the courthouse together, and I sat through seeing her talking to the judge, talking to people. It was a very immersive experience for me. And then after that, we drove back to the prosecutor's office, where I had the opportunity to ask her questions. As part of my ePortfolio, I added that interview and the topics that we covered. For this immersion experience, I did a separate interview. In my conversation with this individual who worked in the prosecutor's office, she was telling me about a case that she worked on, and it was perhaps one of the most memorable to her. It was somebody who was convicted wrongfully. I did this a year ago. I want to say it was about 20 years in prison for a crime she did not commit, and she was accused of killing her son in a house fire of arson. It was later discovered that she did not, in fact, commit the crime. So this person in the Conviction Integrity Unit I spoke with talked about how this was very impactful as a sensitive topic, how even having your name cleared does not change public perception in some points, and how media influences it. There were so many intersectionalities on how that worked. I did a separate interview with her, the person who was wrongfully convicted, and that was very memorable for me. Lasted about three and a half hours. I put the full transcript into my ePortfolio, and I just wanted it to supplement what I already did because I'm talking about wrongful convictions from the perspective of somebody who is helping those cases, but I wanted to see it from somebody who experienced it in a way that not a lot of us think about. So that was a lot to add into my reflection because it was a lot to unpack for me there. So I first made an argument about how an Indiana law needs to be reformed. We're combining everything that we did. The film review, I learned about how wrongful convictions worked. I went into an immersion experience. I talked to people that were involved in this on either side, either perspective, and then I decided that for my argument, I want this to be a result of what happened. My argument was that holistic compensation needs to be for wrongful conviction and individuals. You can't just give a bunch of cash and say, 'done deal that's for your missed time.' You need to help them re-assimilate into society and give them everything that they need because they're going back into society with a damaged reputation, no job experience, sometimes education is impacted. Everything is impacted, and so just throwing money will not be compensation that is adequate. So that was my argument. And then in my reflection, I covered how this whole course was very impactful for me, and I took specific notes from the syllabus, learning outcome goals, and I covered how each learning outcome goal was reached through my ePortfolio process. So it wasn't just 'this was a free for all, write whatever you want'. I had ownership. I had freedom to do what I wanted, but I still followed it in a structured format. So no matter what topic any of us chose, we still had the same result in terms of checking those boxes that needed to be checked. That was my ePortfolio, and after that, in other classes, even if I wasn't doing an ePortfolio, having this holistic, comprehensive knowledge of wrongful convictions, I continued to do projects on that in different classes, following that experience, and it's because I had this full background of what I did in this course.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:38

That is a full on project and really a big research effort also that you did. Coming back to the portfolio work, what I really like in yours is that you work with multimodal content.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 26:52

Something that I learned from doing journalism for a few years is that it's not about having big words or making things look like it's super professional. Communication is about making your chosen audience understand. A lot of what we talked about in this course was, what audience are we trying to reach? Who do we want this to get to? So when I say, for example, that I want the general public or students at IU Indianapolis to understand the impact of wrongful convictions, then when I write this, I can write it in a way that's easy to digest. Part of that was we started the course learning about metacognition and how we remember things, how the layout, if your ePortfolio takes the whole screen, you're writing, it's hard to remember, and your eyes track it differently versus if it's in the middle and it's concentrated in the middle. Having pull out quotes to highlight things, images with captions, everything that we did was supposed to make things engaging, so that if somebody were to just happen upon this, they wouldn't just see a dissertation of page after page. It was to be digestible for the audience that we wanted to read it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:52

I think you've achieved that wonderfully. I'm not the assessor of your paper, but reading your portfolio, it is not in the academic jargon like you would write a regular essay, but it is a website where you are also using language that is engaging, that keeps readers interested, and therefore really nailed the aspect of writing for the audience whom you had in mind, especially since it is also a public portfolio, and at times, also talking directly to us as listeners and viewers of your portfolio. That was one of the learning outcomes that, of course, students needed to think about who's their audience, and therefore, also by creating a web page, it is very different from writing an essay. How do you support students in thinking very differently about writing because they will have been accustomed more to the academic style of writing or have had that drilled into them, maybe before they come to your class.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 28:52

It is challenging to get students to not write for school. I try to do as much as I can with as few pieces of writing as I can as examples. Looking back at Mary Louise Pratt, she actually writes in three different genres. So that page one is her talking about her kid and baseball cards. Then we find out, you read the little note at the bottom, that she's actually presenting this at a very stodgy, formal academic conference. And so she makes a snide comment that they don't want to hear about her kids, and she jumps into this very immersive literary analysis that takes a historical lens of a letter. Then the very last section of her paper is pedagogical. How does this affect the way she teaches and works in the class? From the beginning, we're talking about writing tonally differently, and so the film review, they're thinking about writing strategies, and we're learning a lot of different ways of writing and the narrative - Salsabil and many others break all the rules - and part of the way we introduce that is looking at some of the best journalism on the planet. So we're reading Jennifer Percy's 'My terrifying night with Afghanistan's only female warlord' or 'Duterte's terror' by Burlak from the New York Times, which is story and images to make a photo narrative. As they're seeing these really brilliantly crafted pieces, hopefully they begin thinking about freedom they can express in their writing. I am not grading the portfolio as far as how beautiful it is or the bells and whistles they put in. I'm a writing teacher. I'm assessing their writing, but what I find is as students engage with multimodal discourse, as they begin to think more strategically about the audience experience. So we do a lot of talk about rhetorical context and what that means, and how you think about gatekeepers like faculty members and secondary readers and target audiences. They begin thinking about the context of the release. How are people going to get to it? Who's going to get to it? Who wants to read it? Is this for family and friends? Is this for your professional circle? And then begin to ask some of those questions about like, making the right argument at the right time. Like, how are things very specific and time oriented and always through the lens of empathy. What can we do to be compassionate and engaging with our audience? That brings us to eye track. Once people come to a page, how do their eyes track across a page? What do they need as cues to help them digest material. We're being hosts to the people who visit our website, just like we would to someone who visits our house. And if they asked to go the bathroom, we don't say,'It's here. Go find it.' We give them very clear directions. You know, 'Third door on the right, and you have to jiggle the handle a little bit.' These kinds of things help students begin to feel like their work is their home and their world that they're opening up to others. And some do have a lot more moving pictures and images and visuals like Salsabil did. Some are very stark and minimalist and it's super intentional, and they want that because they're at our school of art, or it's a persona that they're working with. Others are more focused on words, and so they're doing less to build out these multimodal components. But my goal is that they're intentional and that they're thinking about composition holistically. Composition is much more than words and implications and illusions. It is the experience of your audience and letting them know most of you won't write another white paper after you leave college. So let's start breaking the mold right now.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:33

Salsabil, you did not just write your portfolio and go through the motions of the course and engage in all the processes that Debbie told us about. But Debbie had also invited you to present about your portfolio practice at a faculty workshop where you needed to think about your portfolio from the different perspective of why it is so important for you as a student to create it, and also, I guess, in a way, to sell the portfolio idea to the faculty and make them interested in incorporating ideas from portfolio practice into their own classes. Can you share with us, please, what you learned through your creation of the portfolio, reflecting on your learning experience? What were the big things that stood out for you?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 33:27

Well, it was no pressure at all [all laugh]. But when I when I was doing that, when you think about selling an idea of something, I was thinking of it from the perspective of faculty. Just for context, these weren't English professors. These were professors of all different subjects. So this wasn't about ePortfolios and writing classes. This was about ePortfolios for faculty to help their students learn from.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:49

Gosh, no pressure at all to speaking to everybody at the university [all three laugh].

Salsabil Qaddoura: 33:55

But the way that I thought about it was, this is an easy thing to sell because ePortfolios were really helpful for me as a student. I didn't have to stretch it out to make it sound better than it was. Thinking of it from the perspective of a faculty member, I was thinking, if I gave my students that much freedom, then they probably won't be learning from the structure of the class. So I decided that my thesis statement, as you might call it, for my pitch to them, was that the idea that student ownership undermines structure, it is false. It actually prevents students from reaching their The way that the course was designed, it was intentionally potential. designed. We started off by taking out the intimidation factor as we learned for structure, and then when we got to spread our wings and choose the topics that we wanted to, we were still adhering to that structure that was introduced to us in the beginning of the course. We got to see student examples. We got to see how to write on our own styles because, again, it was a writing course. But thinking of it, whether you're a chemistry professor, English professor, no matter what the topic is, you can have a structurally sound, a clear curriculum and still allow student ownership. That was my first claim. Don't worry about the fact that it's student ownership. In fact, that just enhances the learning experience because now this is my ownership. This is my topic. No one forced me to do this topic, so when I'm pursuing this, then I have the motivation to put my best foot forward.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:15

It's also more authentic because you're not just doing the work because there's a randomly selected experience that everybody needs to reflect on, but you're reflecting on something that is important to you, that you have seen in your real life.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 35:30

Yeah, and a lot of courses don't have that collaboration process. So between us doing our own individual projects, it wasn't just between us and Debbie, it was between us and the whole class. We got to share our work as we went. In doing that, we got to collaborate, we got to work on things, and learn from one another. After that, I decided to give my next claim to the faculty. I said that structure is the backbone of student autonomy, and that way, specifically looking at the W131 'Reading and Inquiry' class that we did, it was progression. We started with the readings. After that, we slowly went into talking about metacognition, how people remember things, how that would impact our writing. We wrote a piece that was how to annotate and think in different perspectives as you annotate, we were seeing things from the perspective of writers. Then we started going into our drafts. We started with our first draft and then peer reviews, and then we slowly moved into actually building our ePortfolio. Structure was still there while we had autonomy. After that, I moved to voice and choice are not soft alternatives. They are academic technologies. We developed our own intellectual tools in this process. Voice and choice allowed us to take ownership and to be motivated to work on our own projects. We talked about pedagogy theory, schema building, synthesis, high level writing strategies. Our first piece was a feature narrative. I really enjoyed that, coming from a journalism background, but I think anybody of any background would enjoy that also. We did set pieces. So for example, within my immersion experience, I talked about racial and gender disparities within the criminal justice system. So it was like a focused, research based set piece to give context, to do a little sidebar on the topic that we were already working on, and multimodal composition. So after that, we're working on structuring that in a way that's understandable to the audience. Then after that, I moved to talking about early models and continuous building. For our final project, actually, you had the opportunity to revise a previous project for an improved grade. So in a lot of this was having continuous work and having the opportunity to revise. We were allowed to make mistakes. And as somebody who did honours classes all high school, we're not allowed to make mistakes. You make a mistake, you get an F. That's it. That produces fear, and it makes it so that we don't want to take creative risks. So having that ability to revise, to look back on our work, to change things, to talk to our professor, talk to our peers, it was allowing us to work, and it prevented disengagement. I didn't just shut down because I got a 'Not yet'. This isn't what it could be. Let's keep working on it. So it was that progress that keeps us engaged.

Kristina Hoeppner: 38:05

You do actually also share a couple of your earlier drafts in your portfolio to show your progress. That's I find it's also the nice thing about the portfolio is that it's not necessarily always an end product, but that we can also show the progress and show the process of working on something, making that visible in order to give the reader a better idea of where you came from, how you transitioned to end up where you are then at the end.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 38:32

That's at the backbone of process pedagogy, which is very much at the foundation of modern rhetorical studies, for rhetoric and composition and teaching writing, is that transparency of learning, and if students begin to see draft after draft and how it's even changed and how they've gotten feedback, they begin to not just see I can write a good paper, but understand how they wrote a good paper and why it's a good paper. So not only does the faculty member see them growing and learning, the student sees themselves as someone who can learn and can grow if they follow this process.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:10

How did the feedback loops and peer reviews work for you? Because on your portfolio site, you do not have comments enabled on each page, but I got the impression that the feedback and the comments from other students happened before you actually finished your portfolio, so that they influenced how you wrote the final product.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 39:36

Throughout each step, we always had Canvas discussions, even in an unfinished product. As we were just thinking through our ideas, our brainstorms were available for our peers. It allowed us to be vulnerable. It allowed us to give honest feedback. And something that I especially appreciated from the peer reviews was I always go back to this. Everyone always thinks about themselves. So as we're looking at other people's papers, we were probably thinking about our own paper like, 'Oh, I didn't do that. I should have done this. Or maybe I need to improve this.' Whatever we're doing, we're looking at someone else's paper and thinking back to our own. So at the end, we'd always have the same question, after reviewing other people's work, what changes would you make to your paper? So I think peer reviews, yes, they happen throughout the course, and I eventually added them into my ePortfolio to show the process, to show reflection, but it was definitely continuous throughout the course.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:25

Okay, so you had the peer reviews in the separate platform, in your learning management system, other students were reading through your earlier portfolio drafts, but the conversation, the peer review, happened elsewhere.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 40:37

Yes, exactly.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 40:39

I want to give students room to be honest, but not feel like their failures are public. So for students who want to make all of that available on their website, they can, but that's happening in our learning management system, we use Canvas, and there's something called a threaded discussion. So a student can post and then other students can reply. So I require students to respond to the person above them and the person below them in the thread. That means they're usually going back at least twice. So they post their work. The person above them is already there, and then they need to return back. The feedback they give is highly structured. So they're saying, like, 'I love this idea. I know somebody who has a fishing pond, if you want to try fishing for the first time and not have to get a license, come to my high school buddy's house, and I'll go meet you, and we'll fish together.' One of the beautiful things that can happen is students begin to go with each other to immersion experiences from time to time. So from the very beginning, when they're ideating and saying, 'here's three things I'm thinking about,' and then they pick one thing they want to do, and then they try to figure out how to get access and how to do that. Because some people like, 'I want to pet a tiger.' And I'm like, 'that's not going to happen. This time of year, there aren't any tigers close by.' Somebody's like, 'I want to wash an elephant.' I'm like, 'we can do that. We can get you to some place to wash an elephant.' They're doing this. But because it can be difficult to carve out time outside of class, there are at least four formal peer reviews that happen in class, where 30 to 45 minutes of class is dedicated to them, reading a paper, writing feedback, and then talking in small groups, usually two or four, about an assignment. So they're getting handwritten notes. And these are highly structured, like, 'Do you have a set piece? Does it quote two different authors.' So there's those components, but then there's also, 'what did you like best about this paper? And now you've read your peers work. What are you going to change about yours?' that we integrate into these pretty intensive peer review processes. They do give feedback on the eP near the end of semester.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:39

Is it actually important for the portfolios of the students to be public? Or can students also decide that they want to have portfolios that are only available to other students and you as instructor?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 42:52

They can limit it to most extents. I do ask that they at least be willing to share with one other peer. Most students are open to having it public, and I encourage them to think that way, to think about public audiences. Some of them write about topics that need to be private. And so I see that, and they see that, and most of the platforms they pick at least have some degree of control, but occasionally they just don't publish. They're sharing links with a peer in edit mode, and with me in edit mode, and they work with that same peer through the entire course. There are also students who write things that I don't think they should publish for one reason or another. I want them to know what it means to have public work versus private work, and I often will pull them aside and say, 'Are you sure this is what you want to say and that this is the way you want to say it in these instances.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 43:43

I really like that this is also part of the course that your students don't just have the ownership, they participate in authentic activities that they are then summarising and also reflecting on, but that they also need to think about their audience and the privacy aspect and how people that they are talking about might be impacted if something was to be published publicly, rather than in a more closed space, in order to protect certain identities of people or certain topics that are discussed because as soon as something is public, it can be found again. But back to your portfolio now, Salsabil, we stopped at that peer reviews and also feedback loops were important aspects of your portfolio process. What other elements contributed to the successful portfolio project and then also completion of the writing course?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 44:39

Something else that I kind of pitched, especially when I was talking to the faculty, it was evidence of deep learning. So but whatever topic it is, I'm sure that an immersion experience of some sort can still be evidence of engaged learning, of deep learning. No matter what topic there is, these classes are moving on so people can pursue a career. So there's an immersion experience somewhere down the road for these. It makes something more hands on, but less structured in the sense that home, homework, school, back home. It allows something that's engaging to be a part of that process. Ownership gives purpose in that way. It keeps you feeling held accountable. When someone has their own yard, I don't care if they manage it, get landscaping, but if it's my yard, then I care. So in this case, this ePortfolio is my yard. Instead of it just being an assignment that I feel like I can just turn in a sloppy thing. This is something that I have to take ownership of and be responsible for. This is my name on it. So I think that no matter what the course is, a big part of it is that ownership piece, these immersions, these aspects of our choice, gives us evidence of deep learning. And then I also say that the final ePortfolio is academic proof. So like we kind of touched on earlier, we're revising projects as our final exam. So revising it to expand it, add depth to it, or fix things that we got feedback for earlier. We have that reflection section that we had to complete where I talked about how it linked back to the course, what I learned, what I can take from it to move forward, and it was measurable growth. I'm not just saying I got better at writing. I got better at ePortfolios. I learned how to communicate. I had to go outside of my house and talk to people. I even remember that in the course, Debbie said some skill that we need to do is just go to a restaurant, go face-to-face and make an order. Don't do the mobile stuff. Part of this we learned communication, critical thinking, innovation, we got to have those skills that don't just come from going home and staring at a blank computer screen trying to figure out what to write. There was pieces of this that gave us inspiration, motivation, things to write about. My whole pitch was that, in every sense, this is the student that is learning whatever you want to be in that course, but because they have that ownership and sense of responsibility from it, we feel compelled to do better in our work, and we also get to see our growth. And these aren't just skills that are exclusive to this course. These are skills that we learn as we move into other courses and even into our careers as ePortfolios are now preferred to résumés in professional workplaces. So it was just collapsing the false dichotomy. Structure and ownership are not mutually exclusive. You can have both at the same time, and that student agency is what allows us to keep moving forward and to be feel empowered throughout that learning process.

Kristina Hoeppner: 47:10

Yeah, you're just wonderfully summarising why portfolios also work for assessments and why they are so so important, and as you in your claim in the faculty workshop say, it's not a performance, but it is academic proof because you're still following learning outcomes, you're still getting the job done, and Debbie can still grade you, but she gets to read different experiences instead of reading the same thing all over, the same example...

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 47:43

Absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 47:44

And therefore[Debbie and Kristina laugh], kind of focusing on potentially other things, rather than the writing and the progress that you're also making in your writing because, Debbie, you also see the drafts of the students before and then what they end up at the end. Therefore you can also see their progression, which is also important for the assessment piece to really, truly see what have your students learned throughout the semester. And so that is very much the academic proof of learning throughout the term, learning what is being discussed in class, and then at the same time, also applying it, which we as future employers do want to see and do appreciate because then we know, yes, it's not just that they are attending a course, but they are taking things out of it, and they can apply it, therefore, really having those elements work hand in hand. So it's not just knowledge acquisition, but also the application of knowledge.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 48:41

I think you need to come to class and say that that would help a lot. I do think Salsabil is the culmination of authentic, experiential, evidence-based learning. EPortfolios at their best when they are layered with other high-impact practices give students unique opportunities to own their education, to learn to be assertive and to pursue things that are meaningful for them, not just follow a syllabus and go into a routine where they do as they're told. This is why, when students break the assignment boundaries, like Salsabil did when she stuck in an extra interview, I applaud it. I've had students turn in narratives that were very much just journal entries. Then they did all the things I asked them to do, but they did it as journal entries, as interviews, fascinating choices that they make, particularly with that second writing project, where they have a lot of freedom. And then I find that every single student, after they've had their immersion experience and compose their narrative feels something deeply. So they're usually really happy or really mad about something. That's when we start talking about formal argument, and they have something to argue about, and it's very naturally evolving from research they've done for the past 10 to 11 weeks, and they are prepared then with writing skills they did with their film review. And they are understanding structure to then jump to a more specific form or genre, and they compose a formal argument that is related to then their immersion experience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 50:21

Do you actually provide a template for your students to work off, either in the platforms that you're using, or just by giving them the structure? Because you're essentially talking about a lot of scaffolding, and also Salsabil, you mentioned you had the structure, but you also had the freedom, and so I'm wondering if that is also something that you discuss in the ePortfolio Studio or in supporting faculty and students to get started with their portfolios.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 50:53

I want to address that, but first, I'm wondering what Salsabil would say. Did I give you a template that you followed like everybody logged into the same template and used it?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 51:02

That is actually how we started. In a lot of ways, this can be an intimidating thing when you walk into a class and hear that you have to do an ePortfolio. So there actually was a template that we worked on, and it was, this is a template we're working on this together in class. If you don't like it, you can change it, you can change your font, you can do whatever. You can even change the platform that you're using, whatever it was, but we had a little bit of that in a class, which in college, I learned that a lot of things are go home and do it yourself. And so having that in class support to ask questions and do that was very helpful. It was a generic thing. Some people, I think, ended up using that template for their final ePortfolio. But then for other people, again, by taking ownership. Yeah, it might have been easier to use the template, but because this is something that we want to create, this is our topic, we did kind of evolve from that template to make our own creative choices.

Kristina Hoeppner: 51:50

I like that idea very much because it does still give you that ownership. And many, many years ago, for one presentation, I said when templates weren't quite the thing, and some people found them limiting, that for me, actually, a template is not a fixed structure, but it is more an invitation. So it's almost like a half finished house where you do have structural components so that the roof doesn't fall down, and you have your doors and your windows and but inside, you might still be able to move a wall, or you can put wallpaper on, or you can decide whether to have carpet or hardwood floors and things like that. You have structure, but it does not limit you entirely. You can still have the freedom of expressing yourself.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 52:38

We started off with seeing other student works from previous courses before too, which is very helpful. They said that the generic template is like the bare minimum, and then this is what you can achieve, or you can achieve more than that. I'm someone who always needs an example to see first, like I don't want to start baking a recipe without seeing the picture of what I will be baking. So I think seeing the examples from previous students, or looking through that ePortfolio showcase, it allows us to let our imagination spark a little bit and then think about, yeah, this is the generic template, but this is what I can do with it. This is what I can make it into.

Kristina Hoeppner: 53:10

Debbie, do you want to add something?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 53:12

I do. I feel very, very strongly about templates. I don't like highly structured templates. I've built about 40 this year for other faculty members who want them for their class. I think in these ways, they function like a mad lib, like fill in the blank, pop your work in. There can be a point where templates do begin to limit some of the creativity. But I also understand that in some of these courses, they need some structure because it's going to be part of assessment or programme accreditation, and there are formal constraints at play. I love that ePortfolio is flexible enough to do both. So what I'm doing for students is a homepage and four tabs. For now we're going to name them, project 1, 2, 3, and reflection. But those are terrible titles. Wait until you put your stuff up there and actually give an actual title that relates to the content on the page. And then, basically, while there may be some things on those templates, they're starting tabula rasa. They got a page that they do with what they want. In class, after they finish doing a MLA-formatted white paper. They copy and paste it, and then we go wild. Stick in pictures, hyperlinks, pull out quotes, we experiment with margins, and think about rapid eye return. Then after that, really the sky's the limit. I think, Salsabil changed platforms. Probably 25% of students now do shift platforms. Others of them choose different templates. I pick a really ugly, nasty template, so nobody wants to keep it. That's fine, sort of a goal. But I think template as structure, like you said, I had never thought of it as an invitation, but I do think that templates are just an architecture. This is the basic frame. For people who need more, for faculty members who need more or are so uncomfortable with giving students freedom that they build more, there's a real facility to that, and many students still do take ownership and stretch the boundaries and do more with them. But in its most primal form, if that's possible with the technology, the students are able to see everything in one spot. Students don't go back to previous assignments in a learning management system and look at them. They're not clicking through. It's not easy to get back to the next semester. Something about that curation and collection of pieces emphasises learning, and it helps make it transparent for students, for faculty, for future assessment, but also it makes it something that people care about, so they're much more willing to share it with family and friends. How many students run home with a white paper and say, 'Mom, mom, I wrote a 12-page paper,' and how many moms would want to read it? But I do find that students will tell me, 'I took it home and I shared it, or I'm sending a link to my high school teacher that I appreciate so much.'

Kristina Hoeppner: 56:08

Yeah, most of the portfolios I think that you're creating and that are also in the showcase are more of the assessment type or professional learning or showcase portfolios, whereas sometimes, when we're talking about professional certification portfolios, those are a bit more structured simply because you do need to meet certain criteria and need to have X number of pieces of evidence. So that highly structured portfolio where you're not really colouring too much outside of the lines, also has its place. But for the most part, I think even in those circumstances, you can still bring in your voice, and you can still personalise it in certain ways. I do want to briefly pick up something Debbie that you had said very much at the beginning, and hear how Salsabil, how that helped you with the creation of your portfolio because Debbie, you had said that you don't really talk about the portfolio much at the start of the course, but that you do introduce it later, once students have actually created the first couple of pieces of learning evidence. Salsabil, do you find that was very useful for you so that you already had content that you could put into your portfolio, rather than having it as a more theoretical construct in mind of what you might need to use it for?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 57:27

Yeah, I think having an empty template, it just makes me want to fill it up. So the fact that we had something to start it with, I really think back again to the thought that it's intimidating if you walk into a class that's completely structured different than anything you've ever had, K through 12 before starting college. If it was just 'write three projects and put it into an ePortfolio, and I'll talk to you again at the end of the semester' that would have been scary for me as a student. That ability to first learn writing strategies, read different pieces, talk about them as a class, even watch a documentary as a class and talk about it, and then writing our own first piece and getting feedback on that. That whole process set us up for that ePortfolio, which made it way less intimidating. And also, once we started putting in our information into the ePortfolio, we got to with that first project, mess around with style, taking pull out quotes, adding hyperlinks, doing that sort of thing. So we kind of got the gist of it from that first project, so that when we did do our second project and our third project, and we filled up those tabs, we had the memory of how we did it for the first one, what stylistic choices we wanted to do. So it was easing us into it again, like the ice skating rink. I'm always using the walker, but this time, we got to take a walker out and fully do our twirls and whatever. I really think that was a great structure to anybody who does an ePortfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner: 58:41

Great. So now both of you, what do you wish everybody should know about portfolios? Salsabil, do you want to start?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 58:52

EPortfolios are great, and I think all faculty should look into, regardless of what subject it is, should look into integrating it into their structure.

Kristina Hoeppner: 59:00

Why is that for you?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 59:02

All the reasons...

Kristina Hoeppner: 59:03

All the reasons above that you had mentioned [all three laugh and talk].

Salsabil Qaddoura: 59:08

I think as a student, it is very impactful for me. Sometimes I'll go back and scroll through my ePortfolio just to look at it and have a little smile. So I think that it's a very impactful experience for any student. An the age of AI, I think that a lot of faculty are also concerned about how that works. I do journalism. I even interviewed for an article about how faculty feels about it. And in a lot of ways, it can be concerning for someone who spends their time teaching something, and then to think that somebody just enters a prompt and has it all done. We're encouraged to use AI in this course in a responsible manner. But I think that in the idea of having an immersion experience, for example, that's something you have to go out and do, and again, that ownership, I feel happy about my outcome. I don't feel like I just sent in a prompt and had it all finished within seconds. I can look back at it with pride, saying, yeah, I went through each step of this. I watched the whole documentary. I had to pause it a billion times just to take notes and know what I'm going to write about. Then I did my immersion experience. I had to go through the email back and forth to set up a time and a place, and then I had to go there, and I took pictures, and I wrote about and then I set up another interview. It was that whole process of everything, the research for the argument piece, No matter what subject it is, that ownership, it makes it empowering for us, so that we don't feel the need to quickly turn it in just for the sake of turning in the assignment. It's something that we're proud of. And I think that if faculty want students to remember what they worked on and to have pride in it, then the ePortfolio is the way to go.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:00:30

And to summarise the benefits that you see and why faculty should all be using portfolios in their courses, it was that structure is the backbone of student autonomy. Then ownership. Voice and choice are not soft alternatives. They are academic technologies. Thirdly, that early models and continuous building prevent disengagement from the students. Fourth, that peer review creates intellectual maturity and that includes peer reviews and also feedback loops. Then the fifth argument is that immersion into the specific topic that you had chosen is that evidence of the deep learning. And then lastly, that the final ePortfolio is the academic proof. It is not just a performance, and all of that is collapsing the false dichotomy that portfolios are not assessment, but they actually help assessment, keep students engaged and produce better results, because they are also authentic tasks, just as a very brief summary of all the things you had mentioned before. Debbie, what do you as faculty and also member of the ePortfolio Studio and also president of AAEEBL now think that you wish everybody knew about portfolios?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:01:53

It would depend on what stage everyone is, but I would say for faculty, technology is not the barrier. I wish faculty members were not afraid of the technology. Students typically have the technology, and the technology should be the thing on the back burner. Your content, your disciplinary expertise, and what students are learning should be upfront. When you focus on that, when you focus on the disciplinary expertise that you are sharing and supporting and enabling students to digest and engage with, ePortfolio is your logical choice. It actually becomes the pedagogy and the high-impact tool that spans a semester gives students flexibility and sharing growth over time, and honestly, it's just more fun for you to have to read. It also makes it wonderful at the end of the semester, when you're like, 'What did this student do the first few weeks? I can't remember.' And then you're jumping back into the learning management system and you're trying to figure out which assignment it was. You have them place it in the portfolio, just clicking back a few spots or using a search phrase to get to it, and it really changes the relationship to learning, and I believe the relationship to your students because you begin to see multiple intelligences. So I'm no longer saying 'this student is a strong writer, this student is not a strong writer' because I'm seeing such a broad range of skills, from creativity to ability to go and persevere if their first request for an activity gets turned down and their second and their third, what do they do? They're learning so much about ownership and resilience and learning over time, and that learning is a process. So in those ways, whether it's in a first-year class or in a senior capstone, where they're doing a large independent project ePortfolio is the logical pedagogical choice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:03:46

Because it just also covers so many things of that we want students to learn and incorporates it into a more natural environment, where they learn all of that in context and also bring themselves in and therefore personalising that learning to themselves, making it more engaging.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:04:06

Absolutely and it falls in line with NACE competencies. They're building career readiness skills like technology skills. If nothing else, they're expanding their understanding of technologies and uses of technologies in one more way.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:04:21

Now to the final three questions for the two of you that I'd like both of you to answer, please. And that is our quick answer round. And so the first question, Salsabil, I'll start with you for that one. What words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:04:39

Empowering, engaging, and student ownership.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:04:43

Thank you. Debbie, what are your words or short phrases?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:04:48

I would say experimental, transparent, and empowering,

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:04:53

Nice, both great sets of words that are important and really also encompass what the portfolio does. Debbie, what tip do you have for fellow learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:05:08

Build with students in the classroom after they have something to put into the portfolio that is substantial. Number one tip. This isn't a week one thing, this is not even usually a week three thing, this isn't an'About me'. When they have a substantial, valuable piece of academic work, stop take time in class the day that it's due, transmit it from the academic format that they used into the ePortfolio, and teach them the basic skills re portfolio building. It can take 15 to 30 minutes, and it covers an abundance of problems that will crop up the rest of the semester if you do it any other way.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:05:46

Salsabil, what do you want your future instructors or people creating the courses, learning designers, to know about how to make the portfolio activities a good experience for your fellow students?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:06:00

I think again, starting off with something that is less intimidating, working on course content, and then developing it into an ePortfolio. And then I also think having that emphasis on the ability to make mistakes for growth and then learning from those mistakes and building back on whatever mistakes you made.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:06:18

What advice do you have for fellow students or anybody else creating portfolios, Salsabil?

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:06:26

Take your creative risks. When I had the analogy of this yard versus my neighbour's yard, this is your project. This is your yard. You can choose to landscape it, to make it look nice or not, take ownership of your work. Be proud of it and take creative risks.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:06:39

I really love that metaphor of the yard. I had not come across that. There is the garden metaphor, but the yard I find is less intimidating than a full on garden, and so I really love that idea of having that probably front yard in particular, that you might also want to show to others, or also have the backyard that is more your private area. Now Debbie, what advice do you have for your students or maybe also fellow faculty, who you might want to encourage to create their own portfolios?

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:07:10

I love that you're rolling faculty in because I advocate for using ePortfolios to teach ePortfolios so that faculty are building along with the students as a valuable part of that. But when I was thinking about it, the number one thing you want is patience, bravery, and the ability to go for it. Just try it. You can delete it really easily, or copy it, or duplicate it, or shape it in lots of different ways. The other thing I would say, and I try to tell students like Salsabil, set a clock. You can get lost in this. You can forget, and it's three hours later when you had 45 minutes. So I encourage my students who find themselves over developing to set a clock got 45 minutes work on it, at least know that you've reached that time goal because I personally can start playing with one of my portfolios. It's 11pm and I'm trying to get to bed by midnight, I look up and it's two, and I've had a ton of fun, I needed to sleep. Set a clock.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:08:07

Yeah, I only took 45 minutes on each section. I only took 45 minutes.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:08:11

I don't believe you [Salsabil laughs]. I can't believe you said that.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:08:13

It was not 45[all laugh].

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:08:16

But I did, I did say, set a clock. I did say, try.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:08:20

You did. You did, but I couldn't help myself. I had to take more time for it. It's fun [Debbie laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:08:25

This very nicely mirrors what the ePortfolios Australia Community of Practice offers because they have so called PARE sessions - plan, act, reflect, and ePortfolio. And in these sessions, they use the Pomodoro method so that you do set a timer for 20-25 minutes, work on your portfolio, then you come back together. Then you might want to talk with some other people, ask questions, or ask for feedback, and then you go back into the writing for another 20-25 minutes, so that you have these intense working alone periods. But then go back to the wider group. Mentioning that time aspect is very good because, yes, you can get lost in creating things, especially also when it comes to multimodality or when you're exploring the different audience that you might not have written for before and therefore just want to perfect all that is in there. Thank you so so much, Salsabil and Debbie for this wonderful conversation, sharing all the things that you have learned, Debbie, in your case, throughout your three decades of portfolios, initially lugging around all the ring binders or seeing all the various printouts and then transitioning into the electronic portfolio, and you, Salsabil as a student, thank you so much for sharing not just your portfolio, Salsabil, but also your reflection on the process, so that we get a better idea of what you as a student also get out of the experience and shared that with other faculty at Indiana University Indianapolis, so that they know that the work that they put into creating the portfolio activities land with the students and do have the promised and envisaged outcomes that you are engaged in learning, that you care about what you learn, that you do also learn for life, that you're learning skills and also just can take what you have back into your other studies and apply there as well, so that it's not just this one task, but that you can build on top of that all the time later on. So thank you so so much the two of you.

Salsabil Qaddoura: 1:10:42

Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Oesch-Minor: 1:10:44

Oh, thank you. This has been fabulous. And thank you, Salsabil, as always, this was amazing. I appreciate your voice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:10:52

Now over our listeners. As you think about your own portfolio work, what resonated most with you today? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Mastodon, and tag me or send me an email if you prefer. This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Professor Dr Debbie Oesch-Minor and Salsabil Qaddoura. Make sure to check out the resources in the episode notes in your podcast app or at podcast.mahara.org. If you found this valuable, share it with a colleague who'd appreciate it, too. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.