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, my guest is Dr Megan Mize from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Megan and I have been on the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force since 2019, and thus I've had the opportunity to work with her and learn from her for a number of years now, which is I find always enriching because Megan is such a powerhouse. We call her the 'Badass of ePortfolios' when it comes to portfolio practice. She's been on the podcast already, if you've listened to older episodes, in 2023 together with Dr Amy Cicchino and Dr Sarah Zurhellen when we talked about one of the principles that we've worked on in the Digital Ethics Task Force, which was the visibility of labour. Today though, the focus is on the portfolio initiatives at ODU, which shed a light on how portfolios can be embedded more fully across a university. So nice to catch up with you, Megan.

Megan Mize: 1:22

Oh man, I love being introduced as the 'Badass of ePortfolios'. It should absolutely be on the header of my personal portfolio [laughs]. It makes me feel good. So happy to hear it [both laugh].

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:34

Megan, what is your current role at Old Dominion University?

Megan Mize: 1:39

So my current role at Old Dominion University is the Director for ePortfolios in Digital Initiatives in our Center for Undergraduate Success. In that role, I lead campus-wide ePortfolio initiatives tied to high-impact learning, work-based learning, and now general education reform. I also oversee a student-facing support team that we call the 'ePortfolio studio', so we help students get through their reflective processes and working with building these digital portfolios. And I also teach in our English and our interdisciplinary study programmes. So that, you know, my work is actually grounded in classroom practice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:16

That's a long list of things in your job, and you'd started out with 16th-century English, I think to remember, right?

Megan Mize: 2:23

Yeah, you're totally right. I was a 16th-century literary scholar when I began as a researcher, and my dissertation is on Elizabeth the first and 16th-century pedagogy, but the focus was on media and identity. So it actually made a lot of sense in what I teach, and then that translated to portfolio work because I'm helping students represent identity in new media spaces.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:46

So for how long have you then been the champion for portfolios at ODU?

Megan Mize: 2:50

and then I realise I'm a few years past that. So I've been supporting it since around 2012. I actually began supporting portfolio work in the English Department. I was then pulled up to our Honors College and finally was lifted into the institutional level as part of our former strategic plan.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:11

You've also taught portfolios to information security researchers, right?

Megan Mize: 3:17

Oh yeah, yeah. We've had a lot of work with cyber security as a huge push over the last few years, and so I actually teach a capstone course specifically for helping cyber students develop portfolios, which is really wild because, you know, many of them work for NASA and the CIA and all of that. So it's really quite interesting to navigate what they can and can't share, but also guide students in a discipline where reflection has a very specific connotation and purpose for them, and helping them think about themselves more holistically,.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:47

Mhh, but also with your background then not just reflecting in English and writing, but bringing that multimodal element in.

Megan Mize: 3:56

Absolutely. Yeah, the multimodality is really important, and it's kind of funny to work with students who are constantly - especially with that group - online and getting them to think more creatively about how they represent evidence of their skills because they have a larger array of evidence than they think they do.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:12

Today, I want to focus on the two initiatives- not entirely new - but still newish enough that you have at ODU, where portfolios and reflective practice are written all over them. One, of course, is the Mellon-funded Monarch Humanities Internship Academy and the other one is the General Education Reform. Can you please share how portfolios fit into each of them? And let's start with your awesome Mellon grant.

Megan Mize: 4:41

[Laughs] Thank you for letting me talk about these because these actually kicked off around the same time, about two years ago, and they are really big initiatives. So with the Mellon-funded Monarch Humanities Internship Academy, which we call MHIA, it's this initiative that's really focused specifically on preparing humanities students for work-based learning or work-integrated learning with an emphasis on nonprofit settings. And so the core expectation for students going through this programme is a reflective portfolio on their experience. We developed shared guidelines along with our Internship Office and Humanities Faculty, and then we give ongoing support with our ePortfolio assistance through orientations, multiple reflective workshops, tutoring, and we even give them individualised screencast feedback when they submit the completed portfolio. And then my team also does a lot of operation work for this grant, where we manage the collection of those portfolios, verify access, and also archive them as deliverables. And by the end of this grant, we should have supported about 750 students in the creation of work-based learning portfolios. That's a big deal.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:48

Yeah. And how long is the project?

Megan Mize: 5:51

It is a $5 million, five-year grant, and we're halfway through. So we've really started to pick up some steam, really started to get this streamlined. And, I'll tell you, this is one of the really cool projects, where in a short period, you get such a sharp window into what our students are doing out in the community. You know, many of them are working with local museums, are doing service learning, such as translating for second language clients in hospitals and talking about how that helps the community, and so you can watch in real time where students understand that what they're learning in the class can really impact outside of ODU. It's really gratifying to see that and to see their enthusiasm.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:32

750 students is nothing to sneeze at [Megan laughs] because you do need to manage them, you do need to manage the staff and everything around it. And so you said it's humanities, with the focus on nonprofit. What do the students major in that participate in the programme?

Megan Mize: 6:50

You know, there's a whole list, and I don't want the mhia folks to get upset with me if I don't have them memorised. But for instance, there are very specific departments that get to be a part of this out of our College of Arts and Letters. Obviously, English and history are major players. Some of our Comm, not all of our Communication students can participate. There is a constriction as well on this. Slicing and dicing who counts as Humanities and who doesn't. Those are our largest ones. We also have Women and Gender Studies, Asian Studies; World Languages, obviously, is a part of it, so you get a wide array. But it also shows us, you know, when I say that slicing and dicing, what it really is showing us, too is ways we can build for the rest of that college, which is the intention of the Academy, is to serve all of Arts and Letters and prepare their students for work-based learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:37

And I assume, I mean, ODU is a fairly large university, and that 750 students is not the majority of the Humanities. How do you select the students or the specific work-integrated learning opportunities to participate in this initiative?

Megan Mize: 7:56

Well, so I want to shout out two colleagues, Dr Liz Zanoni and Alison Lietzenmayer. Liz is in our History Department, and Allison is in our Communications Department. They are the faculty representatives. They are Directors for the Academy who work with our Internship Office, and so they have a set of guidelines for the students who are eligible. And so Liz really helps identify market and onboard to students who are interested and Allison works to prepare faculty, integrating preparation for work based learning, and then also helping identify students through that effort. They're really the ones who do that and work with employers, identifying employers, and making sure that they're mentoring our students and having a good learning experience, which then ties to us coming in and trying to mentor the students through concurrent and summative reflection throughout. We work all together, but I want to acknowledge that that's really their labour [laughs]. They do a really good job, and it can be hard because it's a set pool of students. For instance, we do class visits where MHIA goes into classrooms and advertises, I think, they have 40 to 50 current internships, and they're adding all the time to the ones that count for this, and then doing the best to onboard students. And we keep a rolling onboarding process. So at the start of each semester, we get cohort one that comes to my ePortfolio assistance, and they do outreach to those students. And then in the mid semester, we'll get cohort two, which are new students who have been added, and we do outreach to them. There's just this constant effort to try to encourage Humanities students to join. Once we get them in, a lot of them repeat it. They're allowed to repeat. So we will see students doing two, maybe even three internships with this Academy.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:35

Oh, great. That gives you a lot of data to then go through and see what impact the internships have had with the portfolio reflections, and then especially for the students that repeat the programme, whether their portfolio looks different when they go through the second or third time.

Megan Mize: 9:54

Yeah, we certainly see maturation very cleanly across multiple internship experiences because some of them stay at the same one, and some of them stay with the same company, but switch roles. And so you can also see some comparisons.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:06

Mhh. You mentioned that you work with employers. Did you need to do any convincing of them for the students to create portfolios, reflect on their practice? Are there any restrictions what they can talk about maybe because portfolios are public or such, or were the employers directly on board with supporting students in their portfolio practice?

Megan Mize: 10:30

To this point, the employers have largely not touched the portfolio. They're aware the students are doing them, and in fact, we've tried to encourage the Internship Office to have the employers look at the portfolios at the midpoint and at the end. We also do have showcases where employers are invited to see the student portfolios once they're completed and the students give presentations. But by and large, I haven't had to do persuasive work with them. More so, one of the things that we thought has been really useful is trying to send employers the student links with the student's permission, post the internship, and then get their feedback. I have suggested that, I think, it would be useful for us to have a summer session, for instance, we do faculty development for this effort in the summer, and I think we've invited employers to come and speak to the faculty. But I do think it would be useful for us to have an employer panel specifically asking them, what do you think students should be capturing or reflecting on in the portfolios? And what might be further concerns to some of these examples I've given previously, there's certain things students really can't share, shouldn't be recording. I just gave the example of students translating in a hospital. Well, certainly there's rules there, and we've had to negotiate that, but largely we've been negotiating with the students so that they're prepared. But I would love for the employers to talk with us a bit more, but right now, they're kind of really more in that stage where they're establishing the parameters of the role and the expectations of how they'll mentor the student.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:55

Yeah, because it will be interesting to see if they know how beneficial the reflection from the students is if there's the potential then to bring some of those practices also to their regular staff and establish that a bit more if it's not already part of the performance reviews or any of the professional development that's going on within a company.

Megan Mize: 12:15

I think it would be useful to have that summer panel because often what you think a student is learning may not be, in fact, the lesson they took away, and these portfolios are a great window into it where you're you may be thinking you taught them something about administration, but what they really learned was problem solving with a conflict which relates to administration, but you're focused on operations, and they're focused on interpersonal skills.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:39

We always have the possibility to bring you back onto the podcast.

Megan Mize: 12:42

I'm going to be doing this work for a while, hopefully [laughs]. I'm always happy to talk about it

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:48

Latest at the end of the project, once you've gathered a bit more of a summary and reflected on how the project went and whether you've reached your goals for the students or whether actually new directions also opened up for them of how they can work with portfolios. Now you do also have a second initiative in which portfolios are increasingly incorporated, which is the general education reform. What can you share about that work that you're doing there in regards to portfolios?

Megan Mize: 13:19

Oh, boy, y'all. So our General Education Reform is absolutely that. We are rebuilding a new General Education curriculum. And what's really exciting about this is that reflection is built in as a new learning goal. It did not exist before. It's called reflection and integration, and as part of that, we have been proposing and advocating for a vertically integrated ePortfolio experience. So what that means is that a student would initiate their portfolio in a First Year Seminar. All students will go through a First Year Seminar, carry it across multiple Gen Ed courses, where they'll update over the course of four years, and then refine and complete it in a General Education capstone course. And so our hope is to help students really think about how the General Education functions for them, actively connect their coursework and experiences and goals, rather than just seeing the Gen Ed as a thing they're forced to do or set of disconnected requirements. All told, if that happens, we have about 18,000 undergraduates. So as this rolls out [both laugh] - yeah, so if anyone who doesn't know me, I have purple hair, and I keep joking, I dye it so no one can see the white that's creeping in. I'm excited, but that's a huge undertaking. I'm always like, yeah, 750 is a pretty big deal, but [laughs] we're looking at almost all of them. And by the way, these two efforts do intersect because experiential learning is also a part of our general education curriculum, and one of the experiential learning experiences that would count is, of course, an internship. So then a student would have an internship page on their Gen Ed portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:55

Yeah, which also makes sense, because that way the students learn, 'Well, I can transfer learning from here to something else,' and it does connect, and we are not learning in isolation.

Megan Mize: 15:04

Yep.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:05

Megan, for those of us that are not located in the United States and have a different university system, what is considered General Education?

Megan Mize: 15:13

Why do you have to ask me those hard questions[laughs]? I mean, it's funny, I say that jokingly, but literally, we're now two years into this effort, and we constantly debate, what does that mean? But to us, it's a shared set of experiences that lay out foundational skills and knowledge sets that students then build upon within their major. And that's my shooting from the hip understanding of a General Education. There are different ways of people conceiving it, but that's it. Part of what we've really noticed at ODU over the years is that students had wildly different experiences of their supposedly General Education, and we want to make it far more exploratory for them, less prescriptive - it used to have this real checkbox mentality - and more about preparing them for the disciplines they think they might want to get to, while also inviting them to explore disciplines because when you come in, maybe what you think you want to be, is not, in fact, the pathway that is going to light you up or set you up for success. We want it to be far more communal building than it's been previously. It's fairly isolating. So that's not a great answer, other than, you know, a shared experience with a core set of foundational knowledge sets and skills that prepare them for the more advanced work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:27

It's certainly not a small feat, and I think the university has to figure out how to clone you and the rest of the ePortfolio team in order to make sure that all 18,000 students, and then also all the instructors and tutors and staff can support the students. So it's no small feat. The first podcast episode that I recorded was with Lisa Donaldson, whom you also know, who was at Dublin City University at the time, and they actually onboarded 6,000 students in six weeks. It is doable. You just have to triple that effort, maybe not necessarily, just in six weeks[both laugh].

Megan Mize: 17:07

No, we've got time. That's what I keep telling myself, that First Year Seminar really will be a major engine for us. We're certainly thinking through templating and faculty dev(elopment) and staff development and bringing in Advising. So like you said, it is a huge undertaking, but I also will share if I sound enthusiastic because I'm working with people who really care, and this has been such a positive experience, and I was thrilled that reflection and integration got into the General Education goals as a new one, and when no one voted against it, I was like, 'don't move, nobody noticed.' I know all of us Humanities folks were like, 'is this really going to happen?' And it has. So what an excellent thing for ODU students to be invited to do far more metacognitive work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:50

Yay to you and everybody else who was involved in laying the groundwork and making sure that over the many years that you have been at ODU and have been supporting portfolios that people do see how beneficial they are, that they do add a lot of value to the education of their students and really prepare them for their professional careers that they are going to have.

Megan Mize: 18:14

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:15

Megan, you just talked about templates that you're creating them, helping your instructors with the portfolio creation and onboarding students. What other support do you provide, either through the Internship Academy or within the General Education courses where portfolios and reflection are now incorporated?

Megan Mize: 18:38

We're bringing to them, you know, like I said, I'm just gonna stick with a decade, even though that's wrong[laughs]. Like a decade of...

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:45

You can almost say 15 years.

Megan Mize: 18:47

... can almost next year bring me back, I'll say 15[laughs]. But we're actually coming at this drawing on 15 years of supporting the university at large through multiple strategic initiatives and ad hoc work with classes, programmes, grants, etc. So we're pulling on all those tricks and tools and strategies that we've already got in place. We're doing a lot of collaborative curricular design. We're going to meet with departments. We're meeting with individual faculty who are in key classes, so thinking about, how do we convert the First Year Seminars, how do we convert capstones, existing things in place? Or what do we need to build that's new. Professional development is going to be a huge part of how we get all of these initiatives moving. And I'll share that we have a First Year Seminar pilot coming up this fall, so it's really quick, and then we always, always, always have hands on instructional support. I often joke. I use a Zelda joke, which ages me when I'm say, "It's dangerous to go alone, take one of us," And so we always partner with faculty. So as soon as ePortfolios are in the class, from there on, there's just a working relationship, you know, one on one, with them. We really start with the faculty goals, either for the course, the programme, the experience and aligning to portfolio design to learning outcomes and then try to help them to reverse engineer where key points of reflection and intervention would be and then lowering tech thresholds. That's you heard me mentioning things like templates. We co-design assignments and reflective prompts. We offer platform support. We offer class visits and workshops. We create tutorials written and video. Basically, if a faculty member thinks it would help them, we do what we can to create it. We've been doing that with MHIA. We're gearing up to do that with the Gen Ed. We are entrenched around the institution in many, many pockets, and now we're going to start trying to lift that up so that we are doing it at a larger scale, more intentionally, I think. I mean, there's intention there, but now we have the institutional power to go, okay, let's start connecting these, and maybe the General Education portfolio can be a place to do that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:46

Mhh. When you talk about 'we', is that the ePortfolio Studio or also another group or multiple groups on campus?

Megan Mize: 20:54

Yeah, we always joke as a Gemini that I have an evil twin out there. So when I say'we'...

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:58

Not an evil twin.

Megan Mize: 21:00

You would never know. So when I say 'we', I'm often thinking about my colleague, our Assistant Director, Elle Tyson, who oversees my student support team. So that is the ePortfolio assistants in our studio. But I also do include folks like I mentioned, the Academy, faculty, and our Internship Office. Or with the General Education, we have a huge steering committee, about 40 people, who I work with, and then I've also been chairing our FYS programme design. I was prepping right before we came here, our capstone programme design working group. So we've had multiple working groups, and then also our student learning outcomes for the Gen Ed working group. So when I say 'we', I do mean multiple teams. Advising. I can't forget advising [laughs]. We have a huge transfer population that we have to consider, too, and also ODU Global, which is our online institution. So I'm running between all these partners and having these conversations with so many units. You want to try to tie it together so that the faculty and the students don't receive 50 competing messages, but rather see something that's really intentionally and collaboratively informed, and you're building consensus, too.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:05

Just brief abbreviation check, FYS is First Year Seminar, right?

Megan Mize: 22:09

That's right. That's our newest component. We've actually never had a first year seminar programme. Yeah, so I was fortunate enough to go down to the University of South Carolina to learn from them about their first year seminar since it was a compelling model that we're drawing on.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:23

Yeah, and within the AAEEBL community, we've got Professor Dr Candyce Reynolds at Boise State University, who has been teaching First Yay Seminars and incorporating portfolio practice in there as well for many, many years. So you've got pretty much everybody in the university who is involved in that portfolio initiative, and that is really something to take a second to acknowledge that it is not just one group. So your portfolio studio with the students that you employ to help other students and faculty and then your Director that are pushing the portfolio initiative on their own. What I really want to highlight here is that almost everybody at the university needs to be on board with the portfolio practice, and not just because it's a portfolio practice, but I think in general, to achieve change, to make sure that a new practice is well established, and then is successful. That cannot be on the shoulders of just a very few staff.

Megan Mize: 23:23

Oh, 100%. My mentor, Shelley Rodrigo, always talked to me about when I build programmes to make sure I don't build a programme as that is a'that guy project', that is, if that guy were to leave, this programme would fail. I've really spent my career now working through culture change and figuring out how do I do a lot of interpersonal relationship building so that it becomes 'our projects', rather than 'Megan Mize says you should do this', and not that I pat myself on the back, but I will say, when we started the Gen Ed reform, I'm in the room, obviously, to talk about portfolios, but one of the very first things people said, you know, 'what needs to be a part of the General Education is ePortfolios,' and it was like our work here has borne fruit. I mean, I'm in fervent agreement with them [laughs], but it was nice to see that that rhetoric and that discourse has taken

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:09

That also ties in really nicely with the hold over years of support in faculty development and tutoring and models and data for people to say, yes, you know, this is really important to us at all levels of the institution. digital ethics principles, just thinking about the principle of support, transparency, and also visibility of labour, which you in particular, have been working on and advocating for. And of course, also DEIBD - diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and decolonisation - so that you reach all the different students and look into different departments and how you can support them with portfolios.

Megan Mize: 24:49

Absolutely. That labour piece is so important. Whenever we do institutional change or change priorities or emphasise certain pedagogies, there's a ton of work around that, both for staff and faculty, and then, of course, later, students. And if you do it really well, a lot of times, that's invisible. You're going to see it when it goes wrong. But if you've done your job right, it seems easy. That labour goes unvalued and underappreciated, often, especially at large institutions because it worked. So it must have been simple. And it's like, I know how many hours upon hours and meetings in deep conversations with a lot of care, these faculty, administrators, advisors, tutoring teams, etc. have put forth. And so when we were talking ethics and ePortfolios, I really wanted to just say, let's talk about the labour of portfolio. Especially in successful, long lasting programmes, there's more than one primary mover to your point. There is a network, and that will get you to success, but the network has to be maintained, and you can't just rely on a few advocates. You've really got to keep fostering and bringing people on. It's constant.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:51

Yeah, and sometimes it's a multi-year effort to consistently chip away, bring in the practice, and then, in your case, to have a project like the Mellon-funded Monarch Humanities Internship Academy to make a bigger dent in the efforts and get things off the ground, maybe a little bit more quickly than if you did not have that amount of money available to support your 750 students. But then also, I think, a big piece is to not just have the project and do all the wonderful work within it, but then within the project really also see how can that now be manifested so that we make that a sustainable practice at the university, rather than just keep it at the project level.

Megan Mize: 26:35

Yeah, absolutely. I would be so hesitant [laughs] to advocate for the portfolios in the Gen Ed 15 years ago because the culture wasn't there for it. Our last quality enhancement plan focused on writing in the disciplines and reflection. So that helped us, too. So now we have this really rich discourse and conversation and community around reflection. And then you have, you know, a few years later, this Gen Ed Reform, and you have all this portfolio practice and practitioners at the institution. So it's not just one. You've got a couple 100 who are like, yeah, we know portfolios and their value, so yeah, it is exciting time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:08

Yeah, and it's also not just talking with people who are already valuing portfolio practice and going to those conferences, but also going to events outside.

Megan Mize: 27:19

Portfolio scholarship is inherently interdisciplinary, and it's one of those things that you're not just a writing studies scholar. You might be a web designer. I will tell you, the thing that shocked me when I was new to this was how much I was expected to understand law [laughs]. So I had to do a lot of work with our legal department, and I was like, oh no, but now, you know, I can speak very confidently to things like FERPA, about student records, and things of that nature, but it is a field that expects you to learn a lot and then stay on top of it, which is, again, why having a large community helps you because just as an example, last week, my transfer advisors were like, hey, you should know this is changing, or there's this new programme, and we need to design portfolios for that population when we think about the Gen Ed.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:02

So now, looking at all of the work that you do at the university, with the many departments that you're involved in, with the many support groups that you have conversations with, what do you wish everybody should know about portfolios, especially also in the context that you are currently operating with the work-integrated or work-based learning, as well as within the General Education Reform context?

Megan Mize: 28:29

I wish that more people understood portfolios as a process for learning rather than a product or even a glorified résumé, especially with work-based learning because the real, compelling nature of portfolios, I think, comes through when students have the portfolio as a conversation piece during the process. If you are working at the shipyard and you're reflecting throughout, and then you have a mentor who's in your discipline at ODU looking at your portfolio and giving you some feedback or suggestions or 'here's how I would have addressed that problem' or 'here's some scholarship that could help you do that more efficiently.' And then working with someone at that internship, your employer, who's also looking at a portfolio going, 'oh, you know, I thought this intern was getting this, but they haven't mentioned it yet. So maybe we need to take some different steps.' So if you conceive of the portfolio as a process and a place for conversation, I think those portfolios become a lot richer, and they move away from what so many people even when I'm, you know, consulting at other institutions, ask me, like, how do I make portfolios more than 'I learned a lot?' Well, make them a conversation piece. People flourish when they know there's someone reading, responding, there's an authentic audience. In leaving portfolios for the student to make sense of their experience alone at the end of the experience, you will get those somewhat emaciated reflections because now they're looking back over maybe 16 weeks, and they don't know what you want because they haven't been in conversation with you. They just see some static guidelines. That's my soap box for today. I wish people would approach portfolios as a process and speak with students while they were doing it. You don't even have to give them a grade. I mean, asynchronously, I teach a capstone course, I mentioned earlier, and periodically, I'll pull five portfolios and just make screencast feedbacks and send it to those students, and then five the next week. And I always get student feedback on that, that they love that because they knew I was looking, I wasn't grading. I was acting as an editor and a reader, and their relationship to me changes.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:30

Yeah, it also shows that learning doesn't happen in isolation, by ourselves, but with other people through conversation, and in the portfolio we do have the opportunity to capture that for the students, so that then at the end of a term, they can see where they are at and so the sharing component of a portfolio is important. I mean, of course, not every portfolio needs to be shared, but if there's one, especially for an internship, where even if the employer is not involved, the university can take a look at then the students do get some feedback, therefore also helping them further along in their learning.

Megan Mize: 31:09

Yeah, one reason we insisted in giving screencast feedback to the students in the MHIA programme because we think they deserve a final comment, and so they get, you know, 5-10-minute videos where we walk through every page and give them suggestions for how they'd improve it beyond the experience, which is part of a high impact practice, is multiple points of interaction.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:28

That way, you are also demonstrating what you expect from the students. It's not just them working multimodally, but you are also using a different medium than just written feedback. When they can hear you, they can hear emotion through your voice. Immediately, makes it more personal.

Megan Mize: 31:46

Yeah, I always tell this story about one time I was doing it and I said to the student, 'I'm not going to read this sentence out loud to you, but I would love it if you'd revisit it.' And then I moved past the page and I come back, I said, 'You know what, it's bothering me. I am going to read this out to you.' And she said she laughed at that for like five minutes and then played it for her mother because they could hear a polite frustration[laughs]. My mom said, 'I think you probably should revise that'[both laugh]. See that readers really do read for more detail than you think we do, and we have responses. When you compose, you are communicating with other humans, and humans do react. I will say her writing went up after that, but to your point, she heard the affect, and they thought it was funny. So I remember that [both laugh].

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:33

I've heard so much that portfolios are shared with family members and that students also get feedback from them, which is awesome. Megan, now to the last three questions. You had actually already answered them three years ago. I just had a look at when your interview with Amy and Sarah went live, and that was actually on February the 15th in 2023 so this year we are publishing just 10 days after the third anniversary of your first podcast episode. It was meant to be. But I still want to ask you these questions again to see if anything has changed.

Megan Mize: 33:08

Yeah, I'm pretty sure last time, when you asked me about three words or phrases...

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:13

... they were'creative', 'personal', and'valuable'. So what are your three words or phrases this time? Or are they still exactly the same?

Megan Mize: 33:22

Dang, they're close, so consistent. I said 'creative'[both laugh]...

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:26

Yay, one point.

Megan Mize: 33:28

'Unique', which has shifted in the AI era, and'human', which is also an impact of the AI era. So 'creative','unique', and 'human' is something that I really emphasise to people about portfolio work. I thought about'playful', too, but they're not always playful.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:42

Yeah, can you just very briefly say why'unique' and 'human' is so important now in the context of AI for portfolio work?

Megan Mize: 33:51

Yeah, of course, and this will intersect with the advice I would give students or portfolio authors. As part of my work, I also do a lot of work where I sit on panels or in focus groups with local employers, not that I'm someone who always thinks of higher ed as vocational training. Surely, that's not it, but I am conversant with them, and I'm hearing in real time, major shifts in how they're hiring because we're seeing major shifts in how people are applying for jobs and landing jobs, and how employers are searching through applicants. So when I say 'unique' and'human', what I'm hearing is frustration because they're seeing so much AI-generated material and any more, what's really compelling to them is evidence of work and clean articulation of how this works together. So that means that the person who's applying understands their skill sets, understands how they could transfer what they've learned in school or elsewhere to their setting. And then I said that thing about 'human' and 'unique' because the design element of portfolios does so much personality and fit conveyance, which is a major part of hiring. And even when I've worked with some schools that are talking about ePortfolios in graduate applications, they look at personality, and portfolios do a lot of that work in conveying someone's humanity. They're, you know, I hate to say brand, but their identity, and in many cases, we do think about branding. That's, I think, in this era of AI, where AI can crank out things really rapidly, is the difference when somebody, even if they are using AI tools, they work intentionally and make intentional choices, which you can see there is a solid difference between someone who's really tinkered with it and someone who's just put in a prompt and slithered something out. That's why I say 'unique' and 'human'.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:41

Thank you for the explanation. In the Task Force, we are working on an AI paper that we do hope to publish this year, and I also already see a webinar coming on where we are talking a bit more about what you've just mentioned, the human aspect of a portfolio, the value of writing things on your own, or for the majority, on your own, rather than going the very quick route of putting a prompt in and having something generated simply because the portfolio is your own experiences. You've already mentioned the advice that you would give for portfolio authors, for students, that was in regards to using AI, or where maybe not to use AI, is there anything else you'd like to mention for that question?

Megan Mize: 36:26

You know, as I work through these with students, you can debate me on if authenticity is a real thing [laughs], but I always encourage students to think about how they can represent themselves so that they're not just posturing or performing what they think people want from them to be as real and as authentic as they might be. Because if you're posturing, you may put yourself into a scenario that you don't like. You're not a good fit, and then you're going to be really unhappy, and you would have spent a lot of time, effort, and frustration. So to view it as a place, especially within an institutional context, where we are inviting you to have more agency than you might have in other assignments, and to take that seriously. Because I think sometimes reflection among students, they kind of dismiss it. They think it's the fluff work, and I do a lot of work with them try to shift that mentality to that's really where you're deepening the information and retention and understanding. If you take this as an authentic invitation to reflect your real thoughts and experience and granted, yes, you should do some rhetorical work, too, also stay professional, etc. Hopefully, then you start to find the pathway that is the right one for you, rather than what you think your professors think your right pathway is. I hope they look at portfolios as both exploratory and preparatory.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:41

Thank you. What is your tip for learning designers, instructors, ePortfolio Studio folks and on, who create the portfolio activities for students, but maybe also for staff and faculty themselves?

Megan Mize: 37:55

Yeah, I'm going to go with an oldie but a goodie, which is, start with your learning outcomes, not the tool. Be really, really clear about what you think students are meant to learn, and what kind of evidence do you think is going to be meaningful in your course. Then ask yourself, what is it that a portfolio is going to offer that a traditional assignment won't. Is it this integration, synthesis, reflection, design narrative? It can be all those things, but you know, sometimes I'll see learning designers say, 'well, the portfolio wasn't pretty.' And I'm like, 'did you teach them web design? Was that an outcome? If it wasn't, then maybe you didn't fail. If the reflection is good and your goal was reflection, then you have achieved something here' and so on. And the other one I'm going to say is related to that, which is, come to the portfolio activity with some grace for students. Digital, multimodal composing disrupts many of their writing practices. They come up often being taught by folks who are very used to print culture, like we're still around. So we teach them essays, and we don't inherently teach them all those things like accessibility, layout, colour palette choices, etc. So yeah, those early portfolios may not look beautiful or polished, but that's what they're learning. Sometimes you start with the ugly portfolio, you see the mistakes you've made, and then you revise, and you grow over time. I just encourage faculty to have a bit of grace for that because these students are learning new literacies, and not only are they learning new literacies, but they're learning emerging literacies, and we've referenced AI, which is a fast moving field that's impacting all forms of composition. So recognise that they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do. An ugly portfolio is a learning moment for all of us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:35

It might not even be an ugly portfolio. It might just be, 'I'm focusing on text because that's what I was expected to do.'

Megan Mize: 39:41

That's right.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:42

And then a faculty member suddenly changing the assessment criteria to also include design that's not quite fair and should be called out.

Megan Mize: 39:51

Beauty is in the eye of the holder. I will tell you, it is really fascinating doing cyber security portfolios because for me, when I look at some of them, I think these are so spartan. These are not visually compelling, but they're very clean. But that's right for their field, absolutely correct, for the area they're moving into. Sometimes it's also learning, you know, sometimes I'm training faculty on rhetoric- purpose, audience, delivery. Who's the audience for this? Is that visual design correct for them? So that's it. I would just say, don't always look at the visuals and think a portfolio has failed the test.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:25

Thank you so, so much, Megan, for sharing a part of what is currently going on at ODU, the initiatives that you're involved in, and how you look into embedding portfolios in a sustainable way, not just across one study programme, but across multiple and also many 1,000s of students to help them in their learning, to support them in ways that can really also help them later on in their career, and is not just grade focus so that they can get their degree. It was really fantastic to hear about the initiatives and also how many people are actually involved in portfolio practice at ODU. So thank you so much.

Megan Mize: 41:06

Thank you for having me. I hope you'll invite me back in three years so I can talk to you about how the Gen Ed turned out.

Kristina Hoeppner: 41:13

Yep, we certainly need to make another appointment for that. Now over to our listeners. As you think about your own portfolio work, what resonated with you today? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Mastodon, and tag me or send me an email. This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Megan Mize. Make sure to check out the resources in the episode notes in your podcast app or at podcast.mahara.org and if you found this valuable, share it with a colleague who would also appreciate it. Our next episode will air in two weeks, until then, create, share, and engage.