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 guests are a trio from the University of Central Florida, Associate Professor Dr Amy Cicchino, McKenna Slaughter, and Nghi Chau. If you are subscribed to the podcast, you might remember that Amy shared work that she's been doing in regards to high impact practice and portfolios in December of last year. Today, she's back with two of her students, so we can take a closer look at portfolios from the student perspective and also from the perspective of students supporting other students in the creation of their portfolios. It's so nice to speak with you, McKenna, Nghi, and Amy.

Amy Cicchino: 1:08

Thank you for having us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:10

Nghi, let's start with you. What is your role at UCF, and what do you study, please?

Nghi Chau: 1:17

My name is Nghi Chau and my role at UCF - I work as an Undergraduate Peer Tutor, and I study at Legal Studies as my major with a minor in Writing and Rhetoric and a minor in Social Structures and Opportunities.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:30

So you're a bachelor student at UCF, right?

Nghi Chau: 1:32

Yes, undergraduate.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:34

Great, thank you. McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 1:37

Hello. I am McKenna Slaughter. I am a master's student. I am a Graduate Assistant in the Writing Center, so I work with students at all levels, and then I also facilitate writing groups for 1102 students, and I am a Rhetoric and Composition major.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:52

Thank you so much. How long have the two actually already been working in the Writing Center? McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 1:59

This is my second full semester in the Center. So I've started in the fall, and then we're sort of rounding out the spring now.

Nghi Chau: 2:07

Likewise, I also started in the fall, like around August.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:11

Amy and her team must have had a recruitment drive over the summer holidays and got both of you into the team.

Amy Cicchino: 2:17

And I'll just add, at the University of Central Florida, all of our master's students on assistantship spend their first year in the Center with us. We're very lucky to have them, and the second year, they go and they teach in the composition programme. We're so sad that we'll be losing McKenna at the end of this year, as she'll be teaching in our composition programme.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:35

That is awesome that you have that progression in role of the students, so that they can continue, but also flex in terms of doing something different. Amy, over to you. We've had you on the podcast recently, and then this actually is your third time. Currently, you are the Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric and the Director of the University Writing Center. Where do portfolios come in for you in your work?

Amy Cicchino: 3:01

In two ways, actually. First, we do ask our tutors, when they're in our'Tutoring theory and practice' course, to create a portfolio, and that is an opportunity for them to think about how the work they're doing in the Center and how their tutoring identity complements or fits in with that larger professional story they want to tell about who they are and what they value. But then in our department, in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric here at the University of Central Florida, we have ePortfolios embedded in our College Composition programme. And so our students in first year composition complete learning ePortfolios, and then students in the Writing and Rhetoric bachelor's major, they complete capstone ePortfolios. We're an ePortfolio rich department over here.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:49

Definitely sounds like it. Portfolios everywhere. So now, McKenna, we've just heard you're creating your own portfolio, but when did you then start with your first portfolio? Do you remember

McKenna Slaughter: 4:02

I do. So my first ePortfolio, I actually made in high school in an AP Lang(uage) course. And at the time, I think, I really did not have the facilities to understand why we were doing what we were doing (laughs). But then I completed my undergrad here as well. So I completed that capstone ePortfolio that Dr Cicchino was talking about, and that portfolio actually became a really essential part of my grad application, which I think was pretty significant in landing me the assistantship that I have now. And then, I also completed that tutoring portfolio last semester, taking the theory in practice course.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:36

That's fantastic that you've kind of grown up with portfolios and have also seen different iterations about the portfolio and different ways of introducing it to students and then working with it. What do you see as special about the ePortfolio experience that you've had so far?

McKenna Slaughter: 4:52

I think ePortfolios are flexible in a way that a lot of major assignments really aren't. To your point, having developed academically along with ePortfolios, I think that they serve as excellent benchmarks, and as you advance, they give you the opportunity to show your growth over a period of time, which you can't always do in other formats. And even if we're still talking about applications, right, you really lose the ability to represent the actual work that you're doing and how you've developed over a period of time. The ePortfolios give students a really excellent opportunity to practice and showcase their development.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:26

Yes, that always comes back to the documentation of learning, making the learning visible, reflecting on the learning, and then also showing that progress over time, rather than just a one time snapshot of where you are at at the moment. Over to you, Nghi, when have you encountered portfolios first? Was that also in high school or did you start with them at university?

Nghi Chau: 5:51

It was also in high school. I started doing an ePortfolio because of my AICE Media Studies class. They required it for an exam, but it was very limited in terms of what could be presented on the ePortfolio because of the fact that it was specifically for class, rather than entire holistic view of my credentials.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:09

Amy just put in the chat that, of course, nobody can see on the podcast, that you two represent the ePortfolio generation, which is really, really awesome to hear that you have started in high school already because that does mean that all that work that had been done in the portfolio community over the last two, three decades is showing fruits, that it's not staying in higher education, but that it is also going into schools. And of course, there is also an ePortfolio movement within schools. It is also really good to see that it seems to be at least with our sample of two people here, seems to be coming in. I've also recently interviewed another student, she's from Indiana University Indianapolis, Salsabil Qaddoura, and she also created a portfolio already in high school and had an interesting experience around that. So it's really good to see that you can now take your skills that you have learned in high school, evolve with them, and create more portfolios in your study programme and also supporting students. What skills, speaking of skills, do you think you as students develop when you create portfolios? Nghi, do you want to start with that?

Nghi Chau: 7:22

Yeah, I can go ahead. I would say one of the biggest skills is just viewing from the perspective of an employer or hiring manager or from your audience. What are you trying to cater your website, the design, the format, the things that you're presenting in that ePortfolio to ensure that you're captivating the audience that's viewing that piece?

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:43

Are you then more career focused when you're creating a portfolio? At some point, you will also create a portfolio for your capstone, so the portfolio does already serve different purposes. Is that made very clear to you during the instructions of what the goal is of the portfolio? Or do you work that out during the semester?

Nghi Chau: 8:03

Typically, when I'm told to create an ePortfolio, I've been told to create several ePortfolios because of the classes that I've been taking in Writing and Rhetoric, they usually tell me, at the very least, these are the theories that you learned. How do you intertwine this with your ePortfolio? However, as a Legal Studies major, I have to be able to justify what I'm specifically learning from those classes to then intertwine it with okay, these experiences, these fundamental theories that I've learned is actually very beneficial and a transferable skill into how I would succeed for my future career path, or in a specific firm, for instance.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:39

So that's really that transfer of what you have learned into new context, synthesising things, reflecting on your experience, and seeing what you're taking forward with you then into the future. McKenna, what skills do you think students develop when they create portfolios? Or what skills do you specifically think you have gained by creating your own portfolios?

McKenna Slaughter: 9:02

On a personal level, I have definitely gained a lot more understanding of public document design. I think that that high school ePortfolio was the first time that I ever really created anything that was going to be sent out to a public audience. And also you send it out to people, and you kind of lose that amount of like tight control that you have when you're submitting a paper to say, one professor. You know that's the only person who's going to read that paper. When you create an ePortfolio, you understand that, you know it might reach a broad audience of people. Also more broadly, ePortfolios can really help students to zoom out and understand their education as more holistic like to Nghi's point, it really helps you connect how specific courses connect to your broader goals, educationally, professionally, and I think that ePortfolios can really help to generate that top down understanding in students, where specific assignments or courses even serve as building blocks to their larger goals.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:01

You just mentioned the public aspect of the portfolios, McKenna. Does that mean that all the portfolios that you create at UCF are public or can you decide who should have access to them?

McKenna Slaughter: 10:15

I understand that certain portfolio websites will allow you to create a password protected portfolio. But in my experience, all of the portfolios that I have created have been public, and that had been the expectation, although obviously, within the context of a class, if a portfolio is public when it is created, once the class ends, you can take it down if you don't want it to remain public.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:36

The public aspect of portfolios is a really interesting one because, of course, you do, as you said earlier, need to keep the audience in mind, need to keep in mind that maybe some unintentional people might have access to your portfolio. Do you then also make conscious decisions of how much you share on your portfolio in terms of pictures, personal stories, and the like? Nghi, do you want to share what that means for you?

Nghi Chau: 11:01

Yeah, you can have an extremely selective mindset when it comes to developing ePortfolios because you don't want to overwhelm your audience with such a large amount of content. Not only that, but you also want to present the content that you think is the strongest. Let's say you developed so much, there's no point in showing content that you developed like 10 years ago, for instance. Being selective in that mindset also showcases to the audience, hey, I know exactly what I want to go ahead and show to you. And just showing and proving that you are detail orientated by being selective is something that ePortfolios just require.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:37

Yeah. Amy, we've heard from McKenna and Nghi about the skills that they develop and that they see they develop. What do you as Director of the University Writing Center and your team of instructors and colleagues think about the skills that you want the students to develop?

Amy Cicchino: 11:55

To echo some of the points raised by Nghi and McKenna, certainly that reflective mindset. So that ability to pause and integrate the experiences that they're having as learners in this moment with that larger story of who they are and what they value, that's definitely something we hope they take away. The professional communication skills that I think Nghi is speaking to so well, so that ability to think about this public site and how it's going to add to their digital professional identity, we are a Writing and Rhetoric major, and so we also hope they gain some of that rhetorical literacy so thinking about their audience, their design choices, the words they're using, the images they're using, and how those are meant to impact a particular audience. And then finally, and I think this is also the most challenging part of building ePortfolios, that digital literacy. So both that ability to physically put together a functioning site, but then, and you alluded to this, and McKenna has done some work on this topic in our Center, thinking about privacy and ethics, right? How they showcase work that is done collaboratively, or how they choose to share particular images of themselves and their peers, how they've thought about representation in the portfolio site. Those are all things that we hope they take with them as they're composing portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:22

Those are all really, really important aspects. Are there any other aspects of the mindset that ePortfolios encourage that you want to mention?

McKenna Slaughter: 13:32

I kind of want to highlight two elements. The first is collaborative learning. EPortfolios are inherently sustained projects. They take a long time to put together. There's the additional time of the student having made all of the work that they're actually showcasing, and then they have to put it all in, frame everything all nice for it to be public and presented. So I think that ePortfolios can really allow students this opportunity to learn with other students, as opposed to that independent learning model where you produce all of your work, maybe you, you know, submit a mostly finished draft for peer review before you submit a final draft. Whereas ePortfolios really benefit from allowing students to collaborate with each other and with their instructors at all levels of the development process. And I think that especially if we want to talk about issues of access and the digital literacy that Dr Cicchino was just getting at sometimes that collaboration is really necessary because students, especially for their first ePortfolio, have likely never made a website before. So there's an inherent collaborative learning element to learning how to facilitate that information and produce a product like that. I also think that ePortfolios allow students an opportunity to speak with some authority on themselves, which is a skill that is often under practised in the classroom, in my opinion, where they've done all of this great work, they've spent all of this time receiving information, and then the ePortfolio allows them to flip that dynamic and present themselves or present their work with authority, and they get to speak on what they've learned and how they've learned and then present that back to their instructor. That dynamic allows students a really important opportunity to understand how they might choose to present themselves. Again, we keep coming back to professional academic development, but I think that's a really important piece.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:18

Yes, speaking of collaboration and presenting yourself, having that audience, and writing for a particular audience, do you also encourage the giving of feedback on the portfolios that are being produced?

McKenna Slaughter: 15:33

Yeah, absolutely. Feedback is integral to the ePortfolio process. I see now working with students in writing groups, I work with 1102 students who are working on their ePortfolios, and in those roles, I see first-hand the impact that students, even like we meet in a Zoom session, and a student might mention, 'I've chosen to organise my ePortfolio this way.' And we'll take a pause and say, 'Okay, will you share your screen, share your ePortfolio with everybody, talk us through it as it stands right now,' and we'll give feedback back and forth. That collaboration in a less stressful environment than a peer review can allow students to really experiment and grow without the pressure of this has to be perfect immediately. I can't show this to anyone because it's ugly right now. That consistent collaboration can take some of the pressure off and allow students to experience ePortfolios as really a growth opportunity.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:26

I love that you have that feedback element, not necessarily in a written form, but also that you have that verbal feedback because, of course, there are many more clues because you can see the person, you can hear the person, and bring that in so that the ePortfolio is not just in the online medium, but also taking outside of it, and you have conversations around it.

Amy Cicchino: 16:47

I would just add to your point, Kristina, yes, the Writing Center is another space where Nghi and McKenna talk with portfolio composers, whether they're in our Composition programme or creating portfolios for other contexts. And so it's very common for students as they're developing their portfolio, to book a session in our Center and to sit down with our peer consultants, and exactly as you said, to talk through their choices, get feedback, really embrace the making part of the portfolio.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:14

You've talked quite a bit about, now, the benefits of portfolios, the skills that you're developing, the mindset that you're developing, the interpersonal connections that you're fostering and all of that. Looking at the flip side of that, where do you see the students have challenges when creating a portfolio, or maybe also instructors, and how do you think you in the Writing Center at UCF can help overcome those challenges or work with them and see how they can be resolved?

Nghi Chau: 17:46

Two key things that already come to mind is showing relevant versus irrelevant data or proof. For instance, because an ePortfolio can give you such a holistic view, you have so much freedom, right? There's not necessarily set standards on what you can present, because technically, you can justify anything. However, for instance, if you're the Computer Science major, and then all of a sudden you're showing your art, it's going to be a little off putting to the person who is your audience that is viewing that ePortfolio because they're wondering, why is this being presented when you're trying to cater to a computer science audience? The second thing that I was thinking about is this sense of graphic design or aestheticism. I noticed that when a lot of students come in, they're not exactly sure how to present the specific data or all of their proven qualifications onto an ePortfolio. It can be difficult. Sometimes people will have a brightly coloured background and really interesting text that makes the ePortfolio look like a watermelon, and it's a little scary. And you know, especially when it comes to presenting this to a hiring manager, obviously a hiring manager or someone along those lines is going to notice that. At least with those two factors, I do think that they heavily impact on how an ePortfolio can be developed, and if students did have those specific skills preset, students would be extremely excellent in developing ePortfolios, and it wouldn't be such a challenging task.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:09

You've done just a really wonderful summary of what folio thinking is because the portfolio is not just your archive or your backup of everything that is on your computer and everything that is in your mind, but you select things, you organise them, you reflect about them, and you make those connections. That might for some Computer Science students, include why they are putting an art in there, but they do need to make that connection for the viewer in order to tell their stories so that they can then relate everything to each other and therefore really have that holistic portfolio and saying who you are. McKenna, do you think there are any other challenges that the students or also faculty encounter in creating portfolios?

McKenna Slaughter: 19:54

A lot of this comes back to digital literacy. I think that's true on the student and the instructor level. When you're assigning an ePortfolio to a student for the first time, it's very likely the first time they've ever made a website or a document like that at all. And for instructors, there's also an element of staying up to date with and becoming really familiar with the software that you're asking students to use. That can be somewhat difficult and time consuming, especially if you're offering students several different avenues for what platform they might like to create their ePortfolio on. That can really increase the burden on a specific instructor to be able to provide support for their students throughout the process. In addition to literacy, there's also a potential issue of access, where, when an instructor is assigning an ePortfolio assignment, they are, to some level, making an assumption that their students have consistent access to technology, that their institution can provide it if they don't have it. That's not always the case, and so I think that the level of access to technology that your students have is a really significant consideration because we obviously want to avoid putting our students in a situation where they have an assignment that they couldn't complete to the extent that they might like to because they don't have the tech access. My last consideration is also time. At least at our institution, we work on really tight timeframes, especially if you're taking a class in the summer, you might be taking an eight or a 12-week class; in the fall, and the spring, we get 16, but even that if you're considering the amount of time it takes to produce the volume of work that ePortfolios often require, and then the amount of time it takes to produce the document itself, the time both for the instructor and the student is a really significant consideration because it's so limited (laughs) in the classroom so often.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:39

Amy, how do you as part of the University Writing Center support the students and also faculty to work with those challenges?

Amy Cicchino: 21:48

We see ourselves as an important node in that larger support network. Our biggest resource and asset that we have are our amazing peer consultants. They're available to help students who would like additional feedback or would like additional support, and so it's not uncommon for our peer consultants to be asking them questions about audience and rhetorical design, but they could also be showing them how to embed a hyperlink, or they could be looking up together how to do something on the ePortfolio platform the student is using. While we don't consider ourselves IT experts, we do consider ourselves good peers and colleagues, and so we try to help our students find the answers to their questions, even if they go beyond writing in the ePortfolio building process. The other thing that we do, McKenna leads online writing groups with a subset of our Composition students. That becomes a space where, again, they have a community to talk about ePortfolios with. They have checkpoints in their courses. What that hopefully does is, if there is this kind of critical misunderstanding, it brings it to the instructor's knowledge earlier on in the semester so that we can get the student the support that they need. And then finally, we don't have a ton of technology in our Center, but we do have a few student workstations available. So for students who are in our building, Trevor Colbourn Hall and need a space to come and work on writing, including ePortfolios, they're welcome to come and work in the Center. We do have a few technology stations available to them, and then our library, of course, has more technology they can check out.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:30

That's a really nice, comprehensive offering, and also looking at the different needs that people have. Now, McKenna and Nghi, do you feel like you can support your students better by having created one or more portfolios already yourself?

Nghi Chau: 23:49

I can't imagine trying to help a student work through an ePortfolio or develop an ePortfolio without knowing how to utilise Wix. Oh, my goodness. Imagine all of that. Like knowing and going through all the design choices can be extremely overwhelming, choosing a template, and then, not only that, but the aesthetic considerations, like, once again, you don't want to make your website look like a watermelon, and then also trying to ensure that students are able to properly justify whatever they're trying to present on their ePortfolio. If I did not have the experience of developing an ePortfolio in the past, I would be learning alongside with the student how to develop an ePortfolio. Luckily, because I already have that experience helping students go through that process is significantly faster.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:34

McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 24:35

I think, kind of yes and no. To Nghi's point, having familiarity and especially experience with having made an ePortfolio certainly makes it helpful on the software level. But I also think that something we really emphasise in our Center is that co-learning aspect and the idea that we really practice rhetorical and genre awareness and flexibility. For example, I've worked with PhD students who work in photonics labs, and I don't know anything about photonics, and I've never written a dissertation, but when that student sits down in front of me, it is a part of my job to say, what do I know, and how can I help? And how can I make this a more rhetorically effective document? And so there's definitely an element of flexibility and certainly learning on the fly if you've never had first-hand experience with ePortfolios, but I think it can certainly be done. Our tutors are really flexible and really willing to learn and also willing to say, 'I'm not an expert on this. Let's learn together.' A lot of what we do is connecting students with resources that they can continue to use after their session because we're not the authority on every single genre, every single document. So we do a lot of connecting work in that way as well.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:46

Amy, is it a requirement for your students that work in the Center to have created a portfolio before they start supporting students with their portfolios?

Amy Cicchino: 25:57

It's a requirement that all of our tutors complete a 'Theory and practice of tutoring' course. For students who completed that course this year, yes, they all completed ePortfolios. I'll say, being new in my role as Director, our previous cohorts of tutors have not completed ePortfolios as part of that course. Some of them have maybe encountered ePortfolios because we have such an ePortfolio rich culture at our university, but I would bet you, we have tutors in our Center who have not yet created an ePortfolio themselves. To McKenna's point, we still expect them to be able to work with writers who come into the Center with ePortfolios and using the tools and the skills that they have as tutors and peer consultants.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:41

If you're looking at the transfer of ePortfolio skills you've already touched on it, Nghi in particular, with that you for your Legal Studies need to be able to summarise things and put them into a different context. Have you seen other areas where the ePortfolio skills that you've gained have helped you in other contexts or where you've seen fellow students gain skills that they might have even told you, 'Oh my gosh, had I not done my portfolio, I would not have known how to do that'?

McKenna Slaughter: 27:14

For me, it comes back to that flexibility and adaptability. And also, this might sound abstract, but curation. Nghi was getting at something earlier, which was like, you don't pull things that you made five years ago for an ePortfolio, or you could if it's like the best thing you ever wrote, but probably not, right? So ePortfolios, when I started, were a really unfamiliar genre. It took me a long time to learn how to make one effectively, and whereas a résumé and even a CV has very clear conventions that are pretty consistent across sources, also, if you're Googling resume tips, you'll find pretty consistent information. But ePortfolios because they're so much newer and so much more flexible, they require a certain amount of curation and a certain amount of editing down, and it's developing that muscle of knowing what is most important in what order. I have this opportunity to show this multiplicity of work, how do I do that in a way that doesn't become overwhelming and is still effective?

Nghi Chau: 28:11

In terms of transferable skills because once again, you are thinking of the standpoint of the audience, what I noticed that in terms of creating an ePortfolio, the skills that is given me and probably other students, is thinking from the point of view of the audience member. So for instance, in argumentative writing, right? And just in ePortfolios in general, the thing that you notice is that you have to justify what you're putting down. It's not like, oh, I can just put this simple thing and then obviously the audience is going to know and understand what I'm saying. No, you have to make that connection. And then not even in just persuasive writing, but just in writing in general, because you're thinking so much about the audience, your writing inherently becomes more accessible because of the fact that you're thinking of that standpoint and how to improve communicating to that audience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:57

Those are very good points and certainly important in any job that anyone will have in the future. Now, what do you wish everybody knew about portfolios?

Amy Cicchino: 29:09

I wish everyone knew that ePortfolios are a product. It is definitely a thing that you are creating, but it is the product that emerges through a really important process. For students, for instructors, for employers, who mean ePortfolios, I want them to know that they need to really invest in this process of thinking about their identity, thinking about their experiences, and communicating that story through digital means.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:38

McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 29:39

I wish that people knew how flexible ePortfolios are, that they can be applied across so many contexts. We've talked a lot about how rich our specific department is in ePortfolios. I can't speak with authority, but my guess would be that that is not the case across disciplines at our university, and so I wish that people knew how many students can benefit from ePortfolio work, and not just in the humanities and not just in the social sciences, but in STEM applications as well.

Nghi Chau: 30:08

I think it's just such an amazing resource to show proof. It's so different from a résumé and a cover letter, where you can basically claim the experiences that you have. An ePortfolio, you can provide that specific essay that you wrote, that specific publication. You can show so many things, and it kind of just fleshes out who you are as a character and it just provides so many other details that typically an employer would not notice, like your eye to detail, and then also how you present yourself and your voice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:40

From the three of you, what I'm hearing is being seen as a whole person and not just as this is an assessment task, here's another assessment task - having these individual pieces there, but really making connections, engaging with others on the work that you've done, taking feedback from it, making changes, and therefore having a process that, yes, ends in a product, but the process is also important. Which now takes us into the last three questions for you, which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work? I'm going to start with Amy because I've already have six words from her. So I do want to see which three new ones you have to add, or if they are any of the ones that you have already said in there.

Amy Cicchino: 31:27

So I'm doubling down on reflect, curate, and narrate. I sat with myself for a little bit to come up with those three, and then I looked at my notes from the last time we met, and sure enough, same three.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:40

Previously, you had also said integrative, constructive, and hard work. Nghi, what are your words or short phrases?

Nghi Chau: 31:49

Ooh, one of them is you could choose either or so freedom or liberating, innovative, and then holistic.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:57

Awesome and McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 32:00

Mine are very in line with you two - dynamic, reflective, and challenging.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:06

Oh, I like the dynamic aspect of it as well. And yes, the challenging one, but challenging, I guess, in a good way that it is part of that learning process. Amongst the many tips that you have in your back pocket for instructors, faculty, and others. What tip do you want to highlight for learning designers and instructors who create the portfolio activities for the students? McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 32:34

Two things. The first one is to provide scaffolding on the ePortfolio and to check in frequently. Dr Cicchino was talking about this earlier, but in our first-year COMP programme, students have several ePortfolio check-ins where if there are any glaring oversights or misunderstandings, they can course correct early. I think that's really important. And then also, getting back to that access point, be familiar with the platforms you're asking students to work with, and also be ready to connect them to additional tech support or tech access if they need it. Know what kind of tech access your university offers, how to connect students with it, so that if those access issues do arise, you can connect them to people who can help.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:15

Yeah, support is very critical in the portfolio of work. Nghi?

Nghi Chau: 33:19

Bouncing off what McKenna said, other than having an understanding of just design and then a good idea of digital literacy, it would be important for instructors to have a set of questions or even like a checklist that help guide students into the right direction, into creating an ePortfolio that is relevant to their audience. And this can definitely help polish their work, because ePortfolios are already somewhat unguided. There's not a standard like a résumé. Having those questions won't necessarily limit the student from developing the type of ePortfolio that they want. It would help guide them into making a relevant and polished one.

Amy Cicchino: 33:56

We don't have that, but that sounds like a great addition.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:00

And last question now for the three of you, what advice do you have for portfolio authors?

Nghi Chau: 34:07

Having careful intent. Having a specific purpose is always going to help you with developing an ePortfolio. And I think it can especially be motivating to learn the skills that you are required to do in order to develop that ePortfolio. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to make an archive. So just having that purpose in mind, having things that you want to specifically accomplish with that ePortfolio, is especially helpful when it comes to developing it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:34

That's an awesome tip. Thank you so much for sharing that. McKenna?

McKenna Slaughter: 34:38

Students can benefit from leaning into the support that they're being offered, asking questions and experimenting, really approaching with an inquisitive mindset. Practically, start the assignment early. They take a while. And finally, don't be afraid. I think students get really intimidated starting ePortfolios, but you learn so much. You learn so many things. Things about web design and tech literacy and all these things that you know that you're learning, and you also learn a whole bunch of extra stuff that you don't even know that you're developing while you're doing it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:09

Thank you so much for your tips, and now for the last one, Amy?

Amy Cicchino: 35:14

My tip is come to the writing centre. Writing centres are really wonderful spaces to get feedback on your portfolio to support your process. Most institutions here in the United States have writing centres, so I'd encourage you to come on by your writing centre.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:30

Thank you so much, Nghi, McKenna, and Amy, for sharing how you yourself have worked with portfolios, what your own experience is, and then also how you're supporting students, what benefits you see in students creating portfolios, and then, not to forget, how you as members of the University Writing Center can support them so that they are creating impactful and meaningful portfolios, be that for assignments or also beyond that, can then help them in the career. So thank you so much for your time right before your spring break starts, really appreciate it, and I look forward to learning more from you in the future.

Amy Cicchino: 36:15

Thank you for having us.

McKenna Slaughter: 36:16

Thank you so much.

Nghi Chau: 36:17

Thank you once again.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:19

Now over to 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. This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Associate Professor Dr Amy Cicchino, McKenna Slaughter, and Nghi Chau. 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'd appreciate it, too. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create share, and engage.