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 Pablo Avila, who is the current Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, and also a doctoral student. Last year, he became the Vice President of AAEEBL, the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning. LaGuardia, his institution, pioneered work in the area of digital portfolios, especially since the 2000s and so I look forward to catching up with Pablo to hear what he and his team are currently working on and how that rich portfolio history that also includes his own experiences, influenced them. Welcome to the podcast, Pablo.

Pablo Avila: 1:11

Thank you, Kristina, for the invitation, and I look forward to our discussion.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:16

Pablo, I'll already mention that you're the Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at LaGuardia. What are your responsibilities within that role?

Pablo Avila: 1:25

I have been at the Center since 2010 wearing different hats. I started as an ePortfolio Consultant, and since then, I've been in different roles. Currently, my role as the Associate Director is to be responsible primarily for two programmes, the ePortfolio Program and the Student Technology Mentor Program. These two programmes provide support to faculty and students with the use of ePortfolios, but also with the use of different technology tools that the university makes available to faculty, staff, and students, primarily Microsoft Office 365, CUNYfirst, or any other platform support to students on a one on one basis, but the ePortfolio team also provides workshops, essentially teaching classes to help students build portfolios. I'm primarily responsible for those two programs, and I would say they fall under the umbrella of digital learning.

Pablo Avila: 2:26

When I first came to the current position in 2018 my role was as the Associate Director of the ePortfolio Program and Digital Learning, and this was because little by little, we realised that students and faculty alike needed essential support in using those technologies in the classroom. Since then, my portfolio has brought me to include not only ePortfolios, but also other digital tools.

Pablo Avila: 2:51

Since last year, my role switched in titles to being Associate Director of CTL because of my expanding responsibilities in supporting faculty. So in addition to supervising these two programmes, I also support faculty on a range of other things. I'm involved with faculty who teach online, for instance, to help them understand online teaching and learning pedagogies to help serve their students. I also am responsible for various professional development seminars at the Center. We co-design and co-lead those seminars with faculty from across different disciplines, and the topics range from online learning to capstone courses, ePortfolio, high impact practices, and first-year experience as well. So I have been involved in all of those initiatives, supporting faculty in a professional development seminar, but also supporting students, whether it's with their use of portfolios or with the use of any other tool.

Pablo Avila: 3:46

In 2025 we transitioned to using a new LMS, D2L Brightspace. So I am the training lead for the campus. In sum, my responsibilities include professional development, overseeing support programmes for students, and also working closely with faculty in professional development seminars.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:06

That's quite the wide array of responsibilities that have grown over time, and I can clearly see the thread of ePortfolios going through it, but your view goes beyond the portfolio, also looking at how it can be integrated in any other teaching and learning efforts so that they are not standing isolatedly, but are really nicely integrated. Pablo, when did you create your first portfolio? Do you still remember that?

Pablo Avila: 4:36

I do. I do not exactly the class or the date. Actually, no, not exactly the date, but the class. It was my ENG101 course with a dear colleague, Professor Liz Clark, in the English department, back in the day, when I was a student at LaGuardia. I want to say that this probably was between either the spring or the fall of 2008. I was taking a cluster. At LaGuardia, a cluster was known as a group of classes that you take together and all students are enrolled in all different classes. So I was taking ENG101 which is 'Writing composition', and ENG103 'Writing the research paper', in conjunction with 'Introduction to social movements' and 'Introduction to sociology'. So that was my four courses for that semester that I was taking with the same group of students.

Pablo Avila: 5:23

It was interesting because the cluster really gave me the experience of understanding through the lens of sociology and social movements, understanding different things about the country, about the United States because I am an immigrant, I came from Peru, so I didn't have the larger historical context of the United States. And we were essentially writing papers about it, and I remember writing my paper about immigration in the United States. This was my paper for my research paper course.

Pablo Avila: 5:50

In that cluster, Professor Liz Clark, who used to teach the 101 and 103 courses, she introduced us to this thing called ePortfolios, which I was quite confused by at the beginning, I didn't know what it was. I still remember her telling us that we were going to create this ePortfolio. The first assignment was to write about ourselves. And remember, I didn't know what I wanted to write, and I'm like, what do you mean about myself? She gave us a clue and guiding questions to get that page going, and then she asked us to pick courses and assignments that we would like to highlight in our portfolio. I remember including a couple of writing assignments that I had done in the semesters before, and I remember hand picking them and thinking about, oh, this was kind of a nice assignment. Let me just include that. My about me was very brief. It essentially said something along the lines of, my name is Pablo. I come from Peru.

Pablo Avila: 6:45

When I came to college, I had two main interests. I either wanted to become a psychologist, or I wanted to become a teacher. A teacher of what I didn't know, but I really loved teaching. I was an English teacher for little kids, second graders, back in Peru, and I did it long enough to realise that I did not want to work with kids [laughs], but I did enjoy the teaching. So I said to myself one day, I do want to continue teaching, but maybe not teaching kids because that was another experience that I enjoyed for quite some time, but I thought that was just enough.

Pablo Avila: 7:18

So I had those two career aspirations, and I remember part of our portfolio was to not only write briefly about ourselves, but also include writing or assignments that we had done that we thought were worth sharing with others, and then thinking about career goals. There was a page in which we needed to write something along the lines of what we wanted to become. I was taking two English courses and two sociology courses, and I didn't want to go in either direction, but I wanted to either become a developmental psychologist or a teacher of some sort. In the end, I ended up transferring to major in psychology, and I did my Master's in Educational Psychology, and then I took another turn into something else, but still in education.

Pablo Avila: 8:04

But I remember in that portfolio, I wrote something along the lines of, I want to become an educator somehow. I don't think I said the word 'educator', but I did want to work in an educational setting. This was when I was a student at LaGuardia, not knowing that I was going to stay at LaGuardia for now, 16 years [laughs] after I graduated, but I think my portfolio reflected probably very few things about myself, but things that I think have been consistent in my career trajectory, which is working in an educational setting, being passionate about, curious about psychology, which is something that I ended up doing.

Pablo Avila: 8:40

It was fun. It was kind of difficult at the beginning. I remember adding a picture, I think, one of the first pictures that I took of myself in the Statue of Liberty when I first came to live in New York. And I had just one or two pictures, very brief about me, and then just my selection of assignments that I wanted to showcase, and I remember wondering who the hell was going to see that.

Pablo Avila: 9:01

She told us that obviously she was going to review all of that work, but then she said that we were going to give each other feedback, so we were going to see what other students were doing in the class. That was an interesting experience because it made me aware right away that this is something that other people are going to see. I didn't know at the time, but later on, that helped me understand how students build portfolios. At the time, I was just nervous about who was going to see this and what they were going to be using it for. I was trying to be hyper aware about every single thing that I was writing because I didn't want anyone to misinterpret or misunderstand what I wanted to say or do, and she walked us through the privacy settings, making sure that only you and I and your classmates are able to see this. Little by little, it made me hyper aware of who was looking at my work and what I was putting into that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:53

That clearly set you up for a very good career in the area because then two years later, you joined the team at - was it already called Center for Teaching and Learning at the time?

Pablo Avila: 10:06

Yes. So the Center started in early 2000s and it already was called the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the ePortfolio Program existed already. I was going to be an STM, a student technology mentor, but they were only hiring current students, and by the time I applied, I was transferring to a four-year college out of LaGuardia, and I was transferring to Hunter College, my next institution, where I completed my Bachelor's in Psychology, but I had the opportunity to join the ePortfolio team, and that's when I started in January of 2010. That's where my story at Center starts.

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:41

How then did your experience of creating your portfolios in the English courses with Professor Liz Clark shape your professional path in that area?

Pablo Avila: 10:54

One thing that I learned using language, that I learned on the field, is this power of reflection, self-reflection, and being able to articulate your message to others. I learned that many years later, as I was talking to people who did similar work, supporting students building portfolios. But at the time, I wasn't aware of that. I was just curious, who is going to look at this portfolio. I remember getting invitations to student showcases where someone would ask me, 'Hey, do you want to talk about what you did in your portfolio?' And I'm like, okay, sure. Why not [laughs]? Here's what I did, here's why I picked this, here's why I picked that assignment.

Pablo Avila: 11:30

And at the time, I didn't realise that that exercise of articulating here's why I chose to display this assignment because it demonstrates this and demonstrates that - I didn't know that that articulation of my own learning and a reflection of my own learning was so powerful. Years later, when I was, if you will, in the other side, right this time now, in the ePortfolio team helping students build portfolios, I took that experience almost immediately and I started helping students. Here are some potential things that you might want to use this portfolio with.

Pablo Avila: 12:07

LaGuardia has been a vocational institution since its inception in 1971. The goal was to try to get students to showcase their skills that would help them become employable. So there used to be this course that was CEP121, 'Fundamentals of professional advancement', that used to have a lab associated that a ePortfolio consultant would teach, and I was one of them.

Pablo Avila: 12:31

So the instructor would go over things in terms of career readiness, how to build a strong résumé, how to build interview skills, how to network, how to build an elevator pitch, and then you would actually build a portfolio that would demonstrate all of those skills, whether you were in business, in healthcare, in journalism, whatever the field was. You were building a portfolio that ideally would be public facing and target someone that would potentially give you an internship or an employment opportunity.

Pablo Avila: 12:58

Right away, I saw the connections for students to be able to use this for their benefit. But there were some points that I immediately realised that were important to them, that I thought were important to me as a student. One is who's going to see this, and what privacy levels do you have? You want to make sure that you have full control of who's going to look at your work. The second point that I remember making to students is, what work do you want to put into this? What intentional idea do you want to document in this portfolio? Do you want to put that research paper that demonstrates A, Y, and C, or do you want to put that other video project that you did that will probably help others understand the skills that you bring?

Pablo Avila: 13:40

Knowing who's looking at your work and knowing what work you're putting in. There were two things that I took almost right away from my own experience to help students understand and then many other things came along the way that once I started interacting with other people who were doing similar work at LaGuardia, but also at large, when I started connecting with other institutions, it helped me realise, oh, wait, what we were doing at LaGuardia made sense. There was a logic behind doing all of that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:10

That's really good to hear and reflect on that your own experience shaped how you're teaching with portfolios because you have that lived experience, and you know what questions you had when you came to the portfolio first, what questions you wanted to have answered, what emotions you had, how you were lost or then discovered how the portfolio can help you and then translate that into the support that you give your students.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:36

With how many students and faculty do you work in regards to portfolios, Pablo, and do you have a sense of what the major types of portfolios are that your students are creating? Is it mainly for assessment purposes? Is it for internship? Or why do students create portfolios?

Pablo Avila: 14:57

At LaGuardia, there are a little over 60 programmes that are available. I want to say a little over 50, close to 60, I would say, have any portfolio component. This is all thanks to the work the institution has done to establish the first year seminar course. The first year seminar course, which was redesigned in 2014 to incorporate a number of elements that would strengthen the students' first experience, number one it's taught by someone in the discipline, so it's not a counselor any more, but it's someone, a faculty member in the department, someone that, ideally, the student will take a class with down the road if they are in the education major or in the business or in the accounting programme. It also has an introduction to the advisement structure, so students can understand what options they have in terms of degrees, but also what academic requirements they need to fulfil.

Pablo Avila: 15:50

And it also has an introduction to the ePortfolio, and the student success mentor is the one who facilitates this studio hour. So the same studio hour that I was referring to earlier for that CEP121 course back in the day. Now it still exists, but it's associated with the first year seminar course. Almost all programmes at LaGuardia now have a first year seminar course where a studio hour is associated with it, and that's the introduction to students' portfolios.

Pablo Avila: 16:17

Now, LaGuardia has in an academic year roughly 11,000-12,000 students (sic!) coming in. So you can imagine that we have a large pool of those students. I would venture to say 9,000-10,000 of students were seeing a student success mentor and who are taking a first year seminar course, and therefore are introduced to their portfolios.

Pablo Avila: 16:38

At LaGuardia, we have gone in waves as to how we use portfolios. Over the years, we have referred to portfolios as being showcase portfolios, meaning a portfolio that a student builds and shares with an outside audience. An example of that would be the CEP121 course. That course no longer exists, but there are other courses, say a capstone course, where student may build a portfolio that they then share with an outside audience for the purpose of getting an internship or getting an employment opportunity.

Pablo Avila: 17:10

Then we have the learning portfolio. The learning portfolio, and I would associate that with the first year seminar, it's a portfolio that students use from the very beginning in their career at LaGuardia that may not necessarily be shared with an outside audience, but it's rather a portfolio where a student documents all of their learning experiences, a portfolio that serves as a catalyst for all of the things that they're doing in their first year. There's activities, for instance, such as 'Understanding myself', which walks students through what are some of the skills that I would need if I want to be in the accounting major or in the nursing major or in the education major? That helps students solidify their career choice. So the idea is that students solidify their understanding of portfolios, and by using a portfolio, they're able to see all of the options that they have and document all of the work that they do.

Pablo Avila: 18:04

So we support students in the first year seminar, primarily, who are using a version of what I would say is the learning portfolio, where, in conjunction with the student success mentor, who is facilitating that studio hour, the student is introduced to their portfolio, one that they will use over their time at LaGuardia, but one portfolio that is introduced by a peer. Because, I think, another important element of ePortfolio practice is the communication and the delivery. In this case, the student success mentor is someone critical in the process to help students understand the value of a portfolio, and they really support students in different facets, but for the purposes of portfolios, they are the best ambassadors.

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:48

Awesome that pretty much all your students start out with the portfolio right when they get to LaGuardia to then also get into the habit of reflecting on their learning, making connections with what they have learned in the different classes, and then also getting used to receiving feedback from others and collaborating with others. Does that all go back to how portfolios had been then established at LaGuardia, with the work that Bret Eynon and also Laura Gambino did and the whole community around the Catalyst of Learning project?

Pablo Avila: 19:25

A moment ago, I mentioned that a LaGuardia, we normally have about 11,000 students. That I was referring to, the full population of students. Those who are taking or who are in their first semester may be lower than that. So doesn't mean that all 10,000 students are enrolled in the first year seminars. I wanted to point that out.

Pablo Avila: 19:41

I think the work that Bret Eynon did conjunction with Laura Gambino and other institutions, because there were many other institutions involved, I think solidified ePortfolio as a practice. I mentioned earlier that when I was a student, I was almost in this exercise of articulating what I had learned through the work in my portfolio. And many years after that, I learned the sort of like the vocabulary or the importance of this as a practice, and I understood much better my own student experience. I think that's one example.

Pablo Avila: 20:15

What Bret and Laura and other faculty at LaGuardia, even Liz Clark, who was also involved in the early works of portfolios, I think helped me better understand ePortfolio as a high-impact practice. So it's not only that you have a portfolio that is just a website where you essentially document everything you do and you just share it and make it accessible to everyone, but it helped me see portfolios as something more than that. It's something that's intentional, that when you strategically introduce it in the first year, so that students begin documenting all that work, when you infuse reflective activity, so that students can think about, what did I learn in this paper, or what did this video project help me develop, or how challenging was this assignment, and what did I take out of that? I think those sort of like in between the lines things about portfolio practice are the things that helped me further develop my understanding of portfolios, really, as a practice.

Pablo Avila: 21:14

In the work that Bret and Laura did, there's many case studies where they explain not only the intentionality of using portfolios in certain programmes, certain courses, but I think they explored and explained the use of portfolios for multiple purposes. For instance, portfolios for assessment. How does portfolio manifest student learning around integrative learning or digital learning?

Pablo Avila: 21:39

We have three core competencies and three communication abilities for general education courses - global learning, integrative learning, and enquiry and problem solving are the three core competencies. And writing, digital, and oral are the three communication abilities. Portfolios are likely to help students develop digital communication abilities and integrative learning because in the reflective activities that faculty normally use for portfolios in conjunction with ePortfolio work, that's where students are able to make those connections. How did something that I learned in this other course in my major help me understand the next thing that I learned in the next course that I had to take the following semester? If you document that in the portfolio, it really begins to chart and build a narrative for the student work. Ultimately, that's what we want. We want portfolios to be not a timestamp of what a student did at any given point, but rather a narrative of what the student did over time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:40

Yeah, bringing in folio thinking so not just organizing and reflecting on the learning, but also telling that wider learning journey. Pablo, the portfolio work at LaGuardia has evolved over the years, and in recent years, you've introduced a new element, which a lot of people are looking at, the artificial intelligence component, not just in education, but also how it can impact portfolios. Can you tell us a little bit about how generative AI plays into the portfolio offering at LaGuardia? What do you do and what do you maybe explicitly don't do?

Pablo Avila: 23:18

Before launching into the connection between AI and portfolios, I do want to say that LaGuardia is obviously grappling with how to adjust to the evolution of AI. I see the side of faculty who are deeply concerned about how students are using AI for getting around or getting away with things, but I also see the other side of faculty who are eager and curious to learn about how AI could be an opportunity to help students in different ways. For instance, help them practice coding, or help them generate quiz questions when they need to prep for an exam, or even help students who are learning a second language.

Pablo Avila: 23:56

At LaGuardia, we are proud to say that we are a very diverse campus. As matter of fact, many years ago, the main marketing of the college was 'The World's Community College' because we have students who come from so many different countries, and it's very likely that if you select one student at random, that student comes from another country and their first language is not English. So that speaks about the diversity.

Pablo Avila: 24:19

At the same time, I think we also speak about equity, equity divide because many students at other types of institutions - we are a public community college - have access to so many sophisticated AI driven tools that students at a public community college may not. With that as a backdrop in terms of portfolios, what we are doing is we are beginning - we work Digication - we are beginning to explore how AI could be utilised to help us better understand the data that students submit for assessment purposes. And this is not something that we are deploying formally yet because this is still in a very early stages of experimenting and planning to help us better understand, for instance, different assignments or works that students submit for assessment purposes, such as integrative learning or communication, enquiry, and problem solving.

Pablo Avila: 25:10

For each of those competencies and communications, we use rubrics that we based off their VALUE rubrics of AAC&U, we adopted them, and each time there's a human score behind it, who receives the student work, sees the work against the rubric, and then provides a score. But it provided that score, there may be in between the lines that we may not be able to see. There may be other trends, for instance, that students are manifesting like social justice, for instance, that we may be missing because we only are using the core competencies and the communication abilities.

Pablo Avila: 25:44

So we're using AI to begin to try to explore how we could distil those to have a better and more holistic picture of the work that students are submitting. This is in a very early stage, but I think it gets us in the right direction, which is helping us better understand the nuances of student work and the nuances of student learning, especially when you have students who, most likely they are their first in their family to go to college, they have very rich experiences, and most of the time they are not a native speaker of English. So I think that diverse pool of students already is a rich population to look at, so we're trying to investigate how we could use AI to advance our analysis of that work. We're not at the point yet where we can definitively say this is the direction which we're going to go, but I believe we're trying our best to make sure that we match or outpace, in some cases, the evolution of AI.

Pablo Avila: 26:42

Now, AI is a hot topic for productivity, right, for triaging your inbox. For corporate world, AI is just the hottest topic to enhance your productivity and reduce your screen time with tasks, items that you have to do. But we're speaking about the use of AI in another facet, which is to better understand student learning, which I think was the principle behind the evolution of our ePortfolio work. At the beginning, we had the same question. This precedes my time at the Center, but from what I have learned when I speak to colleagues who have been here long enough, the impetus behind doing our ePortfolio work was to better understand student work because in many ways, college can be a very transactional journey.

Pablo Avila: 27:25

You take this course, you take that course, you will fulfil that requirement. You get a degree. But the experiences that come in between those courses, right, the connections, the relationships that you build over time, sometimes are missed in that college transcript. So how can you capture those, in this case, in a portfolio? So the impetus behind the ePortfolio work at the beginning was to better understand the student experience, the student learning. And I think we continue to have that same core question, the same philosophical question of you know, why are we here [laughs]? But we're now grappling with it as we see the evolution of things like AI, and we're trying our best to make sure that we use it in a way that supports and advances our mission.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:09

Do you already have some early insight from the faculty that are participating in your pilot programme, and can maybe share an example of how they surfaced insight that they've gained from the student portfolio by using some of the generative AI capabilities?

Pablo Avila: 28:29

I don't have any examples as of now, but this leads me to explain the other implementation that we're doing. So in addition to using some AI features for assessing our assessment data, we're also testing some AI features for the purposes of building assignments. This is very, I would say, quite similar to building a custom GPT, where it's a bot that you ask students to interact with to reflect on a specific activity or experience. Digication is building a platform that's called TORI. It's Taxonomy of Reflective Inquiry in which they have snippets of reflection approaches that you can apply. So for instance, the students reflecting on their first semester in college, or students reflecting on a difficult assignment. There's many more. Those reflective approaches allow you to embed them into an activity that you then ask students to reflect.

Pablo Avila: 29:22

We're doing a pilot, actually, this spring semester 2026. We have recruited a total of seven faculty who are willing to pilot and design an assignment with us. Then at the end of our spring semester, we hope to get that kind of feedback from faculty and from students to better understand how their experience with this AI bot has made a difference. What we're trying to do is to not use it to generate content, but rather to help students reflect on specific experience. These are not connected to their portfolios yet. I'm sure that at one point it will be, but as of now, it's just a student responding to prompts that are designed to help them understand and reflect on specific experiences they may have gone through.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:07

This reminds me quite a bit of the work, also that Leticia Britos Cavagnaro does at Stanford University, who pioneered the reflection bot Riff a few years ago, introducing an opportunity for students to use generative AI not to help with the content creation, but reflect on their learning and building a reflective framework into the tool because, of course, you can use any generative AI and tell it to ask you questions, but the neat thing I find about those purpose built tools is that they incorporate the research on reflection and how to respond to the students, so that the students still need to think and reflect on their own experiences, rather than outsourcing the thinking to an AI.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:53

So that'll be very interesting to continue watching once you get it connected a bit more with the portfolios, and then have another conversation about that journey of yours and how it is helping because Jeff had shared one of those early examples, after they had incorporated the reflection bot into their platform in an able webinar, talking about also the benefits for the students. And one of course is very much if you don't have a reflection partner available at the time when you want to reflect or when you need to reflect, having that assisting technology available can just help in that moment to sort out your thinking and to walk things through and reflect on the experience.

Pablo Avila: 31:41

When I went to college, there wasn't any bot that I could use to do all of this work. But now that such technology exists, I think those are the opportunities that we can tap into to help our students better understand the world, but also be prepared, right?

Pablo Avila: 31:56

A lot of people are also saying that students are going to encounter AI in the workplace once they graduate and they leave, so they have to be equipped with skills to be able to utilise those tools that I think as an institution, in general, and this is my own opinion about education as an educator, I think as an institution, we have the responsibility to educate our students and prepare them for a workplace that will have a number of different demands, and those demands were not the same as there were 10, 15, or 40 years ago.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:29

The work will shift. The other thing also, because earlier, you had talked about your own portfolio experience in your first English courses at LaGuardia, that you had received those questions and needed to answer them. So the nice thing I find about the reflection bot is that it can personalise the experience because it can ask those follow up questions that are particular to your context, what you've been talking about. So lots of things to watch in the portfolio space, and we'll have more conversations around that topic, also in the AAEEBL community and others. So now, Pablo, what do you wish everybody should know about portfolios?

Pablo Avila: 33:08

One thing that I always keep going back to is that portfolios are more than a website. I think a lot of people see portfolios, and rightfully so, I don't blame them [laughs], people will see portfolios just as a website that you put up and you leave there as a digital footprint. It's more than that. I think it's a practice. And I would underscore things that we have already mentioned so far, things like the folio thinking, right, being intentional about what you include, having a clear message. Who are you directing this portfolio to? Who do you envision will be reading this portfolio? And really manifesting what you want.

Pablo Avila: 33:46

A colleague in the English department wrote an article for IJeP about curating content for your portfolio. He speaks about developing students' capacity over time to curate their own content and their own identity to craft a portfolio that they want to showcase, they want to share with others. That's a core exercise of reflective practice or folio thinking, because you need to think carefully about what you want to manifest in this portfolio, and you need to think carefully about who is going to be looking at this portfolio. That's what I wish people would know right away. It's not just a website where you upload a PDF and you share it with someone.

Pablo Avila: 34:26

There is intentionality about you building a portfolio from beginning to end. We now see that in programmes that are very intentional at LaGuardia, where they build portfolios from first year, there's faculty that I speak to. I am an adjunct instructor as well, and I teach the first year seminar for education, so I only see students right at the beginning, but then I talk to faculty who also teach the first year seminar but also teach the capstone level course, and they speak about students that they've had a year, two years ago in their first year seminar course, now coming to their capstone courses, about to graduate with such robust work on their portfolios, and they're like, 'Wow, this is amazing. I remember when this student was in my first year seminar. I remember the first philosophy statement that he did,' and now you're seeing it at the end. That product is certainly something that we don't see right away. So I wish people would see that ePortfolio is a practice rather than just a tool.

Kristina Hoeppner: 35:20

Yeah, that is really good to see that progression of the students throughout and also then realise their growth, but also for the students to hopefully realise that themselves. Now on to our last three questions for you, Pablo, our quick answer round. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Pablo Avila: 35:40

One is definitely create a story. Create a story. So it's not just uploading documents. Create a story of your journey at LaGuardia, or your career in the States, or your trajectory over time. Another one that I have used a lot, too, is map a career journey. So create a story as a human, but also map a career journey as professional, whether you are in education, criminal justice, paralegal, you name it, there's a trajectory in that journey that I'm sure it's worth putting in a portfolio. I myself started in education, went through psychology, did my master's, and I ended up veering back into education. There were reasons and circumstances that pushed me in one and the other direction, and I think it's just normal for students to change majors and to understand here's why I want to become an accountant, or here's why I want to become a nurse. So create a story and map a career journey. Those are two that I at least think a lot about, rather than just the minutia of upload your paper and that's it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:45

Which also alludes nicely to the lifelong learning aspect that a portfolio can have, that it does encourage to continue learning, reflect on that learning, not just throughout the university career, but also beyond. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Pablo Avila: 37:05

Having a multimodal approach when designing activities. I think, students can have strengths in different facets. One may be their writing is excellent. Another one may be their voice may be excellent if they are recording something or video, right? Or maybe design, if you're more a visual person. I would say, considering all aspects.

Pablo Avila: 37:27

I always remember this one instructor, who is an English professor, and I remember she was very intentional about telling her students, 'This is a writing course. It's an English course, but if you design your portfolio visually speaking, and you articulate to me, why did you choose these colours over the others? And you do so in an intentional way. I will give you extra points.' I remember students having so many visual creations that it was interesting, even though it was a writing class, ultimately, the product was a paper [laughs]. But I think she took it in a way that only because this is a writing class. It doesn't mean that I'm only going to be

Pablo Avila: 38:05

Your portfolio is a manifestation of a number of things. It is the text, it is the images, it is the colours. And I think when you are aware of how all of those could interplay and connect to one another, that's when you really understand ePortfolio practice. So I would say one tip is to be considerate of all of those elements. Only because you are a visual person doesn't mean that you care less about the text.

Pablo Avila: 38:32

I remember an instructor who used to asked students to have three words that represent themselves in the homepage. So she would ask students to think about three words that they really think represent them. It's either text, it's either images, it's media. I think when you think about all of those elements, it's when you really can help students represent their work through portfolio. So that will be my tip, to consider all of those elements of how they could connect to one another, be multimodal.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:02

Thank you. And visual elements in particular can often tell a story much more clearly than a lot of words. So incorporating both those elements is awesome to do in a portfolio in particular, where we have the opportunities to easily work with multimodal content and make that available to others. And our last question for you, Pablo, today, what advice do you have for portfolio authors, be that students, but also maybe faculty that you work with?

Pablo Avila: 39:32

One thing that comes to mind is being able to articulate what you want others to understand of your work. We are working on this initiative that is called Design Studio in our ePortfolio programme. And in a nutshell, essentially, we recruit students who are nearing the point of graduation, we help them polish their portfolios, and in partnership with our career office, we share those portfolios with industry professionals. So if we're working with a class that is from a paralegal programme in partnership with our career office recruit people in the paralegal field who are willing to review these students' portfolios.

Pablo Avila: 40:08

One of the things that we always tell students is that these people, these industry professionals, probably may not know what this particular class was about. But if you translate to them the skills that you're getting out of that class so that they connect to the work that they do, to help them understand that you understand those concepts, in this case, in the paralegal field, that is going to be a major changer for them to understand, 'Oh, this student has an understanding of A, B and C.' Because if you only post an assignment, 'Oh, here's my research paper.' They may read the research paper, but they may not realise what is it that you were trying to get out of this paper or what is it that you learned from this paper, right?

Pablo Avila: 40:50

Say that there's one skill that you need to make sure that you master by the time that you enter the workforce. They don't articulate that well enough, then that can make a difference if someone is willing to give you an internship. It's almost like an elevator pitch. If you happen to meet the CEO of a company and you have between the first floor and the 13th floor, you're going to tell them about you, and you know, what is it that they need to know so that they can hire you? You have that distance to make a difference. The timing is key, right? I think in portfolios is the same.

Pablo Avila: 41:19

So one my advice to students would be to be explicit about who's looking at your work and be explicit about what is it that you want them to know about you? They want them to understand that 'I know this, this, and this skill that will set me apart from another candidate. I know my craft, and here's my portfolio as proof.' That requires that they be mindful of their audience. You're going to want to make sure that your message is clear and is to the point.

Kristina Hoeppner: 41:44

And coming back to folio thinking, bring that story together in order for somebody else to understand who they are. Thank you so very much, Pablo. It was wonderful catching up with you today, learning about your portfolio journey, and your experiences with portfolios over the years that you have been at LaGuardia now, first creating portfolios on your own and then supporting students and faculty all the way to now leading a programme in order to shape what portfolios are currently looking like at LaGuardia and what you want to do with them going forward into the future. I'm sure we'll be hearing more of you also during the AAEEBL Annual Meeting that will be coming up in June this year, and have more conversations around all of the topics that you touched on today. So thank you so very much.

Pablo Avila: 42:43

Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 42:44

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 Pablo Avila. Make sure to check out the resources in the episode notes in your podcast app or at podcast.mahara.org. And if you find this valuable, share it with a colleague who'd appreciate it as well. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.