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 Kristin Hoeppner. My guests today are members of ePortfolios Australia, the community of practice of educators advancing portfolio practice in Australia and the wider Oceania region. Dr Heather Pate and Rebecca Scriven, who is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, work at Edith Cowan University in Perth, in Australia. I've been following, especially Heather's portfolio work, for many years now, and so it is great to chat with her and Rebecca about their work at ECU, in particular around taking a programmatic approach to learning and incorporating portfolios into that. Welcome to the podcast, Bec and Heather.

Rebecca Scriven: 1:15

Thank you.

Heather Pate: 1:16

Thanks, Kristina.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:17

Bec, what is your role at Edith Cowan University at the moment?

Rebecca Scriven: 1:23

I'm the Digital Learning Lead as part of the Centre of Learning and Teaching here at ECU, and my role at the moment is in the implementation of our new portfolio tool, which we have started using just towards the end of last year, so rolling that out across the institution as part of our curriculum transformation project.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:44

You've been at ECU for quite a number of years and therefore are very familiar with all things digital learning there, and so it's great to see how you can manage change and now also bring in portfolios more.

Rebecca Scriven: 1:57

Yes, I was a Senior Learning Designer for most of those years I've only just switched into this role recently, but it gives me a nice lens on the learning design part, but also the digital technology side.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:10

Thank you. Heather, over to you. Congratulations, by the way, on having completed your doctorate at the end of last year.

Heather Pate: 2:17

Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:18

What is your role at ECU?

Heather Pate: 2:21

I have also relatively recently started a new role, as well as Lecturer in the Academic Practice Team, which is in the Centre of Learning and Teaching, same as Bec, at ECU.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:32

You've been in the Digital Learning team before, Senior Learning Designer, right?

Heather Pate: 2:37

Yes, Bec and I were in the same team, in fact, we started in the same year, and we were brought on as part of the shift towards more online learning at ECU at the time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:48

I have known Heather now for many years. I can't even remember when we first met, but probably around 2011, 2012 through one of the ePortfolio Australia events, the Eportfolio Forum. Heather, then what is your earliest experience with portfolios?

Heather Pate: 3:07

Yes, I think we met in 2013 maybe in Canberra at that ePortfolios Australia Forum.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:13

Your memory is much better than mine [both laugh].

Heather Pate: 3:16

I started at ECU in 2012 and you know what it's like when you start a new place, you're given all those online learning things, you're supposed to go off and do the occupational health and safety stuff, and all that sort of thing. I got to the end of all that, I'm like, okay, now what do I do? And in my email, it was like one of my first emails that said, 'Hey, come and join this webinar, we're talking about portfolios.' I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting, I might as well go to that. So I went, and it turns out not many other people were actually there, so I somehow ended up getting involved in the pilot project in ePortfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:49

So an accidental portfolio practitioner in a way [both laugh].

Heather Pate: 3:53

That's right, yeah, and it was interesting because before that I was in China and we had a programme, a language program there, and we used portfolios there as well, but it was like that old school portfolio system, where you tend to just gather everything. There was collation, but it was no sense making. It was straight away a shift to a different way of looking at portfolios, which was good?

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:14

Yeah. Bec, were you then one of the other people in the webinar, or what was your earliest portfolio memory?

Rebecca Scriven: 4:22

No, I wasn't in that webinar, but I was definitely joining ECU at the same time as Heather, and as a learning designer, we were involved a little bit in the online learning courses project, but also we were going through a curriculum uplift at that time, and a new portfolio tool had been introduced to the university, and as a learning designer, we were encouraged to go out to the schools that we were supporting and help them to adopt portfolios as part of their courses and curriculum. So, yeah, I was working with the School of Nursing and Midwifery, and I was lucky enough to help them adopt the portfolio into their curriculum and be part of all of that and was really exciting time. They did take to it really well because a portfolio is something that, you know, nursing students need when they graduate to take with them for their professional development. So, yeah, I worked with them to embed that as part of their whole employability framework. That was my first experience really with portfolio learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:19

Great, that you mentioned nurses, was that portfolio then very standards based, following the Australian nursing competency standards?

Rebecca Scriven: 5:29

Yes, yeah, but that's definitely how it works. So we were encouraging students to take all of their pieces of their practice from when they're on placement, their reflections and things, and put them all together in that portfolio against those standards.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:43

Which other schools or faculties use portfolios currently?

Rebecca Scriven: 5:48

We have quite a strong contingency of courses in education using the portfolios for the teachers. I've also worked with arts and humanities around the social work area. It's mainly students that were going out on placements that were using their portfolios to record their experiences and bring together that evidence of their time on placement, and I know Heather's worked with the engineering school as well, same sort of thing, that was a course-wide portfolio. So yeah, we've got quite a few pockets across the university that have been using portfolios over the years.

Heather Pate: 6:24

There's also speech pathology, they use it. Nutrition uses it a lot as well. Both of them are for placement. Also in engineering, the strongest uptake has been, although it's a whole of course approach, it's the placement that's been the connection to all those strong uses of portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:42

How do the tutors work with the portfolio when the students are on placement and create it? Do they look at it throughout? Do they give feedback to the students? Or how does your placement portfolio work?

Rebecca Scriven: 6:57

I can talk about one that I'm familiar with, which is the social work portfolio. That's a year-long course, and they do one or two placements over the year. The supervisor at ECU would dip into their portfolios occasionally, just to see how they were tracking the students. They were doing a reflective journal while they were out on placement, and I had one unit coordinator who told me that that was the best tool for her to be able to see what the student was doing, how they were coping, and almost using that as a tool to, if they needed to intervene and give more support to their students, that would be the one that would tell them about how they were going on placement.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:36

We wanted to talk about programmatic learning, and some others call it programmatic assessment or a programmatic approach to assessment because that is where ECU is moving, and that involves quite a bit of portfolio work. Can you please explain what programmatic learning entails for you at this stage?

Rebecca Scriven: 7:57

Yeah, we are at a very exciting time at the moment, where we are moving towards this programmatic learning approach, and the portfolio is at the centre of it all. So, all of our newly designed courses, we are taking the approach of the portfolio being the part in the middle that is holding it all together, a way for the students to gather their evidence, show that evidence of the learning, making it visible to both staff and students, and getting the students to really have that view over the entire degree, so that they do get to see their progress and their growth over that time, but not just students, staff as well. The difference between what we're doing at ECU and maybe programmatic assessment as such, is that we've got a lot more focus on the learning and the process of making that learning visible and the feedback that goes into this and the support of the student along that journey. I think it's a little bit different in that way. It's very exciting, but it's a big project.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:57

Bec, you just mentioned the learning evidence, and a couple of things that I wrote down when you had your ePortfolios Australia webinar was that you are making the distinction between artefact and evidence, so a thing and the claim. Can you please explain that distinction for you between what is an artefact and what then is evidence?

Rebecca Scriven: 9:22

This is what we've been talking a lot about at the moment. It is something that is going to take a while to shift that thinking in both our teachers and our students. Up until now, I had thought mostly about people collecting those artefacts in their portfolios and then having them there to show somebody what they've been doing and what they've been learning, but without the little part that needs to go with it, the explanation about what that evidence is and what it means to you and why you've put it in the portfolio, that's the part where it moves from artefact to evidence. So if the student can make that connection between what they did and what they learned and how it has helped them to grow, that's the part that we are really focusing in on at the moment to try and show that learning and making that visible.

Heather Pate: 10:10

That's been the big difference between the way we've traditionally used portfolios here at ECU, as well, in most cases, and this new approach. When we first started and continuing for a really long time, Bec and I know that there's a whole program approach to portfolios is the best way to use a portfolio because it's not just about what's happening in one unit, it's about what's happening over the entire programme or the entire course. So the big shift has been in that, when Bec was talking there about the artefacts that people are creating, that's happening at the unit level, and the difference in making it the evidence is you're connecting it to something, connecting it to something outside your own unit. That's why the course learning outcomes or the programme learning outcomes become really central. You're not just thinking about, okay, in this unit I'm learning this thing, I'm making this thing, but rather I'm doing something which is actually connected to this bigger thing, which by the time I graduate, this is what this means, and making sense of their own learning rather than just making sense of potentially of what's happening in one unit.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:15

That's I find really interesting and a good distinction because typically, at least, I use artefact and evidence quite interchangeably, and so in your language, what the evidence, though, is is the artefact on steroids because it includes the artefact and the reflection on it, and then also they connect into other things, which I think nicely makes a good distinction that can also be explained really, really well, as you've just done.

Heather Pate: 11:43

That's exactly right. The reason that's so important right now is not just about it being about student learning, but also about us being able to assure that that is the student learning. They could create the product itself, the artefact, anyway. They could just throw it into AI and come up with something, so it's pointless. We don't know how much they've learned. We can't be sure how much they've learned based on the artefact because who knows? It becomes meaningful, it becomes purposeful and useful when the student's able to talk about what it is that they've done, why they've done it, and how it connects to their learning. That is the learning, that's the evidence of the learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:16

Yeah, that is awesome. You've actually come up with a framework for your programmatic approach to learning and for your whole portfolio process. Heather, can you please take us through that?

Heather Pate: 12:31

What we did last year for the Eportfolio Forum, Bec and I, was, we came up with a framework based on collecting artefacts and then making sense of that through the narrative and then submitting it for assessment. What's become clear for us this year, as we've gone through this first year of the process of programmatic learning at the university, is that that's great, but that's still sitting at the unit level, and it still separates the artefacts and the work of that unit from all the other units. So, what we're working on right now is an extension of the framework, so that it's like, well, how do those different units work together? How do you collect artefacts from each of the units to create evidence of something at the course level? Because the students, when in first year, they're only up to first year level, so how do you support the process as they change from first year to second year to third year as they go through their course? What does that look like in terms of evidencing their learning?

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:28

What is an example of that support that you give your faculty so that they can then help the students make those connections?

Heather Pate: 13:38

What's been really important is them recognising how important it is that they themselves are super clear on what they're doing and why they're doing it and to themselves shift their thinking from 'this is just about me and my unit' to 'this is about all of us as a whole course.' That requires time, which is so valuable. It's quite hard to take the time to think about, okay, this is what I need you to do in this unit, this is how this links to the other units into the course, and give time in the tutorials or in the workshops for students to learn that process and to do that process and to support them through them taking ownership of their own learning because fundamentally that's what it's about. They decide, do they know these things. They decide how they're going to show that they know these things.

Rebecca Scriven: 14:28

Yeah, and I'll add it, it is a big shift in the traditional way that they've always been teaching, is just focusing on their unit and their content, but now we do require them to think about the connection across an entire stage of their course or programme and how what they're doing fits into the other parts of that student journey. It is a tricky thing to shift those minds into that direction, but it's been very rewarding, and we've had some great feedback so far. So yes, what's this space.

Heather Pate: 15:04

One of the reasons why it's just so hard for them is because, like, traditionally universities have required people to produce a product, you know, it's an essay. We'll mark it, we'll give it back to you, and everyone moves on with their life to something completely different, which is that essays, it is still important, like the work is still important. They still need to do things, but not focusing on just that thing. It's no longer the evidence, and so the whole process has to shift towards thinking outside the product and towards the whole process, the student journey.

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:38

Has that then also fostered collaboration amongst the lecturers that you're working with?

Heather Pate: 15:45

Yeah, that's absolutely it, and that is a massive big change. You're not just responsible for your unit, you're actually part of a team, and together you're getting students between these points that requires collaboration and shared understanding and shared purpose.

Rebecca Scriven: 16:02

They're coming together to make that holistic judgement of the student's progress as well, not just their own decision on whether a student has passed their unit. It's that joining together to look at the student across the stage of a course to decide whether they move on to the next stage.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:21

Yeah, that would have been my next question. How do you make sure that the connections that the students are drawing are also being picked up by the other lecturers so that it doesn't still stay within that one unit, but also that the other lecturers know how the students make those connections. Do they then collaborate on the grading of the portfolio of the students? Do you have any formal processes around it? Are you still tweaking the processes? And I guess right now, Heather, since you switched jobs, you are now on the lecturer side of things, you can actually experience that and be part of that conversation.

Heather Pate: 17:00

Yeah, that's the fundamental thing, and that's why you know, as Bec said at the beginning, the portfolio is essential. They're absolutely central because at the end of each stage, each semester, each trimester, or whatever it is, by the time they get to the end, then it's the portfolio that holds together the student progress towards each of the different course learning outcomes. That's the central place where all the information is stored and shared.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:24

Do the lecturers grade together?

Rebecca Scriven: 17:28

A panel will come together to make a decision around that assessment point in the stage of the course. They will collaborate and decide together whether the student gets to move on to the next stage.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:42

That is fantastic. How has the uptake been by faculty? In which study programme are you currently piloting that, and what did it also take you to persuade people to participate in this very different approach to teaching, learning, and assessing?

Heather Pate: 18:05

It's an ongoing process. It is the whole university that's making these changes. We started with pilot programmes, including in education, in nursing, where else, Bec, law?

Rebecca Scriven: 18:17

And the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

Heather Pate: 18:21

That's right. So, we had about 10 courses going through now. They're coming to the end of their very first semester. All courses will make the change. It's an ongoing process of supporting people to make the changes required, but also to see why we need to do that and to know what to do and how to do it. It's a massive job.

Rebecca Scriven: 18:43

Yeah, and we're getting lots of support from the university to do that as well, and it's definitely not something that's happening overnight. It's about six months to a year for a course to work through the phases of that transformation.

Heather Pate: 18:57

Yeah, or even longer. And I would say it takes the entire university to make it happen. It's happening at ECU because this has come down from the leadership team as 'this is the approach we're going to take.' You also need to have people who are passionate about it and who can stand up and hold the flag and show that it's going to work. It really takes everybody, but without the leadership team, it would be extremely difficult to do this because it's such a major change.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:23

And also a very all-encompassing change. So, it's really good to hear that your leadership team is behind that initiative, also gives you the people and the resources to go through that massive change, and that they also recognise that it's not an immediate change, that it does take time, that you do need that time to bring people on board, that it can't just be the champions, but that you do need to bring everybody along.

Heather Pate: 19:51

That's exactly right, and also it has to outlast people as well. Champions are fantastic, but they're limited in time and what they can give. It needs to be something that's actually embedded in the course, otherwise it's constantly trying to progress something with opposition against it. If you think you don't need a portfolio because you think you can rely on individual products or artefacts, and that's all you have to worry about, then of course portfolios feel like a nice little extra, but if you're thinking about the learning, the student learning, and the student experience, and the students being in charge of their own learning, having ownership of their own learning, then portfolios become a central part, which you actually can't do without, and the programmatic approach becomes logical. It's a challenge because it's actually two different ways of looking at the world, really.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:41

Do you already happen to have some early feedback from faculty that have been involved in the pilot, and maybe also a student or two?

Heather Pate: 20:49

The university's just released an update on how it's going, and we can share that with you. A couple of staff members in SBL talking about the way it's changed their approach to teaching and learning, and how they've really appreciated it, and it's made them think differently. We've heard from students that they've really enjoyed having an opportunity to talk about their learning and focusing on their learning. They've liked the change in focus, so that's been really positive.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:18

That is awesome. Where do you then see the future of portfolios, either just at ECU or the wider

Rebecca Scriven: 21:27

I was really happy to see Phil Dawson a couple of weeks ago in the TEQSA webinar that was on about online community? degrees and the assurance of learning. He talked about seeing a portfolio at the end of a degree, and that has all the pieces of evidence in it, and that they've been annotated and having course leads making an holistic judgement of a big pool of evidence. I was so excited when I heard that, because I thought, yay, because that's what we've been involved in for the last couple of years, making it happen. So I can only see that portfolios are going to becoming very popular, and there's going to be a big leap forward for them across universities as part of this assurance of learning.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:11

That also reminds me a bit of Kate Coleman's PhD thesis, which is a portfolio. We have those early adopters, and now seeing it across more study programmes will be good to see. Heather, where do you see the future?

Heather Pate: 22:26

I'm with Bec. There was clearly a shift happening. It's taken a really long time [laughs], and we've said this every year. We say,"Oh, this time people will understand!" But I think coming from people from outside the portfolio space now saying that as well, that's a big leap. If you look at the TEQSA guidance, one of their suggestions for universities on dealing with AI is programmatic. Portfolios are central to programmatic. How else you hold it together? How else will it work without a portfolio stringing together the different things that are coming up? I think this is the age of portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:59

Let's go with that. That could be the mic drop moment in this conversation[laughs], but I actually do still have a few questions for you. So, what do you then want everybody to know about portfolios?

Heather Pate: 23:15

This came up at that same Canberra portfolio(Forum) back in 2013 when at the keynote said technology needs to be light, learning needs to be heavy, and I've taken that with me this whole way through. Portfolios should be easy. It should be like a breath of fresh air, you know. It should be like you've done this stuff, you know this stuff, you've already shown that you can do it. Your portfolio is sharing that with other people.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:40

Bec, what's on your mind?

Rebecca Scriven: 23:42

Yeah, I was gonna say that. I think I'd like them to understand that the most important part of a portfolio is the invisible part. It's the part that happens in your mind, and you're bringing things together, and you can put them in the portfolio, you can show that to all the people, but it's you doing that process, you thinking through why I'm doing this, what it means, that's the part that I think is the most important for portfolios.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:09

That's why it's not a 30-second thing that can be done by AI, but it does actually involve thinking about it, talking with other people, making those connections that you talked about earlier.

Rebecca Scriven: 24:21

Yeah,

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:23

Now on to our quick answer round, the last three questions for each of you. Let's start with you, Bec. What words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolios?

Rebecca Scriven: 24:35

Learning made visible and evidence, not artefacts.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:40

Yeah, of course, that makes total sense. Heather?

Heather Pate: 24:44

Mine were student-focused and whole of programme.

Rebecca Scriven: 24:48

Lovely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:50

Yeah, definitely bring in that programmatic approach.

Heather Pate: 24:53

Yeah, and I think it's going back to what we were talking about earlier. Bec and I have always pushed a whole of programme approach, do you know what I mean, no matter what, that's central, I think, to portfolio practice, however, whatever institution you're in.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:08

Yeah, exactly, it's just baked into the portfolio experience that you're not just summarising or describing, but that you are telling your story, visualising things, and then making the connections. But now I guess what is really helpful by you having that support from your management and really rolling it out across the entire institution is that you have the shared language that everybody can work from and not just you who are holding up the flag of portfolios.

Heather Pate: 25:39

Yeah, exactly.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:41

What tip, Heather, do you have for learning designers or your lecturers who create portfolio activities?

Heather Pate: 25:49

I would suggest keep it simple, which is hard. It takes time, and it takes thinking it through. It's like teaching. If you walk into a class and you've already done all the preparation and you've planned everything out, the lesson will go very smoothly and clearly, and it will seem simple. It's the same with portfolios; it's all the thinking that goes behind it that makes the process simple at the end. So, do it purposefully, and there's no busy work, there's no unnecessary things. Literally, just, what do you need the students to do to enjoy the process and to do what they need to do to keep going?

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:26

Very encouraging, for sure. Bec, what is your tip for the learning designers or lecturers?

Rebecca Scriven: 26:33

I'm always about the student experience. So I think my suggestions for staff are to always think about what do you want the students to be able to say about their work, not just what you want them to produce, and just don't bolt the portfolio onto the end of your unit. It should be the reason that you're doing the activity. So always, yeah, thinking about how it's going to fit and what use the student's going to get out of it in the end, I think is my tip.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:58

Yeah, and fully embedded and integrated into the teaching and learning. Now for your students, what advice do you have for them, Bec?

Rebecca Scriven: 27:09

Don't wait until the end of your degree to look back. The looking back is what makes the learning stick.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:17

That really just encompasses the whole portfolio and reflection and metacognition work that you want your students to do.

Rebecca Scriven: 27:25

Exactly.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:27

Heather, what's your advice for students?

Heather Pate: 27:30

I would say you are your own unique self. You are different, and you bring your skills, your capabilities, your ideas to your future and to whatever you do. Use your portfolio to support that process. It's like, who are you? Who are you? What are you learning? How does that connect to your core values and yourself that show your true self and who you are?

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:58

Personalise your learning, make it meaningful to you, and don't just recite facts and figures, but really bring it to yourself, so that you can remember it, and then look back and make it stick.

Heather Pate: 28:11

That's right. The learning is about you. It's not about the content. It's about what you do with that content and where that takes you. Enjoy the process and enjoy the fact people are listening to you when you're talking about yourself in your portfolio because, you know[laughs], because why not.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:27

Thank you so much, Bec and Heather, for having taken us into the work that you do at ECU. Changing the teaching and learning approach of an entire huge university is a massive undertaking. We were only able to scratch the surface, I'm sure. Thank you so much for bringing that to our portfolio conversation.

Rebecca Scriven: 28:49

Thank you. I really enjoyed our chat today.

Heather Pate: 28:52

Thank you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:54

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