Portfolios for learning and more brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. Host Kristina Hoeppner talks with portfolio practitioners, researchers, learning designers, students, and others about their portfolio story.
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Dipl.-Lehrerin* Enikö Parrag sees portfolios as vital educational practice in schools, vocational education, and beyond, especially at present when artificial intelligence can produce content easily. Portfolios are much more than an educational technology tool. They foster reflection, collaboration, and tell the learning journey of a student.
Artificial intelligence can be used to augment portfolio work, for example by creating a first draft of templates and by supporting students in their reflections.
As Founder and Managing Director of EDUTECSOL GmbH in Switzerland, Enikö and her team provide educational consultancy services, in particular around educational technology and artificial intelligence. EDUTECSOL has been a Mahara Business Partner since 2024.
* Enikö's academic degree is that of a 'Dipl.-Lehrerin', which is a teaching diploma roughly equivalent to a postgraduate teaching qualification.
Production information Production: Catalyst IT Host: Kristina Hoeppner Artwork: Evonne Cheung Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Introduction
Portfolio support
AI in portfolio practice
Mahara Hui Switzerland
Quick answer round
Kristina Hoeppner:
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's guest is Enikö Parrag from EDUTECSOL in Switzerland. She contacted me at the end of 2023 wanting to learn more about the Mahara Business Partner programme. Since then, she and her team have become very active in the German-speaking community around portfolios and also the use of artificial intelligence in education. Welcome to the podcast, Enikö.
Enikö Parrag:
Thank you very much for invitation.
Kristina Hoeppner:
It's so good to catch up with you because last time we saw each other, oh, it's almost a year ago in Switzerland when we were sitting at the train station in Zurich. Finally, met face to face and didn't just talk online. So it's good to now share a bit more of your work with our community and also learn in particular from you how you have been working with portfolios and also what you have been doing with portfolios and artificial intelligence because you've been doing some experimenting over the last year. Before we get into all of that, Enikö, what is your role at EDUTECSOL, please?
Enikö Parrag:
I am the Founder and Managing Director of EDUTECSOL, an educational consultancy based in Switzerland. My background combines computer science, education, and school development. Before founding EDUTECSOL, I worked for many years, as a teacher, vice principal, and head of ICT; roles that gave me a broad perspective on education from the classroom to school leadership. In my role, I support schools, vocational college, and education authorities in their digital transformation. My focus is not just on introducing new technologies, but on helping schools rethink learning, assessment, competency development, and leadership in a world that is changing quickly because of artificial intelligence and digitalisation. Portfolio-based learning is one of my main focus. I support schools in implementing Mahara, developing better geological concepts that place reflection and competency development at the centre of learning.
Kristina Hoeppner:
That's a lot what you do, and so from being a teacher at vocational schools to being vice principal...
Enikö Parrag:
... and head of ICT
Kristina Hoeppner:
... always with the focus on the pedagogy and ways of using information technology in a pedagogically sound way, so not just looking after the servers and looking after the environments, but really making sure that the pedagogy is also sound. So, when did you encounter portfolios for the first time?
Enikö Parrag:
My first encounter with Mahara was about five years ago, when Switzerland was preparing the reform of vocation education for commercial and retail professions. One of the key elements of the reform was competency-based learning. Students were expected to document their development, reflect on their learning, and collect evidence of their competencies over time. At the time, as vice principal, I was responsible for finding a suitable portfolio platform for our school. We looked at different solution, including Microsoft 365 and OneNote because they were already widely used in schools. But I wasn't looking for a digital notebook or a document repository. I was looking for a platform that supports reflective learning and competency development from both a pedagogical and a methodological perspective. We quickly realised that Microsoft 365 and OneNote are excellent productivity and collaboration tools. They help people create documents, organise information, and work together. However, they were not designed for portfolio-based learning. And for me, portfolio is much more than a collection of files. It should help learners select meaningful evidence, reflect on their experiences, connect learning from different contexts, and gradually build their professional identity. I discovered Mahara that it had been designed around exactly these ideas. Reflection is not just another feature. It is the heart of the platform. Learners can create different portfolio pages for different audiences, connect evidence with competencies, and tell the story of their own learning journey. Later, I founded EDUTECSOL, and my company now provides the subscriptions.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Enikö, you work with vocational schools in Switzerland. How do you and the lecturers at the schools encourage students to create the portfolio? How do you support them in their portfolio work?
Enikö Parrag:
I think the most important lessons we have learned is that students should never fear that the portfolio is just another task. If learners see it is additional work, they usually do only what is required. But when the portfolio becomes a natural part of learning, their attitude changes completely. That is why we do not ask students to create portfolios simply because the curriculum requires one. Instead, we integrate portfolio work into everyday teaching. Students already work on projects, solve authentic problems, complete workplace assignments, and develop professional competencies. The portfolio becomes the place where they document these experiences, reflect on them, and connect them. Teachers do much more than assess the final result. They ask reflective questions, provide constructive feedback, encourage students to think about their own development. In fact, portfolio work changes the role of the teachers. Instead of being only an assessor, the teacher becomes a learning coach who supports students throughout their learning journey. I believe this is one of the most valuable aspects of portfolio-based learning. Another important principle is ownership. The teacher emphasises that the portfolio belongs to the learner. Students decide which evidence they include, how they present themselves, and how they demonstrate their competencies. This gives them much more responsibility for their own learning. Also, try to make the portfolio meaningful beyond school. In vocational education, students are preparing for their professional careers. Portfolio can help them document projects, workplace experience, achievements, and personal growth to become something they continue using after graduation. This matters all the more in the age of AI, when content can be generated in seconds. What counts is not the finished product, but how students learn, decide, and use AI responsibly. For me, portfolio work is ultimately about people, not tools, creating a learning culture in which students take responsibility for their own development and teachers become partners in that process.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Enikö, you are right on track with so many other people these days that are talking about portfolios because the individual courses are not so important any more, but it is important for students to see their learning holistically. In New Zealand, Australia, and also in a number of European countries, there is the programmatic approach to assessment or programmatic approach to learning talked about increasingly, so that we are not looking at learning compartmentalised into individual courses and students stay within those boundaries, but that you look at the entire programme of study and see how you can also make connections between individual subjects, how you can transfer learning between different courses. That's what I really liked in what you had said is that you also put the ownership back into the hands of the students. It's their responsibility. They engage in their learning. They have a learn coach on the side who is their lecturer or their tutor or their teacher, and then they also collaborate, and they talk to each other on the portfolio. So the portfolio is not just this thing that the student creates and nobody else does anything in it. But you can invite others into the portfolio to make them part of that learning experience. That's where then the pedagogical methods and ways of teaching and learning are at the forefront, and we are using technology to support those ways of learning.
Enikö Parrag:
Yes.
Kristina Hoeppner:
You have mentioned AI, and right before we started recording, I learned that you have been vibe coding for your portfolio work, and I knew that you're doing a lot with artificial intelligence because you write about your work and your ideas and how AI can be used in education on LinkedIn, in particular in your newsletters. And so I'm very
Enikö Parrag:
Yes, I believe AI has enormous potential for curious to learn what you have been vibe coding and how you incorporate your artificial intelligence work with your portfolio work. portfolio-based learning, but only if we use it the right way. AI should never replace reflection; it should support reflection. The portfolio should always remain the learner's own work because the real value of a portfolio is not the final text. It is the thinking, the learning process, and the personal development behind it. I see two particularly meaningful applications of AI in portfolio work. The first is supporting teacher. At EDUTECSOL, we have developed an AI extension for our Mahara-based platform. It helps teachers create portfolio templates with the support of Claude AI. Teachers simply describe their learning objectives, competencies, and the level of their learners. The AI then can generate structured portfolio template, that can easily be adapted to different subjects and educational levels. This saves teachers a great deal of time. More importantly, it[is] always then to focus on designing meaningful learning activities instead of creating portfolio structures from scratch AI becomes an assistant for teacher, not a replacement for their education expertise.
Kristina Hoeppner:
So you connect Claude to Mahara via a plugin that your team has developed. That is a fantastic way of creating a template that you can then still adjust in Mahara and then share that template with students. That is an awesome use case of AI and connecting it to the platform. Do you have another way of how you integrate AI with portfolios?
Enikö Parrag:
Yes, second application is supporting learners. They ask themselves,'How do I start, and how should I structure my reflection? Which evidence should I include, and which artefact best demonstrates is my competency?' Here, I see AI acting as a tutor rather than a content generator. Instead of writing the reflection, the chatbot asks questions, just like a good coach would. It may ask, 'What was your biggest challenge? Why did you choose this artefact? What have you learned? How has your thinking changed?' Through these questions, learners gradually develop their own reflections and discover their own learning process. For me, the essential principle is simple. AI should never write a finished portfolio entry that students copy and paste. Its role is to stimulate reflection and ask good questions.
Kristina Hoeppner:
This reminds me very much of what we can do with Riff, the reflection bot that Leticia Britos Cavagnaro at Stanford University at the d.school developed because the difference for me between asking these questions that you had mentioned of a student just by giving them that on screen and using generative AI for that, the conversational partner is that you enter into a conversation with the tool and are often guided deeper into the reflection because it then asks follow-up questions, which is not so easily possible when you give three, four, or five reflective questions upfront. So there's a lot of things for our community to try out and give it a go. But what I also wanted to check in with you is that in May, on the 13th of May 2026, you had organised the first Mahara Hui Schweiz, so Mahara Hui Switzerland, the Mahara gathering in Switzerland. You had already mentioned that in portfolio work, people are very important to you, and not just the tools. So, was that one of the reasons why you wanted to bring the community together?
Enikö Parrag:
Yes. For me, Mahara has always been more than a software platform. It brings together people who are interested in reflective learning, competency development and portfolio-based education. In Switzerland, portfolio work is already more established in higher education. At universities of applied science, portfolios are used in many programmes to document learning, reflect on competencies, and support professional development. In vocational education and upper secondary schools, however, portfolio work is still much less established. Many schools are only beginning to explore how portfolios can become part of everyday teaching and learning. There is also still little connection between the people and institutions working in this field. Schools often develop their own approach, but they don't always know what another have already tried or learned. As a result, variable experience often remains within individual institutions. That is why it was important for me to organise Mahara Hui Switzerland. I wanted to bring together people from different education sectors, so that they could exchange experiences, learn from one another, and develop new ideas together. During the Hui, we did not only talk about Mahara as a technology. We talked about reflection, competency development, assessment, and the question of how portfolios can accompany learning in a meaningful way. My long-term goal is to help establish portfolio work as a natural part of the learning process, especially in vocational education and upper secondary schools, and I hope that Mahara Hui Switzerland will help build this network and centre a portfolio-based learning in Switzerland. The
Kristina Hoeppner:
The importance of the pedagogical approach was very apparent when I watched the recording of the event, and so what I really enjoyed was hearing from a number of learning designers and researchers who implement portfolios and look at it from the perspective of supporting students, supporting their learning in a pedagogically sound way, and also it needs to be integrated into the curriculum. Was there an overall theme that you saw develop throughout the conversations that you had at Mahara Hui?
Enikö Parrag:
There was a very clear and throughout the conversations, how can we make learning visible in a honest, meaningful, and fair way? What I found interesting was that the discussions were not merely about technology. They were about pedagogy, reflection, assessment, and responsibility. Several speakers showed that the final product alone is no longer enough. Therefore, we need to pay more attentions to the process behind the product. Portfolios can make this process visible. They can show how learners develop an idea, use sources, reflect on feedback, and build their competencies over time. Another common theme was that successful portfolio work needs more than a platform; it needs guidance, suitable assessment methods, and enough support for both teachers and learners.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Is that then also what you wish everybody knew about portfolios? That you need guidance, good support, be very clear on your objectives, or is there anything else that you hope people know about portfolios?
Enikö Parrag:
I wish more people understood that a portfolio is not just a folder of finished work. Portfolio tells the story of learning. It shows how person develops over time, what they have tried, where they struggled, what they learned, and how their thinking has changed. For me, the most important part of a portfolio is not the artefacts themselves; it is the reflection that connects them. Reflection transforms experiences into learning. I also wish people knew that portfolios are not only valuable for assessment. They help learners take ownership of their learning. Instead of asking,'What grade did I get?' They begin to ask, 'What have I learned, and what do I want to improve next?' I believe portfolios will become even more important in the age of AI. Artificial intelligence can generate impressive products, but it cannot show the personal learning journey behind them. A portfolio documents that journey. It makes learning, growth, and competency development visible over time. A portfolio doesn't simply show what someone has produced. It shows they are becoming as a learner.
Kristina Hoeppner:
The work is never finished. Learning continues. Learning includes both successes and also failures, and the portfolio helps us to document that. Now onto the last three questions. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?
Enikö Parrag:
Learning visibility, reflection and growth.
Kristina Hoeppner:
What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?
Enikö Parrag:
Design for reflection and not for submission.
Kristina Hoeppner:
A very good tip. What advice do you then have for portfolio authors, for the students or also for teachers that create their own portfolios?
Enikö Parrag:
Don't try to show that you are perfect. Show how you are learning.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Awesome! Thank you so much, Enikö, for taking me on a little trip to Switzerland and learn what you have been doing with portfolios for the last five years, what you are exploring, what you are especially now experimenting with, in particular with artificial intelligence, and also how you support schools, students, and teachers in integrating portfolios into the classroom. Thank you so very much.
Enikö Parrag:
Thank you very much, Kristina.
Kristina Hoeppner:
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 . 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.
