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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Christa Matlack, MSc, and Associate Teaching Prof Dr Rebecca Thomas from Bucknell University help students go deep into their reflection in their portfolio. They use the Taxonomy of Reflective Inquiry (TORI) to build their prompts for their students. Students can also use OpenAIR, the Open AI Resources, to use generative AI tools to help them with their reflection. The AI does not do the reflection for them though. It asks the questions, based on a specific TORI domain and selected category.
Rebecca is also the Inaugural Faculty Director of Bucknell University's Pathways Program, in which she and Christa have been supporting students across the university with portfolios since 2021. Portfolio work at Bucknell University is also supported through the NSF grant 'Revolutionizing Engineering Departments program'.
Production information Production: Catalyst IT Host: Kristina Hoeppner Artwork: Evonne Cheung Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Introduction
TORI framework
Student examples
Portfolio support
What's next?
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. My guests today are Christa Matlack and Associate Teaching Professor Dr Rebecca Thomas from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. If you've attended the recent AAEEBL Annual Meeting or the AAEEBL Symposium or watched the recordings of the Symposium, you would have come across Christa and Rebecca. They shared lots of their work from Bucknell. Today, we are going to take a closer look at some of their work around reflection. Welcome to the podcast, Christa and Rebecca. It's good to see you again.
Rebecca Thomas:
Thank you so much for having us. It's good to see you as well.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Christa, let's start with you, please. What do you do at Bucknell?
Christa Matlack:
Thank you, Kristina, for having Rebecca and I on here. I am a Career Coach in our Center for Career Advancement. So I work a lot with programming and resources that directly impact our student population. So I do a lot of one-on-one student appointments, but also some workshops.
Kristina Hoeppner:
With how many students do you then typically work throughout a term?
Christa Matlack:
That's a wonderful question. I would probably say I average anywhere from 150 to 240 student appointments per semester.
Kristina Hoeppner:
How many students are at Bucknell altogether?
Christa Matlack:
There is approximately 4,000 students at Bucknell. So the appointments are just one-on-one. But I would engage in workshops with larger groups of students. I would say our office as a whole interacts with approximately 80% of the population throughout the academic year.
Kristina Hoeppner:
That's fantastic that the students take up your programmes so much and think about their career development and what they want to do beyond their university life. Rebecca, you are in the engineering department. What is your role, and what do you do besides teaching?
Rebecca Thomas:
I'm an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and so I teach courses in my department, but in addition to that, I also serve as the Inaugural Faculty Director of Bucknell's university-wide Pathways ePortfolio Program. In that role, I help support and promote the adoption of ePortfolios across campus.
Kristina Hoeppner:
When was that programme started, Rebecca?
Rebecca Thomas:
We launched at the beginning of the academic year in 2021, so we've just celebrated having our first five years complete.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Congratulations! Was that then also around the time when you discovered portfolios for yourself?
Rebecca Thomas:
I actually first did a teaching portfolio as part of a professoriate preparation programme when I was in graduate school, but I did forget about them and rediscovered them when I was at Bucknell. Got involved a little bit before the programme launched, and I co PI on an NSF grant, and it was awarded in September of 2020. The NSF grant explores new frameworks in engineering education, and I've led the portfolio effort as one of its major pillars.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Have you then also been in touch with Helen Chen from Stanford University early on because she's also in Engineering?
Rebecca Thomas:
Yeah, we've had many discussions, and we run into each other at the engineering conference as well as the ePortfolio conferences.
Kristina Hoeppner:
You are leading the Pathways Program. How many students participate in that?
Rebecca Thomas:
We have several large classes, including the one that the CCA teaches with Christa. That's usually over 100 students in there. There's over 100 students in our first-year Engineering course, about 140 students. Actually, I guess our entire first-year class does ePortfolio reflection before they even get on campus. So that's a quarter of the students at least, and then individual classes, you know, typically around 20 students, and we've got several of those.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Christa, when did you discover portfolios first?
Christa Matlack:
I discovered portfolios my first week on the job here at Bucknell in the Career Center [laughs]. The start of my employment here happened to coincide with the launch of the Pathways Program. And I had gone to an open forum session to learn more about Pathways and ePortfolios, and immediately saw the impact that ePortfolios could have on students when it comes to trying to articulate their experiences to employers, the skills they've gained, the transferability from one area of their life to another, and how valuable it would be for our students to engage in this when it comes to preparing for internship and job searches. I have about five years of experience with ePortfolios and have been lucky to work alongside Rebecca for the last five years developing the Pathways Program.
Kristina Hoeppner:
That is awesome that Bucknell recognised that portfolio is a crucial element of education and can help them both in classes, but also for their career development. Is that also why you continue advocating for them on campus and expanding your reach?
Christa Matlack:
Yeah, I think from my perspective, we - and Rebecca can chime in here - we have seen a number of students that have said that they've been asked to provide ePortfolios, whether that's for graduate school, fellowships, internships in a variety of different areas and industries. So it seems to be something that's becoming more of a hiring tool and a networking tool for the students. We've definitely continued to offer support in developing, especially that professional outward-facing ePortfolio from our office.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Rebecca, for you, do you also use it quite a bit in your own teaching?
Rebecca Thomas:
Yes, so I obviously do see, and my students see the benefits of using it professionally. But I use it in my teaching as well because I see a lot of the pedagogical benefits of ePortfolios. In using them in my class, like I've seen these impacts first hand. EPortfolios build reflective habits that lead to better learning, better problem solving. They're a way to help me see the thinking behind a final product, and they create deeper connections between experiences. In engineering specifically, I like to use ePortfolios because they've helped students develop a broader perspective of their engineering identity. They can see that they don't have to fit in a particular mould to be an engineer and be a successful engineer.
Kristina Hoeppner:
So you're using portfolios for career development, for personal growth, and then also for assessment purposes, as well as internships. So the work-integrated learning aspect, and not to forget also the teaching portfolios. Do you still have to do those at Bucknell University as well, Rebecca?
Rebecca Thomas:
No, I haven't done those personally. But ePortfolios are used heavily in our education department. Our students,they make really fantastic teaching ePortfolios that they use when they're out interviewing and looking for their teaching jobs.
Kristina Hoeppner:
So we have portfolios being used in Electrical Engineering, in Education and also pretty much every other department at Bucknell because Rebecca, you said all your incoming students are asked to create a portfolio. The students are being introduced to it already really early on when they start their studies.
Rebecca Thomas:
Yeah, some of the first experience is in the orientation and with the first-year experience and common experience that students have before they arrive at Bucknell.
Kristina Hoeppner:
That's fantastic. One big aspect for you is the reflective practice, which was also a focus of your presentations and workshops that you gave at the AAEEBL Symposium and also the Annual Meeting. You introduced us during the conference to TORI, the Taxonomy of Reflective Inquiry, and so can you tell us a bit about TORI, please?
Christa Matlack:
TORI is a framework that was developed by Digication, which is Bucknell's current ePortfolio software, and it's really a framework to help provide a more systematic approach to learning through reflection, but also processing experiences. It's made up of six domains: the cognitive and analytical domain, emotional and affective, the social and interpersonal, personal growth and self-development, cultural, ethical, contextual domain, and then life transitions and development. Within those six domains, there's over 60 categories for the different types of reflections, but also 96 fields that are related to more of the academic areas. We've found TORI to really be helpful in developing our prompts and trying to make sure that we're focusing in on what that question is, so that way we are having the students reflect back what we're hoping to get out of that area of reflection. And so, whether that is the self-development piece, and we want them to reflect on their career and where they see themselves fitting as an engineer, we want them to have the right prompt to guide them through a lot of that introspective work that they're going to do.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Does that then mean with six domains, 60 categories, and 96 distinct fields, that's a lot to keep in mind, and so, how does that work practically for you? Do you look at one of these six domains and say, 'I want students to reflect in this area,' and then you drill further down into the fields and get to your prompt?
Christa Matlack:
Yes, that's how when we've developed recent prompts, we've started really broad, just looking at the domain and figuring out where that reflection should fit from the domain level first, and then we look down into the categories that exist within that domain. The TORI website is wonderful. It gives you a lot of the research behind some of the reflective categories and things that are listed in there, but it also does give you some examples of different grade levels, right? So if you're working with elementary school students, how they can reflect on some of these, maybe it's goal setting or in their self-development versus a college student. So it's really nice to have that website up when you're developing your prompts because it can really help you structure and scaffold that student to get the response you're hoping to get.
Kristina Hoeppner:
For how long have you now been working with TORI?
Christa Matlack:
I would say within the last year, we really started looking at it as a tool to really help us develop those reflective prompts.
Rebecca Thomas:
Yeah, and TORI is a relatively new tool. I think it was only released about two years ago.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Within that year, have you seen any domains that you're favouring?
Christa Matlack:
I think with where I'm coming from, from the career perspective, a lot of the domains that we tend to focus on would be the personal growth, life transitions, and development. So, thinking about some of those different areas that are very critical to your career. Our office focuses probably a little bit more in our course that we have on that personal growth, self-development, self-awareness piece, and trying to make career decisions. I would say we might touch on some of the other domains, but there's going to be a little bit less of that because we're focused on trying to get them to start thinking of themselves as a professional.
Rebecca Thomas:
I would agree. I also use that personal growth and self-development, or aim for that type of reflection pretty often. Another one that I use that's a little bit more related to the technical courses I teach is the cognitive and analytical reflection. Specifically, in there, there's one on problem solving and one on integrative thinking.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Do you then also use the Open AI Resources that Digication has developed in conjunction with TORI, where you can immediately put a prompt into an AI tool, or in your case, directly into your portfolio platform to get students started?
Rebecca Thomas:
Yeah. So I've used that AI enhanced reflection tool that is built into Digication. That's just like what you encounter in Open AI(Resources) in my courses. I mainly trialled it with students last fall, and I didn't get around to actually doing it till the last day, but I gave them 10 minutes in class and had them reflect with the AI. And it was really interesting, fascinating results, and good feedback from the students on how they thought about it and how they experienced it.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Are you then planning to make more use of that to help students get deeper into their reflection from that initial question that you give them?
Rebecca Thomas:
Yes, I am planning to use it in the future. Like I mentioned, I only did it on the last day of class. The first time I trialled it. This semester, I am planning to do it three times throughout the semester, like a kind of beginning, middle, end, so I can see how students reflect differently, and if their reflection evolves over the course of the semester.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Since you've started working with categorising your questions for the students fairly recently using TORI, and therefore organising things more, and also yourself thinking more about what you want to get out of the student reflections, have you looked at any of your previous portfolio questions that you had and mapped those to the TORI categories in order to see which ones you want to keep and which ones you might want to change in order to make them more effective? Rebecca, do you want to go ahead?
Rebecca Thomas:
We haven't done a complete mapping of past prompts to TORI domains and categories yet, and that's partly because TORI is relatively new and we've only been working with it about a year. However, we've talked about the AI reflection tool, like the one accessible in OpenAiR. It has TORI built right into it. If I'm using that, I don't have to be as intentional about having TORI built into my prompt. Instead of giving just a few predetermined prompts like I usually would in an ePortfolio. that tool acts like an iterative coach, and it guides students through a conversation, provides real-time feedback, and maps their responses to specific TORI domains and categories.
Christa Matlack:
Since learning about TORI and starting to really try to work with it, I don't have any comparisons yet, mainly because we made the changes in our career course prompts for this semester. So I don't have anything to compare it to just yet. But we did start to look at how can we be more intentional about those prompts and making sure that they're aligning with some of that, you know, personal growth and development category, especially when it comes to the career readiness piece and that reflective prompt. We did overhaul it for this semester, and it's a part one and part two. It used to just be what are the goals of this course, but now what we have them doing is actually looking at Bucknell's career competencies, diving into those career competencies, digesting them, choosing ones that they want to focus on, developing more actionable steps to improve upon that career competency, and then reflecting on why did you choose these two to three specific competencies, and how they feel improving these competencies are going to help them as they're exploring or pursuing a specific career goal. So having them to start thinking about a little bit more on a deeper level, rather than what do you want to get out of this course? The TORI domains have really helped us asking more reflective question of the student that requires more thought and introspection, but also starting to think ahead. Like if I'm pursuing this career, how are these working on these specific skill sets going to help me be more prepared to pursue that type of career path?
Kristina Hoeppner:
So at the end of the academic year, we might see more of the insight that you have and see if the students go deeper into their reflection by also having that AI coach attend that takes them deeper through asking those follow-up questions and seeing how that influences the student portfolios. Since you've been working with portfolios now for about five years, do you have an example or two of students who illustrate that reflection really benefited them?
Rebecca Thomas:
We do have a couple students that come to mind, although we've had many fantastic students. We can share the links for these students. The first is Jackson. He's a Markets, Innovation, and Design major, and he shared with us that the most valuable part of building his portfolio was stepping back to reflect on his past projects, which actually taught him how to communicate his work to audiences outside his home department. That ability to translate coursework and experiences for a professional audience is an important career skill. The second example is Clea Ramos, and she's a computer engineering student. Over several years, Clea contributed things in an ePortfolio, and it became a running record of her learning process. It helped her to connect those experiences into a cohesive story that she was excited to share with other people.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Those two students did they participate in the Pathways Program then with you?
Rebecca Thomas:
All students are eligible to participate in the Pathways Program. It's a university-wide programme, and so students are part of it just in being a Bucknell student.
Christa Matlack:
Jackson, he's one of the few students that did the ePortfolio achievement. This is like a badging system. We call them achievements here. He went through that whole process with his portfolio, and Clea was just a portfolio rock star[laughs]. So her portfolio. Was amazing. She was also very much into design. So I think it was even from a design perspective really cool to see all of the stuff that she pulled together. We do have a large number of students that participate in ePortfolios, but unfortunately, not all of them engage with Pathways programming.
Kristina Hoeppner:
So, for those two students, how do you support them? How do you work with them because Rebecca, you mentioned that Clea did her portfolio over a number of years. So, what were the touch points for you, or also Christa, with a student like her?
Rebecca Thomas:
Clea was a student in my department. So part of that grant that I mentioned that introduced me to portfolios was to integrate it throughout the curriculum in our department. Since fall 2021, we've integrated it in about eight courses, and I think Clea took almost all eight of those courses. So she saw portfolios probably every semester that she was here as a course requirement, and so she was constantly adding things to her portfolios that went with her courses. Her final portfolio was part of our professional engineering seminar, where I had her make a professional portfolio and pull everything together.
Christa Matlack:
From my end, I actually am the only one in our office currently that provides portfolio reviews. So, if a student does have a professional ePortfolio, like Clea or Jackson, they could schedule an appointment with me, and I can take a look at their ePortfolio, give them some feedback, so they can make any revisions before they feel ready to put that out to the public.
Kristina Hoeppner:
That's wonderful that the students can come to you for the support and also that they have the possibilities to encounter portfolios throughout their academic career, so that it's not just this one-off activity that they don't see again, but that they can develop the reflective habits that you want them to have as future professionals. Rebecca, you had already mentioned that you can use the TORI domains in the Open AI Resources and have the prompts already there, ready for the students to go, or you can tweak them and let students go through the questions and go deeper into their reflections. Do you feel that students make use of that, or do you feel that students ask a large language model to write the reflection for them?
Rebecca Thomas:
When I was doing traditional portfolios, well, not that I've given those up, but in traditional portfolios, I have seen some evidence of that that reflective writing that students are including in those appears to have been outsourced. But when I use the AI guided conversation, like I mentioned, I did it once, and they only reflected for 10 minutes. So I gave them that time in class to do that, and I didn't see the same thing happen. I didn't see that students were going to an LLM having the AIs kind of talk to each other. They were actually reflecting and writing their parts of that prompt instead of outsourcing their reflection. They were using that AI as a conversational partner and actually thinking with AI in a productive way, rather than having the AI think for them.
Christa Matlack:
In my course, we try to keep the reflections fairly short, and it's a learning ePortfolio, and we emphasise more of the reflective piece of it and less on the grammatical accuracy of that. And so I tend to see, I think, a little bit less because they're shorter reflections with less emphasis on it having to look like perfect English. I have seen a little bit when we ask them to generate eight probing questions for their informational interview assignment. You can tell the students who have just asked ChatGPT or some sort of LLM to provide them with eight questions because they're a lot longer than some of the other students' who sat and actually thought through it. You can definitely tell when they're using it, and I feel like for me, I'm not sure why you would do it for one of those because it feels like that's an easier lift than writing a 20-sentence reflection. But I do see more in that question prompt than I have seen in an actual reflection itself.
Kristina Hoeppner:
It'll be interesting to see how that develops further and whether those conversational reflection partners can help get students more into the reflective piece rather than trying to outsource it as well and to see it as content, but really understand that you want to know what they are feeling, what they are thinking, how they experience the activity, and then also what they want to take of that further into their future, into similar activities or into other areas. What's then next for you on your portfolio journey, Christa? This academic year has just started.
Christa Matlack:
Yeah. What I would like to do, at least with our course instructors here in the Career Center, is to look at our existing ePortfolio, learning ePortfolio, and the prompts to see if there are ways that we can improve upon the prompts that are there. So we're constantly making modifications to the curriculum as we go, but I think we could definitely spend some time trying to be more intentional about some of the prompts. But another area that I work in is athletics. So I'm a liaison to the Athletics department, and I would love to find a way to start an ePortfolio initiative with the athletes, knowing that they have a lot that they're doing on campus and they're garnering a lot of different career skills, and then we also have a leadership institute in the Athletics department, which would be a wonderful place for them to reflect upon some of those experiences. So finding a way to potentially start an initiative over there would be great.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Especially with athletes who are already used to reflection and critique and re-watching the games that they've played and talking things through with their coaches, and then formalising that themselves in a portfolio would be a wonderful activity. Rebecca, what's next for you?
Rebecca Thomas:
My immediate plans for the semester are to try out the AI-assisted reflection again, and to do it multiple times across the semester. And I also like to try it in another course where I have students that I could track across multiple semesters. And then I'm still the Director of our Pathways Program, so I just plan to continue to promote and support ePortfolios across campus and continue to be a big advocate of using ePortfolios in STEM education.
Kristina Hoeppner:
I look forward to learning more of what you're doing and how you're also changing your practice, how you're continuing to work with the TORI categories, changing your prompts, and making use of the resources that are available to you. Now on to our last three questions for you, and the first one I'll start with Rebecca. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?
Rebecca Thomas:
So, if I had to narrow it down, the first one would be reflective practice. Building a habit of intentional reflection over time is really important. Practising self-authorship, so giving students a space to try out some stories and practice telling them. And the last one would be identity formation, guiding students as they navigate who they're becoming in college and beyond.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Bridging the academic career and also the career development. Christa, what about you?
Christa Matlack:
If I had to narrow it down, my first word would be integrative, knowing that it's a space where students can pull together a lot of different aspects of who they are into one dynamic story. Then the second would be a personal narrative. We emphasise a lot that students need to develop and be able to articulate their personal narrative to the outside world when they're looking for jobs and networking and going through the hiring process. So I think that that would be another phrase, and the last phrase would be that it is a networking tool, and so emphasising that this can help you better visualise your skill set to potential employers. So really leveraging it in that networking capacity, so people can see more of who you are beyond a one-page resume.
Kristina Hoeppner:
I find it fantastic that Bucknell University recognised through your advocacy that portfolios do not just belong into the classroom or students doing them for themselves, but also that the career development, career services need to be heavily involved to support students and therefore have it centrally located as well on campus. Kudos to especially the two of you who are championing portfolios at your university. Now, Christa, what is your tip for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?
Christa Matlack:
My top tip, from personal experience, is scaffold your prompts. So making sure that you are, if it's a multi-step prompt, scaffolding the student from one step to the next to make sure that you're getting a full reflection out of them. From our course, we've learned very early on that we need to be more specific and scaffold our prompts and make multi-stepped prompts to help get the level of reflection we want out of our students.
Kristina Hoeppner:
You've also developed a really nice handout for that as part of the workshop that the two of you have led at the AAEEBL Symposium, which I'll make sure to share in the resources so that listeners can take that handout and use it as a stepping stone for themselves to create that reflective prompt. Rebecca, what is your top tip?
Rebecca Thomas:
Don't be afraid to experiment. I've never actually tried anything that was a total flop. I think it can happen, but I found the best way to improve is to just try something, learn from that, learn what worked, learn what didn't, and iterate right, and continue to improve your prompts and your designs and your assignments.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Yeah, use a reflective approach as well. Christa, what is your advice for portfolio authors, for your students or anybody else on campus who wants to work with portfolios?
Christa Matlack:
I would say that my piece of advice for anyone creating a portfolio would be that this is an opportunity for you to showcase who you are and what you bring to the world if it's an external-facing ePortfolio. So making sure that you're talking about your skills and your strengths, and your learning, and how you problem solve, and really also adding in there personal touches of who you are outside of that, what feels like the career professional space. You know what are student organisations or causes that you're passionate about that you've been involved in because that says a lot more about who you are as an individual, and it can give people a different perspective on you. And so I definitely think that my advice is to just curate that so that way people can see the whole version of you versus just a professional outward resume version of you.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Really telling that entire learner story. And Rebecca, what is your advice for your students?
Rebecca Thomas:
I would say just to be really authentic and open. Your portfolio should not look like a portfolio that AI could possibly write for you, right? It should be real, have details about yourself, why you're studying, what you're studying, and why you have the goals that you do for the future.
Kristina Hoeppner:
Thank you so much, Christa and Rebecca, for sharing some of it of what you're doing at Bucknell with portfolios, and also introducing us to the Taxonomy of Reflective Inquiry and what you can do with it in order to improve the portfolio questions that you give students, that you ask them to use to reflect on their practice, to reflect on what they have been learning in order to create portfolios and also make reflection a habit in the students that you're working with. Thank you so much.
Christa Matlack:
Thank you.
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 Christa Matlack and Associate Teaching Professor Dr Rebecca Thomas. 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 airs in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.
