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. For this episode, I'm handing the interviewer microphone over to my colleague Penny Leach, and I'm going to be in the hot seat.

Penny Leach: 0:36

Thank you, Kristina. So Mahara recently celebrated its 20-year anniversary. We thought that we would take that opportunity to switch things up a little bit and interview Kristina. So today I will be asking the questions. So Kristina, can you tell me when and how did you first discover portfolios and portfolio work?

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:57

If I remember it correctly, that was around 2004 when I came across the European Language Passport. That was at that time actually also a paper-based one, and in that passport you could document your language learning progress over time. At the project where I was working, we didn't actually end up using it, but the idea had stuck with me, and so I came across electronic portfolios a bit later in 2007 as part of my doctoral studies at the time when I started researching personal learning environments and personal learning networks. Penny, I think that'll ring a bell because that was really what Mahara was at the start and came out of that movement of personal learning environments, providing learners a space of their own where they can decide what was important for them to keep of their learning, and not just what was important for a lecturer. By that time, I had switched universities and was working as a doctoral student, and in about mid 2008 was tasked to find a new portfolio platform for the study programme, which was a bachelor in educational sciences. And portfolios had always been part of that study programme. Students were introduced to them in the very first semester, but they could decide whether it was a paper-based portfolio, whether they wanted to do a PowerPoint, or whether they wanted to put a file on a shared drive. So, kind of on a network drive. The programme director had asked me to look for a different portfolio platform, though, because the shared drive was just not working. Internet speeds and all of that were not what they are today, and so you always needed to download the file to your computer and then make comments and then see how you could upload that again to the shared drive. So very cumbersome, and so of course the question had come up: Isn't there something easier available? And that's when I came across Mahara.

Penny Leach: 3:03

Did you do an evaluation of different portfolio systems at the time, and then settle on Mahara, or was that sort of clear right from the start when you came across it that that was the one that you wanted to move forward with?

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:15

My memory is quite hazy from that time because [laughs] it's been a minute. What I remember is that we had looked, and the programme director was also very keen on using open source software because we had been using quite a bit of open source software in the study programme itself. So we had been working with Moodle, we also introduced students to WordPress for creating blogs, and at my previous job, I had been somewhat actively involved in an open source solution that we used as content management system that had been developed at the university, and so from the start it was already pretty clear that we wanted to use an open source tool. And so we looked at Mahara. I believe we also looked at Elgg, and there was also the Open Source Portfolio from Sakai. But it was really only Mahara that felt like it had the features that we wanted and that we needed for the programme.

Penny Leach: 4:17

Amazing!

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:19

Yeah, went into is it a personal learning network? So, do you have the networking capabilities that Elgg had, and then another tool where you had these interactions, or did you want to focus on the portfolio side of things, or did you want to do blogs like with WordPress?

Penny Leach: 4:35

We wanted to do all of the things, if I remember correctly. So, how long did it take you then to get involved in the community with Mahara? Did you just start on the forums and kind of build up from there, or what was your pathway into that real deep involvement in the community?

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:49

It was pretty early on already because we encountered a couple of bugs in the code, as you do when you use non-standard infrastructure as was the case at the university, since it was Mac servers that Mahara was supposed to be installed on, and yes, Penny, instead of Linux servers. Of course we had to run into a problem, and so we had contacted Catalyst directly to help us with that because at the university we did want to contribute to the software as well. We didn't just want to take, but also have things fixed and also pay for that. So that was fixed, and then we also commissioned a couple of new features that made it into Mahara. Before our chat here, I was looking back at some of the forum threads that we had. So one of them was around improvements to the feedback functionality, so that you could also delete feedback, and that was quite a long conversation between Nigel, Richard, and me primarily. And I then mainly posted at that time about the work that we were commissioning, but definitely lurking in the forums and reading all the posts.

Penny Leach: 5:59

From my memory, the German-speaking community was really active right from the start. We had people like Sigi and also Heinz very active. Did you find that there was also activity in the German-speaking community outside of those original posts with Nigel and Richard and others?

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:15

I don't think I was aware of them that much at the time, besides encountering them in the forum conversations where they participated.

Penny Leach: 6:27

So then, at some point, you decided to move all the way to New Zealand to work for Catalyst. Was that a direct switch or was that a sort of series of hops? How did that happen? Tell me about that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:39

For reasons beyond this episode, I did abort my PhD research at the end of 2009, and put that part about personal learning environments, personal learning networks to the side. At that time, finding a job at a university has not been easier than it is now, and so I was looking more widely and was also thinking of going further afield again for longer than a year. Previously, I had lived overseas and really enjoyed the experience of also exploring different cultures. Because we knew about Mahara because we had engaged Catalyst in developing features, I knew about the company and thought, well, New Zealand is supposedly also a nice place on Earth, never been there, and so I looked at the Catalyst website, which looked very differently from what it is these days. And[laughs] there was little mentioning of open jobs, not really any particular position description, but really more like we are doing eLearning things, we are doing things with Moodle. So I sent an incentive application. That was in February, and then within a month we did all the interviews via Skype. So when people were thinking of the pandemic being the first time when you were dressed just professionally at the top and you had your PJs on at the bottom, that was already the case in 2010 for some of us. I wouldn't have had to worry since Mike didn't even want to turn the camera on, and so we just did an audio interview, which was quite different from the rest because at that time normally you were going for an interview and travelling to it. Then it took about two months to get the visa sorted, and two weeks later I arrived in New Zealand. So that was mid June 2010.

Penny Leach: 8:33

That's amazing. So you went from sending in your expression of interest in February to moving over by the middle of the year. Just as an aside, Catalyst probably were quite used to doing Skype calls back then. I remember doing Moodle developer workshops in the middle of the night, New Zealand time, maybe 2006 or 2007, and definitely having my video off and being in my pyjamas [laughs]. So it was probably already well established as a working methodology by then.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:57

Yeah, and I mean taking bandwidth into consideration, it came at a premium, and therefore audio was definitely much better than video.

Penny Leach: 9:05

100% So that was a long time for you to be working on Mahara, and I'm going to ask a really challenging question, though, which is over that entire period, what would be the one most rewarding thing that you could speak about?

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:19

It's two things: the community, and not just the Mahara community, but the portfolio community and edtech community are just such wonderful people. So it's the connections with community members that has been very rewarding because it's not one of those nine to five jobs where you just do your work, you sit in front of a computer and you produce your documents, but you talk to humans. You engage with them. You look for solutions, and that's the second part. Really supporting community members, clients in their efforts to offer good learning environments and therefore also good learning experiences to students, staff, whoever they are engaging with. Those two things have been absolutely wonderful, and I'm also really thankful to Catalyst that it's really that open source spirit of give and take that we are part of a community. We help each other. We talk to each other, no matter what a commercial relationship is like, and sure, there are certain parameters around it, but there's always the community forums, and there's always the issue tracker. You offer events, and therefore really also want to learn from each other and help each other, give everybody a better experience. And yes, most of the time that is portfolios, but at other times it also goes into the learning management system. Or how do you connect these two? How do you offer a digital learning environment that suits the needs of the community at the moment in that particular institution?

Penny Leach: 10:57

What you say really resonates with me as well. I think my guiding principle is, or at least I try ways to live by this, is use my powers for good. Being in a situation like the education community or the edtech community more broadly, everyone is there because they want to affect positive change in the world. And I think it's very grounding when we go out into the community and talk to educators and learners and hear the real stories about how their lives are changed for the better by software that we're playing a part in is very rewarding. So then I'll ask you what the most challenging thing has been. Not that we want to go into the negative, but just to provide a little bit of balance because I'm sure there also have been challenges.

Kristina Hoeppner: 11:34

Kind of really also what you've already

just mentioned: 11:37

going out to the community, learning how everybody is using the software and how we can make it better, how we can contribute to the community, I find that has also been quite challenging because we are always bound by how much we can do, and therefore we can't fulfil everybody's wish. So sometimes it's been really challenging making tough decisions and what to prioritise because we always need to keep the wider community in mind rather than a single person's pet peeve or awesome feature if we already know, well, that's really only going to affect two or three people, and therefore sometimes, unfortunately, do need to say, well, this is a bit of a lower priority, or can it be revamped into something differently that would suit more people but might not completely fulfil your requirement? Having said that, that's then where the idea of open source comes in because while as the provider of the platform and the shepherds of the community code, we need to put certain things into our backlog, may not be able to get to it immediately. If that organisation says, "I'm going to code that myself and provide that to our learners," they can do that. They can make changes to the code, they can create a theme or they can create a feature. We've had that with the continuing professional development plugin that is now part of Mahara core, where a staff member and a student at a, I believe it was a Scottish university, looked at the'Plans' feature that we had created previously and said, "We can change it so that it works for us to document continuing professional development." So the 'Plans' feature got an update by having hours added, and they released that code as plugin. For many many years, we used that plugin. We've continued updating it as well as our clients were using it on their sites, so that it kept up to date with different versions of Mahara. And then in the end because we were using it so much, we decided to make it part of Mahara core because we then saw this feature is useful for quite a few of the people and organisations and institutions that we are working with, we better put it into core to make upgrades more seamless and not having to worry about a plugin. There is the challenge of we as a team can only do so much, but everybody else in the community can build on top of that code that is Mahara core and make any sort of changes that they like to make. They can decide whether to keep that just for themselves or, like a number of our community contributors do, contribute that back to the community, either in the form of a plugin or also proposing it for core, so that we can have a conversation and say, 'Ah, yep, this is a good feature to include,' or also fixing a bug, or upgrading a third-party library, or any of those things. That's the challenge, but also the opportunity at the same time.

Penny Leach: 14:53

That's nice. As one of those doors is potentially closing just by the virtue of not being able to keep everyone happy all the time, you're also opening other doors for people to keep themselves happy or develop the things that they need. So, Kristina, I know that we see a lot of case studies, and we talk of case studies, and you obviously interview people on this very podcast and get them to tell us their case studies. And I'm imagining that some of them have been very validating, and some of them have been cool and interesting, and sometimes wild, innovative ways that people are using portfolios or Mahara more specifically, but I want to know which of the case studies of the many that you've seen over the years has moved you the most?

Kristina Hoeppner: 15:30

You are really asking the tough questions. There are so many different ways of working with portfolios, and every portfolio story that I hear be that on the podcast, in our 'Ask Me Anything' sessions when people talk about how they are working with Mahara or what they'd like to be able to do. Even if you're looking at our issue track or at the forums when people make enhancement suggestions or when we go to events and meet people face-to-face or also online, everybody has a unique story to tell, and it always makes me smile when we either figure out how Mahara can help them, or even just have a conversation or a brainstorming session and be part of the thinking and implementation process to then get somebody to the stage of saying, 'Ah, now I know what I want to do. This is the idea of going forward,' or they have validated an idea that they had, can then have one of their developers make a change or have us make a change, so that it is not really possible to tell you the story that has moved me most because there are just too many stories to tell. Last week, so we are recording this on the 5th of October, 2026. So last week, for example, you were at Dublin City University. Immediately, three wonderful conversations come to mind. Actually, four, because Mark Brady, he was a bachelor student at the university, is now on a PhD track. He talked about his use of portfolios as a student in a very creative way because he's a videographer and had a career before he went to university. And of course, I also have to go all the way back to September 2022 when Lisa Donaldson talked about the work that she had done in getting 6,000 students onboarded to Loop Reflect the Dublin City University's Mahara site within just six weeks. Then also talking with Orna Farrell, a colleague of hers, bringing open education in. But then also thinking back even before I started the podcast, talking with one of the eterns that Lisa had employed, that helped students and also staff in working with Mahara, working with portfolios, and having a better experience. And then not to forget Mark Glynn, who was the head of the Teaching Enhancement Unit when Lisa was at DCU, who made sure that open source at DCU was also looked at as this give and take. We are taking the software and we are getting heaps of benefits from it, but we are also contributing back. So we've got the placeholder section where you can just pop a section onto a page without needing to decide the content from DCU, learning analytics, and other enhancements. Now, most recently, the group submissions. Penny, that's just one single university. Granted, Dublin City University is extremely active in the wider portfolio community and always happy to share their stories and also gather stories of other community members. But there are many other examples.

Penny Leach: 18:42

We should say as well that DCU were celebrating their 10 years of Mahara, which was the event that Kristina mentioned. If you had one thing that you could change in the broader edtech community, what would you wish that people could understand differently, or see from a different perspective, or do differently?

Kristina Hoeppner: 18:58

Often we try to jump to solutions quite quickly in looking at it from the technology perspective rather than oh this is a learning need so really go into the business analysis and that was definitely something that I wish I had known earlier on working on Mahara and being part of the product development team. It's very easy to immediately look at the features that we have and seeing how we can change them, how we can enhance them, and what else we can add to it. But that shouldn't be the first step. And so, always remind ourselves of that and make sure to ask: Why do you want to do this? Why is this necessary? What do you want to achieve? So, really taking this step back from the tech, focusing on the education aspect.

Penny Leach: 19:51

That's so interesting. We were talking at one of the panel questions last week at DCU, and Rob used the word 'slow pedagogy', which ties into a little bit to what you, saying in terms of not rushing around so quickly, but really stopping and pausing and thinking and reflect. Actually, we were talking about how it takes time to reflect, and it's not something that you can just rush into, but you have to actually pause and take the time to do it. Do you think that if we had done that, we being the broader edtech community, if we had been better at doing that, thinking about the learning process before jumping to technical solutions, would Mahara look differently today? Would Moodle look differently today? And the way we develop those tools and how we use them? What would you do differently? But also, where would we be now if we had done that the whole time?

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:36

Oh, I wish I had that crystal ball [laughs] and could go back to the past and give it another go or look into the future or a parallel universe. It would certainly look differently simply because we would have made different decisions. One of the things that I learned over time because we cannot fulfil everybody's wish, and we should not fulfil everybody's wish in a platform made available to everybody, so that we are not getting to the state of having featureitis. So too many features and exploding features. But always take a moment and think before we go into the technical side of things and try to decide is a database change or as a configuration item? And yes, we can put a configuration in that

we take a moment and ask: 21:24

Is a setting needed, or should it be something that should not have a setting? Is it warranted that we put the overhead of somebody needing to make a decision on a feature, or is it also something that we should be removing? It's always, of course tempting to add more and more because I can tell you at least one person will use a feature that we are thinking of removing, and as soon as it's being removed, there will be an email. But at the same time, we also need to keep usability in mind and not make the software complicated to use, but reduce complexity, which is also important for accessibility. So Mahara is different to, and usually we have a somewhat comparison to Moodle because it's very close at heart, and Catalyst has been a Moodle partner for many many years. Moodle is the community, I guess, that is closest to us because it also operates in the edtech space. There, Moodle core does not have all the features. So the Moodle community does live from the plugins. In Mahara, we've taken a different approach because portfolios are oftentimes not used as widely at an institution like a learning management system or a content management system. Therefore, there are fewer people that can work on the site, can update it, upgrade it, and also support people. And therefore, often IT departments say, 'You can install the core product, but you can't install plugins.' So we've always looked at the features that are suggested from the perspective of can they be useful for a lot of community members, or at least a decent size of members? That, of course, comes with its own challenges of making sure that we are not overloading things, and that we are also creating it in a way, though, as well that is flexible enough so that it doesn't just work for one particular institution.

Penny Leach: 23:21

So now I'm going to ask you to bring out that crystal ball that you wish you have [laughs], and start asking about the future rather than just using your crystal ball to look into different potential futures. I mean, obviously, this is very important at the moment with all the conversations around AI and what does learning look like and everything. So feel free to go down that rabbit hole as well. What do you think portfolio work, and that's sort of more broadly around portfolio praxis, not just around Mahara or the Mahara project or the software, but portfolio work itself, what do you think it's going to look like in five years? And then I'm going to be really, really difficult and ask what is it going to look like in 10 years?

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:59

I think portfolios will become more important to demonstrate learning, and not just in the sense of knowledge acquisition, but making connections, transferring learning, demonstrating competencies and skills because information can be very easily looked up these days, AI can summarise things. Whether that's correct or incorrect is the second question. But you can get content very, very easily. What becomes more important in that case is that you need to be able to verify that content. You need to be able to critically examine it, draw conclusions from it. See where there might be a discrepancy or a contradiction included, and that is not just by looking at one particular subject matter and only that subject matter, but often I find that I can make those connections due to something that I've learned in a different context, therefore transferring learning, transferring what I've seen elsewhere, and then asking a similar question and seeing if that also applies in the new context. Transferring that learning and also demonstrating competencies and skills. The portfolio does not transfer that learning for you, but it helps you to do that because you can document that, you can visualise that learning, and it doesn't have to be just in text. Can use images, audio, video for that, and express yourself in a way that works for you. Coming back to that core on what Mahara was founded, that personal learning environment and the personal learning network, so that you keep what is important for you, what you have learned for yourself from all the different places where the learning happens, and taking all of these experiences in and reflecting on them and seeing, okay, so what do I want to take away from that interaction that I had? It doesn't always have to be now. I'm doing learning because often learning happens incidentally. That will become more important, especially also when we are looking at universities that are moving to programmatic assessment and programmatic learning. Having realised that we need to make the connections between subjects. We need to look at competencies, we need to look at skills across an entire study programme, rather than just within one particular course to get people who can go out into the world and take those skills into their working life. So the crystal ball for five years and 10 years, I do want to waiter that we will have some sort of platform where we are collecting those experiences, so that we have an aggregator where we can bring things together in order not having to go out in all these different places, and where we can also still connect with people and share that learning with others because learning is often very social, and that means having conversations with others, looking at a portfolio with others. Whether I build that portfolio entirely manually or whether I can write a script, a prompt, or have an agent collect certain things, and I then just curate over that, but I'm not physically doing the collection and putting a file into an online space and then linking it into my portfolio, that is another question. But the thinking around what is important for me, that still needs to be done by me. I can't outsource that. So the seemingly simple reflection framework of 'What? So what? Now what?' will still be around in several years' time because first we want to summarise what have we learned, what have we seen? Then, so what? What does that mean for me right now? What am I feeling? What am I thinking? And then now what? What am I going to take of that with me in the future? That is the reflective element that will stay key in portfolios, no matter what the technology will look like.

Penny Leach: 28:24

So then, given that the future is around learning, I think with what I've distilled from your answer is uncertain, but that we think that there's still going to be a very important place for reflective learning and in narratives around learning and ownership of learning. What would be then your most cherished wish for the future of Mahara as a project and as a piece of software within that future?

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:49

I wish that we stay as a community, community in which we learn from each other, have conversations around portfolios and also the wider educational landscape, work with each other, practice together, and translate that into what that could look like on a technical end.

Penny Leach: 29:11

It's a lovely wish for the future. I wish that for the future too. Thank you, Kristina. We're going to go into the quick answer round now. So I'm going to flick back these three questions at you that you always ask your podcast guests. The first one is, which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:28

At the moment, it is aggregator, reflective, and connective.

Penny Leach: 29:34

Does that mean that you're going to change, create, share, engage to be new three words?

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:38

No [Penny laughs], we are not. We are not going to do that. We have changed the tagline for the 20th anniversary. So the new tagline is 'Space to reflect, room to grow.'

Penny Leach: 29:53

Oh, I love that!

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:55

But create, share, engage is still very, very valid.

Penny Leach: 30:01

All right. Next quick question is, which tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:09

Don't assume that your learners know how to reflect and how to give good feedback. Scaffold the portfolio activities based on the prior knowledge and also experiences of your learners, so that the portfolio doesn't become a chore, but that they really want to engage with it and also know how the portfolio can help them.

Penny Leach: 30:31

That's a great tip. And then, what advice would you have for portfolio authors?

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:36

I find it is important that you bring in your own voice and don't shy away from using multimedia. Make sure that your voice is heard and that you also express yourself in a way that works best for you, so that the reflection sticks, that the learning sticks.

Penny Leach: 30:56

Be authentic.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:57

Yes.

Penny Leach: 30:58

Thank you for being authentic with me and letting me ask you difficult questions, and Kristina, also I want to take the opportunity to say thank you for everything that you've done for the Mahara project over the many years that you've been working on it. You've really been an absolute inspiration to many people in the community, and your tireless work has made the project what it is today.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:17

Thank you, Penny. Now over to our listeners. As you think about your own portfolio work, what do you want to be able to do with portfolios in the future? Share your thoughts on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Mastodon, and tag me or send me an email. This was'Create. Share. Engage.' Check out the resources in the episode notes in your podcast app or at podcast.mahara.org. Go through the back catalogue to be inspired by how others benefit from portfolios. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.