Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today, my guest is Professor Dr Mark Brown, one of the original members of the Mahara project team when he was at Massey University in Aotearoa. Recently, he gave us a brief overview of the early days of Mahara at Mahara Hui Online. Now, I'd also like to capture some of his wisdom and insights and also recollections here on the podcast for everybody to hear. It's good to catch up with you, Mark. Welcome.

Mark Brown: 1:02

Kia ora.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:04

Mark, tell me a little bit about your professional journey. What are some of the highlights?

Mark Brown: 1:11

Well, I guess what I'd want say from the outset is I'm first in my family to graduate with a university degree. I didn't start university until I was 25. So I like to think of myself as a good example of the transformative potential of education. And with that background, I've always been driven throughout my career and over my professional life by the goal of promoting wider access and more flexible pathways to education and lifelong learning. I originally trained as a primary school teacher and quickly progressed to being a graduate assistant and assistant lecturer, and then a full-time university lecturer, primarily working in the field of educational technology. In 2006, I was seconded from my lecturing role in the College of Education to the dark side of university management, or what I prefer to say, leadership at Massey University. Initially, I served as the Director of Distance Education with strategic oversight for Massey's 17,000 distance learners. The role evolved - different responsibilities, including the joint oversight for the university's educational technology tool set, which included the selection and implementation of a new learning management system, namely Moodle, which evolved to include the time of my leadership at Massey, we committed additional resourcing to help further enhance Mahara. My role at Massey evolved over the years, and with several title changes, promotions, and additional responsibilities, eventually in 2014, I accepted a new role at Dublin City University as Ireland's first Chair of Digital Learning and Director of the newly established National Institute for Digital Learning. The teaching Enhancement Unit at DCU was part of my portfolio under the capable leadership of Mark Glynn, and Mark and Lisa Donaldson led the DCU-wide implementation of Mahara, and I formally retired from my position at DCU at the beginning of 2025.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:17

When you mentioned that you started your tertiary career at the age of 25, which triggered the reminder why you are so passionate about and also very active in the wider community of open, distance, flexible, and online education because you are also very active in ICDE and other organisations, including also FLANZ.

Mark Brown: 3:42

Indeed.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:43

And so, Mark, you were on the original project team for the development of Mahara in its initial year. Can you share a bit how the project came about and what you wanted to achieve with it?

Mark Brown: 3:57

Sure. First, I think it's important that I give much of the credit for writing the Mahara funding proposal to my colleagues Mark Nichols and Bill Anderson. Also, Richard Wyles was the technical and conceptual guru. To be honest, the success in securing an eCDF government funding grant came as quite a pleasant surprise, as the project was particularly ambitious for what was meant to be just a one-year funding round or cycle. As an aside, I think our understanding of sustainability in the edtech field has matured significantly since the start of the original project. Even though at the time our commitment to an open-source platform was central to this goal, I don't think any of the project team could envisage just how Mahara would continue to be used around the world 20 years later. What an amazing achievement! At the time of the original project, I think a strong focus was really placed on an ePortfolio for critical reflection and lifelong learning. The lofty goal in Europe, championed by EIfEL, of an ePortfolio for all by 2010, was particularly influential. The overarching mantra, if you like, was ePortfolio for every citizen. You need to remember that when we were working on Mahara, a public version of Facebook had yet to be launched. The digital world was only just emerging. Even blogs were a new thing back in those days. However, it was clear to us that the world was rapidly going digital, and a place to store, document, manage, and critically reflect on your lifelong learning made a lot of sense.

Kristina Hoeppner: 5:44

Originally, lifelong learning was very much the focus of the project, more so than the institutional portfolios or using portfolios for assessment purposes. Why did you put so much focus on the lifelong learning aspect, Mark?

Mark Brown: 6:02

Yes, as you say, the original goal was much wider than simply promoting ePortfolios at an institutional level or as part of assessment. I think we actually saw this institutional focus as limiting the scope of the wider potential of ePortfolios. One of the underlying principles in the project development was learner ownership. There was a risk that we saw between a strong focus on institutional portfolio development in undermining that principle of learner ownership and the wider goal of promoting critical reflection and lifelong learning, so there was a tension there. We also saw the strong potential of Mahara to be a social networking tool for learners, where they connect with other learners across institutions. The social networking feature of Mahara recognised that the origin of metacognitive thinking and critical self-reflection, or if you like, learning how to learn, really resided in the social interactions with other learners. There was also a tension with this wider focus on the institutional driver, as actually several of the members of project team, me included, were involved in academic programme development and programmes that were ideally suited to the implementation of an ePortfolio. So we lived with this tension throughout the development, and it wasn't by accident that the different views that a learner could create in the platform could also be used to support the different uses or forms of portfolio, including a showcase of achievements.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:45

What also comes to mind is when you mentioned that in Europe there was the initiative for portfolio for all, there was also one in Minnesota where, at one point, also in the early 2010s, every person could have a portfolio and use it in particular for job applications and so on, but due to funding, that project did not continue, unfortunately, but it also had that very much lifelong view. For which programmes did you originally develop the portfolio ideas, Mark? Was that for education?

Mark Brown: 8:17

Yes, it was not surprisingly, given what we know about ePortfolios and where they seem to sit naturally in inverted commas, was a initial teacher education programme. That programme was being redesigned from the ground up, such that we were able to build a portfolio into it rather than grafted onto an existing programme.

Kristina Hoeppner: 8:42

How was the uptake then in the programme? Did people come on board easily to the idea, or did they need a bit of convincing since it was pretty new to them of how to engage with learning that way?

Mark Brown: 8:55

Well, the key members of the programme team were also members of the Mahara project team. One would have thought that we would be very successful in implementing that initiative, but as it turned out, we all moved off into different roles and positions. Mark Nichols took up a position at the Open Polytechnic. Bill Anderson and Mary Simpson left to take up roles at Otago University in the College of Education there, and I was seconded into a role in the central university, as I described previously, as Director of Distance Education. There's a lesson in this, which I'll probably touch on at some stage in the podcast about the importance of leadership and the need to build that leadership underneath those who are the initial champions. In the end, the programme didn't really live up to expectations, I think it would be fair to say, in the manner in which ePortfolio were embedded into it successfully.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:55

We've seen that over the years that it is so important to have appropriate and sufficient support for programmes, and also the backing of the management to roll portfolios out and make them successful. To fulfil the vision of that lifelong portfolio, myportfolio.ac.nz was created, which was essentially a multi-tenanted Mahara site, so that every institution could be on one site, and no matter whether the students switched their universities or tertiaries, their portfolio would continue to be in one place. Was that the main goal of setting up myportfolio.ac.nz, or was there anything else of why you had immediately envisaged this more country-wide instance?

Mark Brown: 10:48

I'm having to rattle my brain to think back to how that came about. I believe it was linked back to the issue about ownership, learner ownership. The key question that we were trying to address was how could we find a place where learners could develop their ePortfolio and retain their ownership independent from an outside institution in which they were studying through? A related question was how could we make ePortfolio available to all learners, irrespective of the institution they were studying with, which was part of one of the goals of the funding proposal. It also meant we could offer a platform for institutions without the challenge that they would have of managing or hosting the installation. And then another question was how could we ensure the ePortfolio was available for learners beyond the time they spent studying at a particular institution, we really hadn't given a lot of thought originally to what might happen to the portfolio beyond an institutional installation of one form or another. But clearly, for the goal that we had in mind, we wanted this to carry with the learner for life. So MyPortfolio was a solution to allow learners to also connect with one another across institutions in the manner in which I was describing as a social networking platform. I think it would be fair to say that we didn't really end up being very successful with that because partly other tools came along to support that social side of learning. The other aspect to the social networking was we always envisaged the opportunity for group or team-based portfolios. So there was an environment there in which members of the team could communicate and reflect in producing the group portfolio. That's still an area which is underutilised, in my view, in terms of portfolio use.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:48

But it certainly has become more commonplace, and I've definitely heard it asked for more. Already very early on. There was Scotland's Royal College Barony Campus that had already used group portfolios quite successfully. Then also in the UK, a university used it to document student work, and most recently Dublin City University, in particular, is putting more and more focus on those group portfolios, group interactions, capturing that also in the portfolio to make those authentic learning tasks, but I also know from other institutions that do want to have that capability available and make use of what we offer in Mahara to support those collaborations with the students. The Mark, a few years later, you had said in 2014, so that was two years prior to Dublin City University, coming on board with Mahara, you moved to Ireland, became the Inaugural Professor of Digital Learning, and also the Director of the National Institute of Digital Learning at Dublin City University, and in Mahara Hui Online, you take us through the whirlwind of going from one portfolio platform trial to another to finally leading you to Mahara, mainly through the project team. Others than you having selected the platform, and of course Lisa Donaldson being influential in that. The first podcast episode is with her because that story of taking 6,000 learners online with a portfolio just within six weeks is one to tell. Looking at it from your perspective, what were the driving forces behind Dublin City University deciding we need a portfolio? Was it the same values that you had for the Mahara project, or were there also other elements that you and the team at the Teaching Enhancement Unit considered?

Mark Brown: 14:47

Well, at DCU, we were fortunate to have a visionary university president who actively promoted the potential of ePortfolio and was influential in embedding them as part of a new institutional strategy alongside the development of six university-wide graduate attributes. These attributes were known as Generation 21. We actually had a lot of top-down pressure on us to select an portfolio platform after, as you described, two failed pilots. So we actually had a unique challenge, which was mitigating the risks of ePortfolio being perceived as a top-down driven innovation with limited grassroots buy-in from faculty staff. A related challenge was to manage up the risks of over-promising and under-delivering in terms of successful ePortfolio implementation. While the number of active users was important in sort of institutional reporting, I was acutely aware that the figure wasn't always necessarily a good proxy for the manner in which ePortfolio were being fully embedded and ultimately being used to transform the student learning experience. So numbers alone don't tell the full story. The truth is that Generation 21 was driven by the goal of enhancing students' employability through a set of transversal skills, rather than promoting specific discipline goals or programme level learning outcomes. The transversal skills didn't really live in the academic heartland, and an ePortfolio by itself wasn't going to change that. This was going to be a slow burner. But at the programme level, ePortfolios were more sticky and successful in supporting both module and programme-wide assessment, irrespective of Generation 21. Individual faculty and a handful of programme teams saw the potential and really drove the uptake of ePortfolio, especially in teacher education. It's notable that Generation 21, the graduate attributes, no longer exist in the DCU discourse. It was always going to be a hard job using a technology platform to embed those transversal skills in the learning culture across the institution. But without the original driver and high-level institutional support, it's questionable whether ePortfolio would have become such a key feature of the core DCU tool set. Thanks to the institutional work at the level that Mark and Lisa, particularly Lisa, led, Mahara found a more organic role at the key face of those teaching modules and at the programme level. So it's fair to say that aligning ePortfolio with assessment practice was crucial to achieving this uptake.

Kristina Hoeppner: 17:51

I noted that you mentioned programme level assessment, which came out of the Netherlands, so that we are looking at assessment differently and not just at the individual activity or course level, but really across an entire programme, and portfolios lend themselves very well to that approach. The leadership of an organisation does need to stand behind it and need to also make that space and the time available for staff, lecturers, and everybody involved to make that switch because that's not just changing from a paper-based multiple choice test to an online-based multiple choice test. So I imagine you've had lots and lots of conversations with the teaching faculty and also Lisa running heaps of workshops in order to bring everybody on board,

Mark Brown: 18:43

Yes, I don't think anyone involved in this area would underestimate the challenge of getting faculty teams talking to one another and sharing what they do in their individual modules. Sadly, it's not something that's common, dare I say it, and you have to look for where the opportunities arise. So, in my experience, one of the best opportunities is when a programme goes through a formal review process. That provides a framework with which conversations can take place about assessment, the types of assessment, duplication of assessment, and the relevance of the learning outcomes, whether or not they align to graduate attributes of some form because not all programmes use the language of graduate attributes, and some more contribute to discipline-based requirements. But you have to look for where there are those opportunities for those conversations and usually find some allies in a leadership role, hopefully, within the programme that can really work with the colleagues. So it's not something that's being done to them, but being done with them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:56

Yeah, DCU has had lots and lots of success with portfolios because well over 100 programs are using it. At the 10th anniversary event at the start of October 2026, the team launched two case study volumes, one specifically from DCU and another one involving other portfolio community members. Lisa Donaldson had also published volumes with case studies from DCU, and again also wider community base. Your team had published 'The learning portfolio: A game of snakes and ladders' publication that is a literature review of, in particular, learning portfolios, so focusing on the lifelong learning aspect of portfolios, which is widely cited and used because it's a fantastic and small publication that is freely available for everybody to engage with. So, with all that work that had been done over the years and the success at DCU, from your perspective of dealing more with management, administration, and not being on the coal phase of the implementation of portfolios, why do you feel like that portfolios at many institutions are still only very niche?

Mark Brown: 21:14

Yeah, well, that's a really great question because, as you say, despite great case studies and examples of good practice, the successful institution-wide adoption of ePortfolio as a really core feature of the learning experience remains very rare. I don't think there's a single magic bullet answer to the question [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:34

Yeah, I was hoping for a revelation on a Wednesday afternoon.

Mark Brown: 21:37

However, I do think that having the right leadership is important, as well as having the right drivers. It's important to understand that ePortfolio can serve many different purposes, and it helps to be clear about your drivers or intentions when you start. The DCU example shows the value of not sticking rigidly to the original institutional driver. In my experience, top-down driven innovations are almost doomed to fail. So there's a lot to be said for supporting more locally based initiatives where the uptake can grow quite organically, as happened at DCU. Actually, I really prefer to call that adoption strategy as middle out innovation, as there needs to be a link between the local level and then the wider institutional support, resourcing, and infrastructure. Both are needed. Of course, one of the biggest obstacles to institutional-wide implementation is the traditional culture of assessment. We need to be honest about the fact that much of our assessment does not follow contemporary best practice, where learners have opportunities to critically reflect and produce authentic solutions to real-world problems. It's still much easier, sadly, and less time-consuming to produce multi-response quizzes and to set traditional examinations, especially in the age of Gen AI. It's not easy to change assessment practice away from assessment of learning towards more assessment for learning, as it really strikes at the core of what people believe is good teaching and learning, and the purpose of education. So, in my experience, when ePortfolio meets the traditional culture of assessment without some pedagogically led intervention, tradition wins.

Kristina Hoeppner: 23:35

Because it's also easier. It's proven. It has been accredited. Whereas portfolios do take somebody to look at the curriculum and see how can we transform it so that we can make that assessment for learning and then bring in the methods that come with the portfolio.

Mark Brown: 23:56

I couldn't put my hand on my heart and tell someone that by incorporating an ePortfolio into their curriculum, it's going to be less work. But on the other hand, the experience will be far more intrinsically rewarding for both the instructor or the teacher and the learner. If the goal is to meet the learning outcomes and produce reflection and the habit of mind of lifelong learning, then it's a no-brainer to do so.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:27

That is a very good point with the workload, especially if you're looking at programmes that have 100, 200, 400 students. Somebody needs to read the reflections and also give feedback on it. Do you involve peers and so on? And one of the sessions that I do still want to organise at some point is we are thinking of 100, 500 students, maybe, but what about the very large open university courses, like they are at Unisa, the University of South Africa, where Mpho-Entle Modise, who is a professor and had co-edited a book last year on the resilience of portfolios has 14,000 students in a course. So if we as community can put our heads together and see what are some possibilities to put portfolio practices in place and trial in such massive learning settings, then that is also one big challenge for us.

Mark Brown: 25:24

Indeed.

Kristina Hoeppner: 25:26

Now, Mark, you've been involved with portfolios for at least 20 years. If you look back, what are some lessons that you have learned or wished maybe you didn't have to learn?

Mark Brown: 25:40

I tend to think in threes, so let me just give you three lessons that spring to mind. I've touched on the first one, which is that ePortfolio can mean different things to different people. Both educators and learners don't always understand the different purposes or the many different faces of ePortfolio. While the learning portfolio is not mutually exclusive from an assessment portfolio or a showcase portfolio, the tendency is for one form or feature to dominate over another. So clarity of purpose is really important without constraining other uses. The second lesson that springs to mind is to repeat an earlier observation, having an institutional leadership or an ePortfolio champion is crucial. Part of the role is to share best practice and develop an internal community of practice. The person also serves a crucial link to the wider ePortfolio community, as I think Lisa talks about in the podcast that you had with her. It also helps if key staff, instructors, teachers also personally model ePortfolio in their own professional learning and roles. That's less common. The last lesson would be that ePortfolio are arguably most effective, I say arguably because this somewhat cuts across that lifelong learning portfolio, but I'll say arguably most effective at the institutional level when they're fully embedded to support programme-wide assessment and critical reflection across a student's learning journey because they are also involved outside of the programme in other aspects of learning within their institution. It helps if the programme-wide assessment allows learners to demonstrate how they do meet with the evidence any professional or discipline-based requirements or graduate attributes, as I referred to earlier. The alignment between assessment and meeting graduate attributes or programme learning outcomes adds greater coherence to the learner's overall experience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:54

Mark, could it also be that implementing a portfolio initially on the institution level is beneficial because that way the learners get scaffolded into the practice? They are becoming familiar with reflection, feedback, and doing that on a regular basis so that once they are then familiar with it, they can later on use it in their own lives.

Mark Brown: 28:19

It's a bit of a truism I found of any technology. If you don't know how to use it, you don't know how to use it. Often the ways that you end up using a technology are not how they were originally envisaged, or you extend the ideas that were originally embedded in the technology. I think it's a very good thing to get people learning early because there is a technical barrier in the skill level to learn how a platform works, and so you have to be willing to get past that. Hopefully, that's a relatively seamless experience. Certainly, one of the lessons I know from the early development of Mahara is we spent so much of the development funding on the features, and we weren't so concerned about the look and feel. I've learned over the years that look and feel make a big difference to that initial uptake. If something's very clunky and hard to use initially, that's quite a barrier to the goal that you might have in the longer term.

Kristina Hoeppner: 29:22

Yeah, it's always that balance between having a feature-rich platform but also make it easy to use. Where do you think the place of the portfolio is in the coming years?

Mark Brown: 29:36

I don't think the challenges of wider institutional implementation of ePortfolio are unlikely to change. However, the potential benefits of ePortfolio, I believe, have never been greater in the age of Gen AI. With growing concerns about academic integrity and students, putting it bluntly, cheating using Gen AI, a place for learners to document the learning process, the tools they've used in their learning, and the changes to their thinking over time, with evidence along with their critical reflections on learning, is hugely beneficial. An ePortfolio can play a role in supporting peer and self-assessment and new approaches such as interactive oral assessments that I know DCU does quite extensively. An ePortfolio is an ideal solution to many of the challenges as well as the opportunities created by GenAI. I'd like to think that we will see a new wave of interest and enthusiasm for the role of ePortfolio in both assessment and the wider goal of supporting lifelong learning. I'm a born optimist.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:49

Yeah, and I think it comes down to quite a bit of trial and error and seeing what are students doing here. You had said that people use tools in unintended ways, and so same thing with the portfolio, same thing with Gen AI. What is possible? What is not possible? And how do we then integrate things? How do we also make the use of Gen AI a beneficial one? Like, for example, using it as Socratic partner, as reflection partner, and eliciting more of that reflection rather than staying on the summary level. So there are also some positive ways, and not just looking at it from the perspective of that it's going to write the entire portfolio.

Mark Brown: 31:28

Yes, it would certainly be a sad outcome if a portfolio ended up being written by AI.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:35

Yeah, would not be a portfolio because the portfolio does not just live from the artefacts, but really very much from that reflection and making the connections between the different learning activities. So that then takes us to our last three questions, Mark. The quick answer round. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Mark Brown: 32:00

The phrase that really springs to mind is 'habit of mind'. Critical reflection is at the heart of ePortfolio thinking and is a lifelong learning disposition for promoting the goal of learning how to learn. So it needs to become a habit of mind which ePortfolio just happens to be able to scaffold.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:23

Now you've already given us a number of lessons that you've learned over the years. Do you have a final tip for learning designers or instructors, lecturers, tutors who create portfolio activities?

Mark Brown: 32:37

Don't try to graft ePortfolio onto traditional approaches to assessment. Help educators to reimagine their assessment practice, and the benefits of embedding ePortfolio should follow. It's a cliché, I know, but it's really important to identify the educational problem first, rather than see ePortfolio as the solution in search of a problem.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:02

And what advice do you then have for portfolio authors, for the students, or also the faculty that should be creating their portfolios themselves?

Mark Brown: 33:11

To offer something true to the original spirit of Mahara, critical reflection doesn't stop in the classroom. Consider how you can use an ePortfolio to bridge your formal, non-formal, and importantly informal learning to better holistically reflect you as a person and your evolving identity as a lifelong, life-wide learner. So to extend what I said earlier, make critical reflection and that ePortfolio scaffold a habit for life.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:46

Thank you so very much, Mark, for the chat today and sharing your opinions on why portfolio practice is important, why it should become a habit of mind, essentially for everybody, not just for students, but also everybody taking that into their professional lives. I really appreciated that you shared with us where you were coming from and why the portfolio and the idea of the portfolio, in particular the lifelong learning portfolio, were so important to you. So thank you so much for the chat today, Mark.

Mark Brown: 34:25

You're welcome. I've enjoyed the opportunity.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:28

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 Professor Dr Mark Brown. 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 would appreciate it too. Our next episode will air in two weeks. Until then, create, share, and engage.