Dr Terrel (Terry) Rhodes is Distinguished Fellow at AAC&U and can look back at a long history of working with portfolios, establishing the VALUE rubrics, tying portfolios to assessment and employability, and supporting many institutions in their portfolio journey.
In this interview, Terry touches on many of these areas, highlighting the importance of digital ethics, student control, authenticity, and the need for integrative practice.
Connect with Terry on LinkedIn
Resources
Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter about Mahara and portfolios.
Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Dr Terrel (Terry) Rhodes is Distinguished Fellow at AAC&U and can look back at a long history of working with portfolios, establishing the VALUE rubrics, tying portfolios to assessment and employability, and supporting many institutions in their portfolio journey.
In this interview, Terry touches on many of these areas, highlighting the importance of digital ethics, student control, authenticity, and the need for integrative practice.
Connect with Terry on LinkedIn
Resources
Click through to the episode notes for the transcript.
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter about Mahara and portfolios.
Production information
Production: Catalyst IT
Host: Kristina Hoeppner
Artwork: Evonne Cheung
Music: The Mahara tune by Josh Woodward
Kristina Hoeppner 00:05
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.
Kristina Hoeppner 00:28
Dr Terry Rhodes is my guest today. He's a distinguished fellow at AAC&U, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, worked at a number of universities, published numerous articles and books, and has been at constant in the portfolio community for many years. Thank you very much, Terry, for having a chat with me today.
Terry Rhodes 00:50
Well, thank you, Kristina. I am delighted.
Kristina Hoeppner 00:52
So Terry, you've been as I've just said, a constant in the portfolio communities and actually retired in 2021. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? What did you do or also still what do you do because you have certainly not given up here academic research and involvement in the community.
Terry Rhodes 01:12
I actually was thinking about how I ever got involved in all of this because as a younger person, it never was something that was in my awareness. I'm a first generation college student, and my father was a boiler maker who worked on building power plants, and my mother, a secretary bookkeeper. But they always said I needed to go to college. And that was an important thing to a better life. And so I did that. And I did it with some enthusiasm, but knowing very little and having very few resources to pursue that.
Terry Rhodes 01:46
And so it wasn't really until I was a college student that I even became aware of things like digital portfolios or portfolios at all, from students and friends in architecture in other fields where it's been a longer standing physical activity, but I never used and I became a faculty member, but I never used portfolios, and none of my colleagues used portfolios in their classes. And eventually, I got married and had children, and it was when my children were in school that I encountered portfolios. They were something utilised in the K-12 environment in our country. I ended up with a daughter who was having to do a portfolio. And I started then to be introduced to it, and I thought, this has wonderful possibilities.
Terry Rhodes 02:37
I began to just check around and talk to some of the people who were doing this in the K-12 environment and said, "We need to be doing this in higher education." So I started scouring friends and meetings and things and asking people, "Do you know anything about this? What do you do with this?" and that kind of thing. And I remember being at a conference in, I think it was Connecticut, in the United States, and encountered a couple of colleagues from the Rhode Island Institute of Design, and they used portfolios in their own teaching, and they were central to it, and they were in the process of starting their own ePortfolio company to be able to expand this into higher education. That just opened up all kinds of new doors and resources and things. And so I tried to just do as much networking as possible to pursue opportunities for this to become part of higher education.
Kristina Hoeppner 03:30
You're talking about Kelly Driscoll and Jeff Yan, right?
Terry Rhodes 03:34
Yes and continue to work with them as colleagues and have them as friends to this day.
Kristina Hoeppner 03:39
Jeff is also a member of the AAEEBL Digital Ethics Task Force, which is fantastic to have him there as another provider of portfolio platforms so that we can look at any of the ethical issues that we talk about or topics that we discuss and not just look at it from the student and the staff perspective or the learner designer perspective, but also from the platform perspective because we as providers of platforms, like Digication and Mahara definitely also need to be aware of any of the discussions that are going on in the community.
Terry Rhodes 04:13
Exactly. As a matter of fact, thinking about questions that you had suggested that we might include in our conversation, looking to sort of the present and into the future a bit, I think the digital ethics work that was always a part of our conversations when I got together with Jeff and Kelly and the work in AAEEBL and our portfolio community has grown in recent years and become quite formulaic and developing resources for others to use. I do think into the future as we confront artificial intelligence, as our platforms begin to emerge and the digital world becomes more pervasive and this boundaries and seams that were often there in the past are disappearing and people, alive people are disappearing in many instances that I think the digital ethics work is becoming more and more central to anything that we do going forward with portfolio work in this digital arena in order to preserve integrity, in order to preserve the authenticity that it brings to the learning process and the educational process.
Terry Rhodes 05:27
It started so long ago, I don't even know now how many decades ago it was, but I'm so pleased that it is becoming much more pervasive and integral to the work both from those who are creating the platforms, but also those who are helping students create portfolios and instantiate learning through them.
Kristina Hoeppner 05:46
Terry, I think you've always looked at digital ethics as part of your mandate of things that you were doing in particular, I think at AAC&U because you were the Vice President for the Office of Quality, Curriculum, and Assessment, the Inaugural Executive Director of the VALUE Project and the VALUE Institute and VALUE stands for valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education, and then also the Director of the annual AAC&U Institute on General Education and Assessment. What interested you in digital ethics in the general education and assessment field, but then also particularly in portfolios? You, of course, already mentioned a few of those items. But is there anything that you'd like to add?
Terry Rhodes 06:31
My higher education experience, I was a political science major, and my graduate work was on public policy, urban politics, and a lot of the research I did initially was in relation to Native Americans and Indigenous peoples. There was no way to avoid ethics in the political work that I was doing, even though sometimes it's very difficult to see it surface in many political circumstances these days. It was always a central part for me in the work that I did the questions that I asked, and when we talk about student learning and the power that was there and still there in our ePortfolio and digital work as a mode for engaging students in learning, it just seemed like it was so important that portfolios - it just coupled with assessment.
Terry Rhodes 07:26
How do we know that we've learned something? At what level do we want to be learning something? Do we need to be learning? Are we at mastery or are we beginning? Are questions that we used to use, so only relied upon grades to give us a clue of that, A meant this and F meant that kind of thing, but what did that mean? And what did it mean for a student in a context of learning that was going to be central for them both in receiving their educational credentials, but also the work environment that they would then be going into.
Terry Rhodes 07:59
They needed to be equipped to be able to look at the qualities themselves. So it was an ethical issue for me as an educator to be sure that my students were able to make these judgements themselves and to know on what basis, what were the critical things that were needed that they should be paying attention to, that were indicators of the quality of their actual learning what they were actually being equipped to be able to do, not just on my paper, my test, my project, this course, but in their lives in the work that they were doing. So it was an ethical issue for me as an educator to be sure that I was helping my students be equipped to make their own judgements about this, and for me to be able to articulate what I was making a judgement on, what basis, and so they could see whether I was looking at different things differently, how that was the case, how it influenced a judgement, so they could make their own choices and decisions about that. It just seemed to be so natural to me for those things to be there.
Kristina Hoeppner 08:57
I think that's also where then the VALUE rubrics come in that were developed at AAC&U because you were just talking about the transparency that the students know what they are being assessed on that it is also very clear for the faculty member. How did you go about developing those rubrics because you were [Terry laughs] the Executive Director when everything started. Can you tell us just very briefly about that?
Terry Rhodes 09:20
Again, I think it was actually one of the advantages of being a first generation college student. So I had very few models that I had grown up with that had influenced how I thought about things and stuff in higher ed. Just as I indicated, I was ignorant of portfolios during much of my development into an educator, I also as a faculty member never used rubrics in my classes because they were those things that they did in K-12, and we're higher education. So we couldn't possibly need anything.
Terry Rhodes 09:51
Then I ended up at Portland State University. They were using both portfolios, but they were also using rubrics to be able to help make judgements about the work being done in those portfolios. They had only been doing this for two or three years, I think, when I became aware of it and was at the institution. But it just made so much sense to me. It started to articulate key things around learning on different things, one of which was we had VALUE rubrics.
Terry Rhodes 10:20
Initially, there were a handful, and then we expanded to more like 15 of them. But these were the essential learning outcomes. These were things that seemed to be central to our learning, like oral communication, like writing, like quantitative literacy, ethics needed to be one of those things. And so for each of those, we said, it was an issue of what do we look for? What are we actually looking at, to make judgements about ethical decision making, about quality writing. I said, we need to be doing this, and we need to be articulating, and we need to share it. Grades are ubiquitous, rubrics are not. Rubrics need to be ubiquitous because they are the essence of what a grade ends up being.
Terry Rhodes 11:03
So we invited colleagues. We just sent out notices to people, emails, and so on and so forth and said, "Would you like to help join us in this work?" There were hundreds of faculty and student affairs professionals who responded and said, "Yes, I'd like to work on this one, or that one, or this one." And obviously, writing project coordinators had been developing these things for many years, oral Communication had had them for many years. But we said we want those people in the sub conversation, but we want people who aren't experts, too, because they're also making judgements about this, what are they looking at.
Terry Rhodes 11:36
So we recruited volunteers from two-year, four-year prestigious institutions, such as Harvard and Michigan, to liberal arts colleges, to community colleges, to technical institutes, military academies, and we worked for about 11 months or so digitally, remotely, occasionally coming together to develop language that identified the key elements of each of these learning outcomes, and what we actually looked for, and what different levels one could see in that, working from beginning, introductory things, to mastery.
Terry Rhodes 12:12
We said, "this is the guide, this is sort of the core, but you'll have to expand on it and articulate it more purposefully for your students, in your programme, in your setting that works in your institution because those local factors are going to influence this, but it needs to be within a shared framework." And that's what the rubric provided was an articulation of a shared framework. And I still remember the faculty that were doing this, tried it out in their classes that they were teaching, and then they'd come back and say, "that didn't work, or that's terrific, we need to really showcase that." They would say, "can we share these rubrics with our students?" And I said, "Yes, that's the whole point of it." That is the whole point. We have a shared framework as educators that we're making judgements about students, let them know, they have to know what that is. And they also can give us feedback. And so we collected the feedback from students, too, as we develop these.
Terry Rhodes 13:06
This was at a time where in the United States, the Federal Government through the Department of Education affiliation, with it had a programme called the Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education.
Kristina Hoeppner 13:17
That's FIPSE, right?
Terry Rhodes 13:18
FIPSE, yes, FIPSE. And they gave grants to faculty or groups of faculty who wanted to work on new ideas, particularly around learning and assessing learning, and they funded us, but we had to deliver something by the end of the funding period. So we had like a year and a half of funding, and then we had to deliver something. So we got as much feedback and work done as we could so quickly from faculty and from students, put the feedback together, the teams that we're working on said, "we can live with this, we can live with this." So we ended up with I think it was 15, eventually, of the VALUE rubrics, and they're now used by 1,000s of institutions and programmes, not just in the U.S., but around the world, which is one of the most exciting pieces of this.
Kristina Hoeppner 14:01
I think another item that or another initiative that came out of AAC&U was the High Impact Practices to which ePortfolios was added as the 11th high impact practice in 2016. Because that really elevated its stance.
Terry Rhodes 14:18
It did.
Kristina Hoeppner 14:18
Because especially American colleges and universities kind of are looking towards AAC&U to provide guidance and having portfolios included, made it then a bit more formalised, I think. Have you noticed a change then at the institutions that you've worked with in how they perceive portfolios? Are they being perceived as having more gravitas and being more important because they are now in the official canon?
Terry Rhodes 14:45
Yes, I think the short answer is yes. Part of why high impact practices took off, I think, is partly the time period it was following you know, in the 60s and 70s, when higher education in many parts of the world was going through all kinds In some transformative things and student voices were being raised and faculty were becoming more open to new things and doing things differently than in the past. At the same time, the research was happening, and there were fortunately colleagues who were focused on that.
Terry Rhodes 15:15
The research was coming out with results that indicated that student learning was deepened and broadened when engaged in activities that allowed them to see how to use the learning they were getting in a more traditional classroom or programme. This really facilitated them seeing the relevance, the importance of the information they were getting because it actually was helping them do things, and they were often things that they wanted to do or didn't want done, but allowed them to try to influence that.
Terry Rhodes 15:49
George Kuh was instrumental in helping AAC&U develop high impact practice, that terminology. And when we were developing the VALUE rubrics, I had invited George, and he served on our National Advisory Committee for the development of the VALUE rubrics. And so again, it was an effort to try to connect and to integrate the different threads so that we could maximise the connectivity and the integration of learning and maximise the ability to people just to expand it and see it and link it to other things that were happening.
Terry Rhodes 16:21
A lot of institutions picked up on portfolios. I mean, it took me a long time, and not just myself, but also my other colleagues, to get George and his colleagues who were overseeing, sort of managing the high impact practices piece to say, "Yep, portfolio should be there." And so finally, it became official in 2016. Everyone said, "Yes, we should open the list a little and put this in there."
Kristina Hoeppner 16:45
And it's all for putting the learner at the centre, and as he said, at the Batson Lecture, now almost a little over five years ago at Capilano University in Vancouver, that why would you use portfolios, the students will have control over their own learning, they will have ownership of their learning, and because it is their learning, it is not the teacher's learning.
Terry Rhodes 17:06
I mean, we can't make them learn.
Kristina Hoeppner 17:07
Terry, when you talk about portfolios, of course, with your background, you mentioned a lot of assessment, but you've also mentioned especially in that Batson Lecture, that portfolios also serve employability quite a bit. What other trends or do you want to expand on one of those trends have you observed of portfolio work over the years?
Terry Rhodes 17:26
I was pleasantly surprised as we were engaging in the portfolio. One is indeed as AAEEBL, the ePortfolio professionals organisation was being formed, that it very quickly became not just something happening in the United States because it wasn't just happening here, but that the connections internationally occurred. And so it was so exciting that here was a way for educators and people across great distances, who would never have thought about connecting to people abroad or whatever to connect, and to do it around enhancing learning. And so internationalised higher education, advancement, and creativity beyond, you know, the study abroad kind of thing that was a fairly scripted, contained kind of thing to really being able to see students in other learning environments, what they were doing, what you were doing, comparing those notes, engaging with others, and it allowed students to interact in ways that were not available. It weren't occurring, I think, and traditional student exchange kinds of programmes.
Terry Rhodes 18:34
The other thing was it allowed faculty to be doing that as well. It then became interesting because employers started contacting people more about these portfolio things that they really liked that because they would say to us, "what I look at now is that this student went to Yale, and that's a good school. So they're going to be a good student. And so I'll hire them. But I'm not really sure that they can do the job that I need done for my instance of this, my company, my place, my workplace. But with a portfolio, I can see that." Part of the work that was happening along with portfolio development was the development of digital transcripts. And so as technology emerged and expanded, employers loved that it was so much easier to do a digital resume that could actually have links in it that would open up an example of what the student could actually do, and they had a much better idea that the student who went to Wichita State actually was a better fit than that student who had gone to Yale. And so it gave much more information to them in a better fit to use their language.
Terry Rhodes 19:40
That was an eye opener and it was actually one of the things I think that also helped ePortfolios establish themselves on some campuses like Florida State, for example. It was when they sought that connection to employment and careers that it became a more solidly established thing on that campus.
Kristina Hoeppner 19:58
Do you see an evolution of portfolio work or do you see it to come and go, that it ebbs and flows?
Terry Rhodes 20:05
Well, I think it does ebb and flow. And it does it partly on the budget vicissitudes particular institutions and locations. When the money is there, it's easy to say, 'yeah, we'll help support portfolios. When the money disappears, you're on your own because we have to have it for this, that, and the other thing that's more core to our mission.' But the exciting thing is that many institutions are saying 'no, this is actually core. And it's because it allows our students to be marketable, it allows them to communicate,' and the pressure that we're getting this well, we're spending all this money on higher education of kids getting jobs. Well, yes, they are. And employers are saying, "and this is part of what I looked at, and so I'm glad you're doing this." But I think it still goes up and down.
Terry Rhodes 20:50
Quite frankly, I'm totally disappointed that it's not more central at more institutions, that it's not more central to funding priorities at state and federal levels as part of what is supported as core activities to educate students for modern society. And I think artificial intelligence, again, it's the big deal now in the media, but it's affecting all aspects of all of our lives, it becomes even more critical to be able to actually see what the actual person that you're trying to interact with and deal can do, and how they do it and have confidence and the authenticity of what it is that you're seeing. And that's also an ethical issue. So...
Kristina Hoeppner 21:31
With the importance and portfolios being core at institutions, does it mean that they are situated in maybe the wrong place? At Stanford University, for example, where Helen works, and recently, I've also interviewed Michael Joiner-Hill, who is the Associate Director of the Integrative Learning Portfolio Lab, which is situated in Career Education at Stanford, should it be a permanent fixture in those areas that are more central to the university, that are helping students with employability, with getting their careers, or also be part of an internship office because at least in New Zealand and Australia, portfolios are increasingly used for work integrated learning activities, that we maybe need to expand the reach of the current offices.
Kristina Hoeppner 22:18
Should they be their own offices or should they be part of a higher structure at an institution in order to have that support from management, from the wider university and be seen as this integral part that you can't really remove? Of course, it doesn't mean that every course now needs to have a portfolio, but that it is part of every programme and available to every graduating student, instead of them maybe finding out shortly before graduation that there's this possibility?
Terry Rhodes 22:50
I do agree that they are often located in a sort of siloed or not always marginalised, but in a contained environment. I mean, there's such a long, long history in higher education of silos and separation of autonomy down to, you know, departments and colleges and areas, and foci, and programmes. Trying to put it somewhere that is more integrated, more cross cutting is indeed necessary.
Terry Rhodes 23:20
I do remember from our early days of doing this work at one college, they were talking about their portfolios, and they had in the room, the head of the technology unit for the college. No technology was acquired without them, and they said, "we're not doing that because it's not cost effective," and I said, "you know, the wrong people are making the decision then if that's who's making the decision, because it is instrumental and fundamental for learning, and that's what you're doing is trying to turn out learned people." So different campuses is going to be a different story, and so there's no one answer to it.
Terry Rhodes 23:54
But yes, whatever the mechanism that could be, whether it's just the heads of different areas coming together and meeting on an irregular basis, I happen to think that at a provost level or even at the presidential level is where ePortfolio or some office that is integrative, that is indeed looking at how these pieces need to fit together from a cost perspective, from an effectiveness perspective. And again, I think in terms of what do you do with artificial intelligence? That is something that a university or college as a whole needs to be engaged in, there needs to be a place for that to happen that goes beyond single instances. So I don't have an answer, but I strongly support the effort, whatever it is, to be more integrated and comprehensive location for the portfolio work to be a part of that.
Kristina Hoeppner 24:45
Now going a little bit directly into portfolios, is there anything that you would like to be able to do with them, but haven't been able to do just yet?
Terry Rhodes 24:56
How to be more communicative. One of the things that I always loved about portfolio work, especially, it seemed to surface very, very easily at a community college or two-year institutions was the value of the portfolio for being able to communicate with their families and their extended families because they were people who didn't know what higher education really, they didn't know what their son, daughter, cousin, whatever was doing, but college was good because it made you smarter and you got a better job and stuff.
Terry Rhodes 25:30
I don't know how to say this to be different than X, formerly known as Twitter, or social media is different than portfolios. And how can we distinguish it as a way for agency in concept, in ownership to be communicated to others in a way that they can understand and respond? I mean, internationally, not locally, internationally within your family? I haven't gotten that identity thing straight yet. And I don't know that portfolios have either. There's ownership and control and voice. But how do we get beyond? How do we help the individuals use it in a way that allows it to distinguish from low level of results and dialogue that one typically gets through social media?
Terry Rhodes 26:16
That's the thing that I think we would do a great service if we could figure out ways of establishing its identity beyond and away from so many of the other trends that are happening. And that's where, you know, having a rubric or a reference point of this is how it's different because this is how one is able to show the quality of what they do and the usefulness of it to achieve these things. It's not just 'oh, I think I feel' kind of stuff, is to be able to actually connect those things and integrate them.
Kristina Hoeppner 26:45
Let's see who's going to take up the challenge next to think more about that. That already then takes us pretty much to the end of our conversation today, Terry, which has come really, really quickly. So the last three quick questions for you, if you're up for them.
Terry Rhodes 27:00
Mhh.
Kristina Hoeppner 27:01
Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?
Terry Rhodes 27:05
Agency, integration, enquiry.
Kristina Hoeppner 27:08
Thank you. And I just have to figure out whether I've already have 'enquiry' and then see where that is spelt it with an e or with an i. It might change to an e because I'm using more British English [laughs].
Terry Rhodes 27:20
Yeah, I understand.
Kristina Hoeppner 27:22
But the sentiment is still the same there. Terry, what tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities?
Terry Rhodes 27:31
Let themselves step back and be open to creativity from the learner. And that what they ask students to do, their learners to do, has to count. It has to count in the currency of whatever the situation is in which the portfolio is being utilised. Learners in higher education very quickly realise whether this is worth their time and energy, and if it doesn't get them the grade they want, or the whatever it is that it's supposed to be in, that means something for them that they're seeking, it's got to count.
Kristina Hoeppner 28:05
Now what advice do you have for portfolio authors on the other side?
Terry Rhodes 28:09
It's there, it's there, but I think it would be useful to try to figure out ways for reflection to be a larger part of portfolio work that not in the more traditional sense, I think, reflection is always there. It's a part of almost all platforms. But the learning about self that occurs, having that be an integral part of any platform or environment of a digital learning portfolio is that it's not just the learning, but it's learning about self and how those things relate and fit together. That allows the learner to bring in other things, too, which are important to them for the other learning, but they need to help integrate it, too. And again, it's partly because I was never very good at this, I don't think, as an emerging professional educator. How do these things fit together in me and help become me? And so if they could strengthen the things that are there and maybe be tweaking them to make it equally important not just to show one's learning, but to show one's self learning and how these things fit together and connect and integrate because that's going to be the ultimate worth of it. We're building people who are more at ease with themselves and as a result of that more able to give to others.
Kristina Hoeppner 29:28
Thank you for that, Terry, and thank you so much for sharing from your many years of portfolio practice and then also all your work at AAC&U to let us know where you are coming from, how the VALUE rubrics started, why they were started, and how they also fit into a portfolio practice. So thank you so much.
Terry Rhodes 29:48
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Kristina Hoeppner 29:50
Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Terry Rhodes. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the portfolio platform Mahara. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and to tell a colleague about our podcast, so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.