Dr Debra Hoven is an educator at Athabasca University in Canada, teaching and researching primarily in the Master in Education in Open, Digital, and Distance Education and in the Doctorate in Education programme. She has a long history with portfolios and shares one aspect of her research and practice in this interview, the autoethnographic video project that some of her MEd students engaged in to reflect on their own learning in the programme and help students coming after them get a head start.
Connect with Debra on LinkedIn
Resources
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 Debra Hoven is an educator at Athabasca University in Canada, teaching and researching primarily in the Master in Education in Open, Digital, and Distance Education and in the Doctorate in Education programme. She has a long history with portfolios and shares one aspect of her research and practice in this interview, the autoethnographic video project that some of her MEd students engaged in to reflect on their own learning in the programme and help students coming after them get a head start.
Connect with Debra on LinkedIn
Resources
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
Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. My guest today is Dr Debra Hoven from Athabasca University in Canada. Debra has been conducting research with portfolios for many years, and I met her for the first time at an AAEEBL Annual Meeting in Boston quite a few years ago now. Debra, it's great to catch up and talk about one of your current teaching and research interests.
Debra Hoven:Thank you, Kristina, and hello to everyone who might be listening today.
Kristina Hoeppner:Debra, can you please tell us a bit about yourself? What do you do?
Debra Hoven:Oh, what don't I do.
Kristina Hoeppner:That's true, too, yeah [Debra and Kristina laugh].
Debra Hoven:So I'm a Professor of Open, Digital, and Distance Education, which involves innovation in education and educational offerings. These days, I mainly teach, supervise in the Doctorate in Education programme at Athabasca University in Canada. It's Canada's fully online university. So we all live and teach remotely.
Kristina Hoeppner:When did you actually get interested in portfolios?
Debra Hoven:I got interested in portfolios back in the early 2000s when the technologies started to enable some of the things that I really, really wanted to get interested in. And so I'd got my first computer, well, my first Mac SE in 1988, and it was a wonderful surprise to me to be able to use HyperCard and hyper stacks and the linking capacities and facilities that that enables. And so I created a choose your own adventure type program for teaching, well, hopefully teaching, inspiring learning among international students about plagiarism. From there, I thought, wow, this linking, this hyperlinking stuff is really cool. So when I saw ePortfolios, I thought, well, that'd be great because I'd used teaching portfolios with pre service teachers for many years, and lugging these huge portfolio manuscripts all over the countryside was apart from being heavy and muscle building was also very tedious. So I thought, wow, this ePortfolio, the electronic portfolio or learning portfolio where people could actually demonstrate their learning using different media. Wow, that was mind blowing for me. So early 2000s. Then I started trying to construct my own, and it was so clunky because the technology at that time was very unenabling, shall we say [laughs]?
Kristina Hoeppner:Yeah, I think we've come a long way with technology since the early 2000s there. It's incredible.
Debra Hoven:Exactly. Yeah.
Kristina Hoeppner:Debra, last year in October, you presented on one of your recent projects at the Eportfolio Forum in Australia when it was held in Darwin. How did the autoethnographic video project that you reported on come about?
Debra Hoven:Oh, how long have we got for this podcast[laughs]? Okay, so at Athabasca in 2008, which was shortly after I joined Athabasca, we decided to introduce ePortfolios as alternative and evidence-based assessment. Prior to that the final exam for the MEd was comprehensive exams.
Kristina Hoeppner:And that's the Master's in Education.
Debra Hoven:Master's in Education. Sorry, yes. The comprehensive exams students were sent random questions from a question bank, and they had to write a sort of like an open book exam, several 1,000-word response to those questions. Then they were examined by instructors from the programme, but they never seemed to be very incisive, and students found them pretty ho hum. So I, with a little bit of encouragement, I managed to get the idea put across that ePortfolios might be an alternative. So between 2008-2012 we piloted giving students the option of either an ePortfolio or a comprehensive exam as their final piece of assessment in the Master's in Education programme. They were quite successful. So in 2012, we replaced the comprehensive exams with a full credit course called 'The capstone ePortfolio' course. There was then a lot of how do we construct this course? How does it look what we put in it? What are the students' main problems or issues in tackling an ePortfolio? And first of all, what is reflection, and how to reflect? We discovered in the process that a lot of the instructors didn't necessarily know how to reflect on learning or how to scaffold or encourage or foster reflection among learners. And from everything that I'd been reading and researching over the years, it's that reflective element that is the most critical for making the difference in an ePortfolio from a collection of bits and pieces that you've done well in during a course, during a subject, during a programme. As it was a programme wide ePortfolio, being the capstone course, we really had to focus on that reflective element and how to develop that. In a previous study, research study, I did a lot of work on what constitutes reflection, what it might look like, what's most effective in encouraging and scaffolding students into that true, critically self-reflective perspective on their own learning. So in 2022, in the January semester, I was talking about this with students, and I was asking them pretty much throughout the semester, "What else do you need? What else might help you? What might help you understand better your own learning, understand the process of reflection, how to put together an ePortfolio, what the value of it is? There was a group of about 12, initially, of the 20 plus students who said,"Well, this is a really exciting idea, and we'd like to help you." So after several synchronous seminars and discussions during the course, about eight of them said, "We'd really like to contribute, we'd like to tell our own stories." I thought, wow, this is an amazing idea, a these would be really great resources, and coincidentally, there were also people who had done very nice ePortfolios, nicely reflective, creative, lots of hyperlinks to different kinds, to projects that they'd produced, etc., podcasts videos. So I thought this is a really neat idea. So I could use these as resources in the course, and then I started thinking more broadly and talking more generally with them about this Canadian community of support because they also said, "You've done a really good job in constructing this course and providing the resources, but what about other instructors, other people?" Because I don't teach it every semester. I only teach it two semesters, sometimes only one semester, a year - trimester, sorry. So they said, "What about we talk about our experiences, what we wish we had known at the beginning of the programme, the Master's in Education programme, so that we could better prepare for doing a really good, useful, valuable ePortfolio for ourselves, but also that could be used for others? And what do instructors need to know? How do they need to prepare for teaching us, guiding us, facilitating the course." That's how it came to be. So in the end, five actually contributed. I mean, life is what happens when you've made other plans. So of the eight, six said, "Yes, we're really interested." So they went into the research ethics application, which we had to do. And I said,"Okay, you can't do this until you've graduated because otherwise there's a power imbalance, and it might seem that I'm pushing or coercing you and you could do it just because you want a better grade or something," even though the portfolio is ungraded. So we went ahead, and they produced these really nice videos, five of them, on both what students coming into the programme should think about, start doing, preparing right from the beginning, and what instructors should think more deeply about and do their background research and preparation for.
Kristina Hoeppner:That was not just the only time that you've done it, right? You've also done it with a few other students or am I mistaken there?
Debra Hoven:In our previous study, in 2021 where we looked at - this is my research team, Dr Pamela Walsh, Dr Rita Zuba Prokopetz, and Dr Rima Al-Tawil, we conducted a research project across Canada, 11 provinces of Canada, and looking at what professional or educational development activities are most useful or might be most useful or effective for instructors new to ePortfolios to develop their skills and understandings. And at the same time, from our experience of trying to identify appropriate people to teach, facilitate, instruct students to building their ePortfolios, we needed to know also the personal characteristics, the teaching philosophy characteristics of effective ePortfolio instructors. So that was our 2021 project, which we wrote up as a paper and was published in the Irish Journal of Educational Technology Teaching and Learning(sic).
Kristina Hoeppner:That is amazing that the students can reflect on their own learning, but also help others later on so that what they have learned is being taken forward to the next generation of learners and supporting them better.
Debra Hoven:Yeah, so also, as I've developed the course and talked with students in each of the iterations or offerings of the course, I've also identified which students' ePortfolios might be best used as exemplars, not samples of this is what you can do, this is what you should do, this is how it should be done. But this is a nice example. So I always ask the students if they'd be willing to, after they've graduated, they're willing to have their ePortfolios included as a sample in the course for incoming students or also annotate them with a little bit of background about the particular student what area, discipline or area of work they come from, or they're now working in.
Kristina Hoeppner:How have these reflections impacted the Master's in Education programme at Athabasca so far already? Because you've said it was in 2022 that you've talked with your students. So I assume that kind of in 2023, they would have been able to do their reflections after they've graduated.
Debra Hoven:Several of them have said that they have now implemented ePortfolios in their own workplaces. And something that I didn't mention earlier about our Master's in Education. It's a Master's in Education(Open, Digital, and Distance, Blended Learning). So we have quite a range of students from different disciplinary backgrounds. So we have students who are teachers in the K to 12 system. We have students who are instructional designers. We have students who are deans of various faculties in other universities, colleges, vocational, preparatory institutions, etc. People in business, people in the corporate world who are looking at, especially during COVID, how better to offer the training and instruction and professional development necessary. From that broad range of students, there's a lot of variety and a lot of value and contributions that they can offer to incoming students and faculty. There's been a lot of discussion between each other and students contacting me asking, "Can I get in touch with this person or that person whose portfolio I really like," but those people who have contributed their ePortfolios as samples and also who participated in this project have been very open and interested in providing feedback to each other, but also asking questions and moving the conversation on. And so graduate instructional designers are using their ePortfolios in their own training now, and K to 12 teachers introduced ePortfolios in their grade nine maths, history, STEM classes. And yeah, there's a lot of forward moving within that area. But also, I'm Chair of our Faculty of Grad Studies ePortfolio Working Group. The previous Deputy Dean, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Grad Studies is now the Dean of the Science and Technology Faculty, and she's incredibly interested in ePortfolios, and we've had a lot of discussion also about how to move that forward as well as in computing science. We have students who are also doing the Master's in Education, some of the courses from our programme as part of their IT computer science degrees.
Kristina Hoeppner:Right, so we might be seeing more portfolios out of Athabasca not just through the MEd and the education doctorate programmes there.
Debra Hoven:Exactly [laughs].
Kristina Hoeppner:Debra, why did the students actually decide to on using video instead of writing down their reflections as part of this project?
Debra Hoven:Okay, good question. In the Master's in Education, most of the courses are asynchronous. So there's a lot of writing, there's a lot of asynchronous discussion forum activity. And what they discovered in the capstone ePortfolio course is that with the synchronous, video supported discussions, they really got to know each other so much better, and they were really very much taken with the idea of being able to video, not just audio or write their input, their thoughts, their suggestions, their advice, their recommendations. So they pretty much unanimously said, "Yeah, let's make videos. We can make video segments, record them. And that would be great. If we had had more of those in our course, in our programme, it would have been so much more interesting." And of course, there are some students who prefer audio only, some students who prefer text only, but some of these graduates who made their videos, also use closed captioning. So thought about the accessibility side of videos as well.
Kristina Hoeppner:Are you teaching them some of those ideas, especially around accessibility, equity, inclusion, and belonging in your courses because that is also one of your interest areas?
Debra Hoven:Yes. So I always and throughout our programme, actually, pretty much all of our courses emphasise the diversity, inclusivity, and the accessibility aspects of anything we design or teach. But also, we have, because we're Canada's Open University, we have quite a fair percentage of Indigenous students in our programme. And in fact, one of the graduate participants in our study lives and works on a Métis settlement and teachers in the school in the community there, so very much aware of how accessibility for Indigenous students can be a barrier if not realised, talked about, discussed, thought about, and she embraced the concept of ePortfolios because it can incorporate land-based teaching, talking to elders, making notes, project based, etc. that can be incorporated into an ePortfolio. So she really enjoyed and embraced that.
Kristina Hoeppner:Debra, you already mentioned that the students that participated in that research project have also gone on to use portfolios in their own organisations, be that at school or at companies. Is there anything else that they have taken away themselves for reflecting on the programme and what they might want to do in the future?
Debra Hoven:Oh, yes. Several of them have talked about how they have used their ePortfolios to enhance and develop their CVs, use them in job applications and promotion applications and career changes. I did have a student once previously, not in this particular cohort, but who used - a couple of them actually- who used their ePortfolio as a means to show how they could negotiate, how they could work through conflict resolution type events using a group project artefact that had gone fairly badly wrong, right from the beginning, and how they had negotiated that sometimes taking a leadership role, sometimes taking a backseat, and developed various skills, soft skills, in negotiating difficult personalities and difficult situations. And they got the jobs. One got a promotion, and one change careers and got a new job. And so those kinds of skills... I even had one student, male student, who talked about the skills he learned from reflecting in his ePortfolio, helping him negotiate his future bride's family demands and instances in planning their wedding. So there are certainly lifelong and lifewide aspects that are good skills to have and develop that come from the reflective learning in an ePortfolio. So many of the students talked about the difficulties, initially, in the ePortfolio to change from the objective, academic approach to writing and expressing themselves because some of them do podcasts and videos as well as part of their ePortfolios, but how to change from that academic type writing and thinking to actually taking a critical look at their own learning and what a mind opening experience it has been for them to actually look at their learning as a whole, look at their own professional and personal development from the beginning of the programme to the point where they're expressing it and communicating it in their ePortfolios, their learning growth, their professional growth, and also the capacity to actually use their own voice, to have their own voice, and to own this piece of learning, this exemplar of learning that has been their own journey.
Kristina Hoeppner:That's what I really love about portfolios that you can make those connections between so many different areas of your life that yes, while you're reflecting for a course, to get a grade, but that you make those connections to your personal life, that you really make that transfer of knowledge also in a way more transparent than at other times might not be possible because while we do oftentimes reflect in our head, the portfolio allows us to verbalise those things...
Debra Hoven:Or express it in other ways. Yeah [laughs].
Kristina Hoeppner:Yeah, yes, verbalising, either writing, speaking, or also in other artistic expressions.
Debra Hoven:Visual and and other modalities, yeah. That's such an advantage, especially for people who are creative in different areas and gravitate towards more visual or more audio or tactile or whatever approaches so that they can express themselves and really introspect on what they've learned, how they've learned, and how this learning has been manifested in their own lives and careers, but also can be moved forward and pushed forward into other areas.
Kristina Hoeppner:That also personalises what they are talking about. You did talk about the very academic writing style and that your students wanted to use the videos or certain cases also,the audio to share their thoughts because then suddenly, all of those things I feel come more to life than if it was just a written text.
Debra Hoven:Exactly. More personal, more personally communicated from one to the other and offering each other opportunities. So it's some of them offer each other feedback in video format as well.
Kristina Hoeppner:Yeah, exactly. Because it's not just the reflection that you can write in a multimodal way, but also the feedback that you get or comments on that. The autoethnographic research project is one to support the students and also faculty in the MEd programme and then kind of seeing how that can improve the teaching at Athabasca. But you did also mention that your students were interested in sharing their ideas more widely, and very briefly, you talked about the Canadian community of support. What have you and your colleagues cooked up [Debra laughs]?
Debra Hoven:Well, we're still cooking. We're still collecting the ingredients and putting them together. So at the moment, we're still working on the prototype and trying to find, identify a platform that will be persistent without being cost intensive and labour intensive, and that's the critical aspect. From the graduate participants in this research project, we've got some amazing ideas and suggestions and recommendations for things to include. Things like a Frequently Asked Questions, things like a discussion forum, things like highlighting the shining stars of either graduate students or faculty across Canada who have really brought along their students through ePortfolio pedagogy. Having visual elements, podcast, video podcasts, but also exemplars and means of communicating across Canada, which is pretty big country and pretty diverse country [laughs], to try to enable as much as possible whoever is interested to find access to resources that can help them develop their own pedagogy and students to develop their own reflective processes and professional areas, but also to provide accessible different levels of resources, whether they're video, audio, text, links, or many other aspects, many other modalities.
Kristina Hoeppner:So you are looking for additional collaborators on that project? to see what should be included in order to map out what you want to make available and how you want to involve people. Debra, you've been in the portfolio world for many years now and have done wonderful work over those years, which is exemplified, I find, by the students and the work they do in both the master's and the doctorate programmes at Athabasca, but also through the many articles that you and your colleagues have written and really helped push the field of portfolios forward, share what you are doing, and therefore also influence the thinking of educators, not just in Canada, but really around the world. And so my question for you now is, what trends have you then observed in portfolio practice throughout the years? Are there any trends for you that you could observe?
Debra Hoven:Well, I think like everything else, there's been peaks and troughs. I think that initially, the focus was very much on showcase type portfolios, and ePortfolios for pragmatic, transactional purposes, if you like. So putting yourself out there. And these days, things like LinkedIn etc., have pretty much taken over that area, I think. Coming back to what I believe are the two key elements of value and value addedness for ePortfolios, and that is the self-reflective element on what you've learned, how you've learned, how you've learned it, how it could be applied elsewhere, what links, connections you can make in your own head with your own expertise and move that forward and outward into other directions, other fields, other aspects, other parts of your field. And also then the value of peer and instructor feedback. So feedback from others. When someone else looks at your reflections in your ePortfolio, they see things that you would not in a million years have thought of by yourself because we all tend to have fairly directed, focused paths in our thinking. And we mostly tend to do the same things in the same way, or go in the same directions, until we can see a little window of creativity or until someone else says to us, 'Well, this is really good or this it looks like it's going in a really interesting direction. But what about, or have you thought about? Or how do you think this could be taken into that area or this area or this direction or that direction? Or I've read about or heard about somewhere someone was doing this with this sort of thing? Have you thought about that? Do you think you could do that?' And all of a sudden you think, wow, maybe I could? That's an interesting way of looking at things. That really changes how I think about this. So it's those two elements of self-reflection, but also that reflection on other people's reflection on their impressions and what they have gained from your portfolio and you sharing your thinking.
Kristina Hoeppner:It's that interaction and learning from each other.
Debra Hoven:Mhh. So that's the biggest positive trend I think I've seen.
Kristina Hoeppner:Now, what would you like to be able to do with portfolios that you currently can't?
Debra Hoven:I think my biggest ask would be for openness. Open platforms that can be persistent and multimodal. That would be, I think, my biggest ask because currently, ePortfolio platforms or platforms that can be repurposed for ePortfolio use often have a corporate, financial, economic agenda, and that's not conducive to the openness and persistence of an ePortfolio. One of the other values of ePortfolios is that you can go back and see what you thought then and what you think now, and your perspective on life changes, your perspective on your career changes. So the capacity to be able to go back and change things or create a new portfolio for different purposes with links back to your previous thinking and manifestation of your thoughts is, I think, something that would be - I still haven't found a platform that is affordable or cost free and open enough to be able to enable that persistence aspect.
Kristina Hoeppner:Yeah, because there's always some sort of costs involved that you need to have because you don't really want to have unwanted advertisement on it if you go from a cost perspective. At Athabasca, are your graduates able to continue using their portfolio once they leave the university?
Debra Hoven:At the moment, yes. We use Mahara. It's not mandated, but it's provided because we've always felt that it's important to have a password protected ePortfolio platform within the university system. So we sort of guarantee in an unwritten way to students that they can continue to have access to their portfolios for 10 years or so as long as they put those sharing options in the right manner, so that even after they don't have the password protected access, they can still go in and edit their own portfolios. And that ownership element is really important to students.
Kristina Hoeppner:exactly the manner that he already described.
Debra Hoven:And they can export and create new portfolios on different platforms if and when they find another platform that they can afford and that is compatible with the way they want to create their portfolios, then they can move material out of their university one into their new personal or professional one.
Kristina Hoeppner:That is a good way to give them the ownership and also the authorship of their own content and really keep it focused on them.
Debra Hoven:Exactly.
Kristina Hoeppner:Now, the last three questions, Debra, I really look forward to be talking to you very soon again, next time actually, with one of your students to explore a different topic. So let's round up this interview with the three questions that I do want to ask everybody so that we can also in a way, gather some data from the community to raise some other questions and of course, make all of those things available to them. Which words do you use to describe portfolio work?
Debra Hoven:I did think about this. I reflected on it as you might expect, and I thought okay, firstly, fascinating. Secondly, enlightening. And thirdly, mind opening. They would be my three terms and fascinating encompasses exciting as well as the wow factor as well as, okay, I can do this that self realisation factor, which also comes into enlightening.
Kristina Hoeppner:Yeah. What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities for their learners?
Debra Hoven:First of all, I thought, well, it's a co creation activity. And I think a good instructional designer or faculty instructor really works with students to create those parameters or criteria. But I'd say be creative and be open and collaborative. Create flexible outcome possibilities and have clearly expressed purposes for students or users regarding what is required or what is expected. From talking to the various people in my various projects, as well as students, they would be my tips [laughs].
Kristina Hoeppner:Thank you, Debra. Now, on the other side, what advice do you have for people who create portfolios?
Debra Hoven:Mhh, okay. So relax. Be as creative as you can be. Be honest with yourself. Think deeply and widely. Ask questions of yourself and experienced others. Take risks and seek feedback for improvement. That would be my list of advice. And it's not just from me, it's from my collaborators, whether they are graduates or students or other instructors.
Kristina Hoeppner:As you said, you're learning from your students and your students learn from you, and so all of that together makes up the good portfolio practice in what you want to convey then to future students and also future faculty who get involved in the practice. Debra, thank you so much for your time. It was wonderful to have a bit more time than we usually have at conferences to catch up [laughs].
Debra Hoven:Exactly. Thank you, Kristina. It's been fun.
Kristina Hoeppner:I definitely look forward to the next interview that we'll have with Margaret because then we can go into a different area of your research interests and how to support students and also how to shake up academia a little bit there...
Debra Hoven:Oh, yeah.
Kristina Hoeppner:... with how she's creating portfolios.
Debra Hoven:That's the fun part.
Kristina Hoeppner:Exactely, right [both laugh]? Transformation. Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Debra Hoven. 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 tell a colleague about it, so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.