AAEEBL Annual Meeting 2020 - Week 1
Dr. Chen’s virtual background is less distracting than some of the others I’ve seen
During the month of July, 2020, I attended the Annual Meeting of the Association for Authentic, Experiential, & Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), held online. The organizers did a remarkable job of creating a manageable schedule, full of meaningful, interactive sessions.
The theme of the first week was, “Doing It Right (or Doing the Right Thing) in a Changing World: Considering the Role of Portfolio Pedagogy in Pivots to Online or Blended Learning Environments,” and while I had encountered many of the ideas in other resources and other conferences, I was very grateful to have them recapitulated and expanded in the same place. I started a new binder to contain the materials so that I can have them at hand in the future.
Kickoff Conversations
The conference opened with three short conversations featuring Dr. Lisa Donaldson (ePortfolio Ireland), Dr. Gerry Hanley (Executive Director of MERLOT), and Dr. Allison Miller (ePortfolios Australia) with Dr. Tracy Penny Light (AAEEBL President).
Dr. Donaldson’s talk focused on the impact of ePortfolio implementation in Ireland. I was especially interested in her observations that ePortfolios maintained connections, supported learning for all, and provided both a scaffold and a safety net for students. In my own exploration of reflective learning, I have had a similar experience: having access to the students’ thoughts and reactions in the reflections gives me, as Dr. Donaldson described, a “window to the student experience.” I feel like I know the students better, and I have greater agility to adjust to their learning needs. She strongly advocated rubrics as creating a “roadmap” for student success, and based on these comments and Wednesday’s discussion on the topic, I will be rethinking my position.
I had actually forgotten all about MERLOT; it has probably been fifteen years since I browsed through it, but Dr. Hanley’s comments were a welcome reminder about this resource. I was particularly interested in his emphasis on ePortfolios as narratives: their ability to capture the voice of the individual. I had encountered this idea before, but again, was grateful for the reminder. I especially appreciate the opportunity to leverage the knowledge and experience of the larger community of practice, and plan to review the section on course redesign. Since I will be redesigning nearly all of my courses in the coming year, it only makes sense to capture the process in my own portfolio.
Dr. Miller called for us to reexamine what evidences of learning we were asking students to demonstrate. I am especially passionate about this topic, as my department recently adopted revised mission and vision statements to reflect profound changes in the discipline, and I want to be sure that we are working together to live up to the goals and principles we’ve outlined. I hope to moderate a discussion on this before too much longer, lest we fall further into irrelevance. I also appreciated her concern for setting up everyone for success, and assertion that both digital literacy and digital ethics were pragmatic skills in the current job market.
Doing Assessment “Right” with ePortfolios
This session was an informal panel discussion with Drs. Lisa Donaldson and Naoimh O’Reilly (ePortfolio Ireland) moderated by Dr. Penny Light, with additional comments from Terrel Rhodes (AAEEBL Vice President) and Kevin Kelly (the Conference Director). The most prominent themes of the discussion concerned the pedagogical “teeth” of ePortfolios, rubrics, and issues of equity.
I was particularly impressed by the observation that simply creating the portfolio required the student to think at a higher level: what evidence would best demonstrate their achievement of the objectives? How could they present the evidence in such a way that it was compelling? How should they not only structure the argument but also lay out the page in order to make the bast case for the substance of their learning. One of my more articulate students had observed that when I dropped traditional exams in favor of reflective statements, he actually felt he had to work harder: while one could simply cram for a test and forget everything the next day, he explained, the reflection put the burden of proof on him. I will definitely stress this point to my colleagues. Furthermore, the presenters stressed the importance of reflecting on the reflective statements themselves, in order that the students could see their own progress. This aligns with a Growth Mindset intervention I’ve been experimenting with, and again, I appreciated that the research supports what I’m already doing.
The rubric discussion was a little dizzying: I ended up downloading four rubrics to study over the weekend: the Holy Grail of Rubrics from ePortfolio Ireland, the VALUE Rubric from AAC&U, the Equity Rubric from Peralta Community College, and the Transparency Rubric from the Transparency in Learning and Teaching project. While I have had something of an antipathy for rubrics (I most commonly use a single-point rubric, and I’ve been applying it more intentionally in my current summer online course), the presenters made several convincing arguments, including 1) they make the expectations for and thinking behind the assignment more explicit, 2) they provide a road map for completion of the assignment, and 3) they demonstrate the complexity of the leaning process to the students. Some other points I particularly appreciated were that rubrics were starting points, and while they were meant to be adapted to specific academic cultures, it was important to retain the shared conversation. I was inspired by the vision of coming together as a department to follow a backward design process in re-imagining the degree requirements, and then working together to integrate all the courses, ensembles, etc. (My collectivist tendencies seem to be getting stronger as I get older!). I also appreciated the caveat for using positive descriptors. Emphasizing what is there gives the students something to build on—it shows students how to get better, which should surely be the goal of any Growth Mindset- inspired program. In retrospect, I think my frustration with rubrics came from implementing them without embracing them; without weaving them into the whole of the pedagogical process. I will meditate on it.
After the issues surrounding COVID-19 and the atrocity of George Floyd’s murder, equity has been something on everyone’s mind. While the events of the late Spring and Summer have spotlighted and amplified the issues surrounding equity in higher education, they were present before the crises and will remain afterward. I especially appreciated the comment that we can’t always imagine the constraints under which our students are working. While I am planning to address the obvious issues diversity and equity overtly in my Fall courses, I was grateful for some reminders of the more subtle issues. One in particular concerned first-generation college students (and I might add some of my learning-disabled students) who we assume know more about how to be successful in education than they actually do. It’s tempting to posit that, as the former Honors director put it, our “advanced” students are simply more fluent in “education as performance.” They know how to play the game, as it were. Student who aren’t as fluent tend to be marginalized, and put into self-defeating feedback loops: “You are a bad student and I will either, a) ignore you and let you go down the drain, or b) penalize you for not knowing the secret code.” My Catholic conscience recoils at this. To be sure I am not falling into a version of this trap, I plan to take a close look at my materials against the equity and transparency rubrics mentioned previously.
A final thought that I will be carrying with me as we go forward was the assertion that education is communal and also iterative. In their concluding remarks, the presenters challenged us to take advantage of the social nature of these tools.
ePortfolios 101: Getting Started with ePortfolios
This session was presented by Dr. Helen Chen (Stanford) with Dr. Penny Light. Their methodical approach made it especially useful. While the process sometimes seems a little laborious for me (I tend to jump to the prototype and fix the problems later), I appreciated the deliberate look into the craft of ePortfolio development.
Dr. Chen began with some definitions (see the photo at the top of the page) and devoted some time to unpacking Ashley Kehoe’s concept of the “e” in ePortfolio coming to represent experience, evidence, engagement, empowerment, excellence, equity, effort, etc. She then described several preliminary steps for implementing ePortfolios at the program level that I plan to explore in more depth in the coming weeks. These included 1) making a Journey Map, 2) identifying Stakeholders, 3) settling on Learning Outcomes, and 4) Mapping the portfolio to outcomes at the college and university levels.
The purpose of the Journey Map was to understand the students’ experience of the major; to see the journey from their point of view. In this way, we as instructors can develop greater empathy for the people for whom we’re designing. As I sketched a map for the HPU music major (for both the current and proposed curricula) I realized I was missing a few pieces: what actually happens in the Music Theory courses? How much are studio recitals differentiated as the students progress (or are they)? If we had more than six seniors at a time (and could offer the classes), what would the that year typically look like?
I especially liked the identification of Stakeholders, as it both clarified the audience of the portfolio (and, accordingly, the types of artifacts to include and the tone of the narrative), and also thought beyond the academic experience. The example Dr. Chen used included a startling number of stakeholders from a variety of milieus; this kind of thinking could open up possibilities for artifacts that I had never considered. I’d like to take this to the faculty for further discussion.
The discussion of Learning Outcomes put me back in familiar territory, and I appreciated the backward design approach based on the stakeholders identified in the previous step. As with the Journey Map, however, when I sat with the new departmental mission and vision to think about revised learning outcomes of my Fall courses, I realized that I wasn’t sure what constituted necessary “professional and technical skills” in the 21st century. I sent a quick message to my students to see what they felt they were missing, and they responded with improvisation and experience with digital audio workstations. I set up a Zoom call for the next morning so that they could help me brainstorm ideas for integrating these into our existing courses.
The discussion of Mapping was a little vague, but Dr. Chan provided a link to a slideshow in MERLOT that clarified the concept somewhat. If I understand it correctly, it consists of aligning (or mapping) the objectives of the portfolio with the missions of the college, university, etc. I believe this is good practice, and often overlooked. In my recent redesign of MUS 1600 SOL, I realized almost by accident that my course goals were better articulated in the HPU Academic Mission, and elected to make the connection explicit in the course design. This will be my standard practice going forward.
A final thought from this presentation that I also want to bring back to the faculty was “how do we support our students; help them to be successful in this time?” I would like to see all departmental pedagogy phrased this was in any case: how are we helping students to improve? rather than: how are we punishing students for not doing what we expect? The added circumstances of the pandemic, economic downturn, and heightened social tension make this approach even more necessary.
(The week concluded with a hands on “playshop” in portfolio creation, but I will build the notes from the session directly into this portfolio.)