 Hello again everyone and welcome to our Live and Fairly Parallel session. I'm delighted to be joined today by two Cateys, Catey Dallison and Catey Stripe who join us from Imperial College for their presentation BYOP. Love a good acronym. BYOP, bring your own portfolio, what to do when you have no or many institutional portfolio tools. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Catey and Catey. Enjoy the session. Hi, good morning. So I will start with a little bit of housekeeping. So I am presenting through Mentimeter. So you should see the code at the top of my slides and I think it will appear in the chat shortly. All of my slides are on Mentimeter so you can follow them on another device. There will be points where I ask you to contribute. You should see little icons in the bottom corner. So if I am speaking it will be a heart. If Catey is speaking it will be a cat. Give us some love. It makes us feel better. You know, thumbs up if you think we're interesting, thumbs down if you can't hear us or you know if you think we're boring. And the questions in the chat please. Also, Catey has warned me this morning that she's having internet issues. So if I start waffling like I don't know what I'm talking about it because they're her slides and I don't know what I'm talking about. So this is us. If you have any sensible questions, please direct them to Erin Simpson, the project manager. But generally we are more than happy to talk about any and all aspects of our project. So we're going to talk to you today about portfolios and the different options that are available for using them, sharing them, etc., with students. So we'll look a little bit at what portfolio is, our problem with portfolios and our context surrounding it and the solution or something resembling a solution that we found to deal with it. And then maybe a little bit about what comes next. So my first question to you is what is a portfolio? You should see this on Mentimeter. I will read them to you though because I'm conscious that they're quite small on screen. So it is a portfolio, a collection of work to be addressed, assessed, a demonstration of learning, a personal collection of learning assets, a way of achieving professional recognition, an exhibition of work, a skills audit or something else. Come on, it's more than two people. There's got to be more than two people. So that's that person. Top choice seems to be a collection of learning assets. Given an audience of sea malt holders, I would have expected a little bit more love for the way of achieving professional recognition. Give you a couple more seconds to share your thoughts. But a skills audit, Katie, that was your vote was a skills audit. No love for that, I'm afraid. Okay, so as I think we can see from your answers, portfolios are everywhere. You know, we use them for our students. We do use them for our own professional development. And of course, most of us will have a sea malt portfolio and probably a HAA portfolio as well. So it's not just for the students that we use these portfolios. So my next question is, does your institution have a defined portfolio tool? No, seems to be the general answer. Quite a lot of you seem to have institutional tools. This is interesting. Okay, someone in the chat is saying that we're a little bit behind. So I'll stop being offended that you're being slow to answer my question. Okay, so the general majority seem to have an institutional portfolio tool. I don't really have time in this session to ask you what they are, but I did a little bit of research for me with starting to prepare for this presentation. And I found a lot. And there were a lot of options for different tools available for student portfolios. Some of them are specific portfolio tools. Some of them are, you know, basically a WordPress or a website builder. So that kind of leads us on to our major problem, which I will now hand over to Katie for. Cheers, Katie. And so before we start, I'll just let you know, I'm Katie Dellison, Stripey didn't introduce herself. I am a, it's okay, she was doing lots of other things. I'm a careers consultant at Imperial. So I'm not a learning technologist. However, I have been thrown together with the wonderful Katie Stripe, who is a learning technologist. And has this introduced me to this wonderful design and learning technology. And I'm very much enjoying navigating it. And I'm just going to say hello to Peter. I'm a Kiwi, not an Australian. Sorry about that. But well done for joining us at 1030 at night. That's super. So I guess what our problem was at Imperial is there wasn't one portfolio. There were just hundreds. And we could just choose what I wanted, what we wanted to use or didn't want to use. And it was a bit confusing. Well, from my end, as quite new to the learning design side of things, when Stripes was giving me different options. And I was sort of like, but none of them quite fitted what we were after. And what we were trying to achieve and what we needed the portfolio for wasn't something that was necessary, necessarily going to fit into what else was out there. And the reason this was is because so we've been put together on a project. We'd actually bid it for the funding and managed to get this to create an online learning tool for, which is called attributes and aspirations. And the idea was that our students out, particularly our master's students, weren't getting enough career support, they weren't getting enough instruction on transferable skills or not instruction, but the ability to develop those transferable skills. So we're working with academics, we're working with employers, we're working with all these different people to try and pull together some content that was actually going to support our master's students, firstly, at being better students, but also helping them in that one year program. So in the UK, so we've got a bit of an international audience, in the UK, we have a one year master's program. It isn't really enough time to sort out your career if you haven't got an idea of what you want your career to be when you come in. So a lot of the content around careers support wasn't able to get into the curriculum because they were too busy learning about all the stuff they needed for their master's. So our students needed this extra support, they needed it in a way they could access it when they sort of got to that, I'm going to say desperation point, or when they realised they needed it, which wasn't always when I thought they needed it. And we needed to have the career support alongside developing transferable skills like, I mean, I remember having a conversation with an academic who basically said, oh, we get them to do group work and we ask them to do lots of reflection. I said, oh, do you teach them how to reflect? Do you teach them how to work in a group? And they were sort of like, oh, no, not really, they should know that. And when you actually speak to the students, they don't really know that. So what we wanted to do was put together this course and try and blend together this idea of transferable skills and careers and give them something that they could use going forward in their life, but also something that's going to be really handy when they're a master's student. And we needed that to make sense. So we put together this course based on these three pillars, which we, which focus on this idea of, you know, you need to reflect actually for career stuff, you need to network, which I know everyone always shies away from whenever I say the word network, we teach the students how to network. I get lots of requests for academics to use that course. But then we wanted to bring it all together in a portfolio style element. And I had already created a thing called plan me, which is to help students plan that career, or at least understand it and put some structure in it. That's always been my problem as a careers consultant. I was always struggling with career planning because there's no structure in it. So we found, well, I designed this, this plan called plan me, it was going to be called project me, that that's a ruby trademark somewhere else. And there's a, we'll pop a link up in the chat so people can sort of better understand it. But basically, it works really well in the form of a portfolio where you're looking at is these things you're trying to decide between and to decide between them, you need to do these things, basically to get to a point where you know enough information to make that decision, or when you've got enough evidence around the skills that you're developing. So we decided that we would implement plan me as kind of one of the foundations, but also use it as a structure to build the portfolio around before we went out and tried to find a portfolio that would work. So that's kind of what we were looking at to make that structure and to create those things. Strax, do you want to move to the next slide? So obviously, reflection is kind of key to the course we've developed and we embedded it in throughout the course. So it is a completely online course and it's got interactive elements throughout it. But one of the keys to every unit has at least one point where we ask them to write something in their plan me or their reflective portfolio. So it is very much throughout the course, which of course means we have to give them some idea, some suggestion of how we do that. And as Katie said, we don't have an institutional portfolio tool. I've seen some chat in the comments about Blackboard. And yes, I mean, we could use Blackboard. We could use one of the other portfolios that are available across college, but none of them really fitted with what we wanted to do. So ultimately, we decided not to do any of those things. So we start the course basically by saying, you know, this is your professional portfolio. We hope that it will be useful for you during your studies. And once you've left, once you move into a PhD or a career or whatever's next. So pick something that works for you. And we gave them some options. We have pretend students in our course that kind of navigate things for the students. So each of our archetypal, avatar students, we have whole presentations on this, if you want more information on them. Each of those pretend students has their own plan me. And we built them and developed them in different tools. So the ones we share in the course are one note, because we have it available. Mind view, because it is part of the core set of tools that we provide for our staff and students. Padlet, because he doesn't love Padlet. Google Drive, as a kind of more generic, you know, if you just want to stuff some documents in a place, you know, why not use Google Drive? Other mobile phone applications are available. And of course, you know, simple paper and pen, because some people, me included, like to write things on paper and scroll things, you know. And ultimately, the idea of the portfolio is to collect things that are going to be useful for you, which you can go back and reflect on, on which you can use. So our solution was very simply, there is no solution. So we decided not to try and force it on students, give them some options and, you know, well aware that students may find other things, other tools that they might want to use, and that's fine. You know, as a learning technologist, I understand that this isn't necessarily the best solution across the board. But much as with the bring your own device, kind of, that happened over the last five years, I think that there is now too much choice for us to ethically be able to say, well, we've picked this one because we like it, so you have to use it. And there are, of course, other, the engineering, Katie, help me with the engineering things in their portfolio. So as we rolled it out, we started out with medical, so the medicine faculty, which Strapi knows really well, so they don't have the portfolio, but engineering do have elements of portfolio, because they are obviously creating a portfolio to be able to get professional accreditation. Some of the doctors that we might be rolling this out to will also have their e-learning portfolio that they've got that they need to get revalidated every year. So we didn't want to pick one that was then going to be embedded into the course that wasn't going to work for the various different students. So a big part of AA is that it's tailored for each student, and we do that using our avatars and our mock students. But it also meant that we needed the flexibility for students to be able to choose what was going to work for them or for their departments to choose what was going to work for them, which I know kind of goes against exactly what Katie Strapi said, but some of them are going to need that flexibility for professional reasons. This is typical of the departments. I've held them the right thing to do, and they normally happen all the time. Back to you, Ms Darlison. So at the moment, we have ethics approval to do further research into our course and how students are receiving it. Unfortunately, due to COVID, we have not been able to activate that because we've not been able to hire PhD students to do our data collection. However, we have got quite a lot of qualitative evidence that's come back from students, and much of that focuses on how they enjoy the flexibility within AA. So the idea that they get to choose the portfolio that works for them is very much something that they like. They can then reflect and add their reflections as they make sense. They can alter everything as they need to. And so our student response has been pretty overwhelmingly positive. Obviously, we want to look into this, but we've been collecting feedback as we go along. And much of the feedback is based on the kind of underpinning elements of that plan, me, as well as some of the interactive bits, but all of them seem to be very positive around being able to do it for themselves. And also means that it's not tied to their university login, which is another thing they quite liked actually. It was interesting, we didn't expect that, but they quite liked that it sat in a different place to all of their kind of university work because it meant that it was theirs. They didn't need to worry about it disappearing when they finish university. They can take it all with them. And that was another thing that obviously when you're only at uni for a year with us, they really liked that response going forward. So we are looking further into it, but our student response on a whole has been incredibly positive. There hasn't been any confusion. So I was a bit worried, are we giving them too many options? But actually by giving our avatars an example of each different portfolio, it's actually meant that they've got those things to see examples to play with, if you like. So that doesn't seem to have been a problem so far. We will continue to monitor. What was more interesting, and if Katie wants to go to the next slide, was actually- So you do know what I put in the slide. I did. I got a quick look. Usually I just talk, sorry. But what was actually really interesting, bearing in mind that it's a course that's related to employment afterwards and PhDs moving forward basically, was I've talked about this to lots of different employers that take on our master students. And they really like the idea that the student gets to choose the various, make their own decisions around these sorts of things because it's actually very reflective of what they're going to have to do when they move into a job or when they take on a PhD. So this idea that what we're trying to do in the course, actually we've been able to make that part of the infrastructure of the course as well in that sense that everything is reflecting what you're going to have to do when you become kind of a grown-up, which was a comment that one of our students gave us. Actually, it was the same student that kind of said, it helped me figure it out. I didn't want to do a PhD, which was terrifying at the time, but very, very glad that I found that out then as opposed to when I did a PhD. So in terms of that employer context, they're quite liking the idea that students have got this flipped approach and actually being able to see that students are able to choose and defend the options that they're making as generally part of an interview process anyway. So we've seen students using these examples within interviews too. So we're continuing to gather this information. We've only run the course for one full cycle and we're in the middle of our second cycle, which we've introduced employers, sorry, the engineering and our Faculty of Natural Science version goes live on the 4th of January. So we will be gathering more data and we'll definitely be looking at putting more of this information out as we go through. So I think that's me, that's us. So I will just pick up a couple of questions from Tell Team, which is it Reading the Tell Team? So one of the questions are all of your options tools that we have licenses for, i.e. checked by the IT team? No, one note obviously is a core tool. Our MindView is part of a core package. We do provide pen and paper occasionally to the students. We are very conscious when we sort of tell them these and provide these options that if they use one note, there is no guarantee that once they have left, they will still have access to it. Likewise with the MindView, we tell them that this is an institutional tool. So you're kind of locked into keeping it. We don't provide any support with any of these tools. We don't have the capacity to do that. So it is very much a look. Here are options. Pick what works for you and do what you need or how you need to manage it with that. So the next question is around data security. Quite a good question actually. We don't necessarily highlight the data implications of using tools like Padlet. Perhaps we should. But equally, we are telling them that they're on their own and that they may need to take some responsibility for this themselves. I don't fully understand the question about the summative assessments, but nothing that is done in AA is assessed and we do not ask or want to read any of their reflections. They are completely personal. So there's nothing that... We have ethics approval to study this, but Katie will clarify. I don't think there's any idea of... Sorry, tell team from Winchester, my apologies. I don't think there's any need to or desire to look at any of the reflections. You might want to unmute yourself to continue talking, Katie. Oh, that's important. Yeah, it's probably best you couldn't hear me when I was trying to butt in. I think we designed AA and actually it's really interesting because we're trying to evaluate it in some ways. But we designed it so that really students didn't need to finish modules. They didn't need to complete things. They could do it in... None of it was assessed. So it was completely up to them as to how they engaged in it, which means that actually in terms of those traditional evaluation methods of completion and kind of engagement, I mean, we can't see how many of them use their portfolios for the reflection that's completely theirs. So we're now struggling a little bit on how do we evaluate it and we're having to create new ways of evaluating it in some ways because it's designed to not be evaluated in those normal ways, which is probably another question that we haven't been asked. So I will not try and answer it right now. I'm just looking at Neil's comment there about doing the student struggle with making a decision of which tools to pick. We've not heard of the students struggling. It doesn't mean they don't. We've not had any feedback on that. So we have got some focus groups. We'll be running some focus groups and we're going to ask some of these more specific questions to them in this follow-up focus group. So our first focus group was more general, but this one we'll look at. I've spoken to quite a few students who are using AA and they all seem to be using slightly different tools and very surprisingly, I've spoken to probably five and one-to-one appointments. So I work with the General Career Service as well and all five of them were using something completely different and two of them were using very much a paper-based, which surprised me because I thought that they were way cooler than me and I use the paper-based option. So what they were saying, actually one of them did say that they started with one and then moved to another because it was working better for them. So clearly I guess the nice thing is that there's that copy and paste option so they can wriggle around between them if they choose. But yeah, I'm sorry Neil, I can't give you a definitive answer, although I am a careers consultant and we never give definitive answers anyway, just to clarify. But our students are pretty good at telling us when they don't like things. So you know, our first pilot year, we took a lot of feedback. So they probably would have told us if they were like, oh stop making us make decisions. Although if they told that, we'd probably just told them to do the decision making unit. Yeah, we did get one student who said, I don't like to reflect. That was a less helpful comment. Probably this isn't the course for you. And maybe moving forward you may struggle a little bit in your life. But that's okay. It was good to get every comment that we got. So I don't think we've got any more questions in the chat. We just have a lot of praise for the session. Also the tail team correcting you that they're from Winchester. But other than that, lots of praise and comments there around that. But no further questions I can see. I might be cheeky and ask one of my own if you don't mind. Did you notice much of a difference in what tools the students preferred over what the staff preferred? Did you find there was a bit of a conflict there over ones that were easy for staff but maybe not so easy for students? I think that, how to say this diplomatically, with our staff, assuming our staff have any kind of preference over technology is bold. So we have institutional tools which are universally disliked by staff and students. So I think the staff probably like the fact that we're putting the responsibility on somebody else so they don't have to think about it. Would be my hunch, but that is entirely sub-position. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that it all, so the fact that AA was developed when the move to online because of COVID happened. So we were in our first full year we'd run a pilot. The staff were incredibly happy that they had something that they could use straight away, which kind of tells you how advanced some of the imperial teaching methods were in that dual zone. And I think that most universities, to be fair, had a similar situation. But what we did find was that a lot of the staff were very much more interested in AA as soon as we had to move online. And actually some of our units had been used in curriculum because they were there, they were ready to go. So things like our critical learning and things like that. So yeah, I would agree with Katie that probably they're not so bothered as long as they don't have to really fully understand it. But actually, and we alluded to it earlier with the particularly engineering departments that there is a certain amount of departmental pressure to pick one. And they ask us for help. And we're like, sorry, we can't pick one. But we also discuss it with them to help them to understand why we can't pick one. It was a very diplomatic answer. Thank you. All that's left for me to say is, first of all, fantastic hat, Katie. Love it. Feeling very underdressed now. But thank you both for coming and speaking to us today about your portfolio journey and to all of you that have been watching this session. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. We're welcome. Welcome to get in touch with us if you want to chat further about anything.