July 1, 2025 • 31 mins
Dr Lindsay Richardson is the Educational Technology Manager in the Teaching and Learning Services Department at Carleton University. She is also an Adjunct Professor and Contract Instructor in the Department of Psychology at the university.
Lindsay has been using portfolios in large introductory psychology courses with 200 to 450 students. Students create 'success portfolios' which they also grade themselves based on a rubric. In this interview, Lindsay talks about why she introduced portfolios into her courses and how she is navigating the use of generative AI.
Resources
- Dr Lindsay Richardson and Dr Ashley Thompson's podcast 'Agile Ed': Exploring learner-centred education fuelled by curiosity and critical thinking
- Students as Partners Programme
- cuPortfolio, Carleton University's instance of Mahara
- Ungrading and alternative assessments, a resource from York University
Related episode: Cathy Elliott: Have fun, be flexible, and encourage feedback in your portfolio
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
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kristina Hoeppner (00:05):
Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is
the podcast about portfolios forlearning and more for educators,
learning designers, and managerskeen on integrating portfolios
with their education andprofessional development
practices. 'Create. Share.
Engage.' is brought to you bythe Mahara team at Catalyst IT.
My name is Kristina Hoeppner.
(00:29):
Today I'm speaking with DrLindsay Richardson from Carleton
University in Ottawa in Canada.
When I visited the university inMay, I learned that she's been
using portfolios in very largepsychology classes that can also
have an artificial intelligence(AI) component. We didn't have
the chance to talk more, so Iinvited her to share her
thoughts and experience on thepodcast. Thank you for making
(00:51):
time, Lindsay.
Lindsay Richardson (00:51):
Thanks for having me, Kristina.
Kristina Hoeppner (00:55):
Lindsay, what do you do at Carleton?
Lindsay Richardson (00:57):
That's a big question [laughs] right out of
the game.
Kristina Hoeppner (01:00):
I know you're wearing multiple hats there,
don't you [both laugh]?
Lindsay Richardson (01:03):
I have so many hats. What I would say is,
right now, I am the EducationalTechnology Manager in the
Teaching and Learning ServicesDepartment. So what that means
is I work with a group ofwonderful people, of which some
of them you know, who help toconsult on and support the
pedagogical uses of educationaltechnology, including
(01:26):
cuPortfolio, which is ourePortfolio solution you're
familiar with.
I also, though, am an AdjunctProfessor and Contract
Instructor in the Department ofPsychology, where I teach mostly
large enrolment courses. So thispast fall, I had 450 students,
and this past winter I had 220.
So big classes, mostly introlevel. I teach a lot of 'Intro
(01:50):
to psych', 'Intro to cognitivepsych', although I started out
in my teaching journey atCarleton, teaching 'Intro to
stats for psychology students',and that, to date, is my
favourite course to teach. Mostpsychology students don't want
to take statistics, and they allhave to. So they come into my
course and they hate me rightout of the gate. They don't want
(02:11):
to take my classes. But thenthey leave and they say really
nice things, like, 'Thanks formaking it not so bad [both
laugh].
But yeah, so those are the tworoles that I have right now, but
So with the 'Intro to psych',students come in with this
notion that it's going to be abird course. So they're really
interested right out of thegate, and invariably, I let them
(02:32):
down somehow, and then by theend of the semester, I get
things like, 'This wasneedlessly difficult!' So it's
I will say that I've been at theinstitution since 2010. Against
not as rewarding.
all the advice of ourforefathers, I guess I could say
[laughs], I did all of mydegrees at Carleton. I really
(02:54):
like the institution, I comefrom here, I am from Ottawa,
born and bred. So I was happy tostay at Carleton and do my BA,
my masters, and my PhD, which Isuccessfully defended in 2023.
Kristina Hoeppner (03:10):
You do have a beautiful campus right on the
river.
Lindsay Richardson (03:13):
It's so nice, yeah.
Kristina Hoeppner (03:15):
I did get the chance to walk the river walk
with Chloe when I visited. Andso it's a really wonderful
opportunity for lunchtime walk,getting outside. Well, as long
as there are no mosquitoes, Iguess in summer.
Lindsay Richardson (03:28):
Yeah, or birds there's lots of geese
[both laugh].
Kristina Hoeppner (03:31):
What you actually forgot, Lindsay, is
that you're also having apodcast of your own.
Lindsay Richardson (03:37):
Ah, yes, I do [laughs]. I shouldn't forget
that. I co-host - it's called'Agile Ed' with my co-host, Dr
Ashley Thompson, who is also anadjunct professor and contract
instructor at the institution.
She teaches out of theDepartment of Neuroscience. She
often teaches smaller courses,which means that between the two
of us, we have a pretty bigbreadth of teaching experience
(04:00):
in terms of scalability.
Kristina Hoeppner (04:05):
Yeah, and it's fantastic listening to your
podcast because you have awonderful conversation style
between the two, and it reallycomes across that you two have
been working together for awhile, that you like working
together, and that you're reallyplaying off each other.
Lindsay Richardson (04:19):
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you for that. I am quiteproud of the conversational
tone.
Kristina Hoeppner (04:24):
Lindsay, when did you start using portfolios?
Lindsay Richardson (04:26):
Yeah, I have to tell you that I never used a
portfolio as a student ever. Ididn't have any instructors who
had them in their courses. Iwill say I was also a first
generation student, so I didn'thave family to lean on either to
know what they might haveencountered. Everything that I
experienced and thought about interms of university and what is
(04:48):
traditional it all came throughjust what I was seeing and what
maybe I saw in the movies, forexample.
I thought that portfolios weremeant for art class, right, that
you would put together pieces ofartefacts, and you would show
them, or maybe an employer, ifyou were a graphic designer, an
employer would want to see yourwork. That's where I thought
(05:10):
they started and stopped.
I was hired in 2020, August of2020, with what used to be
called the EducationalDevelopment Centre. So that's
Teaching and Learning Servicesnow was the EDC back then. My
PhD supervisor used to joke thatif I continued to spend my time
over there, that they might oneday give me a job, which
[laughs] isn't exactly how thathappened. Yeah.
(05:35):
So I mean, you'll remember 2020,summer 2020, we were in the
midst of a global pandemic, weneeded to shift all of our
courses online. So the EDC wasdoing a pretty big hire, and I
was one of their hires to helpfaculty move their courses
online. Incidentally, I wasalready teaching online. So I
(05:56):
was going to need to supportcuPortfolio, and I had never
used cuPortfolio before. How wasI going to do that? How was I
going to support instructors'use of this tool that I had
never used before? And Ithought, well, I may as well
just use it. Right, like I haveto get in there and I have to
I took what was the beginning ofmy teaching dossier that was a
use it.
(06:19):
work in progress, and so I waskind of thinking this like feed
two birds with one seed, so tospeak, I could do something that
I'm going to need to do anyway,and I can learn this tool. And
that's exactly what I did. So Itook what was a Word document,
put it into cuPortfolio, and itwas so cool. I learned lots
about the tool, and I thought,this is pretty cool, and could
(06:41):
have lots of uses in psychology.
Think about psychology, and mostpeople think about 'Intro to
psych', one to two midterms,final exam, and you're lucky if
you get some quizzes along theway. Traditionally, that's what
an 'Intro to psych' class is,and it makes sense. It's mostly
large enrolment courses. There'slots of material, lots of
content that you have tomemorise, lots of foundational
(07:03):
knowledge. And so when I startedteaching the 'Intro to psych'
sessions, I went, mhh, what ifwe just had a portfolio? Like
just one small component of it?
So about two or three years ago,this also came alongside my
learning about alternativegrading approaches or ungrading,
which I've learned is a movementthat predates the 80s even. I
(07:26):
thought it came out of the 80s,but I've been corrected. I think
somebody told me the 60s is whenthey started talking about
ungrading.
Kristina Hoeppner (07:34):
Yeah, some of those teaching methods do have
quite a long history. Likeportfolios, they are nothing new
at all. They've existed forcenturies. Of course, not the
digital portfolio, but theportfolio itself, in particular,
in the iteration that you havementioned, for the artists where
they are showing off their bestwork. Teaching portfolios have
been around, at least in NorthAmerica, since the 70s as well.
Lindsay Richardson (07:56):
That's incredible. So all these
innovative teaching practicesthat I just would have never
even thought about have beenaround for so long. So I
thought, I mean, I wanted toradically change the entire
system, and I think I still kindof do, but one step at a time
[both laugh]. So I thoughtthat's one thing I can do in my
course that is a little bitungrading or a little bit in
(08:20):
line with alternative gradingapproaches. And I thought, ooh,
a portfolio that is self graded.
Why not? Right? It's aportfolio. If it's meant to be
metacognitive, then it's meantto be self graded as well, I
think, it's a perfect candidate.
So that's exactly what I did.
I started employing them in my'Intro to psych' and 'Intro to
cognition' courses wherestudents complete what's called
(08:43):
a success portfolio. They firsthave to define what success
means to them, which could bedifferent depending on what
students want, right? Somestudents will flat out say,
"Success is an A+ in thiscourse." That's it. I hope
that's not what success is, butwho am I to judge? Some students
will say, "Well, success to memeans being able to adequately
(09:08):
articulate psychologicalphenomena related to my everyday
behaviours." Okay, great.
I pair it with a module on thepsychology of success that also
has a bundle associated with it,an indigenous knowledge bundle
from some of our indigenousknowledge keepers here at
Carleton. They talk a little bitabout non-western versions of
(09:31):
success as well. So studentshave now the ability to go out
and to think through differentforms of success from different
people and different ways ofknowing.
In their portfolio, theyarticulate what success means to
them. They look through thelearning outcomes in the course
of which there are often in mycourses, seven. Any educational
(09:52):
developer right now is grittingtheir teeth, seven learning
outcomes, not so many [laughs].
Yes, it's too many. So I havestudents choose between three to
five learning outcomes that theywant to work on in the course. I
don't need to measure all ofthem in most of the courses,
three to five is sufficient.
Then they plan for how they'regoing to achieve those learning
(10:15):
outcomes. Very concretely, theysay things that they'll do
throughout the semester, andthen they engage in learning
cycles throughout the portfolioto demonstrate with artefacts
what they've done, what maybedidn't go the way that they
thought, what feedback they got,how they integrated their
feedback. And so you're reallyseeing a journey of their
learning throughout the course,where at the end, they reflect
(10:37):
on the entire journey, they talkabout that, and then they also
submit their rubric and theirgrade for the portfolio.
Kristina Hoeppner (10:44):
And that's in your classes with 200 to 450
students?
Lindsay Richardson (10:48):
Yes.
Kristina Hoeppner (10:48):
Lindsay, you said that your students are self
grading their portfolio. Whatdoes that look like?
Lindsay Richardson (10:55):
It doesn't look like the Wild Wild West, is
what I'll say. It's not thatstudents are just submitting a
recipe for guacamole and givingthemselves 15 out of 15, for
example. I make it very clear inthe syllabus and in the
assignment instructions that anylarge discrepancies between the
grade that they providethemselves and the quality of
(11:17):
work submitted will need to comethrough me, and they'll need to
come and have a conversationwith me to ultimately defend
their learning.
More practically, what thatlooks like is students get a
rubric that they engage with inorder to grade themselves. So
they have to put themselves onthe scales for all the different
rubric criteria. And I try touse really plain language to
(11:39):
ensure that there's minimalsubjectivity in the rubrics. So
I avoid using words like'mostly' or 'some of the time',
or, you know, things that canhave a certain layer of
subjectivity that isn't helpfulfor students. So they really can
almost objectively measure theirown success. They also have
(12:00):
points of practice throughoutthe term on all of their
deliverables I ask them to gradethemselves, which I do believe
is a great practice anyway. Whywouldn't students grade
themselves before submittingtheir work? So I have them do
that, and then they practicetheir level of calibration
throughout the course bysubmitting their self assessment
and then seeing the teachingteam's assessment of their work
(12:23):
and noticing the discrepanciesbetween that so that, hopefully
by the end of the course,they'll be more well calibrated.
And then, instead of having togo through and grade all of the
portfolios, what we do is we gothrough all of them as a team,
and we look through and makesure that the grading matches
on, right. We're just lookingfor large discrepancies. We're
(12:44):
not looking to nickel and dimestudents. That's not what I'm
interested in. Instead of havingto grade, what we can do is we
can provide authentic reactionsto their portfolios. So we're
not so much worried about makingsure everybody gets the same
amount of feedback or the sameamount of comments, or like,
really looking into the nittygritty of the grading, we can
forget about the grading that'salready done, the work's already
(13:06):
done. We can really concentrateon feedback.
Kristina Hoeppner (13:08):
And supporting your students through
that feedback that they thenhopefully also read.
Lindsay Richardson (13:11):
Yes, hopefully, yeah [both laugh],
exactly. But I have found, forexample, in my winter course, I
asked my TAs not to grade theportfolios. I graded each and
every one of them myself, and Ifound that it didn't take a
really long time either.
Kristina Hoeppner (13:26):
Now that you've run your course with the
portfolio component for two tothree years, and you had not
used a portfolio in at least oneor maybe even two years prior to
that, after you had started,have you seen a difference in
the students' learning?
Lindsay Richardson (13:44):
I have. So I have some anecdotal evidence
from students, via 'Students asPartners Program'. We have a
'Students as Partners Program'at Carleton. It's paid work, so
they get a grant, and they workalongside a supervisor who is an
instructor. They work onprojects that help to boost
teaching and learning. So I hada student, this partner, work
(14:07):
with me on improving theportfolio. So they improved the
instructions. We actually tookthe instructions and put them
right in cuPortfolio. So nowstudents have to engage with the
software even to read theinstructions. So they did that.
They tweaked the rubric a littlebit and conducted a small scale
(14:27):
survey on the students from lastcohort to ask questions about
their experience.
What was surprising because itwasn't a question we were asking
students, is students starteddivulging that they were less
likely to use AI to help themwith their work. What we found
come out of this, and I'm reallylooking forward to doing some
(14:48):
actual research in this area, soI'll have some data hopefully
soon. But just like what we'venoticed with the alt grading
movement that has come from the60s, right, is that when
students are motivated bygrades, they're robbed from
their love of learning,essentially. They're motivated
by their grades. That'sextrinsic motivation, and that's
(15:10):
one way that we call an AIhazard. That's one way for
students to want to offloadtheir work because they're
scared that if they don't,they're not going to get the
grades that they need to get tothe next level and do the next
thing.
So with this type of assignment,students were saying, like, 'I'm
not going to use AI because I'mgoing to grade myself. Why would
I use AI when I'm just going tograde myself?' Or 'why would I
(15:33):
use AI when this is about myjourney?' It's made it deeply
personal for them. I havenothing to compare it to because
for as long, as you know,ChatGPT has been around, I've
been using these portfolios. Mynon-use of portfolios predates
November 2022 unfortunately[both laugh].
What I can say, though, is itbrings it to the surface, right?
(15:54):
I'm no longer relying on ourteaching evaluations or student
feedback surveys to see thelearning that's come out at the
end of the term, right. I get toread beautiful reflections about
their learning and have studentsclearly articulate things to me
that they're taking out of mycourse that maybe I didn't even
intend to. It's quite beautifulto see what students are taking
(16:16):
out of the course.
Kristina Hoeppner (16:17):
Mhh because that's when you realise that
they've actually learned andtaken on what they have learned
and applied it to their owncontexts.
Lindsay Richardson (16:27):
Absolutely, yeah.
Kristina Hoeppner (16:28):
So your students don't necessarily use
AI in their portfolios to writetheir reflections, but you do
allow the use of AI. What doesthat look like?
Lindsay Richardson (16:37):
I mean, I think next semester, it'll look
different from last semester,which looks different than the
semester before [laughs]. I'llsay that. It's definitely an
iterative process. I will say,though, that the graphic design
component of the portfolio isnot a learning outcome of mine.
I don't need to measure evidencethat students can use the
software or that they havegraphic design capabilities. So
(17:01):
one example is students canengage with AI or chat bots to
help them make their portfoliosmore visually appealing or help
reduce the cognitive load oftheir audience.
AI can offer advice on where toput artefacts or elements on a
page, for example. And you know,it's a software which means that
(17:22):
there's going to be a little bitof a learning curve. So if
students want to engage with AIfor some troubleshooting, that
helps me, honestly. It helps toreduce my workload as an
instructor, where students canengage with AI to help them
learn the tool, which, again, isnot a learning outcome of my
course.
What I do is I just ensure thatas with all deliverables in my
(17:44):
course, students submit an AIdisclaimer that says how they
used AI and exactly what theyused. They have to name the
model, when they used it in linewith APA formatting, and talk
through how it helped theirlearning. What I'm finding more
and more is that having thisinformation in the syllabus is
(18:06):
not enough. Now I have exactlyhow they can use AI in my course
in my syllabus, and then on eachassessment, it needs to appear
in the assessment instructions.
And I also have a rubric itemnow. One of the criteria is that
you have to have submitted an AIdisclaimer and that it is in
line with the template and inline with the policies, our
(18:27):
course policies.
Kristina Hoeppner (18:30):
The students use AI in your courses,
currently, primarily forstructural elements so to
generate images that make theirportfolio more visual, plain
English, so I assume somethingthat helps them rewrite and be
more concise in their writing,and then also how they should
structure their reflections.
Lindsay Richardson (18:51):
I would also urge students to avoid the use
of AI to polish their language.
We talk a little bit about thedifferent types of language for
different types of submissions.
And while AI can be reallyhelpful in structuring work that
is meant to be templated, like amanuscript for a psychology
(19:11):
paper, for example, that ispretty templated language, there
is right and wrong tones. Imean, there's a little bit of an
art to it, but for the mostpart, AI can be very helpful in
helping students be morestreamlined and concise in their
writing.
But for a portfolio that's meantto be a little bit less of a
professional tone because I'musing this as like a
metacognitive journey, ratherthan something that's meant to
(19:33):
be super polished and ready foran employer, I would really urge
them to use their own voice andavoid the temptation to have aI
clean it up because what theymight think is cleaning it up is
making it real boring. Everybodywill just say how the things
have been woven through thetapestry of the landscape. And
like [Kristina laughs], I don'twant to read that. That's too
(19:55):
boring to me, too flowery.
Kristina Hoeppner (19:57):
What was the use of AI from your students
that you've seen in the rubricsince you have implemented that
and also the disclaimer, isthere anything that they use
predominantly or anything thatnobody uses at all?
Lindsay Richardson (20:10):
Interesting question. I don't have them all
in front of me right now, so I'mgoing based off of memory. One
thing that I can say, though, isI was surprised at the number of
students who were telling methat they used it for
translation. So I had a numberof students who were French as a
first language, and who had saidthat they completed their entire
(20:32):
assignment in French and thenused AI to translate it into
English, which I think kind ofcool. People get paid a lot of
money to translate work, and soif we're asking students to do
this work, and then a subset ofour students are having to do
the work that we're asking themto do and also translate it,
(20:52):
that is completely inequitable,in my opinion. They shouldn't be
having to translate. That's notthe learning outcome for the
course. Maybe if they're goinginto jobs where they'll need to
work on their English, theymight need to do that. My course
isn't necessarily the place thatthey need to do that. So if they
can outsource some of that work,great, if that allows them to
(21:16):
truly dig in and engage with thematerial authentically.
Kristina Hoeppner (21:21):
Is there anything else that had stood out
for you, in general, in the useof AI by your students?
Lindsay Richardson (21:27):
Yeah, I mean, so there's a spectrum out
there of students, studentswork, and there's work that I
can see that is, I mean, ifthey're using AI, they're doing
a really good job hiding it, andthey must be fixing it up on
their own. And so there arestudents that seem to be
avoiding it and engagingauthentically. And then there
(21:47):
are students who all the way onthe other side of the spectrum,
who seem like they might just becompletely disengaged, but it
feels blatantly obvious. With apaper it's harder to tell,
right, because if a studentwrites 'delve' 12 times, most
instructors would say 'delve' isa telltale sign that you're
using AI. Well, that might notbe true, and especially not in
(22:08):
five years, when students startengaging with synthetic material
more and more, they're justgonna start writing like AI
writing. So it's hard to sayit's like a chicken and the egg
problem, like which came first?
We don't know, and so it's goingto be hard to pinpoint and say,
'you definitely wrote your paperwith AI.'
Even with those horizontal linesthat we start to see now, the
HTML lines that chatgpt uses toseparate the sections. I'm
(22:32):
starting to see more and more ofthat in students' writing now.
I'm like, where did thesehorizontal lines come from?
Nobody's ever submittedhorizontal lines before [both
laugh]. Now, papers are riddledwith them, annotated
bibliographies, especially.
But with a portfolio, it's thewhole assignment. If I open a
portfolio, for example, and thetemplate that I give students is
seven pages. They're meant totake these seven pages and do
(22:54):
something with them. So if I seeseven pages, each of which has
one block of text or even it hasa few blocks of text, but
there's bolding, and then it'skind of like a block of text
with a few bolded items and thenbulleted items with bolded first
parts, and then another block oftext, to sum it all up, that
looks templated by AI. Whereasif you open up a portfolio and
(23:16):
you're seeing artefacts andyou're seeing images and you're
seeing videos and quotes pulledout and it looks very
intentional. It's easy to tellwhether students have short
circuited their learning AI ornot.
Kristina Hoeppner (23:30):
Do you use AI yourself in your teaching with
portfolios?
Lindsay Richardson (23:37):
Yeah, I do engage with AI alongside my
teaching. I created a custom GPTusing the paid version of
ChatGPT, which I'd love to stopusing because it's in US dollars
[laughs], which is anastronomical amount of money for
me as a Canadian right now,among other reasons. I've
created the custom GPT that I'vecalled 'Psychology course
(23:58):
designer'. This GPT is trainedon my teaching dossier, my
teaching philosophy statement,the history of all the syllabi
that I've ever created. It hascertain articles that I've
pulled that I think are relevantfor instructional design in my
area and a few other materials.
So now I have this AI bot'Psychology course designer',
(24:21):
and I'm not offloading it to getit to design my course for me,
but what I'm doing is I'mleaving it open on the side, and
if for nothing else, it helps tokeep me on task because I no
longer feel like it's anastronomical ask to design a
course. I can sit down and I canplan myself, and I can offload
my cognition to this AI bot andsay, like, I'm filled with
(24:43):
ideas. And you can probably tellby the way that I speak that my
ideas kind of just shoot out ofmy head, and I chase them, and I
have a hard time putting themall together, but AI can help
with that.
I'm sat down, and I start all mycourse. Okay, I'm working
through my syllabus. Here we go,and then any cognitive
offloadings I can offshoot toAI, I can ask it questions, and
I can engage with it that way. Iwrite the assignment
(25:04):
instructions myself, mostlybecause they already exist, and
what I started to do was get itto tell me what it thinks it
should do. Notoriously, AI rightnow is pretty bad at giving
constructive feedback, like it'sreally good at telling you how
great you are at things[laughs], but not so good at
(25:25):
outlining ways for you toimprove. So if I give it my
assignment instructions and say,'Is this clear', for example,
which is a leading question. AIis not so great with leading
questions? Is this clear? Thebot will come and it will say,
'Yes, it's so clear, you're themaster of the universe and
here's all the reasons why'[laughs], right? But if I spit
(25:49):
it on its head for a minute andI say, here are the instructions
for my assignment, do theassignment? Okay? Well now I can
see what it does, and that helpsto outline all of the ways in
which I was not clear.
Kristina Hoeppner (26:01):
That can be one tip for educators to still
write your own assignments, butthen use a bot to figure out
whether it could be understoodand whether you'll come across
with what you want to do. Do youhave any other AI and portfolio
related tips for other lecturersor learning designers?
Lindsay Richardson (26:21):
Yeah, one is to think carefully and
critically about your level ordegree of integration. It's
necessary at this point to thinkabout how you want students to
engage with AI in your course,and how you want AI to be
infused in your course, and itmight be none at all. That's
(26:43):
okay, but it needs to be madeclear to students, and the
reasoning and rationale behindit needs to be made clear of
students.
One of the reasons why isconfirmation bias. So if I am an
instructor, and I say studentsin my course can use AI however
they want? And you just kind oflike, tell me how, and that's
great. And then Kristina, youhave a course, and you tell your
(27:06):
students you're not going to useAI under any circumstances. If
that's all students have to goon, and there's a student in
both of our classes, they'regoing to go, 'Kristina, you have
no idea what you're talkingabout [laughs]. I like Lindsay's
version better, so I'm going toapply her course policies to
your class because I'm justtaking her word for it', not
(27:28):
understanding that there mightbe nuances behind why we've made
those choices and why it mightbe reasonable that students
should avoid AI use in yourclass and not necessarily mine.
So not only thinking through thedegree, but being sure that
we're critical about that andthat we're making it clear to
students.
The flip side of that is to notrequire students to use it
(27:52):
unless the course is aboutgenerative AI. If that is not a
learning outcome in your course,though, we need to make sure
that we're giving students theability to opt out of Gen AI use
and not exposing them tosynthetic content without their
consent because there are veryreal ethical reasons why
students might want to avoidusing these systems, and they
need to be at this point intime, given the opportunity to
(28:16):
disengage from AI.
Maybe they don't want to leavesuch a large carbon footprint.
There are very big climateimpacts and energy demands of
these systems, and we might havesome environmentalists in our
courses, or some people fromdifferent cultures that might
feel like AI undervalues theirculture and that their ways of
knowing are not necessarilyrepresented in the training
(28:38):
data.
Kristina Hoeppner (28:39):
Yeah. It's been great to hear about your
use of AI, how you think aboutit, also the transparency level
with your students, that you'remaking it very clear to them
what the consequences are orwhat they might want to think
about, and then also using thealternative grading methods for
them to critically engage withtheir learning, and again, also
(29:00):
reflect on that learning becausethey need to put themselves into
a different position when theyare putting their hat on for
judging their own work. So theyare also engaging in a
reflective process forthemselves there.
So the last three questions,then for you: which words or
short phrases do you use todescribe portfolio work?
Lindsay Richardson (29:20):
I would say transformative, intrinsically
motivating, and student-centred.
Kristina Hoeppner (29:27):
What tip do you have for learning designers,
instructors, educators, whocreate portfolio activities?
Lindsay Richardson (29:34):
Pair them with very clear rubrics.
Kristina Hoeppner (29:40):
You design your own rubric, right? Or do
you sometimes also use a preexisting one, like one of the
VALUE rubrics from AAC&U?
Lindsay Richardson (29:48):
I create all my rubrics myself.
Kristina Hoeppner (29:51):
What advice do you have for portfolio
authors, be they students oralso staff, who might be
creating their teaching dossier?
Lindsay Richardson (29:59):
Mhh, I would say, find a way to stand out and
reduce your audience's cognitiveload.
Kristina Hoeppner (30:06):
What are some examples for standing out?
Lindsay Richardson (30:09):
Ooh, I would just say, look different. Be
different. Do what feelsauthentically right to you, and
don't worry so much abouttraditional standards that a
portfolio ought to look likethis or should look like that. I
often say to my students, don'tlet anybody 'should' all over
you like if somebody's coming atyou with 'you should this, that'
(30:32):
forget about it for this,especially. It's a portfolio.
it's meant to be about you. Putsomething that makes it you.
That's how you can really standout.
Kristina Hoeppner (30:42):
So nice personalisation component there
that also matches that studentscan choose their own learning
outcomes. So really personalisethe course to them. Thank you so
much for today's conversation.
Lindsay Richardson (30:53):
Great. It's been awesome talking to you.
Thanks so much.
Kristina Hoeppner (30:59):
Now over to our listeners. What do you want
to try in your own portfoliopractice? This was 'Create.
Share. Engage.' with Dr LindsayRichardson. Head to our website,
podcast.mahara.org, where youcan find resources and the
transcript for this episode.
This podcast is produced byCatalyst IT. Our next episode
(31:20):
will air in two weeks. I hopeyou will listen again and tell a
colleague about our podcast sothey can subscribe. Until then,
create, share, and engage.
Welcome to 'Create. Share. Engage.' This is
the podcast about portfolios forlearning and more for educators,
learning designers, and managerskeen on integrating portfolios
with their education andprofessional development
practices. 'Create. Share.
Engage.' is brought to you bythe Mahara team at Catalyst IT.
My name is Kristina Hoeppner.
(00:29):
Today I'm speaking with DrLindsay Richardson from Carleton
University in Ottawa in Canada.
When I visited the university inMay, I learned that she's been
using portfolios in very largepsychology classes that can also
have an artificial intelligence(AI) component. We didn't have
the chance to talk more, so Iinvited her to share her
thoughts and experience on thepodcast. Thank you for making
(00:51):
time, Lindsay.
Lindsay Richardson (00:51):
Thanks for having me, Kristina.
Kristina Hoeppner (00:55):
Lindsay, what do you do at Carleton?
Lindsay Richardson (00:57):
That's a big question [laughs] right out of
the game.
Kristina Hoeppner (01:00):
I know you're wearing multiple hats there,
don't you [both laugh]?
Lindsay Richardson (01:03):
I have so many hats. What I would say is,
right now, I am the EducationalTechnology Manager in the
Teaching and Learning ServicesDepartment. So what that means
is I work with a group ofwonderful people, of which some
of them you know, who help toconsult on and support the
pedagogical uses of educationaltechnology, including
(01:26):
cuPortfolio, which is ourePortfolio solution you're
familiar with.
I also, though, am an AdjunctProfessor and Contract
Instructor in the Department ofPsychology, where I teach mostly
large enrolment courses. So thispast fall, I had 450 students,
and this past winter I had 220.
So big classes, mostly introlevel. I teach a lot of 'Intro
(01:50):
to psych', 'Intro to cognitivepsych', although I started out
in my teaching journey atCarleton, teaching 'Intro to
stats for psychology students',and that, to date, is my
favourite course to teach. Mostpsychology students don't want
to take statistics, and they allhave to. So they come into my
course and they hate me rightout of the gate. They don't want
(02:11):
to take my classes. But thenthey leave and they say really
nice things, like, 'Thanks formaking it not so bad [both
laugh].
But yeah, so those are the tworoles that I have right now, but
So with the 'Intro to psych',students come in with this
notion that it's going to be abird course. So they're really
interested right out of thegate, and invariably, I let them
(02:32):
down somehow, and then by theend of the semester, I get
things like, 'This wasneedlessly difficult!' So it's
I will say that I've been at theinstitution since 2010. Against
not as rewarding.
all the advice of ourforefathers, I guess I could say
[laughs], I did all of mydegrees at Carleton. I really
(02:54):
like the institution, I comefrom here, I am from Ottawa,
born and bred. So I was happy tostay at Carleton and do my BA,
my masters, and my PhD, which Isuccessfully defended in 2023.
Kristina Hoeppner (03:10):
You do have a beautiful campus right on the
river.
Lindsay Richardson (03:13):
It's so nice, yeah.
Kristina Hoeppner (03:15):
I did get the chance to walk the river walk
with Chloe when I visited. Andso it's a really wonderful
opportunity for lunchtime walk,getting outside. Well, as long
as there are no mosquitoes, Iguess in summer.
Lindsay Richardson (03:28):
Yeah, or birds there's lots of geese
[both laugh].
Kristina Hoeppner (03:31):
What you actually forgot, Lindsay, is
that you're also having apodcast of your own.
Lindsay Richardson (03:37):
Ah, yes, I do [laughs]. I shouldn't forget
that. I co-host - it's called'Agile Ed' with my co-host, Dr
Ashley Thompson, who is also anadjunct professor and contract
instructor at the institution.
She teaches out of theDepartment of Neuroscience. She
often teaches smaller courses,which means that between the two
of us, we have a pretty bigbreadth of teaching experience
(04:00):
in terms of scalability.
Kristina Hoeppner (04:05):
Yeah, and it's fantastic listening to your
podcast because you have awonderful conversation style
between the two, and it reallycomes across that you two have
been working together for awhile, that you like working
together, and that you're reallyplaying off each other.
Lindsay Richardson (04:19):
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you for that. I am quiteproud of the conversational
tone.
Kristina Hoeppner (04:24):
Lindsay, when did you start using portfolios?
Lindsay Richardson (04:26):
Yeah, I have to tell you that I never used a
portfolio as a student ever. Ididn't have any instructors who
had them in their courses. Iwill say I was also a first
generation student, so I didn'thave family to lean on either to
know what they might haveencountered. Everything that I
experienced and thought about interms of university and what is
(04:48):
traditional it all came throughjust what I was seeing and what
maybe I saw in the movies, forexample.
I thought that portfolios weremeant for art class, right, that
you would put together pieces ofartefacts, and you would show
them, or maybe an employer, ifyou were a graphic designer, an
employer would want to see yourwork. That's where I thought
(05:10):
they started and stopped.
I was hired in 2020, August of2020, with what used to be
called the EducationalDevelopment Centre. So that's
Teaching and Learning Servicesnow was the EDC back then. My
PhD supervisor used to joke thatif I continued to spend my time
over there, that they might oneday give me a job, which
[laughs] isn't exactly how thathappened. Yeah.
(05:35):
So I mean, you'll remember 2020,summer 2020, we were in the
midst of a global pandemic, weneeded to shift all of our
courses online. So the EDC wasdoing a pretty big hire, and I
was one of their hires to helpfaculty move their courses
online. Incidentally, I wasalready teaching online. So I
(05:56):
was going to need to supportcuPortfolio, and I had never
used cuPortfolio before. How wasI going to do that? How was I
going to support instructors'use of this tool that I had
never used before? And Ithought, well, I may as well
just use it. Right, like I haveto get in there and I have to
I took what was the beginning ofmy teaching dossier that was a
use it.
(06:19):
work in progress, and so I waskind of thinking this like feed
two birds with one seed, so tospeak, I could do something that
I'm going to need to do anyway,and I can learn this tool. And
that's exactly what I did. So Itook what was a Word document,
put it into cuPortfolio, and itwas so cool. I learned lots
about the tool, and I thought,this is pretty cool, and could
(06:41):
have lots of uses in psychology.
Think about psychology, and mostpeople think about 'Intro to
psych', one to two midterms,final exam, and you're lucky if
you get some quizzes along theway. Traditionally, that's what
an 'Intro to psych' class is,and it makes sense. It's mostly
large enrolment courses. There'slots of material, lots of
content that you have tomemorise, lots of foundational
(07:03):
knowledge. And so when I startedteaching the 'Intro to psych'
sessions, I went, mhh, what ifwe just had a portfolio? Like
just one small component of it?
So about two or three years ago,this also came alongside my
learning about alternativegrading approaches or ungrading,
which I've learned is a movementthat predates the 80s even. I
(07:26):
thought it came out of the 80s,but I've been corrected. I think
somebody told me the 60s is whenthey started talking about
ungrading.
Kristina Hoeppner (07:34):
Yeah, some of those teaching methods do have
quite a long history. Likeportfolios, they are nothing new
at all. They've existed forcenturies. Of course, not the
digital portfolio, but theportfolio itself, in particular,
in the iteration that you havementioned, for the artists where
they are showing off their bestwork. Teaching portfolios have
been around, at least in NorthAmerica, since the 70s as well.
Lindsay Richardson (07:56):
That's incredible. So all these
innovative teaching practicesthat I just would have never
even thought about have beenaround for so long. So I
thought, I mean, I wanted toradically change the entire
system, and I think I still kindof do, but one step at a time
[both laugh]. So I thoughtthat's one thing I can do in my
course that is a little bitungrading or a little bit in
(08:20):
line with alternative gradingapproaches. And I thought, ooh,
a portfolio that is self graded.
Why not? Right? It's aportfolio. If it's meant to be
metacognitive, then it's meantto be self graded as well, I
think, it's a perfect candidate.
So that's exactly what I did.
I started employing them in my'Intro to psych' and 'Intro to
cognition' courses wherestudents complete what's called
(08:43):
a success portfolio. They firsthave to define what success
means to them, which could bedifferent depending on what
students want, right? Somestudents will flat out say,
"Success is an A+ in thiscourse." That's it. I hope
that's not what success is, butwho am I to judge? Some students
will say, "Well, success to memeans being able to adequately
(09:08):
articulate psychologicalphenomena related to my everyday
behaviours." Okay, great.
I pair it with a module on thepsychology of success that also
has a bundle associated with it,an indigenous knowledge bundle
from some of our indigenousknowledge keepers here at
Carleton. They talk a little bitabout non-western versions of
(09:31):
success as well. So studentshave now the ability to go out
and to think through differentforms of success from different
people and different ways ofknowing.
In their portfolio, theyarticulate what success means to
them. They look through thelearning outcomes in the course
of which there are often in mycourses, seven. Any educational
(09:52):
developer right now is grittingtheir teeth, seven learning
outcomes, not so many [laughs].
Yes, it's too many. So I havestudents choose between three to
five learning outcomes that theywant to work on in the course. I
don't need to measure all ofthem in most of the courses,
three to five is sufficient.
Then they plan for how they'regoing to achieve those learning
(10:15):
outcomes. Very concretely, theysay things that they'll do
throughout the semester, andthen they engage in learning
cycles throughout the portfolioto demonstrate with artefacts
what they've done, what maybedidn't go the way that they
thought, what feedback they got,how they integrated their
feedback. And so you're reallyseeing a journey of their
learning throughout the course,where at the end, they reflect
(10:37):
on the entire journey, they talkabout that, and then they also
submit their rubric and theirgrade for the portfolio.
Kristina Hoeppner (10:44):
And that's in your classes with 200 to 450
students?
Lindsay Richardson (10:48):
Yes.
Kristina Hoeppner (10:48):
Lindsay, you said that your students are self
grading their portfolio. Whatdoes that look like?
Lindsay Richardson (10:55):
It doesn't look like the Wild Wild West, is
what I'll say. It's not thatstudents are just submitting a
recipe for guacamole and givingthemselves 15 out of 15, for
example. I make it very clear inthe syllabus and in the
assignment instructions that anylarge discrepancies between the
grade that they providethemselves and the quality of
(11:17):
work submitted will need to comethrough me, and they'll need to
come and have a conversationwith me to ultimately defend
their learning.
More practically, what thatlooks like is students get a
rubric that they engage with inorder to grade themselves. So
they have to put themselves onthe scales for all the different
rubric criteria. And I try touse really plain language to
(11:39):
ensure that there's minimalsubjectivity in the rubrics. So
I avoid using words like'mostly' or 'some of the time',
or, you know, things that canhave a certain layer of
subjectivity that isn't helpfulfor students. So they really can
almost objectively measure theirown success. They also have
(12:00):
points of practice throughoutthe term on all of their
deliverables I ask them to gradethemselves, which I do believe
is a great practice anyway. Whywouldn't students grade
themselves before submittingtheir work? So I have them do
that, and then they practicetheir level of calibration
throughout the course bysubmitting their self assessment
and then seeing the teachingteam's assessment of their work
(12:23):
and noticing the discrepanciesbetween that so that, hopefully
by the end of the course,they'll be more well calibrated.
And then, instead of having togo through and grade all of the
portfolios, what we do is we gothrough all of them as a team,
and we look through and makesure that the grading matches
on, right. We're just lookingfor large discrepancies. We're
(12:44):
not looking to nickel and dimestudents. That's not what I'm
interested in. Instead of havingto grade, what we can do is we
can provide authentic reactionsto their portfolios. So we're
not so much worried about makingsure everybody gets the same
amount of feedback or the sameamount of comments, or like,
really looking into the nittygritty of the grading, we can
forget about the grading that'salready done, the work's already
(13:06):
done. We can really concentrateon feedback.
Kristina Hoeppner (13:08):
And supporting your students through
that feedback that they thenhopefully also read.
Lindsay Richardson (13:11):
Yes, hopefully, yeah [both laugh],
exactly. But I have found, forexample, in my winter course, I
asked my TAs not to grade theportfolios. I graded each and
every one of them myself, and Ifound that it didn't take a
really long time either.
Kristina Hoeppner (13:26):
Now that you've run your course with the
portfolio component for two tothree years, and you had not
used a portfolio in at least oneor maybe even two years prior to
that, after you had started,have you seen a difference in
the students' learning?
Lindsay Richardson (13:44):
I have. So I have some anecdotal evidence
from students, via 'Students asPartners Program'. We have a
'Students as Partners Program'at Carleton. It's paid work, so
they get a grant, and they workalongside a supervisor who is an
instructor. They work onprojects that help to boost
teaching and learning. So I hada student, this partner, work
(14:07):
with me on improving theportfolio. So they improved the
instructions. We actually tookthe instructions and put them
right in cuPortfolio. So nowstudents have to engage with the
software even to read theinstructions. So they did that.
They tweaked the rubric a littlebit and conducted a small scale
(14:27):
survey on the students from lastcohort to ask questions about
their experience.
What was surprising because itwasn't a question we were asking
students, is students starteddivulging that they were less
likely to use AI to help themwith their work. What we found
come out of this, and I'm reallylooking forward to doing some
(14:48):
actual research in this area, soI'll have some data hopefully
soon. But just like what we'venoticed with the alt grading
movement that has come from the60s, right, is that when
students are motivated bygrades, they're robbed from
their love of learning,essentially. They're motivated
by their grades. That'sextrinsic motivation, and that's
(15:10):
one way that we call an AIhazard. That's one way for
students to want to offloadtheir work because they're
scared that if they don't,they're not going to get the
grades that they need to get tothe next level and do the next
thing.
So with this type of assignment,students were saying, like, 'I'm
not going to use AI because I'mgoing to grade myself. Why would
I use AI when I'm just going tograde myself?' Or 'why would I
(15:33):
use AI when this is about myjourney?' It's made it deeply
personal for them. I havenothing to compare it to because
for as long, as you know,ChatGPT has been around, I've
been using these portfolios. Mynon-use of portfolios predates
November 2022 unfortunately[both laugh].
What I can say, though, is itbrings it to the surface, right?
(15:54):
I'm no longer relying on ourteaching evaluations or student
feedback surveys to see thelearning that's come out at the
end of the term, right. I get toread beautiful reflections about
their learning and have studentsclearly articulate things to me
that they're taking out of mycourse that maybe I didn't even
intend to. It's quite beautifulto see what students are taking
(16:16):
out of the course.
Kristina Hoeppner (16:17):
Mhh because that's when you realise that
they've actually learned andtaken on what they have learned
and applied it to their owncontexts.
Lindsay Richardson (16:27):
Absolutely, yeah.
Kristina Hoeppner (16:28):
So your students don't necessarily use
AI in their portfolios to writetheir reflections, but you do
allow the use of AI. What doesthat look like?
Lindsay Richardson (16:37):
I mean, I think next semester, it'll look
different from last semester,which looks different than the
semester before [laughs]. I'llsay that. It's definitely an
iterative process. I will say,though, that the graphic design
component of the portfolio isnot a learning outcome of mine.
I don't need to measure evidencethat students can use the
software or that they havegraphic design capabilities. So
(17:01):
one example is students canengage with AI or chat bots to
help them make their portfoliosmore visually appealing or help
reduce the cognitive load oftheir audience.
AI can offer advice on where toput artefacts or elements on a
page, for example. And you know,it's a software which means that
(17:22):
there's going to be a little bitof a learning curve. So if
students want to engage with AIfor some troubleshooting, that
helps me, honestly. It helps toreduce my workload as an
instructor, where students canengage with AI to help them
learn the tool, which, again, isnot a learning outcome of my
course.
What I do is I just ensure thatas with all deliverables in my
(17:44):
course, students submit an AIdisclaimer that says how they
used AI and exactly what theyused. They have to name the
model, when they used it in linewith APA formatting, and talk
through how it helped theirlearning. What I'm finding more
and more is that having thisinformation in the syllabus is
(18:06):
not enough. Now I have exactlyhow they can use AI in my course
in my syllabus, and then on eachassessment, it needs to appear
in the assessment instructions.
And I also have a rubric itemnow. One of the criteria is that
you have to have submitted an AIdisclaimer and that it is in
line with the template and inline with the policies, our
(18:27):
course policies.
Kristina Hoeppner (18:30):
The students use AI in your courses,
currently, primarily forstructural elements so to
generate images that make theirportfolio more visual, plain
English, so I assume somethingthat helps them rewrite and be
more concise in their writing,and then also how they should
structure their reflections.
Lindsay Richardson (18:51):
I would also urge students to avoid the use
of AI to polish their language.
We talk a little bit about thedifferent types of language for
different types of submissions.
And while AI can be reallyhelpful in structuring work that
is meant to be templated, like amanuscript for a psychology
(19:11):
paper, for example, that ispretty templated language, there
is right and wrong tones. Imean, there's a little bit of an
art to it, but for the mostpart, AI can be very helpful in
helping students be morestreamlined and concise in their
writing.
But for a portfolio that's meantto be a little bit less of a
professional tone because I'musing this as like a
metacognitive journey, ratherthan something that's meant to
(19:33):
be super polished and ready foran employer, I would really urge
them to use their own voice andavoid the temptation to have aI
clean it up because what theymight think is cleaning it up is
making it real boring. Everybodywill just say how the things
have been woven through thetapestry of the landscape. And
like [Kristina laughs], I don'twant to read that. That's too
(19:55):
boring to me, too flowery.
Kristina Hoeppner (19:57):
What was the use of AI from your students
that you've seen in the rubricsince you have implemented that
and also the disclaimer, isthere anything that they use
predominantly or anything thatnobody uses at all?
Lindsay Richardson (20:10):
Interesting question. I don't have them all
in front of me right now, so I'mgoing based off of memory. One
thing that I can say, though, isI was surprised at the number of
students who were telling methat they used it for
translation. So I had a numberof students who were French as a
first language, and who had saidthat they completed their entire
(20:32):
assignment in French and thenused AI to translate it into
English, which I think kind ofcool. People get paid a lot of
money to translate work, and soif we're asking students to do
this work, and then a subset ofour students are having to do
the work that we're asking themto do and also translate it,
(20:52):
that is completely inequitable,in my opinion. They shouldn't be
having to translate. That's notthe learning outcome for the
course. Maybe if they're goinginto jobs where they'll need to
work on their English, theymight need to do that. My course
isn't necessarily the place thatthey need to do that. So if they
can outsource some of that work,great, if that allows them to
(21:16):
truly dig in and engage with thematerial authentically.
Kristina Hoeppner (21:21):
Is there anything else that had stood out
for you, in general, in the useof AI by your students?
Lindsay Richardson (21:27):
Yeah, I mean, so there's a spectrum out
there of students, studentswork, and there's work that I
can see that is, I mean, ifthey're using AI, they're doing
a really good job hiding it, andthey must be fixing it up on
their own. And so there arestudents that seem to be
avoiding it and engagingauthentically. And then there
(21:47):
are students who all the way onthe other side of the spectrum,
who seem like they might just becompletely disengaged, but it
feels blatantly obvious. With apaper it's harder to tell,
right, because if a studentwrites 'delve' 12 times, most
instructors would say 'delve' isa telltale sign that you're
using AI. Well, that might notbe true, and especially not in
(22:08):
five years, when students startengaging with synthetic material
more and more, they're justgonna start writing like AI
writing. So it's hard to sayit's like a chicken and the egg
problem, like which came first?
We don't know, and so it's goingto be hard to pinpoint and say,
'you definitely wrote your paperwith AI.'
Even with those horizontal linesthat we start to see now, the
HTML lines that chatgpt uses toseparate the sections. I'm
(22:32):
starting to see more and more ofthat in students' writing now.
I'm like, where did thesehorizontal lines come from?
Nobody's ever submittedhorizontal lines before [both
laugh]. Now, papers are riddledwith them, annotated
bibliographies, especially.
But with a portfolio, it's thewhole assignment. If I open a
portfolio, for example, and thetemplate that I give students is
seven pages. They're meant totake these seven pages and do
(22:54):
something with them. So if I seeseven pages, each of which has
one block of text or even it hasa few blocks of text, but
there's bolding, and then it'skind of like a block of text
with a few bolded items and thenbulleted items with bolded first
parts, and then another block oftext, to sum it all up, that
looks templated by AI. Whereasif you open up a portfolio and
(23:16):
you're seeing artefacts andyou're seeing images and you're
seeing videos and quotes pulledout and it looks very
intentional. It's easy to tellwhether students have short
circuited their learning AI ornot.
Kristina Hoeppner (23:30):
Do you use AI yourself in your teaching with
portfolios?
Lindsay Richardson (23:37):
Yeah, I do engage with AI alongside my
teaching. I created a custom GPTusing the paid version of
ChatGPT, which I'd love to stopusing because it's in US dollars
[laughs], which is anastronomical amount of money for
me as a Canadian right now,among other reasons. I've
created the custom GPT that I'vecalled 'Psychology course
(23:58):
designer'. This GPT is trainedon my teaching dossier, my
teaching philosophy statement,the history of all the syllabi
that I've ever created. It hascertain articles that I've
pulled that I think are relevantfor instructional design in my
area and a few other materials.
So now I have this AI bot'Psychology course designer',
(24:21):
and I'm not offloading it to getit to design my course for me,
but what I'm doing is I'mleaving it open on the side, and
if for nothing else, it helps tokeep me on task because I no
longer feel like it's anastronomical ask to design a
course. I can sit down and I canplan myself, and I can offload
my cognition to this AI bot andsay, like, I'm filled with
(24:43):
ideas. And you can probably tellby the way that I speak that my
ideas kind of just shoot out ofmy head, and I chase them, and I
have a hard time putting themall together, but AI can help
with that.
I'm sat down, and I start all mycourse. Okay, I'm working
through my syllabus. Here we go,and then any cognitive
offloadings I can offshoot toAI, I can ask it questions, and
I can engage with it that way. Iwrite the assignment
(25:04):
instructions myself, mostlybecause they already exist, and
what I started to do was get itto tell me what it thinks it
should do. Notoriously, AI rightnow is pretty bad at giving
constructive feedback, like it'sreally good at telling you how
great you are at things[laughs], but not so good at
(25:25):
outlining ways for you toimprove. So if I give it my
assignment instructions and say,'Is this clear', for example,
which is a leading question. AIis not so great with leading
questions? Is this clear? Thebot will come and it will say,
'Yes, it's so clear, you're themaster of the universe and
here's all the reasons why'[laughs], right? But if I spit
(25:49):
it on its head for a minute andI say, here are the instructions
for my assignment, do theassignment? Okay? Well now I can
see what it does, and that helpsto outline all of the ways in
which I was not clear.
Kristina Hoeppner (26:01):
That can be one tip for educators to still
write your own assignments, butthen use a bot to figure out
whether it could be understoodand whether you'll come across
with what you want to do. Do youhave any other AI and portfolio
related tips for other lecturersor learning designers?
Lindsay Richardson (26:21):
Yeah, one is to think carefully and
critically about your level ordegree of integration. It's
necessary at this point to thinkabout how you want students to
engage with AI in your course,and how you want AI to be
infused in your course, and itmight be none at all. That's
(26:43):
okay, but it needs to be madeclear to students, and the
reasoning and rationale behindit needs to be made clear of
students.
One of the reasons why isconfirmation bias. So if I am an
instructor, and I say studentsin my course can use AI however
they want? And you just kind oflike, tell me how, and that's
great. And then Kristina, youhave a course, and you tell your
(27:06):
students you're not going to useAI under any circumstances. If
that's all students have to goon, and there's a student in
both of our classes, they'regoing to go, 'Kristina, you have
no idea what you're talkingabout [laughs]. I like Lindsay's
version better, so I'm going toapply her course policies to
your class because I'm justtaking her word for it', not
(27:28):
understanding that there mightbe nuances behind why we've made
those choices and why it mightbe reasonable that students
should avoid AI use in yourclass and not necessarily mine.
So not only thinking through thedegree, but being sure that
we're critical about that andthat we're making it clear to
students.
The flip side of that is to notrequire students to use it
(27:52):
unless the course is aboutgenerative AI. If that is not a
learning outcome in your course,though, we need to make sure
that we're giving students theability to opt out of Gen AI use
and not exposing them tosynthetic content without their
consent because there are veryreal ethical reasons why
students might want to avoidusing these systems, and they
need to be at this point intime, given the opportunity to
(28:16):
disengage from AI.
Maybe they don't want to leavesuch a large carbon footprint.
There are very big climateimpacts and energy demands of
these systems, and we might havesome environmentalists in our
courses, or some people fromdifferent cultures that might
feel like AI undervalues theirculture and that their ways of
knowing are not necessarilyrepresented in the training
(28:38):
data.
Kristina Hoeppner (28:39):
Yeah. It's been great to hear about your
use of AI, how you think aboutit, also the transparency level
with your students, that you'remaking it very clear to them
what the consequences are orwhat they might want to think
about, and then also using thealternative grading methods for
them to critically engage withtheir learning, and again, also
(29:00):
reflect on that learning becausethey need to put themselves into
a different position when theyare putting their hat on for
judging their own work. So theyare also engaging in a
reflective process forthemselves there.
So the last three questions,then for you: which words or
short phrases do you use todescribe portfolio work?
Lindsay Richardson (29:20):
I would say transformative, intrinsically
motivating, and student-centred.
Kristina Hoeppner (29:27):
What tip do you have for learning designers,
instructors, educators, whocreate portfolio activities?
Lindsay Richardson (29:34):
Pair them with very clear rubrics.
Kristina Hoeppner (29:40):
You design your own rubric, right? Or do
you sometimes also use a preexisting one, like one of the
VALUE rubrics from AAC&U?
Lindsay Richardson (29:48):
I create all my rubrics myself.
Kristina Hoeppner (29:51):
What advice do you have for portfolio
authors, be they students oralso staff, who might be
creating their teaching dossier?
Lindsay Richardson (29:59):
Mhh, I would say, find a way to stand out and
reduce your audience's cognitiveload.
Kristina Hoeppner (30:06):
What are some examples for standing out?
Lindsay Richardson (30:09):
Ooh, I would just say, look different. Be
different. Do what feelsauthentically right to you, and
don't worry so much abouttraditional standards that a
portfolio ought to look likethis or should look like that. I
often say to my students, don'tlet anybody 'should' all over
you like if somebody's coming atyou with 'you should this, that'
(30:32):
forget about it for this,especially. It's a portfolio.
it's meant to be about you. Putsomething that makes it you.
That's how you can really standout.
Kristina Hoeppner (30:42):
So nice personalisation component there
that also matches that studentscan choose their own learning
outcomes. So really personalisethe course to them. Thank you so
much for today's conversation.
Lindsay Richardson (30:53):
Great. It's been awesome talking to you.
Thanks so much.
Kristina Hoeppner (30:59):
Now over to our listeners. What do you want
to try in your own portfoliopractice? This was 'Create.
Share. Engage.' with Dr LindsayRichardson. Head to our website,
podcast.mahara.org, where youcan find resources and the
transcript for this episode.
This podcast is produced byCatalyst IT. Our next episode
(31:20):
will air in two weeks. I hopeyou will listen again and tell a
colleague about our podcast sothey can subscribe. Until then,
create, share, and engage.
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