Team Axia

Can an e-portfolio really help?

2011-11-24T00:41:00.000-08:00

I have been Chair of Governors at a large High School for the past five years. One of the initiatives we have introduced is for Governors to have direct access with departments in the school. This week I had the priviledge of listening to an revealing discussion between two of the more experienced teachers in one department. They have been responsible for helping develop study and thinking skills across the school. Their reflection was that having done this for a couple of years, they prehaps had disadvantaged their students because whilst they had really become engaged in learning, they may have unwittingly walked out the classroom without the information they needed for their exam.

There were real echoes here with the e-portfolio debate, around the question of just how useful they really are. Is an e-portfolio something that encourages individuals to discover and capture using multi media a variety of learning experiences or is it a means for individual's learning to be assessed for a specific purpose.

Of course there had can be elements of both however if an e-portfolio is being used for assessment there has to be a real sense that records should be opened to others for external scrutiny. There are of course questions about how this is done, but in all the systems we have designed there is always the fundamental pedagogical question that needs to be addressed, which is who owns the portfolio. If it is fully owned by the individual then how reliable is the assessment?

I can imagine the cries for those that espouse the benefits of livelong learning portfolios who will argue the importance of holding your learning documents in one place. However how many of us really need this and furthermore when do we actiually look at work we created in our various historical learning episodes.

If you don't face this fundamental question of ownership then e-portfolios creators will be constantly haunted by the So What question. Is this all about just creating a more interesting storing space than an attic.

We are very clear e-portfolios are there for a purpose. To actively support people with their learning journeys through the provision of interactive learning plans; an easy means to gather evidence and where required to put permissions in place for others to interact with the portfolio.

If they are not we might be reflecting like the teachers about whether we have actually missed the point. Like it or not examinations and assessments exist and well designed e-portfolios can help.

What's the future for m-learning in the next 18 months

2011-11-08T01:21:00.000-08:00

The pace of developments in mobile technology means it is hard to make judgements about how this will impact on learning and ePortfolio applications. The only sure thing is that it will have an impact.

Our philosophy has always been to create solutions that can be as ubiquitous as possible so that they can be used across the full range of computer software and accessible from all browsers. We have recently been applying the same approach to mobile devices. As a result many of our clients sites are now accessible from most of the browsers operating on modern mobiles. We have also started to create custom interfaces for some clients that work better on mobiles.

The only challenge we have is with i-based applications like the iPhone and iPad which can be used to access our sites however there is a challenge around uploading files. Put very simply iOS runs browsers in a very tight sandbox, access to files held locally on the device is not possible from a browser. The only solution is to create bespoke “applications” which can be installed on a iPhone/iPad which do allow access to local files. One of our clients has asked us to develop an application to allows users to be able to attach from iOS based devices.

There is much to admire about Steve Jobs. His design principle of keeping solutions simple is one to which we aspire. Our sites should be intuitive enough to use without the need to read a great manual. We however do not want to follow his approach of creating a ‘closed’ community, even if we admire the fact that it has been a great business model.

Consequently the question about what will happen to Apple post Steve Jobs is an interesting one for us. Our current view is that Apple will do the same again in the phone market that they have done in the PC market i.e. become a choice based on design/brand rather than cost and functionality. We are pretty sure that Androids growth will hit their bottom line as they lose market share. It is also conceivable that they will lose income from application sales and iTunes particularly if another music/entertainment supplier comes into this market offering more competitive rates.

We also think that it is possible that Amazon might start hitting Apple hard with the Kindle Fire, although we are concerned that Amazon they have a modified version of an earlier version of Android which would appear to be heavily tied to their "platform" and as such is not open as we would like.

Microsoft release Windows 8 next year will also be significant. This is being designed to run on PCs, Tablets and Netbooks and for the first time not tied into the x86 chip (Intel/AMD) but will be ported to run on ARM processors which are cheaper and less resource hungry.

So what do we think will happen over the next 12 to 18 months? We think there is a real chance that Apple will lose market share unless is does something drastic around the pricing of its products. They have done it before in the portable music player market which they now dominate. There is talk that Apple is currently looking to secure a large supply of 7" screens, the gossip being that they are going to come out with a lower spec iPad to try and stop Amazon and the Kindle Fire becoming a threat. They have the early adopters and now need the mass market.

Amazon is probably the one company that can take Apple on in this space, they have the client base, they have the content, and they have the global reach, their product price point with the Kindle Fire looks spot in to take tablets to the mass market.

It is not surprising HP dropped their touch Pad pretty much after launching it when you consider this market, however there are rumours that they will come out with a new offering and we are pretty sure it will be designed to compete at a lower price point. It was interesting to see they could not sell the touchpad at £400 but they went like hot cakes at £89.

Our sense is that Kindle Fire, when released internationally, will start a new wave of tablets hitting the market that are better priced for mass adoption. Increasingly the PC we all own will be used for serious work where a keyboard and the fine control of a mouse is required with tablets becoming the way we interact with technology in the home environment. Already we find an increasing number of people using their smart phones to “check” things out while in the living room and this would be so much better on the larger screen the tablet will provide. We think the Kindle Fire might have it right, it’s not all singing and dancing but it does do what most of us want for ad hoc use, read my email and check the web while relaxing at home.

With Apple, Goolge, Microsoft and now Amazon all seriously entering this market we could finally see the mass adoption of the tablet in our home and business environments. This could have a major impact on the portability of electronic devises to support learning and assessment.

Let’s watch this space.

First free to use NVQ/QCF e-portfolio; so why are you really doing it?

2011-10-25T03:24:00.000-07:00

This Autumn we are announcing that creation of the first ‘free to use’ version of our endorsed e-portfolio for the assessment of vocational qualifications. A first reaction to this announcement might be, why are you in effect throwing away thousands of pounds of development by making it freely available? Well clearly we are doing it in a way that enables us make some income by selling our services, rather than the software, however it remains the case that someone could download our software for free, we would not get a penny back in return for all our work, so why are we doing it?

We are passionate about e-portfolios and have seen the dramatic impact they can have on learner achievement and retention. However we have been puzzled for sometime about why the take up of e-portfolios for vocational assessment remains relatively slow particularly as there are good quality products ‘out there’ including our own.

This is of course in marked contrast to the almost blanket adoption of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) initially through the adoption of products like Blackboard and then through the massive of impact of Moodle the open source VLE.

It is the story of Moodle that has had the most influence on our taking the decision we have. We believe that the attraction of Moodle is not that there are no costs associated with implementing it. Although it is open source and therefore free to download institutions do spend money in making sure that it ‘works for them’. However what institutions like is that they own the software and they are part of a community of developers all committed to improving the management of learning programmes.

We have always been committed to this philosophy and we talk about a NOW.net community of users who we have worked with to improve our core platform.

Indeed we have sought to influence others to adopt a similar approach as a way of improving the offer to learners. I have endeavoured on behalf of this company, to persuade awarding bodies to include an e-portfolio as part of the services they provided through their registration fees. This appeared to me to both to be a good way to develop a stronger relationship with their customer base and to enhance their offer to them. It is interesting to note that one awarding body VTCT has adopted this approach. However they would appear to others who would rather go for short term profits and be making offers to the market, at if anything a more exorbitant price than previously. The new e-hairdressing log book developed by Learning Assistant/City & Guilds is an interesting approach but is it worth nearly £40 extra per candidate on top of the registration.

We do not believe that approaches like this, will encourage the mass adoption of e-portfolios for vocational assessment which is what we are committed to do hence our latest offer.

However the offer of itself will not deliver this outcome. It also needs to be accompanied by the creation of a community of developers committed to the continuous development of approaches to e-assessment required to deal with the inevitable changes in the way vocational qualifications are assessed. We hope you might want to join us. Have a look at the offer www.nvqnow.net and let us know what you think.

E-portfolios and Higher Education; What works?

2011-10-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

If you google search e-portfolios and Higher Education it is surprising how many entries there are and how far they go back. Although it is a relatively recent development there are some that go back to the start of this millennium.

If you track the entries the zenith of activity appears to come around 2007/08 with lots of well attended conferences and a variety of different papers and applications. In the UK the majority of usage in the Higher Education sector appears to be for the purpose of creating Personal Learning Records. This is perhaps because of the approach of the leading supplier.

Sometimes these records are linked to assessment but great play is made on the fact that the record is owned by the learner. They can publish that record to another or allow access to it but ultimately they are in control.

This has perhaps become the nub of the debate in Higher Education. To what extent is an e-portfolio something that is solely owned by the user and therefore can only used for assessment with their permission? Or alternatively can the e-portfolio be used to manage in effect a complex set of relationships as is the case with many work based modules, with permissions set that determine who is allowed to do what with the evidence. These permissions are in effect ‘controlled’ by the assessment strategy that is in place. This use of the e-portfolio in this case can be further complicated by the need to involve others who maybe external to the University.

Take for example a Nurse Prescribing Course where although nurses come into be trained the reality is that much of their learning is managed outside the university. They make visits to different practices and they capture their own reflections on their work in practice. Furthermore they have mentors who then authenticate their work. Potentially this is a costly exercise for the university managing the paper trail and visiting placements etc. However at some Universities this has been replaced by an e-portfolio system. This is particularly by systems that can be easily customised to replicate the complexities of this assessment process.

I have often argued in this blog and elsewhere that what an e-portfolio is not the key issue. The only thing that matters is what the e-portfolio does or how it answers the So What question. So you have got this information electronically stored then what are you going to do with it? And linked to this How are you going to make it easy for the user to extract it so that they can make use of their evidence for a specific purpose?

My sense is and it is part reflected in the google search that not enough time has been devoted to that question. Instead there have been diversionary debates such as ones about interoperability which mask the key questions about what purpose has the e-portfolio being used for and is it fit for purpose. This is perhaps why the google search reveals that there are lots of entries announcing that there is an e-portfolio that you can use and then a long gap before there is any further entries about how it is actually being used.

E-portfolios are the same as any other product they are only used if ultimately it is found to be a useful activity to do.

Don't Lecture Me

2011-05-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

This is another e-mail inspired by Donald Clark's blog. His most recent entry refers to a talk he gave called 'Don't Lecture Me' to the Alternative Learning Technologies Conference in 2010.

He encourages you to think about effective learning and whether a lecture is a good way to deliver learning. I think I can count on one hand the lectures that 'stuck' and made a difference. Invariably they were poorly delivered and as I recall I learnt most from watching the responses from students to some of the remarks the lecturer made. Invariably the best learning experiences took place in seminars, particularly where there was an academic involved whose real skill was in managing the learning interactions. I recall a Dr Coulson, then as probably now a leading expert on Cardinal Newman, who had the ability to create a learning environment in which all contributions were valued and 'supportively' examined. As a result his seminars were always full to the brim.

Now my best learning continues to takes place in small group discussions but is now augmented by the ability to drop into videos, blogs, websites and forums. For example my current learning is primarily focused on open source solutions and their application to learning. I have not attended a lecture yet about this subject nor ever thought about doing so.

I do not think I am unusual in adopting this approach although I still expect to receive the usual prospectus from our local college full of courses that are based on lectures. I was also reminded about how far we have to go by a discussion yesterday with an NVQ verifier/assessor about the relevance of electronic systems to NVQ assessment. They clearly have a 'paper-based system' in place through which they have managed to 'perfect' a process that takes a learner successfully through to their Level 2 qualification. They are a Grade 1 training provider so it is difficult to argue with them but heaven help any learner who wants to stretch themselves and take an alternative path; or the one who can see an easier way of capturing what they have done on their phone rather than in a paper-based description.

It could still be a long time before the lecture-based pedagogy becomes redundant.

The E-assessment question

2011-04-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

Don Clark recently made an entry on his blog http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ entitled ‘E-portfolios – 7 reasons why I don’t want my life in a shoebox’. Apparently it followed a presentation he had made at the ‘e-Assessment question’ conference. He stimulated a debate with over 70 responses that has been of a higher quality than most that take place at e-portfolio conferences, where, in my experience, people often tie themselves up in ‘interoperability knots’.

My conclusion is that the notion of having an e-portfolio as a means of capturing your own identity, when there are other ‘systems’ out there that do this better like Facebook, is clearly absurd. I am daily told (I don’t look for fear of finding information I don’t want to know) what the ‘status’ of my children is that day by their entry on Facebook. It is their representation of ‘who they are’ that day and it is stretching credibility that they will want to look back to review that in 30 years time, other than in embarrassment or in terms of the generality of how they have developed.

It is similarly absurd that today 90% of people assessing the skills of aspirant hairdressers do so by writing down their observation of a haircut and if they do take a picture, it has to be downloaded, printed and then attached into the relevant section of a paper portfolio. The other 10% just get out their mobile phones take a picture of the haircut on their mobile phone, find the learner’s portfolio on the same phone, add the evidence and make a comment.

There are lots of other examples. The time and effort involved in transferring paper portfolios between different people involved in the assessment process; the car journey to authenticate someone’s evidence, when this could be replaced by simply, temporarily, allowing that evidence to be viewed by the witness and asking them to make a comment.

Similarly if you were a member of a professional body faced with a number of regulatory requirements, it does seem to make sense for you to have one electronic record that you can regularly update and use to meet multiple requirements.

A number of entries on Don Clark’s blog acknowledge that e-portfolios can serve this purpose in relation to vocational assessment.

The challenge is to find a way of making the distinction between this sort of e-portfolio and the one that Don rightly attacks. I have no easy answer other than to say that the word e-portfolio will now be virtually banished from my lips for fear of being misunderstood.

Over engineering learning computer solutions?

2011-03-10T01:38:00.000-08:00

I would guess that there are still software engineers and developers who harbour the ambition of engineering the human out of more and more processes. You often hear the retorts that a process would work really well, if only people were not involved. Doubtless there are people too, who would like to be engineered out of particularly tasks and procedures to a point where everything is automatic. But is that really a desirable objective?

The car is now massively advanced from the days when cars had to be cranked up to start by hand. You could imagine we will get to the point where it would be possible to point our car at a destination and, with a combination of satellite navigation and automatic controls, get to where we want to go almost without thinking. Is that really what we want? Isn't part of the enjoyment of a car journey and what captures our interest having to make decisions.

Making decisions can therefore be good and it is important to remember this when engineering computer-based learning solutions. Take e-portfolios for NVQs as one example. There are some systems that in essence make the decision for the assessor, if you have this and this, the following is automatically satisfied. There are others which require an assessor to make a genuine judgement. From a learning pedagogical perspective and in terms of motivating the assessor and learner the latter approach must be better. Providing helpful tools and guides is good, as is removing unnecessary paperwork but if we are over-automating any learning process we are in real danger of turning off all those involved in the learning journey.

Part of the creativity in developing computer software for learning lies in managing that difficult balance, between automating processes to reduce what the learner has to do but not to the extent where the learner becomes disengaged from the whole process.

Jamie pays attention to Education

2011-03-10T01:14:00.000-08:00

So, yes, it is all artificial and unreal and, yes, there would be few other schools with resources like this and the capacity to bring in top people in their profession, but there is something about this programme that means it is authentic. This week David Starkey’s genuine and successful attempt, to find better ways of engaging with young people and the dramatic impact on a young person, of being told that they have an A plus, not least because they know it is deserved.

I watch the programme from two angles. One, as a former leader of a Second Chance School (2CS) in Leeds I am intrigued to see the parallels between that experience and what is taking place in the Dream School. Already the claims that the staffing levels at the 2CS were too large for the young people we were dealing with, is starting to look suspect. They, as does this group, needed that level of support to try and unpick what had happened to them previously in schools, so that they are enabled to start to learn again. The desire to learn and achieve that is apparent in the students at the Dream School, despite all their disruptive behaviour, was also apparent in the young people in the 2CS.

I am also interested in the use that Jamie is making of technology - or not. Symbolically Jamie’s first action in his class is to collect all the mobile phones, because of the way that the mobile was seen to be disrupting learning across the school. Computers although always seemingly available are not being used in the learning. This is, with the exception this week of the photography class, where technology was partly used, to deliver the most powerful lesson so far, in which the group demonstrated brilliant skills in producing self images.

It is a fascinating ‘experiment’ and now has me glued although I do not have to wait until next week for what comes next, because there is a blog, website, Facebook page to look at. Where shall I start?

It is time that JISC started to provide responsible leadership for the use of technology for FE/HE.

2011-03-01T06:18:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I found myself presenting a seminar on e-portfolios alongside the person tasked, for this region, with developing good practice in technology, to support the delivery of FE/HE. He produced a bamboozling presentation on the way you could use technology like google mail and other ‘free’ software to create an e-portfolio.

His diagrams were certainly confusing to someone like me with some knowledge of e-portfolios and software development and it’s only purpose appeared to be, to demonstrate that you could do for free, what nasty commercial companies were delivering for excessive amounts of money. To my knowledge, since his presentation, no one has successfully applied this ‘blueprint’ to produce a solution that is ‘working.’ In contrast one of the FE Colleges there at the same seminar decided to buy into our solution.

It would appear from the programme for the latest JISC event ‘Towards a New Horizon: Using Technology to deliver HE in a Changing World’ that he is still mounting the same campaign. There is a session about e-portfolios which is introduced in the following way;

‘The traditional method of assignment work submission is costly in resources and imposes constraints on staff and students alike. However, most of the workable, E-Portfolio solutions available are prohibitively expensive and often difficult to set up and administer, giving no appreciable saving in cost, effort or resources. But there is another way of approaching this problem, using existing resources and knowledge, which is elegant in its simplicity – email.’

Now I accept that this maybe an introduction to a session that someone other than a JISC member of staff is delivering. However the fact that it is has been allowed to be timetabled by JISC, suggests at the very least that this is being promoted as a worthwhile approach to the region. There is also an implication that those learning institutions that are using these E-portfolio solutions are being irresponsible with public money, not least because they do not deliver any appreciable benefits and there is a simple solution,- e-mail.

I am aware that I am in danger of prejudging the session that is about to be delivered but the notion that e-mail can accommodate all the complexity of groups, roles and permissions that are required to deliver robust and quality assured assessment beggars belief. In that process e-mail has a role to play and we use it for witness testimonies to authenticate work based evidence and confirm embedded practice. However this is not without its challenges. Spam filters have a habit of ‘disrupting’ e-mails particularly where there is a complex chain of communication and addresses.

There is a reason why charges need to be made for the e-portfolios that capture effectively work based assessment. It is because to capture that process and make it simple requires highly sophisticated and well engineered technology.

JISC would serve the sector better by recognising that, rather than by giving airtime to half baked and ill thought through proposals. To return to the theme of a previous blog it is about time they found a way of working collaboratively with companies who have been developing truly elegant technology based solutions for many years.

Turning round the Ocean Going Liner

2011-02-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

When I worked in local government we often talked about the challenges of turning an ocean going liner by which we meant the council. We imagined that it was too far big a task, indeed one that was so big that we could not contemplated really making significant changes to the way the Council operated.

I recall the moment well when it dawned on me that although I had managed to persuade TESCO to change their recruitment policies so that unemployed people were in an advantaged position in respect of jobs at their store in Seacroft, it was proving impossible to persuade the Council to adopt a similar approach.

Well we were wrong, because the ocean liner is currently being stopped and the Council’s are shedding services and jobs at an alarming rate. Furthermore those organisations that are dependent on government money, distributed through Council funding, are if anything being more affected.

It is therefore no surprise that today the leader of Liverpool City Council had this to say to the Prime Minister;

"How can the city council support the big society and its aim to help communities do more for themselves when we will have to cut the lifeline to hundreds of these vital and worthwhile groups?,I have therefore come to the conclusion that Liverpool City Council can no longer support the big society initiative, as a direct consequence of your funding decisions."

The problem is that there is a captain on the bridge with his trusty lieutenants but there is a huge disconnection between them and the engine room and as a result the boat is paralysed to the point of inaction. It is therefore sad for us to see the pressure on many of the people we have worked with in the public sector, who are now struggling to work out what to do with the services they offer both now and in the future.

A bigger bang for our buck

2011-01-31T03:16:00.000-08:00

The United Kingdom Radiological Conference is the UK's flagship scientific conference that brings together 'clinicians, scientists, radiographers, technologists, managers and other professionals to present and discuss the latest developments and challenges in diagnostic imaging and allied radiological sciences.'

I had proposed to the conference organisers that we would deliver a joint session with the Society and College of Radiographers about how the CPD online system, we had developed with them, was being used by radiographers to enable them to apply for consultant and advanced practitioner status.

I was delighted when I received the programme for the event to see that there is now to be a full afternoon session to discuss the emerging models of consultant and advanced practice, with the final presentation by Michael Fell the first radiographer to have successfully applied for advanced practitioner stastus using CPDnow.

The facility to use our CPD online system to apply for different grades within the professional body is proving a great addition and was one of the features that has attracted the interest of the radiographers in Australia.

Hacking over the Careers Service

2011-01-31T02:51:00.000-08:00

I recently spent a day with our company Chair Barrie Hopson and other leading experts in Information, Advice and Guidance learning about and experiencing the benefits of agile technology. The purpose was to see whether these group of experts could use this technology to come up with a new tool that would help deliver an effective IAG service.

Agile Technlogy is full of interestingly named techniques like 'scrums' and 'spiral waterfalls', which have ben developed apparently over many years, although I have not heard of the technique before. Except when they described this approach to building software it did seem very much like what we do. I cannot recall when we last produced a detailed specification for a project and my sense would be that all our customers would describe us as collaborative in our approach, open to change and constantly seeking continuous improvement.

It was therefore interesting to hear about the approach although frankly I am unsure that it will have helped UKCES to make the careers service more effective. This was because the organisers failed to practice what they preached. The developers worked separately rather than collaboratively and only engaged with the practitioners at the end of the day. As a result the whole day ended in disarray and whilst the developers were going on to produce somethg on their own I cannot believe that it will have any impact. An opportunity missed methinks.

Although not for us because we had some interesting discussions in relation to finding homes for our diagnotics that when on the direct.gov site were each accessed by 30,000 individuals every month.

Why JISC struggles to deliver Innovation

2011-01-31T01:54:00.000-08:00

One of the other blogs I follow is Don Clark Plan B http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ There are lots of stimulating entries because as Don says on his introductory page he now has 'enough time to attend, read, listen, watch and comment on anything I want to'. I particularly like the way he 'attacks' sacred cows e.g. the most recent one is the notion that universities justify their existence because they teach critical thinking. The evidence suggests that this is not the case. He also has no hestitation in attacking learning institutions/organisations. I made the following contribution to his blog on JISC an organisation which was set up to inspire 'UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education.'
In my experience one of the major issues for JISC is the way they relate to private companies. They do have a relationship and we have been involved in events that they have organised, but they behave as if they would prefer all innovation to be solely generated from the FE/HE sectors and ignores the way that this sector can sometimes work effectively with and through the private sector.

We have been involved in some innovative work with Huddersfield Univeristy on exploring the use of e-portfolios to make it easier for work based assessors to comment on the work of learners registered on the nurse prescribing course. It is innovative in the sense that we are genuinely exploring whether such an approach makes it easier for nurses to capture evidence and have it assessed. At the moment the 'jury is still out'. We have had some technical challenges with NHS spam blockers but looks like we have now found a way round this.

We recently responded to a JISC request to present innovative projects to their local conference but were turned down on the basis that were 'giving priority to the colleges and universities rather than the private companies.'

This approach contrasts with the one taken by Learn Direct for example, who in my experience are very effective at harnassing the skills and knowledge of the companies they work with. Indeed we have been involved in a project where three companies have been involved with their own internal team and through collaborative work produced an interesting and highly innovative solution.

JISC has a key role in developing innovative practice but they will only partly deliver this if they fail to encourage engagement with a sector where innovative practice and ideas are being developed.

Australia; final reflections

2010-11-07T06:47:00.000-08:00

In the airport about to start the 'short' journey home. So what are the final impressions. Well none of them are going to be commercial or provide an insight into educational developments and opportunities as there are too many other companies happy to feed off that information.

As a country it leaves a very favourable impression. A public transport system that is integrated and works e.g. Manley to Sydney Airport in less than a hour through a combination of ferries and trains at rush hour and always an available seat; lots of people engaged in unpaid work to support the delivery of various services e.g. Manley beach full of volunteer lifeguards who have trained long and hard to be one; a general courteous 'air' in each of the four cities I have visited. The only major drawback is the cost of living there although as I discovered they also pay alot higher day rates.

A thoroughly worthwhile trip even with the 20+ hours flying time each way.

Report on the Mahara salesperson

2010-11-06T21:17:00.000-07:00

This week was the first time I have seen someone selling Mahara in action. Indeed it is the first time I have seen a Mahara site. Well of course I have to recognise the benefits of being able to link into Moodle, which is being used by many institutions in the UK but nobody can claim that it looks great.
Anyway here is the sales pitch. Can you really thrust proprietary software when it is quite possible that compnay's owning that software will be taken over, the implication being that of course that software will disappear, leaving the learning provider high and try. Instead you can have access to open source software which you can be assured will be always be there. No mention what state that software will be in nor how stable it is you can just have the reassurance it will be there.
You can of course if you wish pay a company like the one the salesperson was representing to help implement the software and of course if you need any other services like hosting and support we will of course be happy to oblige albeit at a fee.
Seems that institutions will swopping the so called dependence on a company where there is some guarantees on the security and availability of software with a 'relationship' with another company that will be using software over which there is ultimately little control apart from the fact you know it is 'out there' which apparently better...still struggling to see how.

Can you trust your presenter

2010-11-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

I am surprised that one of the other main UK e-portfolio providers is not fully represented at this conference, given that they have a major presence in Australia. What they have decided to do instead is to trust some of their users to present their product.

One of these is the University of South Australia. The presentation starts with some understandable concerns about the ability of students to use an e-portfolio. However then the presenter launches into the challenges they faced implementing the e-portfolio. There was too much there; there were initially some technical bugs; the e-portfolio required a fast connection; it makes marking slower because there are lots of pages that need to pop up and the e-portfolio does not look like a professional tool e.g. pebbles and little kids does not tally with ongoing professional development.

Changes were then made to make it better but this seemed to be internal ones by the University rather than any changes to the product.

So what the presenter told the audience that the software was initially difficult to implement and then when it was successfully implemented the University of South Australia ditched the software in favour of open source software.

To then compound the poor presentation, the company now have an out of focus virtual presentation in which no attempt is being made to use multi-media until the end. We are just being given a static lecture.

I do not say any of this with great relish, because in my view it is incumbent on all of us in the e-portfolio business to effectively demonstrate what they offer in order to engineer the important ‘cultural’ change which will encourage more people to use e-portfolios.

The challenge of Mahara

2010-11-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have naively underestimated the power of internal technical teams or prehaps there desire to survive. All the talk here is of Mahara and Moodle. What is the main attraction of this software is that it allows the technical teams within Universities and other institutions to retain control. Of course nobody really buys Mahara, what you do is get hold of the open source software and implement it and therein lies the cost either the internal cost of your technical team or bringing in experts to help you use it.

However you would not believe it from the discussions here. As I previously reported the South Australia University are moving over to Mahara although not quite yet. When the poor lecturer was told that they were switching to Mahara; she was also told that she had to wait for a couple of terms because we have a ‘team working on it.’

What a surprise?

Again to repeat my previous comment that I will support anything that encourages more people to use e-portfolios, however I would urge that a proper evaluation takes place of cost and benefits associated with each portfolio.

Mahara like all open software is freely available that does not mean that it is free. Someone has to maintain the core software and deploy it.

It would be good to know how much that on average it is costing to implement Mahara e-portfolios in particular institutions.

Here is another question if Open Source is so great why are not major corporate bodies, with their eye on the bottom line falling over each other to use it?

Pedagogy guides technology?

2010-11-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was the first day of the e-portfolio conference here in Australia and it is literally standing room only. I cannot really get a proper feel why there is this level of interest, other than e-portfolios are coming, so we better quickly find out what they are about.

It is strange how different words only appear in certain contexts. One of the words like that is pedagogy that only appears in my experience at conferences. We have just had 'blended pedagogy' of all things.

I fully agree that pedagogy should guide technology or to put it another way technology is the servant not the master.

However what I do not get is why those who are so interested in pedagogy, seem to have such an interest in blogs when from a pedagogical perspective they seem to be a pretty inefficient way to gather evidence of competence. Why would you use blogs and wikis as an assessment tool when they are so difficult to manage?

How for example would I use this blog to demonstrate my competence even though I have been incredibly diligent about flagging what is in each blog? Maybe someone out there can help me.

A quicker way of showing what you do and having it checked

2010-10-30T17:14:00.000-07:00

I was recently challenged by my long standing group of mates to come up with a sentence to describe an e-portfolio. The implication of their question is that I inhabit some mysterious world that requires an explanation because it is not obvious an e-portfolio is.

I imagine at the e-portfolio conference later this week there will be lots of definitions being offered although I doubt if they will be as simple as the one above.

My defintion is heavily influenced by the point that I will be making at the conference which is that the key question is not what an e-portfolio is but what it can do.

Learning styles; Have you found what yours is yet?

2010-10-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

There is a constant and generally uninformed debate, that usually occurs when the exam results come out in the summer, about whether the quality of education and learning now is better than decades ago. My answer is always that education and learning is different now and in most subjects you are comparing apples and pears.

One of the major differences is that young people today have usually been helped to discover how they learn. It is quite critical to know whether you are a auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner. Unfortunately when I was at school it was one of a number of secrets that were kept from us. I also do not remember much sharing of learning objectives and course syllabuses. If there had been I might have worked out sooner that I spent a whole term being taught the wrong period of history.

I discovered my learning style totally by accident and for many years could not put a name to it. I just knew that if I wrote something down repeatedly I remembered it and that if I read lots of facts I didn’t.
It would have been nice to have known sooner although in some ways in may have not helped me as much as it does now with the widespread availability of e-learning. I recently had to lay a lawn so dipped into ‘You tube’ discovered a few helpful three minute videos and successfully laid the lawn without having to go anywhere near a book.

Powerful Learning; Ctrl C and Ctrl V

2010-10-30T16:45:00.000-07:00

If you were asked to name the three most powerful learning experiences of your life what would be they be. I would be pretty confident that few if any of those moments took place in an educational environment

I have never had any training in the use of computers. My colleagues would confirm that was pretty self evidence. However my ability to use computers was transformed when a colleague showed me how to Copy and Paste. I think it took them five minutes but it changed the way I was able to use computers.

The next key moment was on the best work based course I attended. It was a residential week long experiential course on management with little or no formal teaching. The course was built around a group task and what was clever about the course was in the way that those groups were constructed and the fact that the task was a real one. We had to develop a new structure for a council department and present it to a group of councillors at the end of the week. The revelation was this that the three men in the group got tied up in a leadership battle and produced nothing and the two women just got on with the task and of course did all the work. I can still remember the group session at the end of the course when we reflected on our experience and recognised the importance of focusing on the task.

The final experience did take place in a classroom but again the learning was produced through an experience rather than any formal teaching input. At school I was reasonably good at history. I loved the subject and still do. I arrived at a double period lesson and without warning we were all asked to produce an essay comparing Castlereagh and Canning. I was incredibly put out. How could I produce my normal five pages when I had no chance to prepare so in a fit of pique I wrote Castlereagh did this and Canning did that in a really simple structure nothing like the great literary pieces I usually produced. Of course I got an ‘A’ and in an instant I understood about analysis. Brilliant teacher that Mr Dickens.

It is a salutatory lesson and if I were to reverse the question and ask myself when I was best as an ‘educator’ I would again be thinking of key moments rather than significant learning episodes. I often say people pay me for the 5 minutes of insight.

E-portfolios like blogs are often at their best because they are ideal for capturing moments rather than the ‘big’ learning journeys.

'I don't do CPD ?'

2010-10-30T16:42:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons that I am in Australia is to speak at the e-portfolio conference in Melbourne (a sold out event), and to meet with potential partners and customers. The trip also gives me an opportunity to reflect on my own work on e-portfolios over the past decade and also inevitably on my own learning.

Reflections is a significant word to use because the process of ‘selling’ e-portfolios as a great way to capture reflections on the impact of learning on someone’s practice, is so often hindered by the fact that people claim not to know what a reflection is. It is not hard to help them recognise what a reflection is and unless they are incredibly arrogant most people do in fact reflect. Their initial response often means that it is a lot easier to say that they have attended a course, rather than identify how as a result of a particular insight on a course, or more usually a series of ‘learning episodes’ they started to change their practice.

I rarely ascribe anything positive to my early career as a social worker, it is not fashionable to either admit to having been a social worker never mind to have claimed to have learnt something from the experience, however one of the big pluses from being a social worker was the regular supervision which was all about reflection. I can’t claim to have captured all that I learnt, e-portfolios were unavailable then but what it did teach me was the importance of reflection.

Now there is a great way to capture those moments hopefully more people will recognise the CPD that they are engaged in.

Australia; another side of the world?

2010-10-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

I have just landed in Australia-it is my first visit. I remember as a child when digging in the sand or the muck there was always the chant in my head that if we dug far enough we would get to Australia. It felt like it was truly the other side of the world. As a I grew older it also started to have the sense of being that place where relatives/friends went out to and often did not come back. This is certainly less the case now, as it has become more of a tourist destination and I have only come out here for ten days. So why come?

Well part of the reason is to answer my own question. There are plenty of signs that this is the right time for the company to come here. Even before the National Broadband Project is in place Australia already has better internet penetration and speed than many countries including the UK. Indeed it leads all English speaking companies. A number of UK e-learning companies are doing well here and CPD for all Australian health professionals is becoming mandatory.

It is therefore a trip filled with genuine prospects-let's hope that I strike Gold?

Wet Signatures

2010-10-16T00:28:00.000-07:00

There are probably lots of people who are getting familiar with Vince Cable's signature as he sends out letters closing qungoes and announcing cuts. He is the new person responsible for Skills and Higher Education amongst other things.It is a large C with a dot strategically placed in the middle.

I had a discussion recently that I have not had for sometime, with some one who was insistng that only a signature is the proper guarantee of authenticity. She is not on her one. We still have various elements of the Adult Funding Agency insisting on what are called 'wet signatures' for funding claims.

It is a difficult argument to sustain when we are prepared to agree numerous financial transactions on the basis of an electronic signature, by which I mean the capacity to link an action back to a person who has been authenticated through the use of a user name and password.

So now we have a Secretary of State whose signature is easily replicable; how much can we trust wet signatures? prehaps it is time to 'move on'.

I wonder whether I can get a copy of Mr Cable's cheque book ? although that will probably be a waste of time because like the rest of us he wont use it and instead rely on electronic transactions. Maybe Department letter headed paper might be more fun?

Getting on the technology bus

2010-09-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

I have just spent a full day at the Reflections Training Academy in Bristol. It was great to see how an assessment centre operating in a vocational area not renowned for its use of technology has fully embraced the use of computers.

When I first visited this centre there was only a small IT suite and a limited use of laptops, today I visited a centre with computer suites located in between the training rooms and most impressive of all a full bank of computers alongside the student’s chill out area.

Alongside this transformation of the infrastructure of the centre is the adoption of an e-portfolio that is now used by all learners, assessors and verifiers. Reaching this point has not been easy. The training manager Carolyn Spence recently described the learning ‘journey’ in these terms.

‘Reflections Training Academy decided it was important for us to begin our journey on the “Technology Bus” and although it has been challenging with individuals occasionally feeling they would like to get off at the next stop or hide at the back of the bus, particularly at the beginning of the journey, we have continued to listen and respond to all our “passengers” with the invaluable support of the NVQnow team, who continuously improve the comfort of the ride. We very much feel all our staff are now seated comfortably on the bus along with the majority of our Learners. Although it is clear that a remaining few of our Learners and our partner employers have only just boarded the bus and are currently standing up in the aisles, we are continuing to work hard together to get everyone seated comfortably on this ever forward moving journey that Reflections Training Academy are fully committed to making a great success.’

What is clear from my visit today is that they are now transforming their technology bus from an old London double-decker into a fully equipped luxury coach. It is a great tribute to vision and commitment of the whole team.

E-assessment; now what does that mean?

2010-07-22T23:23:00.000-07:00

I am preparing for a speaking slot at the e-Portfolio conference in Melbourne, Australia and as part of my research discovered a recent report by the Government called, ‘E-assessment and the ATQF (Australian Training and Quality Framework). It took me a while to understand the report until I discovered that the term e-assessment in the Australian context, describes a very limited range of activities, ‘the predominant example of e-assessment is the online quiz.’

There are a few references to e-portfolios other than recognition that there is a ‘slow but persistent growth in the use of e-portfolios in training organisations’ but only a superficial recognition of the benefits that e-portfolios can bring.

What however is ‘common’ with the UK experience is the ‘stifling’ role often played by what in Australia are called ‘auditors’ and in the UK what are called External Verifiers. In fairness to the auditors in Australia they recognise some of their own limitations in terms of their understanding of technology but they raise the same ‘serious questions around the authenticity of evidence gathered by learners and the validity of the assessment tasks given for units of competency.’

It is time that ‘auditors’ recognised, in whatever country they work, that technology provides far more stringent auditing than the most advanced paper system because every action is date stamped in real time and linked to the person undertaking it. Indeed the major opportunity/fear that UK assessment centres recognise is how visible their assessments are now if they use an e-portfolio. It is an opportunity if they are confident in the quality of their assessment procedures or a fear if they are not.

More evidence that Generation x and Generation Y is a myth

2010-06-29T23:51:00.000-07:00

There is further evidence today that the notion that the internet is a young person’s game is a myth. Alex Burmaster speaking on behalf of UK On-line measurement company (UKOM) states in a story on the BBC news website that “There is a still a perception that the net is youth-centric but this is clearly not the reality," He then backs up the claim with a number of statistics ‘Over-50s account for 31% of the UK net audience. Men over 50 accounted for 38% of the 1.9 million new surfers. Women over 50 accounted for 15%, women aged 21-34 for 14%, while girls aged 12-20 made up 12% of the total.’

The interesting question is who is it who wants to keep this myth going. Is the world full of ‘Sepp Blatter’s’ who do not want their own ignorance of the potential of technology exposed? A little like External Verifiers who insist that the centres continue to use outdated spreadsheets of Internal Verifier activity, despite the fact that this information is automatically created by centres using electronic portfolios.

It is time people stop using age as an excuse for their own unwillingness to grasp the potential that technology offers to all people to streamline paper based processes whatever their age.

Technology bah humbug

2010-06-28T01:40:00.000-07:00

The morning after the day before despite fully accepting the drubbing of England by Germany I remain amazed by the refusual of FIFA to allow goal line technology to be introduced. The main argument for it apart from fairness, is that this technology has been successfully introduced in other sports. It is proving quite a feature at Wimbledon although at the cost of removing McInroesque rants, it works well in Rugby. The only sport where it is a small problem is in cricket but that is often due to the ineptness of the fourth umpire rather than the technology, in taking far too much time in reaching the correct decision that everyone realised much earlier.

The reason the FIFA have said that for not introducing it is that they cannot guarantee to make it available at all levels of football and all situations. This reminds me of the perverse equal opportunities argument that I have often heard in relation to technology although less so now, which is that if there is one person who does not have access to technology then no one should be able to access it, on the basis that one person is disadvantaged.

Technology can and does improve lots of different situations not least the simple ability to determine whether a ball crosses a line. The challenge lies not in preventing it's use but in continuing to make every effort to making it widely available.

Lots of inventiveness and endeavour but is it just re-inventing the wheel?

2010-06-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

In the past fortnight I have attended a couple of JISC events. I would imagine although I do not know that this organisation is another candidate to be thrown onto the bonfire of quangoes although in my view it would be a great shame if this was the case. Certainly the event in the North West was a good testimony to their ability to put a large number of IT suppliers for educational purposes and interested delegates in one place and create an interesting dialogue.

I had a very interesting conversation with David Hopps from Hargreaves Training at the event in Leeds. David is someone who is a real enthusiast for technology but in a very pragmatic way. We discussed the notion of having an e-portfolio with the ability to register candidates at the beginning, manage the learning journey and then spit out the paperwork at the end. As David succinctly put it one input, multiple interventions and one output all managed in the same system. It maybe closer than we both think.

At the event in the North West what was noticeable was the number of learning institutions who were devoting lots of resources to create technology based solutions themselves.

This is entirely laudable, indeed all systems need to be routed back to the learning experience, however you have to question whether such an investment is justified when they already lots of organisations who have invested millions of pounds of research and investment to create solutions that already work well.

I recall a conversation with another training provider who when discussing e-portfolios said we had a go at building one but after they had invested £70k gave up. At least he knew the figure, I wonder how many of the educational institutions at the JISC event who had developed or were developing their own software know how much it has cost them and their funders so far.

E-portfolios; a way of helping reduce government spending?

2010-06-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

My natural instincts are to be reticent about providing any government with information about how they can reduce public spending. I spent 25 years working in the public sector and admire much of the work that takes place. Indeed I once cheekily said that when I moved to working for a private company, that I was coming to bring the rigours of the public sector to the private sector. Nevertheless I do accept that some publicly funded programmes could be delivered more cost effectively.

The delivery of NVQs in whatever guise, be it through the Train to Gain programme or as part of an apprenticeship programme, is undoubtedly one example of where if electronic methods were properly adopted substantial savings to the public purse could be made or to put in a better way the same amount of money could deliver more qualifications.

We have recently reviewed how much it costs to deliver an NVQ and it is easy to see how significant savings can be made primarily in reducing the bureaucracy and reporting that is required to support the process of assessment and verification. Indeed we have estimated that the savings could be as much as £300 a learner. If that is multiplied by the 1.2 million candidates who are registered for NVQs each year then you are looking at a substantial saving.

I have therefore broken the habit of a lifetime and have found a way to send this information into government

What is the purpose of an e-Portfolio?

2010-05-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

I have just stumbled on Helen Barrett's blog. Helen is one of the most frequent speakers at e-portfolio conferences across the world. She is committed to the notion that an e-portfolio should be a creative reflection of and owned by an individual and as a result would struggle with the sort of e-portfolio we deliver.

There is currently on her blog yet another debate about the purpose of an e-portfolio. I have left the following entry.

Since I have been involved in developing and working with e-portfolios over the past five plus years I have watched these discussions about what is an e-portfolio with waning interest.

There is nobody who would claim that electronic portfolios are just for assessment. However if there is no possibility that the learner can easily use the content within an e-portfoio for assessment, by which I mean that the learner/individual can use the content to demonstrate their skills and knowledge, then you are inevitably faced with question of So What? It was a question that Serge Ravet grampled with in a memorable paper a few years ago.

Furthermore who is to say that assessment limits creativity. I know of many people who use e-portfolios in a highly creative way even when the end 'product' is to do with assessment.

It is time this tired argument, with its tired and unnecessary semantic nuances is put to bed'

A few years ago I presented a seminar at a conference organised by Eif-l the European Institute of e-Learning where both Serge and Helen were speakers. My paper was a joint presentation with the Royal College of Nursing and was called 'Cake for the Masses' and was designed to show that it was quite possible for one e-portfolio system to be developed to meet multiple requirements.

I used the memorable poem by Roger McGough;
'You wanted one thing
I wanted the other
We couldn't have our cake
So we ate each other.'

In the debates about what an e-portfolio is we are in danger of losing sight of the key debate about what it can do to support learning.

The Internet is at last transforming learning

2010-05-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

I recall the words of the then US Secretary Of Education Rod Paige that just having technology in classrooms was not of itself sufficient.

"It's not enough to have a computer and an Internet connection in the classroom if they are not turned on. It's not even enough to turn them on if they are not integrated into the curriculum, And it's pointless to integrate them into the curriculum if they don't add value to student performance. So our mission should be about the quality of education, not the quantity of computers "

His words were spoken at the turn of the millenium and since that time I have wandered into various classrooms and College campuses and seen little evidence that the way that the curriculum was delivered was starting to change, other than in ICT classes where you have to work very hard not to integrate computers. That is until now.

Recently I visited the new Newcastle under Lyme College building. It is a great learning environment full of space with computers located in the places where students are most likely to be. It was lunchtime and I caught sight of two young students sat at one of the computers on the edge of the cafe area, downloading from their mobile, images of the hair cuts they had completed that morning and cross referencing them against some occupational standards. They were engrossed as were the students in the salon itself who were competing a colourful interactive exercise about of all things Health and Safety.

Last week I attended as I have done for the past thirteen years the summer school music concert. The first concerts we attended usually had more polished performances by ensembles however everything has now changed. They are full of work composed by the students themsleves. Of course composed 'work' was there before however it tended to be the school heavy rock band crashing out a number. Now it was the variety of the music that was presented that was so impressive.

I asked one of the performers about her work. She explained that she had never been taught the guitar but she had found a website on Youtube where there were lots of different videos you could watch designed to help you not only learn the guitar but to compose as well.
The evening finished with the school's dance performance for a local 'Rock Challenge.' A really full on committed and disciplined performance with over 50 dancers involved. We were told that the young people involved had choreographed and organised it themselves and I was pointed towards the 'Rock Challenge' blog. It provides both a great history of how the work was created and it is also real evidence of a live learning community.

What impresses is not the technology but the learning it enables and supports.

End of Ning Free Service

2010-05-05T00:41:00.000-07:00

I could not have choreographed it better, indeed it could even look to be deliberate, the day after a posted the previous blog I receive a news flash prompted by the decision to end the Ning free service. Ning is simply a customised social network for any group of users, based on underlying technology from ning.com In its basic form, the Ning is free to set and use but lately the use of it has become more sophisticated and I have certainly seen it demonstrated as a way of creating learning environments.

The controversy now is about the fact that suddenly those who have used it in the belief that it was free are now going to be faced with charges. Ning announced yesterday that three versions of the Ning platform-Ning Pro, Ning Plus and Ning Mini will launch in July 2010 and the 'free ad-supported product' will be phased out. The charges appear to be prompted by the recognition that the maintenance and development of code is costly. 'Our shift to a paid service model will enable us to focus to a greater degree on enhancing the features, performance and services we offer to our paying network creators.'

It is also significant that the news flash I received links the end of the Ning free service with 'the new approach to personal data management by Facebook.' Keeping users personal data safe is a growing issue. Recently following the award of a government contract we were first faced with demonstrating that we met the stringent measures now set by government for looking after personal data. In this case these measures were set at the highest level because the data belonged to children under 16. We passed because underlying our NOW.net platform is a highly sophisticated tool that allows us 'to control' what individuals can do and see using groups, roles and permissions. Creating and making available such an environment does cost but the benefits it brings of ensuring that individuals data is genuinely secure are worth it.

Open does not mean Free

2010-05-02T01:20:00.000-07:00

It is now notable how many times that the Open source 'debate' comes up in discussion as those faced with making decisions about resources grapple with what choice to make about software. Open and free? almost too good to be true so what's the catch?

Well it's not free. The code might be but someone has to work out how to use it. It is just that you swop the dependance on a software house to dependance on the people who develop the code for you. There are lots of companies making good money from deploying and maintaining open source software.

It is a challenge to this company to ensure that all the various pieces of code in our core platform all work effectively work together. No matter how well we test and plan there are sometimes those unseen consequences from implementing one change on other parts of our solutions. Last week it was the new pivot table for reporting impacting on the editor tool we use but only for those using Firefox and Safari.

Fortunately it was a quick fix because we work within a secure and a restricted environment with respect to the code we use. It is difficult to imagine the challenges, where there is the possibility that the code that you have grabbed from a more 'open' environment, you then subsequently discover has changed when you need to make a fix.

It is not surprising that there is a growing trend of organisations who 'purchase' the creation of a solution using open source software are then reluctant to make it available to others.

We support the principles that underlie the Open source movement and our customers frequently share and benefit from changes to our core NOW.net platform that others have requested and funded. However we also recognise that our customers require quaranteed reliability and stability which is why we will continue to be .net and meet that relatively small cost.

Growing interest in e-portfolios

2010-04-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

There are a number of encouraging signs that the interest in e-portfolios is growing particularly with respect to how they can support vocational learning.

JISC has just announced that they will be funding a number of research projects about e-portfolios. One is a study to 'identify,explore, document and analyse examples of large scale e-portflio implementations' with the outcome to produce models and guidance materials on effective practice in this area 'aimed at different stakeholder groups.' The other project aims to recruit ten people from the HE/FE sectors with varying experience of e-portfolios to review how e-portfolios are being used and make recommendations for their future use.

We really welcome these developments both because e-portfolios is an under research area and because anything that empowers centres and organisations, to make decisions about what is the best e-portfolio for them is welcomed

Electronic v Written Submissions

2010-04-21T02:40:00.000-07:00

Members of two of the health professional bodies with whom we work have recently been audited by the Health Professions Council (HPC). BAPO the British Association of Prosthetists and Orthitists have been praised by the HPC for doing particularly well in terms of their CPD audit. Early indications are that the majority of the radiographers who were asked to produce a submission to the HPC elected to do so using CPDnow, the e-portfolio we developed with their professional body SCoR.

This should be no surprise because the new HPC report template we have developed with SCoR enables their members to access their on-line CPD record, select the record(s) of their CPD activity that they wish to include in their HPC submission, select Run Report and their submission is instantly compiled ready to be e-mailed or sent to the HPC.

Outputs v Inputs

2010-04-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

There is a growing recognition that e-portfolios provide a great way to capture evidence of the impact of professional development on practice. Many regulatory and professional bodies recognise that counting hours engaged in Continuous Professional Development (CPD) activity on its own means nothing. What matters is the impact of this activity on the development on professional practice.

Such a view would appear to be self evident yet there are those that still cling solely on to counting hours as the key measure for assessing professional practice. It maybe because they are tied into existing and often cumbersome Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are designed to count and 'control' inputs; however there is increasing evidence that counting on it's own is no longer sufficient for regulators and professionals.

The Institute of Continuing Professional Development, in its commissioned research project Regulating Competencies: Is CPD working? found that, although many professions use a combination of both the input and output systems, they are increasingly turning to the more effective output systems.

E-portfolios and the new Qualifications and Credit Framework

2010-04-21T01:23:00.000-07:00

This important change to the way qualifications are structured is imminent and it provides a great opportunity to all e-portfolio providers to help assessment centres with this fundamental change in the way that qualifications are delivered.

Fortunately when we first designed our e-portfolio we had contact with one of the organisations that was assisting the government to determine whether a credit based approach to qualifications was feasible. Our judgement was that this approach would be introduced and therefore from the outset we constructed our e-portfolio so that units from qualifications are selected.

The introduction of the QCF therefore does not fundamentally challenge the way our e-portfolio operates. However we have always wanted to go further than this in order to ease the introduction of the QCF.

We notice that some e-portfolios are already providing the ability to calculate the credit values,in order to determine whether the qualification is an Award, Certificate or Diploma. Although we think its important to do this, the key point where we can assist Centres most is when they are 'constructing the qualification' for each learner using the Rules of Combination. They need to know what Units can be combined to create a qualification at the appropriate level and with the necessary number of Units.

Our developers are already working on this and should have something ready in the next two weeks. As with all our developers it will be designed in such a way to be able to accomodate any rule of combination. Exciting times and ones that we enthusiastically welcome and support.

Horses for Courses

2010-04-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

I have just been watching the presentation by Martin Douglamas the founder of Moodle Pty Ltd at the Educ Berlin event in December last year.

I sense from his presentation that he would find the debate about whether Moodle can be used to create an e-portfolio as being pretty irrelevant. He is very focused on what he believes to be the main purpose of Moodle which is to act as what he calls a 'Course Management System' and he appears very relaxed about other features being linked to it whether they are developed using proprietal software or based on Open source software.

What comes across very powerfully is the fact that, what he calls his guiding star, is learning and that his commitment is to creating learning environments that are flexible and adaptable and which help encourage purposeful and appropriate learning behaviour.

There is lots here that chimes with our approach.

Interoperability

2010-04-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

I recall attending an e-portfolio conference where as a diversion from some of the less interesting contributions, we decided to decided to count the times that interoperability was mentioned. They were numerous and often the word was used to indicate the likelihood of computer systems failure, much in the way that people referred to the Millennium bug.

Our experience is that substantially interoperability is a myth. We have successfully created secure connections to any other database to which we have been required to make a link. Indeed we currently have in place sites where data is being transferred between multiple databases.

The trend is likely to continue because my colleague Robert Kimoff who is an expert in these matters recently reminded me that with respect to linking to systems that use open source software his view is that systems like Moodle appears to understand the evolving standard SCORM manifest. The manifest is simply an xml file which defines the learning experience and has resources and other supporting files, associated with it. NOW.net our platform has the ability to import just about any type of xml file so we would be able to handle a bridge between Moodle and NOW.net.

If the software is good enough then it can interconnect both ways.

A 'proper' e-portfolio???

2010-04-13T03:28:00.000-07:00

I recently found an interesting entry in Derrin Kent's blog http://derrin.biz/?p=88 What is Mahara (versus Paperfree, eNVQ, et.al.)? NVQnow is presumably in the list of et.als.

It is thoughtful contribution designed to help people faced with the decision about whether they should 'buy' one of the current solutions that are in the market, or alternatively use on of the 'Build your own kits' available through open source software like Mahara.

Clearly I need to declare an interest at this point as a provider of one of the solutions however I would also want to assert that we embrace many of the principles that underpin the Open Source movement. The users of our software all become members of the NOW.net community which enables them to have access to any developments of and enhancement to our core platform usually at little or no cost to themselves.

We therefore come to the debate as interested contributors rather than people who just wish to defend our position.

In his blog Derrin makes the bold declaration that TDM is 'now running an adaptation of Mahara (using Moodle and a special patch....which allows training providers (colleges or independent) of Evidence-Based Qualifications to create NVQ/QCF (or similar) template "pages" into which candidates can submit evidence for QCF units (of NVQs).'

There are other features like to the ability to add more content to enable the learner to 'show-off' their extended and reflective learning; submit pages for recording outcomes in Moodle's gradebook; make those pages available for assessment and allow learners to form '"walled garden" communities of practice'.

The blog finishes with an important reflection on who owns the e-portfolio. Clearly in Derrin's view it is key that the e-portfolio is owned by the individual. Whilst we recognise that is desirable, we have had to grapple with the notion of how can that work fully in an environment, such as the one created by QCA and implemented by awarding bodies, where quite rightly there are clear rules about who is allowed to do what and when in relation to the assessing and verification of evidence. In our experience awarding body endorsement of e-portfolios is not a random exercise, it is one that is based on their recognition that an e-portfolio delivers a secure and appropriate audit trail.

There are also some other real challenges to the open source approach that Derrin alludes to by implication if not explicably. Firstly although it is open source this does not mean it is free, something he tacitly acknowledges 'it is free of cost for anyone who has the skill to implement it...and we offer very reasonably-priced, zero vendor lock-in support services (hosting, configuration, end-user training, consultancy, etc.) for those who don't.'

Anyone who has been involved in assessment knows it is a movable feast and that any system that is designed to reflect best assessment practice has to be constantly evolved and changed. It is good that special patches have now been created but whose responsibility is to maintain and change these? Furthermore what are the guarantees that the core code will not be changed in a way that affects it's capacity to deal with any new changes in assessment.

It is indeed arguable that the principles that underpin the development of open source code are counter intuitive to the regulatory environment that is required for assessment that can be fully quality assured. When we have been involved in co-operative ventures with company's that use open source software, their reluctance to produce the sort of admin tool that enables us to control who does what using groups, roles and permissions is notable. The same tools that we use to keep the user experience as simple as possible.

This is where we again we agree with Derrin for we are as focused on the individual as he is. What matters however is that the user experiences an e-portfolio that is both fully accessible and meets their needs.

Smart use of technology for assessment

2010-03-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

We may sometimes believe that we are the experts in the use of e-portfolios to support assessment but frequently we are overshadowed by the skills and knowledge of the assessors and verifiers who use our products.

Michael Reichart is an assessor with DEFLOG VQ Trust based in Germany. I first met Michael when we jointly delivered a seminar at the ITeC conference in Brussels about the use of e-portfolios to support the assessment of army personnel. At that time Michael was making creative use of his i-phone to capture his assessments.

I have now discovered he has found a great way of combining a notebook; smart phone and a video editing programme to capture evidence and then store and cross reference it in the e-portfolio.

He films the assessment with the use of smart phone(MP4); however he stands back away so as not to interrupt or lead the learner perform the assessment task and to avoid bothering the learner with questions during the assessment, as more often than not due to the limitations of the microphone the learner is not often heard. So to overcome this problem he simply films the learner with the sound off. Once the learner has finished what they are doing then they are ready for the feedback. Michael will then quickly load the film onto his notebook and show the learner the film. During this film he will ask him to explain what he is doing and ask questions and this is recorded with the smart phone. Then with the use of a video editing programme the film and the recording the video is then uploaded onto the e-portfolio, cross referenced against the standards and the assessment is complete.

Great assessment practice because it allows the candidate to demonstrate that he knows why he has performed the task in the way he has and gives time to the assessor to reflect upon and capture what he has seen.

NVQs and added value

2010-03-31T05:20:00.000-07:00

The frequent assertion that all that NVQs do is to recognise existing skills and therefore they are of less value rather than promote and assess new learning is mixing up the means with the end.
It must be good that people's existing skills are recognised especially when the skills belong to people who are often prone to under sell the skills they have; 'the I just-do syndrome.'
How that acquisition and recognition of skills is paid for and rewarded is a different question. There is a strong case for variable tariffs especially where technology is used to effectively track learner journeys.

Generation X and Generation Y a new urban myth

2010-03-31T04:45:00.000-07:00

Mark Weber ex MD of Atticmedia was the first to explode this myth for me. There is very little evidence that the so called digital natives are better and more comfortable at using technology. They may use it more but not very well. The latest letter from my daughter's school requests that we talk to her about using Facebook appropriately because of a number of issues at school.
The digital immigants or Generation Y may have some reservations about technology but when they step over these all the evidence suggests that they use it very well.That is certainly our experience.

E-portfolios; bureaucratic?

2010-03-31T04:21:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Team Axia blog. The purpose of the blog is to be a forum where we can share our experiences of creating an e-portfolio to support the gathering,assessment and verification of evidence whether it be for Professional bodies or Assessment Centres. We hope you will share your experiences too. To kick start the blog we share our thoughts on a number of key issues.

There is now a general consensus that e-portfolios do reduce bureaucracy and as a result reduce the cost of delivering an NVQ. They are still a few who do not hold this view. ENTO the awarding body; not to be confused with ENTO Aberaman the Welsh football team are currently holding a series of workshops entitled 'Utilising technology in the Qualifications Framework'. One of the purposes of the workshop is to show the benefits of technology without 'the expense or bureaucracy of an 'electronic' portfolio system.'

The view of ENTO as a major influencer on the practice of Assessor and Verifiers is clearly important but it stands in direct opposition to most other awarding bodies and a growing number of assessment centres.

Rather than creating barriers it would surely be better if ENTO joined the lobby for LLUK to create a new e-assessment unit within the standards, thereby offering practitioners who are working effectively with e-portfolios a chance to have their skills recognised.