Australia; final reflections

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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 ?'

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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???

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

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

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

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?

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.