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

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 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.