Bridging Assessment with Enfranchisement

I find it refreshing to discover a teacher that thinks the same way as I do about ePortfolios. Certainly the brief statements in the blog of Tamara Malloff ring true with my own feelings.

However, I must also focus on an extract from one of her previous posts which looks towards the future:

• Portfolio or Project-based learning. While some courses will undergo initial disaggregation, the essential trend in education is toward a holistic, self-directed experience.
  


• Eportfolios will become the basis for learning design from a younger age, with a teacher-mentor and/or community mentor acting as guides and co-facilitators. Parents will be involved in the educational design of their children in a more authentic way, as they also have access to their child’s learning portfolio online. There will be less emphasis on grades, and more of an emphasis on holistic learning outcomes that students have to meet in terms of evidence and artefacts.
  


• Movement toward project-based learning in brick and mortar schools. Educators will work together to synthesis learning outcomes to plan a holistic, problem or project-based learning experience based on learner interests. The project would be co-designed with the learners, but with educators guiding the process. There will be community access and involvement, making the learning experience authentic.
  


• IDS (Independent Directed Studies) becoming more predominant initially as learners look to designing their own learning experience and schools look to credit their learning experience. However, IDS may potentialy fall off as an option, making way for holistic portfolio learning experiences based on learning outcomes, not course credits. This may include BAA (localy developed) courses as well. This will require the education system to rethink assessment, grading, and reporting.

E-portfolios for apprentices

E-portfolios for apprentices: A guide for providers and employers. Available here.

This document, published last year by Becta is an important and well collated document. However, readers will soon be aware that it does not provide a clear sense of direction, but, as many reports do, it only describes the current mass of confusions relating to ePortfolios. The fundamental error, in my view, is that the authors still see different functions for ePortfolis relating to the varied perspectives of exam-boards, training-agencies, universities, FE colleges and employers. And thus one learner could be required to hold several different ePortfolios for different purposes - what a mess!

The opening statement in their conclusion is indicative:

"This report has reviewed the existing published information and guidance on e-portfolios as they relate to apprenticeship programmes. It is evident that there is a considerable body of information on e-portfolios but very little of it is targeted at providers and employers offering apprenticeships or at apprentices themselves."

My question therefore is 'if the education providers, the employers and the apprentices themselves do not know about ePortfolios then, who on earth does???'

Perhaps the Australian work on VET should be given better publicity here in the UK? Click here for more from the Australian Flexible Learning Network

Student-Centered Learning: Target or Locus for Universities?

Trent Batson always writes both eloquent and very relevant articles and this is no exception. I quote but three brief paragraphs from a very challenging post:

"Student-centered learning has been largely a rhetorical distinction for decades - e.g., more group work or less group work - because, practically speaking, everything happened in the classroom. But now, student-centered learning has, as a concept, particularly in the past five years, come to encompass a vastly wider variety of choices, about how to design and plan for it.

"Now, the distinction is not just rhetorical, but a life style distinction: scarcity learning (content delivery) in the classroom or abundance learning (discovery) often out in real-world situations. In scarcity learning, the student is the target for delivery systems, while in abundance learning the student is the locus, the starting point, of learning.

"Higher education has unwittingly chosen to use the very technologies that have changed our broader economy to resist change in education. In the free market, in society, people are choosing to use technology inventively and boldly, but in the controlled market of the academy, administrators limit the technology options and proceed without imagination or courage, except in rare cases."

The points that Trent identifies have worried me for over a decade now. My son left High-School at the age of 16 with 11 good GCSE grades hoping to do even better at College. Unfortunately he found the lecturers dull and in his estimation not always competent in their subjects. The textbooks that he was supposed to work from were generally out of date (and expensive) and the coursework moronically boring. Invariably, in his Computing classes, he found himself supporting other learners rather than extending his own competencies. It was not long before he left in disgust.

My concern at that time was simple: "Why should we encourage our pupils to be bright enquiring collaborative learners if all their new learning skills were to be 'rubbished' by the colleges and universities?"

Fourteen years later it would appear that the same scenario still exists. Trent's conclusions need careful contemplation - and application, not only in HE but also in mainstream education.