Recognition of Prior Learning by e-Portfolio

Background

When I was working for my (now outdated) Certificate IV Trainer and Assessor (TAA) qualification, I went through the exercise of assessing a portfolio of evidence against a national qualification. Strangely enough, I have never assessed any student’s portfolio of evidence for the same purpose. But I wondered what creating and submitting a portfolio of evidence was like from the student’s point of view. Added to that, I wanted to see if it was possible to submit such a portfolio entirely by electronic means, rather than (as I have seen others doing) submitting three large lever-arch files crammed full of paper.

The short answer is “Yes, e-portfolios can work”. The rest of this post describes a history of my efforts.

A Piece of Educator’s Jargon

There is a process in Australian education known as “Recognition of Prior Learning” (RPL). If somebody submits a portfolio of evidence, often based on their experience in the work place, to a Registered Training Organisation (RTO), and the RTO assesses that the portfolio demonstrates competence for the award claimed, then the RTO must award the submitter an appropriate certificate.

Subject Area

My subject area was information technology. More specifically, it was Certificate IV in Programming.

The Production Process

Following guidance others who work a lot with the RPL process, I wrote a number of web pages describing my work experiences, and set about matching those experiences against the specific “Performance Criteria” contained in the Units of Competency that constitute the award. Just as I was about to find an RTO that would accept my portfolio, the Certificate was changed, which meant a major overhaul of my portfolio. It will come as no surprise that I found doing the overhaul rather irksome, but at least it meant that the qualification would be valid for rather longer than otherwise.

Structure of the Portfolio

The portfolio was designed with the following objectives:

Navigability: it had to be easy for assessors to move their way around the portfolio
Adequacy of evidence: the evidence presented needed to be absolutely convincing
Entirely electronic

The result was a web site stored on a CD. It contained the following items:

A front page, containing links to the rest of the portfolio
A guide to the portfolio: how it was organised, with suggestions to assessors as to how they might like to use it
An “evidence matrix”, containing exactly one link for each Unit of Competency
For each Unit of Competency, a listing of all the Performance Criteria, along with links into the rest of the portfolio showing how each Performance Criterion was met
A listing of each of the work place experiences

The portfolio contained a mixture of text, pictures, screen shots, movies and links to external web sites.

I regarded both the evidence matrix and listings of the Performance Criteria for each Unit of Competency as being crucial to the organisation of the portfolio. It allowed me to check for completeness of evidence prior to submission, and it also afforded assessors a means to do their work easily and efficiently.

A Side Issue

As an educator, I assess student work against Units of Competency, and I do so quite ruthlessly. If there is a requirement for something to be demonstrated, but it is not demonstrated by the student, then I am required to not sign off on the award. As I was digging through one of the Units of Competency (ICAA5154B), I came across two things that I did not immediately recognise (Oikos, SOCCA). After doing some research on the Internet, I discovered that they were both projects that had ceased by 1997, and so could no longer be considered relevant. I approached Innovation and Business Skills Australia about this, and was told, in effect, that they can be ignored for the purposes of assessment. This was in stark contrast to what I was taught when I undertook my TAA training. This, and other issues with other Units of Competency, has left me wondering about how well Units of Competency relate to the needs of such a rapidly evolving industry.

Finding an RTO

There are a number of RTOs near where I live, any one of which could have assessed my portfolio. The first one that I approached kept on passing me from person to person, and never returned my telephone messages. This carried on for weeks. The second responded on the same day that I approached them, and I was enrolled on an information session for RPL candidates two days later.

Feedback from the Assessors

When I attended the information session, I handed in a CD with a copy of my portfolio as it then was, this with the purposes of establishing whether or not the assessors might be happy with it as a means of proceeding. In my view, the contents of that CD could not in any way be considered as being fit for assessment: almost half the evidence matrix was missing, and there was a major error in one the work place experience files. Nevertheless, the assessors concluded that I “was operating at a level far higher than [the] Certificate IV level” (their words), though they did not tell me this until much later. Being educators, and hence rushed off their feet, it can be argued that going through that version of the portfolio thoroughly would not have been a legitimate use of their time.

The assessors needed to check that the portfolio was indeed my own work. They checked with one of my clients that I performed the work claimed in the portfolio. They had also encountered another RPL candidate whose portfolio was not his own work (in other words, a fraudulent candidate), and they needed to check that I was indeed the author of the portfolio. We arranged to meet. It was at this meeting that I handed over a CD containing a complete and correct portfolio of evidence. They also revealed that the fraudulent candidate did not even understand the questions that he was being asked at the equivalent meeting.

The assessors deliver learning in a Microsoft context. I work an an open source context. This might have presented something of an issue when it came to a practical demonstration of my own competence. I required of my assessors that I perform my demonstration in my own context, to which they were unhesitatingly agreeable. As a result, I needed to use a student computer in a sandpit setting so that I could load on to it everything that I required. Fortunately, such computers were available. (For the uninformed, most student computers are locked down so hard this sort of thing is quite impossible on them.) The practical demonstration went flawlessly.

The meeting continued after the practical where we chatted about both education and information technology. I was asked for my motive in going through this RPL process, and I duly explained. They also invited me to go for a Diploma based on the evidence that they had seen on the initial CD.

And returning to the theme of having an entirely electronic portfolio, the assessors said that it was by far the best that they had seen, and that it was very easy to navigate. I had achieved my objective.

Update

In a similar fashion, I submitted a CD for the Diploma of Software Development a few weeks later. This was assessed as demonstrating competence without any further work needed on my part.

To the Future

There is a Teachers Guide on the Use of ePortfolios in Education by Med Kharbach (twitter: @medkh9). My own portfolios sit at the “Portfolio as Showcase (Product)” end of the spectrum. They were created using a simple text editor and basic image editing software, this coupled with a good grasp of HTML and CSS. For classroom usage, I would suggest the tools pointed at by Med’s post.

20th Century Expectations in the 21st Century?

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Jacques Cool (Twitter: @zecool, web site http://about.me/jacques_cool (in French, en français)) for prompting this post. It was sparked off by an exchange on Twitter about evaluating student learning in a digital age, with the key issue being identified (in Jacques’ words) as “Amount of learning, or quality of learning? 😉 I just want to avoid assessing 21st c learning with 20th c expectations and tools.”.

A View of a Metric of Learning

My own view of the value of learning is that it is something that finally rests on the judgment of the learner: “How useful or important is that piece of learning to me?”. It is a learner-centered viewpoint, and the learner’s answer is critically dependent on the learner’s own aspirations.

A Viewpoint From Assessment

There are really two strands in Jacques’ implied question: that of the human narrative (his “expectations”), and that of technology (his “tools”).

In terms of the human narrative, I feel that I cannot offer a proper answer, as it devolves to questions about the expectations of learners and educators, how those expectations evolve over time, and how that evolution is shaped by society’s wider expectations. Readers might like to consider Sir Ken Robinson in this context.

In terms of technology, I think that we come down to the strengths and weaknesses of educators. My current , and perhaps poorly informed assessment, is that it is very much like the Curate’s Egg: excellent in parts. In terms of my own practice, I will use any tool that is available to both me and my students, even if that tool is 3,000 years old (astrolabe). My preferred tools depends very much of the subject being assessed: numeracy skills very much lend themselves to being assessed using computer technology. Having said that, I am aware of other educators who, despite recognising the power of such 21st century tools, really struggle to harness them to good effect.

Quantity, or Quality

I must draw upon my own experience of learning mathematical skills when it comes to addressing this point, and perhaps the more difficult question of what is meant by the quality of learning, this last being perhaps influenced by the learner’s own capabilities. I know that there are some people who are capable of learning vast amounts of what seem to me to be apparently unrelated facts. From that viewpoint, being able to recite all Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory could be regarded as having depth. In another dimension, the learning that I had about basic numeracy at age 6 really came alive for me when I learned about polynomials 10 years later. Similarly, my learning about vectors and matrices at age 16 became fully internalised when I used it on behalf of my then employer 20 years later. We are now touching upon classification of knowledge: “Recall, Explain, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate and Create”. In this context, I see evaluation tools as being classifiable by relevance, not by age, while expectations again come down to societal values.

Finally, a Question

Ultimately, I feel that I must answer Jacques’ question with another question: Are we allowing ourselves as a group of educators to become bogged down in questions about technology and educational history when our prime focus should be on the learners who are asking questions of us right now?

Putting my neck on the block

Introduction

I have had cause recently to work with something called a Unit of Competency, specifically ICAA5154B (Model data processes). For those of you unfamiliar with the framework from which this comes, this is under the auspices of Innovation & Business Skills Australia (IBSA), a body charged with ensuring that every Unit of Competency is both up to date and reflects the current needs of Australian industry.

Issues of Relevance and of Currency

That Unit of Competency requires that learners be skilled in both Oikos and SOCCA. There are two issues with this. Firstly, both Oikos and SOCCA are areas of knowledge; more specifically, they are research projects, not skills. Secondly, both projects were current in 1995, but both have long since vanished from practical usage.

The Teacher’s Dilemma

Any conscientious teacher follows the requirements of the Unit of Competency in its entirety. We now have teachers with a conundrum: are they honest to the Unit of Competency, or do they do the right thing by their students? Individual teachers are likely to take different views on this point. (In my own case, there was a requirement as late as 2009 for learners to be able to format a floppy disk, a skill that became irrelevant several years earlier. My solution was to get them to do it once, and thereby deem them competent, knowing full well that they will never need to do it again.)

A Way Forward

I took this matter up with IBSA, and received a very positive response, giving both advice to teachers (both “Oikos and SOCCA” should be ignored), and saying that the Unit of Competency was due for review, and inviting me to become part of that review process. This demonstrated IBSA’s commitment to serving industry’s needs.

Next Steps

My own practices in Information Technology only make use of some of the bits and pieces in that Unit of Competency. As such, I can contribute directly to the updating of those bits and pieces. However, this raises the question of how I might contribute to the other areas in the Unit of Competency. How do I find out what other practitioners are doing in my industry area? How do I keep myself up to date? Two answers suggest themselves: read industry news (which I do occasionally anyway), and see what vendors are offering (a new task for me).

Watch this space!

Wow! Just WOW!

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Brad, Caitlin, Erika, Ethan, Jayden, Jordan, Jo and Micky for contributing so much to the Extraordinary Learning For A Digital Age (ELFADA) project.

Some Background

This project is two runs of an intensive course lasting four weeks. It is funded through the National VET E-Learning Strategy (NVELS). The project’s driving force (Jo) has written a detailed post about it.

The project is an adjunct to the Certificate in General Education for Adults (CGEA) course. Student achievements in the project are carried forward to their CGEA work. One of the central aims of the project was to encourage students to develop a habit of studying, and to be able to use this effectively during their CGEA work.

The first run of the project succeeded beyond all expectation.

“How Come?”

The Mechanics

Before explaining why the project so far has been so successful, it is worthwhile looking at the mechanics.

Each day’s work was structured around three sessions:

09:00 to 11:00, where lecturers present material
11:00 to 14:30, where students could work, and there was always a lecturer available to answer questions
14:30 to 15:00, to round off the day, and answer any outstanding questions

All contact with the students was virtual: there was no face-to-face contact.

What Happened

The use of a virtual environment freed students from having to be in a certain place at a certain time. One of the students had to miss parts of some sessions due to prior variable commitments. Another student was traveling as a passenger in a car during one of the sessions. The need to be inside any particular pile of bricks became void.

Students also worked to their own schedules. They performed research, undertook individual creative work, sent the lecturers e-mails, and posted on their blogs at times that suited them. In return, they understood that the lecturers would always be available during the stated hours, and that, provided it suited the lecturers’ own schedules, the lecturers would provide feedback outside those stated hours. It is a complete break from the factory model of learning.

Readers could be forgiven for thinking that the social sense was one of nine isolated individuals with very little in the way of an esprit de corps. In fact, quite the opposite happened. Despite the separation in space, there was a very powerful sense of social bonding between everybody who participated.

A Vision for the Future

What I have seen here is a radical experiment that successfully challenges the notion that “the [physical] classroom” is the only way to achieve educational success. It is a way forward for people who are physically isolated, and for whom the strictures of Monday-to-Friday 09:00-15:30 are unacceptable.

I look forward to seen this model being developed and used to great benefit in the future.

The Teacher, the Student, and the iPad

A Question

There is a discussion that seems to be becoming increasingly common among educators along the lines of “How can we make best use of e-technology [to assist with teaching and learning]?”.

The Good

It is worthwhile looking at the work of Eric Scheninger (Twitter: @NMHS_Principal, web site http://ericsheninger.com/esheninger/home) whose primary focus is on achieving effective communication with the learners, with a subsidiary focus of using e-technology to achieve that communication.

The Bad

More locally, I have been in face-to-face discussions with other educators who have puzzled over how to use the functionality of a particular e-device as an aid to teaching, learning and assessment. Fairly recently, I overheard a despairing “What devices will the students be using next semester?” – this with the idea that if the answer was known, it would then be possible to devise suitable delivery materials.

Even worse, there is view that “Because we are using e-mail [alone!] with the students, we are therefor using e-technology very effectively.”.

The Ugly

The reason is that this is bad is that it puts the focus of attention on the wrong component of the system. It flows from teachers who wish to nail down the e-technology before they start thinking of how to use it. It misses completely the reality that the technology at the start of the school year may bear very little resemblance to the technology at the end of the school year: new devices are coming out all the time, and many of today’s learning are buying and using them. Any approach that relies on knowing in advance what devices will be used later in the course is always sub-optimal, and may be very bad for the students.

We need instead to consider how we connect with and communicate with students. To list a few off the top of my head, these could include:

Their Personal Learning Networks
Web 2.0 technologies
Synchronous/asynchronous methods
Campus/mobile

We then need to be ready to exploit whatever technologies are at hand – typically in the students’ hands, of course – to achieve that communication. As teachers, we need to be prepared to accept (at least) and exploit (much better) whatever devices and patterns of use that our students present to us. The excuse that “It is a new device, I don’t [want to] know how to use it.” simply will not do!

Teachers these days have access to an enormous range of ways of finding answers:

They should have and exploit their own PLNs. (“You haven’t got one? Why not?”)
There are search engines available, not limited to just Google, Ask and Wolfram Alpha, but also including the “search” box included on many web sites
Ask the other students
Go to the manufacturer’s web site
And as a final resort, “Read The Beautiful Manual!”.

If teachers are not modelling these behaviours themselves, how can be expect our students to function effectively in the coming decades?

In Conclusion

Teachers often talk about teaching students about “learning how to learn”. I can now say “Physician, heal thyself!”. Unless we ourselves learn how to learn to use these new devices, we are failing in our duties to future generations.

Old teachers, new technology

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Santtu Toivonen (Twitter: @touqo) for prompting this post.

Santtu tweeted “Any evidence or studies that the younger generation of teachers is more willing to adapt their teaching to fit new technologies? #edchat” which generated a fairly long exchange of tweets between him and me exploring a number of ideas, this helping me to clarify my own thoughts.

Initial Remarks

I will assume that all readers are familiar with the phenomenon that the ability to learn decreases with age. I will not explore this point further.

I will however mention an owner of a training organisation, in her 70s, who understands new technology very rapidly, and a lecturer in his mid-30s for whom using technology is somewhat difficult.

What I Learned

As a teacher, I will use the technology that is available, best suited to the learners’ needs, and which I feel I can use effectively. At one extreme, this could be two rocks to sit on, a stretch of sand between them, and a stick to draw with. (Who knows, I may well do this one day.) At the other extreme, it could be a mobile device that became available to the public earlier that day. I am fortunate: because of my own background in Information Technology, I find new technology particularly easy to use. To give a comparable example from the automotive industry, I would like to think that when gas-powered cars first became widespread, teachers would be very comfortable with the changes in the engine.

Different people have different aptitudes for different things: some find information technology very easy, while others can find it impenetrable. Again by way of offering two extremes, I realised that I had left my teacher behind when it came to learning how to program a computer about half-way through the course – this was back in 1970. At the other extreme, I still meet local teenagers who dread such classes – this could be due in part to the teacher, but having worked briefly with such teenagers they seem to lack the aptitude for the subject. This manifests itself in an inability to follow a set of steps in the order given, for example.

Da Capo

Looking into my crystal ball, I see more changes in degree over the next decade, rather than any changes in kind. The rapid transition from mobile phones to smart phones is a change in kind, but adding more power to smart phones is merely a change in degree: the crest of the Information Revolution is now behind us.

My guess is that tomorrow’s teachers will use the technologies with which they feel comfortable, and they will tend towards those subjects for which they have an aptitude.

Pictures and presentations: an issue of size

Reflections on an Edublogs/Collaborate Session

It was my pleasure to co-moderate a serendipity session where one of the topics was the large size of some PowerPoint files, and what to do about it. Jo Hart’s thoughts on the same Edublogs/Collaborate session are at http://johart1.edublogs.org/2012/02/20/edublogs-serendipity-webinar-overview-four-topics/.

I was moved by the difficulties of one of the participants to write a Google document about how this issue could be managed. It is a public document, with readers invited to add their comments for improvement, or they can send them to me via an e-mail link embedded within it. I have so had two very valuable contributions from readers; they are credited in the document. (For the sake of security, I am the only one able to edit it.)

I first came across Google documents years ago, but I had no cause at the time to use them. It was not until relatively recently that I started using Google documents, creating them as and when needed for some or other purpose, whether it be education (as in the example above) or business. I felt immediately at home when I first started using Google documents.

Time Management – An Alternative Viewpoint

My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Sweetie Berry (Twitter: @SweetieBerry, web page http://www.sweetieberry.com) for prompting this post. She shared with me a link to a web site which is (in her own words) “geared to help ADD high abilitied people (all ages) learn to use 7 minutes at a time to prioritize time to organize how they are effective in their plans of action, choices.”: http://www.the7Minutelife.com. This fired my grey cell into thinking about the whole issue of time management, which I find to be a somewhat peculiar phrase.

First, Some Groundwork

Before developing an argument, I need to lay some foundations from which I will be arguing.

Time is Finite

Whatever the time management experts say, we all have exactly 86,400 seconds available to us every day. Time is incompressible.

Of Goals and Tasks

We all have goals. Some goals are minor, such as having clean teeth after a meal, while others can be major, such as completing a research project. We achieve those goals by undertaking and completing tasks, such as using a toothbrush or writing research papers.

Continuous Choices

I now raise an idea that seems to be much neglected: the notion of “continuous choice”. This may need some explanation. By continuing to read this item, your are making a choice to keep reading: this is a choice that you keep making for as long continue to read. There any number of things that might change that continuous choice, such as

You reach the end of the item
Your telephone rings
You have a sudden and great urge to visit the bathroom
The device that you are using to read this item runs out of power

The same idea applies to driving a car on a long journey: anything could happen to change your mind to keep driving, including

Desire for a coffee break
Having a flat tyre
Needing to refuel your vehicle

These are decisions that you take continuously, and largely unconsciously, but they nevertheless control your actions on a moment-by-moment basis as you respond to the varying priorities of your own consciousness.

Da Capo

What we have here is an issue of task management, where we change the task of the moment to meet different goals. Whether or not we decide to switch between tasks is a function of the relative priorities of the goals at any given moment (“continuous choice”). The phrase “time management” is something of a smoke screen, merely reflecting the amount of time that we allocate to any given task, while obscuring the issue of goal prioritisation.

My Own Daily Goals

There used to be days when I remembered in the evening that I had forgotten to do something important that day. It might be to call a client, or pay a bill. To overcome this, it is now my habit to write a “to do” list at breakfast time, when my mind is usually least cluttered. It usually fits comfortably on a small “Post-it” note, measuring about 75mm square. I then refer to it throughout the day, and somethings think, “Woops, I’m glad I wrote that down.”.

“You Are REQUIRED to Attend this Time Management Course”

We now come to the classic case where time management is seen by some management teams as a “universal panacea”: they perceive more effective time management as a means of squeezing yet more work out of staff who are already fully committed to the business. At best, this is simply an exercise in futility. At worst, this can be a very effective means of demotivating everybody.

In Conclusion

Perhaps it is time to start thinking in terms of goal prioritisation and task management.

My First Cyberbully

Opening Remarks

This has been a slightly troublesome post to write, as befits the slightly troubling experience which it reports. The motive for writing this post is to illustrate a perhaps subtle approach employed by a bully.

For the sake both of protecting identities and of brevity of language, I refer to the other person concerned as “Mr Ully”. Mr Ully was the first tweeple in the slightly over 2,000 that I follow who behaved like this.

The Lead In

I was using Twitter, and had just made the acquaintance of Mr Ully, and I was going through the usual sort of exchanges that you do when engaging with somebody new. The conversation then turned to the matter of education. Soon afterwards, Mr Ully came out with this little gem:which I found somewhat confronting. It was a harbinger of what was to come.

It was a classic example of first befriending someone, and seeking to impose your own world view on them.

I have included the exchange in the panel on the right in case any reader wishes to study the exchange in detail.

Mr Ully was working very hard at undermining my confidence in my mastery of English, and seeking to impose his own understanding on me, this prompting me to tweet “has just blocked a tweeple who tried to bully me into accepting that a specialist word in my area of trade does not exist.”.

This produced this wonderful response from James Greenwood (web site: http://www.james-greenwood.com/, twitter @jpgreenwood) “@philhart Wouldn’t lose much sleep over it… you were perfectly coherent.”.

As I am a mature individual, Mr Ully’s efforts got nowhere. I also found James Greenwood’s tweet to be heartwarming.

Think of the Children

I now come to the main point of this post. Some young people may lack the developmental maturity to recognise such a form of bullying and to deal with it accordingly. This is something that I will now be very much more conscious of in the future.

<end of post>

I Want to Learn About …

A Goad

I have a small confession to make. It is this: I am thoroughly dissatisfied with the quality of educational resources on the Internet. I say this both as a learner and as an educator. But before I go on too much more with this rant, I had better define what I mean by the role of a “learner”.

What Is a Learner?

For the purposes of this post, I will define a “learner” as somebody who has a question to which they want an answer. The question can be mundane, or abstruse, or anything in between.

A mundane question could be “When is the next bus to the middle of town due to leave from here?’. A more abstruse question could be “What are good mathematical tools for modelling three dimensional surfaces, and why are some other approaches impractical?”. If you don’t happen to understand the second question, that doesn’t matter: it merely serves to illustrate the abstruseness of the question.

The first question can be answered using Web 1.0 technology, typically by going to the web site of your local bus operator. Getting answers to questions of the second type sometimes leaves me tearing my hair out.

Issues!

I have yet to find an educator who is completely happy with all the existing online educational resources that are available to help them deliver a particular course. I hear instead a cacophony of complaint: “I do not have time to prepare resources to what I would regard as the miminum acceptable standard for my students (and there is nothing suitable that I can find on the Internet).”.

Using my question about modelling three dimensional surfaces as a starting point, I was initially confronted by a mass of seemingly unrelated facts: the linkages between them took a lot of figuring out. To make matters worse, different authors used different definitions for the same thing: it was only after thinking quite a lot about what these people were saying that I finally understood what was going on. A lot of time and frustration would have been saved if I had found a comprehensive online text on this subject; from what I can find, no such text exists, and I do not have the time to write such as text gratis. (I hear mutterings of “information curation” coming from readers of this post: I will return to this shortly.) I have had similar issues in another area of applied mathematics, as well as in other areas of human endeavour. You may have had similar experiences yourself.

I had heard about Web 3.0 (or “the Semantic Web”) with its promise of linking together pieces of information, so I poked around in this area. I found a motley collection of tools which, while I am sure that they are very good at doing what they each set out to do, between them offer nothing in the way of joining up the bits of information needed to answer my 3D question, and what is more to do it in such a way as to present all the information in a digestible order.

Just to make matters a little more exciting, we have Sir Ken Robinson’s prospect of individualised learning (as opposed the factory model of teaching), this aided and abetted by learners’ love affair with mobile devices.

Questions!

I will take it for granted that today’s learner expect to be able to ask a question, and to receive a comprehensive, well-informed and lucid reply in response regardless of the nature of the question that they asked. So …

What will it take to reach that position?
Who will be involved?
How long will it take?
Who will manage the process? (Educators? Corporations? Specialists? Individuals? Other?)
Will knowledge curation require subject specialists, or could it be automated? If so, to what extent?

If you feel inclined to respond to any of these questions, I, and perhaps future learners, will be very grateful to you.