Last week saw the first ever joint AAEEBL and CRA conference, hosted in Edinburgh between 6th – 8th June 2016 whioch was titled, ‘Understanding the essence(s) of portfolio-based learning’. For those who don’t  know AAEEBL is a US based global portfolio organisation, it stands for the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence Based Learning. CRA is a very similar UK based organisation, with it’s name standing for the Centre for Recording Achievement. So, as you can imagine this was a portfolio conference.

There were 3 key themes that emerged from the conference. These themes kept popping up in presentations and discussion :

Scaffolding
Process not product
Cultural shift/ change

Let’s look briefly at these themes below, but if you would like a more detailed look them please see the AAEEBL/ CRA Conference 2016 on my personal blog.

The first theme,  scaffolding, refers to the importance of having structure around portfolio activities. This predominately broke down into conversations about templates and frameworks for guiding staff and students without restricting them. Templates can be useful for giving students a little bit of direction without restricting their creative freedom (depending on the content and detail of the template). They are also useful because, anecdotally, students can find it overwhelming to simply be given a blank space to do with as they please. A template gives students a starting place. In relation to frameworks this was mostly a discussion about their usefulness for staff, to help give them some scaffolding from which to build a portfolio activity into their module or course, either as a single assessment or as an on-going activity to support learning via reflective practice. It was thought that this framework should be fairly high level, meaning it was not too prescriptive and not software dependant.

This actually leads quite nicely into the next theme, process not product. There was a strong emphasis on focusing on the process and pedagogy of portfolios and not the product (either meaning the final output or the technological product used to facilitate them). It is easy to become distracted by debating whether you are using the best online portfolio system. At the moment UCL use MyPortfolio, which is based on the Mahara platform. As good practice we will be reviewing the use of this platform in the near future, however whether we use Mahara, WordPress or Office 365 the process of running a successful portfolio is the same and the buttons are not as important as strong pedagogy.

The final theme is perhaps the one that has the biggest impact for portfolio, especially online portfolio adoption at institutions, and that is the need for a cultural shift/ change. This is perhaps best summarised by an analogy that was used by Trent Batson (President/CEO of AAEEBL) at the conference. He was talking about the American automobile and how it took 35 years to become fully part of US culture. First they invented the automobile and it opened up a lot of possibilities, such as people being able to commute more easily for work. But even after this it still took time to build all the roads, parking spaces and petrol stations needed. The idea was proven but it took a lot longer for the infrastructure to become part of daily culture. It is fairly easy to see how this relates to portfolios. There are a number of case studies out there to prove their potential, however the infrastructure to support them is not fully part of the culture of universities. Portfolios tend to expose the learning process which can be an intimidating prospect for both students and staff a like. However, portfolios can offer a very useful reflective space where you can use journals to do written reflections, and also reflect whilst curating examples of work you have produced that you are going to include in your portfolio. Reflection gives us the ability to stop and think about our thinking, and to understand how we can do better moving forward.

(For latest news about ABC LD, visit ABC LD blog)

Nataša Perović and I took UCL’s popular ABC learning design workshop on the road last week, on Friday running a session for the first time outside UCL. We were invited to the University of Glasgow by ex-UCL colleague Dr Vicki Dale, now with their Learning Technology Unit. Vicki had seen the workshop running in London and was keen to try it with her colleagues. 32 participants came from all four of Glasgow’s colleges and the energy in the room was remarkable and  indicative of the huge interest generated. We were pleased to see the method was as “really useful” for Glasgow participants (see below) as we have found it with UCL colleagues.

In a curious coincidence on Friday the ABC method was also used for the first time abroad, this time in Santiago, Chile. Robert Pardo, Director of the Centro de Aprendizaje, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, had taken our materials, translated them into Spanish and after a couple of Skype sessions with us ran the workshop very successfully with a group of his colleagues. His conclusion? ” It works!! “

Employability is something of the elephant in the room in higher education. We dream of students enthralled at learning new knowledge, making discoveries of their own as they develop their curiosity and strengthening their identities as they work with others.

For many of course, the reality is that they are undertaking their programme of study to get a good ‘job’ at the end. I use quotation marks because the nature of the ‘job’ may be wide and varied: it might be traditional employed work; self-employment; voluntary work; portfolio working; or a combination of these.

Jisc Technology for Employability report

Jisc has been exploring the role that digital technologies, and the digital literacies needed to use them effectively, can play in developing employability. Peter Chatterton and Geoff Rebbeck have recently produced a detailed report on the topic on behalf of Jisc. They argue that technology is often woefully underexploited when it comes to giving students the opportunity to develop their professional skills and that both staff and student skill development will be necessary to close this gap.

An introduction to the report is available or you can download the full report from the Jisc website. A webinar summarising the report will be held on 25 January 2016, with free registration.

Can you see the UCL logo in this video?

Like it or not, many of the trends, technologies and issues in learning technology often drift eastwards across the Atlantic, so it is useful to attend a US conference occasionally to hear the emerging debates.

EDUCAUSE is by far the biggest US conference of IT in education, last week attracting seven thousand IT, library and learning tech professionals to a very rainy Indianapolis. Popular topics were cybersecurity, the cloud, digital libraries, organisational change and generally managing an ever more disintegrated IT environment. Learning technologies were also well represented.

It is certainly not true that US universities are universally “ahead” of UK and European counterparts in educational IT. Many of the issues arising were depressingly/comfortingly familiar but in a few areas there were interesting differences, reminding me of the famous William Gibson quote, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed“.

A striking example was learning analytics, the monitoring of student performance, attendance and so on. In the UK collection of such data, the focus of a large Jisc project, is generally seen as benign. Some US universities however are much further down this path, trying to link performance to lecture attendance, library use, time spent in the VLE and so on. This data can be used to trigger interventions from tutors, but some questions had already arisen as to reductionism and even ethics of “profiling” students in this way. The fundamental question raised was who is this monitoring actually for; the student to improve study practices or the institution to reduce dropout statistics?

Not surprisingly several sessions attempted to identify key future trends. Number one was growing US student debt, commonly described as a “crisis”. One response may be a refocusing on competency-based education, short vocational for-credit courses from both new and traditional providers. Promoted as more affordable and career-friendly, credit accumulation enables flexible study paths (often online) and timeframes. The traditional three/four year residential degree was described as “over-engineered”, i.e. too long, too expensive, too unfocused, for increasing numbers of cost-sensitive, more consumer-minded students. The growth of “sub-degree education” and alternative HE-level providers is becoming more noticeable in the UK, too.

Whether this leads to the long-predicted decoupling of study paths and accreditation remains to be seen. In this new diverse environment universities, while still maintaining their elite status for the moment, were now “not the only game in town” and maybe not the automatic choice for a future generation of aspirational students.

Meanwhile on traditional US campuses the student demographic was subtly remixing. Students were on average older, more culturally diverse and ever more demanding of student services. Wellbeing and psychological support were becoming critical components of learning. Universities, we were told,  should take adult non-traditional learners far more seriously. I heard a frequent critique of the US trend of over-investing in glossy, expensive residential campuses at the expense of building a more agile, future-proofed and hybrid infrastructures. Distance education, it was claimed, would soon become the delivery norm in US higher education.

As mentioned above the pervasive connectivity of modern student life presents a major challenge to conventional IT services and roles as well as to academic colleagues who often struggle to accommodate the impact of technical changes, and often associated changes in discipline practices, into traditional programmes.

“Maker culture” inspired by consumer-level 3D printers, coding schools and the “internet of things” should continue to impact across the curriculum, with libraries possibly playing a major role in providing maker spaces and opportunities for self-publishing. Optimists felt all this may produce the “next-generation workforce” ready for high-tech and distributed advanced manufacturing enterprises, where creativity and design will be as important as traditional attributes

It may be a bumpy ride, though. One EDUCAUSE keynote was MIT futurologist Andrew McAfee who predicted a rapid growth in machine intelligence as the effect of Moore’s law kicked in to mainstream computing. His thesis was that in many areas machines would soon be able to make better predictions and decisions than experts, and the market are already demanding that they do.

Postscript: If this futurology seems  a bit far-fetched back here in London, note a Guardian article this week; Robot doctors and lawyers? It’s a change we should embrace. But don’t worry, a recent BBC Tech article Will a robot take your job? reassured us that we Higher Education teaching professionals have only a 3% likelihood of automation!

• 57 billion web pages
• 143 million STM journals
• 570 million essays
• 26 million students

They are aiming to improve this with a new deeper crawler called ‘Walker’, which not only goes deeper into webpages and documents but also has the ability to crawl Java script links.

• Non integer grades – estimated to arrive in  Q3 2016
• Individual extensions – estimated to arrive in Q1/2 2016

They also said that they were planning to launch a research project into how group work might be facilitated in Turnitin. As this is only at the very initial stages I would caution it will be a while until anything is produced (if ever depending on the outcome of the research). For group submissions I would still recommend Moodle assignments, you can find out more about how this works in the UCL Moodle Resource Centre wiki.