1. 2013 Eportfolio Forum
Digital Identities, Footprints and Networks
University of Canberra, 3 October 2013
The session will begin at 9.45am AEST
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9.50am Keynote: Prof. Phillip Long
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10.30am Opening Speaker: Dr Alan McAlpine
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2. ePortfolios in the New World
of Learner Driven Pathways
Prof. Phillip Long
Exec. Dir., Innovation & Analytics
Dir. Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
School of Information Technology & Electrical
Engineering
October- 2013
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
3. Robert Reich
Chancellor‟s Professor of
Public Policy at the
University of California at
Berkeley, was Secretary of
Labor in the Clinton
administration.
Black Monday, October 19, 1987
6. But the Public See Tertiary Ed For
Professional Job Training
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
7. “While technical and job
specific skills have sufficed
in the past, it is increasingly
being accepted that the
worker of the future will
need a more
comprehensive set of
competencies, “metacompetencies” such as
M. McMahon, W. Patton, & P. Tatham
http://www.blueprint.edu.au/Portals/0/resources/DL_life_learning_and_w
ork.pdf
8. Universities Lag in Uses Technology
2012
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
11. More than once a day
80%
70%
60
%
40%
S
martphone
Tablet
Notebook
30%
20%
10%
0%
LMS
Record lecture
Ed Apps
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
13. Main eLearning Systems @ UQ
Learning Management System - Blackboard
Text Matching & Marking - Turnitin
+ ECP & iTunes
Lecture Capture - Echo
Virtual Classroom - Adobe
14. Digital Learners & Their Gadgets
2011 - 98% of UQ students own a smart device with WiFi and a
browser
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
15. At Place-based Campuses:
30000
more students are onlineBlackboard
People on
People On Campus
than on-campus.
22500
UQ 2012
15000
7500
M
on
Tu day
W esd
ed
a
ne y
Th sd
ur ay
sd
Fr ay
id
Sa ay
tu
r
Su day
nd
ay
0
More staff and students use UQ’s
online learning system each day
during semester than come to
campus
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
16. The Rise of Lecture
Capture
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
17. Lecture Capture
@UQ: Any classroom seating 50 or
more students is auto-recorded
With lecture capture we are engaged currently in
a massive “distance learning project” – delivering
online education every day that is totally devoid
of good learning design.
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
20. High Impact Practices
(National Survey of Student Engagement--NSSE)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
First-year seminars and experiences
Learning communities
Writing intensive courses
Collaborative assignments
Undergraduate research
Global learning/ study abroad
Internships
Capstone courses and projects
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
21. Participatory Culture of the Web
How do we make classroom learning more like participatory
culture?
• Features of participatory culture
o
o
o
o
Low barriers to entry
Strong support for sharing one‟s
contributions
Informal mentorship,
experienced to novice
Members feel a sense of
connection to each other
Jenkins, et. al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory
Culture
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
22. The Post-Course Era
End of the era of the selfcontained course as the center
of the curriculum
“The fragmentation of the curriculum into a
collection of independently „owned‟ courses is
itself an impediment to student
accomplishment, because the different courses
students take, even on the same campus, are
not expected to engage or build on one
another.” (AAC&U, 2004)
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
23. US student‟s have been moving
across schools, seeking their own
pathways has decade
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
24. ePortfolios
& authentic
learning?
•Real-world relevance
•Ill-defined problems
•Diversity of outcomes
•Applied across different subjects
•Opportunity to reflect
•Seamlessly integrated with
assessment
What‟ the point?
…Develop habits of mind that are useful for managing chaos
and complex thought with increasing effectiveness.
contingency thinking
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
25. Of course the problem with
• There are so MANY of them!!!
portfolios?
33. A good start but something‟s
missing
• The mechanism for badging is
o
o
o
o
Institution independent
Linked to verified issuer
Link baked into badge
Owned by the learner
BUT…
How do we
really
capture the
richness of
34. What is the Tin Can or Experience API
(xAPI)?
• Tracks experiences, scores, progress, teams,
virtual media, real-world experiences (not just
completions) – the learning activity stream
• Allows data storage AND retrieval (ex. 3rd
party reporting and analytics tools)
• Enables tracking mobile, game, and virtual
world experiences
• And it’s open source!
35. Key Concept – Activity Streams
• Format: <Actor> <Verb> <Object> (I did this)
o
I (actor) completed (verb) the circuits course
(activity)
• Allows reporting of experiences, not just
completions
o
o
o
Nikolaus posted a photo
Nikolaus liked a photo
Nikolaus commented on a photo
43. At the Program
Level
• Degree
Profiles
http://www.luminafoundation.org/publications/T
he_Degree_Qualifications_Profile.pdf
The Degree
Spider Web
44. •
•
•
•
xAPI statement (actor, action
verb, object): “I did this”
Open Badge (issuer, owner,
assertion, evidence): "She can
do this”
Portfolio: (repository of data
supporting the generation of
statements and badges -and to
collect them): "I can do all
?
these things, and I can prove it”
Learning credentials, owned by
& in the hands of the learner!
45. Where will the traditional school,
TAFE, Uni be in this ecosystem?
The Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology
83. Thank you for attending
• This session was recorded
• The recording will be available from the
ePortfolios Australia website
Notas do Editor
On Monday Oct 17th, Robert Reich appeared on the morning Today Show in the US. He was asked “whether the stock market was due for a major correction?” He clapped his hands and said “Of course- it could happen any time now; indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if it dropped 500 points today.” That would be the equivalent today of a 2,800 point drop or 23% of the market’s entire value. And is precisely what happened – a more than 500 point drop in a single day. He later said that for the next six months his phone didn’t stop ringing – everyone wanted to know what was gong to happen next, and they were more than happy to pay him to make the ‘next big prediction’. He tells finishes this story by saying “But do you want to know the question nobody asked me? No one every asked me if I had mad such a prediction before. And had they asked I would have had to tell them, Yes, as a matter of fact, I had been predicting every Monday morning for the last three years that the market was due for a 500-point correction.”
At the heart of Reich’s parable is what every punter knows – you can imagine big changes and big winnings but the safest course is to continually bet with the house – that is, betting there will be no change at all in the odds that the house will on average, win. The alternative is to bet the that the house will lose, knowing that you could go three years or longer before being proved right. For the past twenty plus years I’ve been watching, engaging, and involved with “everything e” in higher education. I’ve been directly involved in implementing the change from Gopher to Web services months after the introduction of Mosaic; I was a leader at one of the first five institutions rolling out 1:1 laptop programs when the IBM ThinkPad was new; and I was involved in the Open Knowledge Initiative – OKI – that was the Mellon Foundation funded software architecture to build educational service APIs on which a new approach to LMSs could be built – that new approach was phase two of OKI called the Sakai Project which produced the Sakai LMS. Finally, I am a colleague and I’m proud to say a friend, of Trent Batson who championed the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) that later was rolled into Sakai as its ePortfolio tool. But none of these I’m sad to say has transformed the core business of higher education. They have had their impacts, of course, but fundamental change in the academy? Not really. Robert Barr and John Tagg wrote in the Nov/Dec issue of Change Magazine in 1995 called for a transition from a teaching paradigm to a learning paradigm in university education. Two years ago Robert Barr said he’s still waiting to see a single institution make the shift. With ePortfolios we’ve been advocating their transformative potential – but the house has continually won. Today I’d like to suggest that it may be time to bet against the house, if you’re brave and can risk the consequences we might just be glimpsing a shift.
We used to think that with a good college education our work skills would be trained for life. Today the expectation is that the average worker will change jobs something like 12-15 times during their working lifetime, and change careers all together 3-4 times at minimum. Being a lifetime assembly line worker at Holden today is not a good bet.And will the academy has resisted change technology has changed the life outside of the academy dramatically – especially our students coming into it today. Something has changed. <next slide>
At UTAS learning technologies are being accessed with increasing frequency – especially the LMS.
Setting learning tools into a wider context only social networking comes close to displacing the frequency of email or LMS use. But then LMS use is for many institutions essentially required since it’s a good statistic to report to Canberra that you have all your course content online, and it has allowed departments to shift the cost of printing back to the student.
UQ has a core set of digital learning tools from Bb toTurnitIn to Echo360 to Adobe Connect.
And our students increasingly own the devices that offer them the distraction of multitasking – this is data now 2 years old showing UQ student ownership of a wifi enabled device with a browser at 98%.
A consequence of this mandate that all learning materials be included in the LMS or VLE is that we have more people engaged in learning on line at even place-based institutions than set foot on campus.
And the most significant cause for this is the spread of lecture capture – at UQ any classroom that is 75 seats or larger has lecture capture built in and implemented with an opt out policy – and students demand it. It’s convenient. And to be fair It is incredibly valuable to those learners who need to hear the lecturer more than once to get what’s being said. That may be because English isn’t their native language, or because they prefer to hear rather than read the material again to prepare for tests.But the resulting reality is that deeply campus-focused learning environments at University <click>
With lecture capture we are engaged in a massive distance learning enterprise delivering effectively online education that is totally devoid of good learning design – since it was never intended to be the primary channel for instruction – even though that’s precisely what it has become.
There are many fears about where this is all taking us. And it’s right and proper to ask if this is really where we want learning to go?One of the remarkable things about the internet is that it can and does offer a way for people, when technology is thoughtfully and creatively used to do just the opposite of what it is often criticised for – that is, it can instead of isolating people in their homes or even across the table from others, which Sherry Turkle calls the effect of technology causing people to be “alone together.” – it still can in fact make powerful connections , drawing people from disparate parts of the globe to sense and feel as though they are a part of something with others that they could never have been before. Some of you may know about Eric Whitacre – a musician, and director of a choirs. He embarked several years ago in an experiment exploring the notion of a virtual choir – with extraordinary effect. <click>
Technology can be transformative – and certainly for the thousands of people around the world in Eric’s virtual choir it has been.
In the US the NSSE – the national survey on student engagement – these 8 attributes characterise the kind of pedagogical activities that are significant facilitators of learning.
Compare these with a set of attributes that describe the participatory culture of the Internet. Henry Jenkins notes how the internet engages people in a common activity, much like Eric encountered in the choir. These features like having a low barrier for entry into an online activity, doing things with strong peer support, as in many multi-user games, getting mentored online while involved in a shared experience, and critically having a sense of ownership in what you’re creating and that the thing your doing or creating matters. These are keys to the participatory culture of the web and things we’d love to have as part of our learning environments in secondary, TAFE and tertiary education.
The trend in these events is toward what Randy Bass at Georgetown university calls the “post-course” era. This describes the circumstance today where the centre of the learning in the curriculum is not longer the classroom or even the container of the course. Our courses taken together largely lack coherence – it’s more like a chinese menu of options that you have to pick 36 courses from among hundreds if not thousands taught at the uni to achieve a degree. But their relationship to each other is often tangential at best.
In fact, students have been putting courses together not just at one institution but as they increasingly travel across institutions their pathways have diverged from the single curriculum even further. This is much more prominent in those countries with more choice in learning institutions, like the US, the UK and Europe, but it is happening in Australia as well.
So you might be wondering at this point whether I’m going to talk about portfolios or not in this keynote. I was wondering that two as I put this together. But fear not – Portfolios, as I hope you’ll see, are precisely the kind of tool that is suited for a learning environment that is distributed and where the focus is increasingly on learning that this authentic – involving the real world, messy, diverse, and yet where learning carries over from one subject to the next. Portfolios can offer the habits of mind that help learners manage the chaos of their learning environments and give them an opportunity to aggregate the attributes of their acquired knowledge and the artefacts that demonstrate it.
Take IMS, the international standards organisation, who have built an inter-operability infrastructure for portfolios, defining the characteristics of different kinds. Assessment ePortfolios, for example, are used to demonstrate achievement to some authority by relating evidence within the ePortfolio to performance standards defined by that authority. Rubrics are commonly used to score assessment portfolios. For example, nursing students at a university might be required to submit an assessment ePortfolio that presents evidence that they have a set of competencies defined for nurses in their country as a graduation requirement. Departments or schools may use assessment ePortfolios for accreditation purposes.Presentation portfolios are used to evidence learning or achievement to an audience in a persuasive way. Presentation portfolios often contain instructions about how their contents should be rendered. Presentation portfolios are often used to demonstrate professional qualifications. For example, a software engineer might create a presentation ePortfolio that incorporates and shows the relationships between professional certifications she has received, code she has written, and her employment history in order to convince a potential employer to hire her. Faculty members might use presentation ePortfolios to collect materials for tenure track review purposes.These two, with emphasis on the former, are often referred to as “standardised portolios”. IMS’s description as a presentation portfolio adds the element of persuasion. Learning ePortfolios are used to document, guide, and advance learning over time. They often have a prominent reflective component and may be used to promote metacognition, to plan learning, or for the integration of diverse learning experiences. Learning ePortfolios are most often developed in formal curricular contexts. For example, a secondary school students might be asked to develop a learning ePortfolio that tracks and allows them to reflect upon how their technology skills improve over the course of a yearPersonal development planning is defined in the UK as "a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and / or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development." Thus, an ePortfolio for personal development planning contains records of learning, performance, and achievement which can be reflected on, and outcomes of that reflection, including plans for future development. This could include a learning ePortfolio, but goes beyond that, as it is often related to professional development and employment, so also possibly used as a presentation ePortfolio. This is what Helen Barrett refers to when she talks about “portfolios as story”.Multiple Owner ePortfolios are used to allow more than one individual to participate in the development of content and presentation. A multiple owner ePortfolio might combine elements of the above portfolio types, but most likely takes the form of a Presentation ePortfolio when used for such purposes as a website or group blog and a Learning ePortfolio when used by a group of learners to present evidence of their academic growth through the group collaboration. Multiple Owner ePortfolios are often used to represent the work and growth of an organization or organizational unit and, when so employed, may by referred to as program or institutional portfolios.Working ePortfolios combine elements of all of the proceeding types. They often include multiple views, each of which may be analogous to an assessment, presentation, learning, or development ePortfolio. In the terms of the NLII definition, a working portfolio is the larger archive from which the contents of one or more ePortfolios may be selected. The whole of a working ePortfolio is generally accessible only to its subject, while views are made accessible to other individuals and groups.
IMS separates out the different kinds of learner data in this diagram with the yellow circles those parts that are in scope for their view of what is pertinent to an ePortfolio
A more systems oriented diagram from IMS shows that they describe learning interactions as components, here referred to as LIT Enabled Provider/Consumer tools that engage learners in a set of activities – the yellow punch card shape container – that generate learning ‘events’ on the one hand and, with my literary license I’ve added to it a store for the artifacts that we commonly put into a portfolio. On the right most side of the slide is a set of consuming tools that process or manage the data that have been put into the analytics store – doing predictive analysis or adaptive learning or reporting or content curation.
But these solutions are notoriously difficult to build, implement and maintain. They are heavyweight answers to the portfolio requirement. There are some very good commercial products and well as increasingly sophisticated and powerful open source projects that offered portfolio services to one degree or another. But they remain big, usually enterprise IT costly solutions. And they retain the learner data and artifacts often in an institutionally situated and controlled setting.But remember the light weight, distributed participatory nature of the web and web applications?
Enter into this fray one of the most intriguing developments in more than a decade. And that is the advent of the architecture known as open badges. The Open Badge architecture provides a way to engage in activities that result in an artifact, the badge to recognise that activity. If the steps needed to earn the badge are successful a badge issuer can recognise this and provide the learner the badge with a link built into it that connects the badge as representing the achievement to the evidence for it. Lastly the learner needs to put these tokens of achievement somewhere and the third part of the architecture supplies that need with what the Open Badge Architecture calls the Mozilla Backpack. Lets look more closely at how this works. <click>
A learner is at the center of it all. Now THAT’S refreshing isn’t it? <click> There are different badges the learner can earn that are issued by different organisations or groups. These recognitions of achievement are stored in a backpack but can be displayed on the web, or in social networking sites that you may belong to line LinkedIn or Facebook or Wordpress or Tumblr or even your online CV and increasingly directly on the employee pages of your employer.Each badge has metadata that describe it – it’s title an image that represents it, a description, a set of criteria for achieving it (though this is still optional) the name of the issuer and a contact to that group, an issue date – when was it earned? – potentially an expiry date – after which is it is no longer valid – and finally a link to the evidence that justifies it being issued in the first place that is authorised and secure.
Who’s issuing badges? Lots of non profits and businesses, but sadly still too few educational institutions. That’s not too surprising since the badging movement largely arose outside the school yard – in the informal or personally structured learning environment. <click> Only a handful of Unis are badge issuers today though that number is rapidly growing.
What’s not to like?
The key to this is that the learning organisation can define the verbs it wants. It can make up its own ontology. There are set that you can start with from the Experience API community, but you can make it as rich and granular as your needs dictate.
The Experience API (xAPI) and Learning Record Stores (LRS) serve the primary purpose of documenting and retrieving learning experiences from arbitary learning environments. Each "experience" in a LRS refers to one event in the learning process. Therefore, it provides an overview about what people have developed their knowledge, skills and competences. These events can be as simple as "accessed a resource", "watched a movie", "played a game", "passed a test" or "visited a location". They can also cover more complex events such as "completed a course by passing all necessary tests with 60%" or "Visited all waypoints of a treasure hunt", and even complex meta processes "passed all courses for a master degree and applied the concepts in professional practice" might be included as experiences.
Serge Ravel from the EIfEL goup that develops supports and promotes ePortfolio and Identity concers in Europe and sponsors the Europortfolio group has done a massive amount of work in this emerging area, along with his colleagues in the EU community. He’s described this eloquently in the July-August Europortfolio Newsletter. There are three axis represented here – the collection of portfolio contents, their aggregation into meaningful constructs, and what has been missing to date, the granularity of the constructs.The Experience or Tin Can statements – the tuples of subject – verb – object described before are facts <click> that are the elemental components of skills <skills> which taken in sets can describe competencies <click> that ultimately reflect mastery. In this sense the collection of facts represent that the “Learner has done this” The skills describe not what has been done, but what the learner can do.A competency reflects not what the learner can do but with this knowledge and skill what she can achieveAnd finally her mastery is connotes that she can manage the what is required to succeed and excel in a particular domain.The Tin Can or Experience statements focus on what you did (may be just once) and do not imply what you will be able to do in the future.Open Badges focus on what you can do and assert the fact that you will be able to do it again, now and in the future —for the duration of the Badge, if it has a limit in time.
With a grant from the federal government, Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) designed a competency-cbased bachelor’s degree. Unlike “accelerated” three-year degree programs that squeeze four traditional years of courses into three years by offering additional courses on nights, weekends, and summers, SNHU restructured the entire curriculum of its residential bachelor’s in Business Administration to fit four years’ worth of competencies in three regular college years. Faculty members came together to identify the competenciesof the program and determine the appropriate sequencing. In some cases they eliminated duplicative competencies; in others, they intentionally re-exposed students to competencies to ensure greater mastery. In the process, SNHU removed an entire year’s worth of time and cost (up to $40,000 for the student). Students in this program score as well or better than their counterparts in the traditional four-year program.
A degree profile concretely describes what is meant by each of the degrees addressed. This effort is in no way an attempt to standardize degrees. Nor does the Degree Profile define what should be taught or how instructors should teach it. Instead, the Degree Profile describes student performance appropriate for each degree level through clear reference points that indicate the incremental and cumulative nature of learning. Focusing on conceptual knowledge and essential competencies and their applications, the Degree Profile illustrates how students should be expected to perform at progressively more challenging levels. Students’ demonstrated achievement in performing at these ascending levels creates the grounds on which degrees are awarded and the record of their performance constitutes the ePortfolio of their life-long learning journey.
Where are we going?
Finn, Alfred C. [architect]; Cato, Lamar Q. [architect];. (June 14, 1938). Architectural drawing of tower entrance to the Roy G. Cullen Memorial Building. University of Houston Buildings. Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Retrieved from http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/p15195coll3/item/245