e-Porfolios (Practice) – howsheilaseesIT

What Sheila's seen this week: celebrating learning and teaching, #cetis14 , and the need for handwriting

It’s been a busy old week this week with some very contrasting experiences and perspectives on Higher Education. I’ve already written about #cetis14, and I’m still catching up with other blog posts, tweets etc about it. Marieke Guy has written an excellent post summarizing both days. I’ve already posted some of my thoughts from the first day. In between #cetis14, I attended a couple of school based learning and teaching events here at GCU. These annual events give an opportunity for colleagues to share some of the new approaches they have been developing. It was really inspiring and reassuring to see such good practice in blended learning being celebrated, and some of the bigger questions for education generally (such as developing more open, online approaches) being addressed.

Some of my highlights included getting up close and personal with the very real mannequins being used in Health and Life Science as part of medical training, hearing real stories about how staff were being told what they had been doing for years was actually this new thing called flipped teaching, and how much student collaboration and reflection is being enabled through various mechanisms including our VLE. Seeing the various ways our staff are developing new and existing ways to encourage our students to reflect, and share and build their own portfolios of learning openly is exciting but it does bring up a number of wider digital literacy issues.

One thing I (and I’m sure many others) have been pondering for a while now is profile management. From an institutional provision point of view, it seems that every system now has a cloud based student profile feature. So which ones, if any, do we switch on? From the staff/student point of view, which one(s) is it worth developing?

I know from my own experience I have a number of profiles, most of which are half complete. Take note Facebook, I am never going to fill in what school I went to or complete your profile on me (yes I know why you want that info). My network either know or at this stage in my life don’t care. Some of the ones I took time to populate – and these were work related – are no more. RIP Vizify, I did like you but now you are just a snapshot in time. LinkedIn, well again I did update about a year ago when my employment status was unclear, but I’m a pretty passive user. About.me I had forgotten about, but after doing my own visitor and resident online mapping remembered. I like it a lot and in many ways I think it is the closest thing I have to an active personal portfolio.

So if a reasonably digitally literate and tech savvy person like me is a bit fuzzy about my own use of online profiles, how do we support others, particularly our students? Perhaps this is an area where we really can work on some co-creation with students as we are all really just exploring the really effective use of portfolio/profile tools. I know of at least one new course here which is going to be doing exactly that.

I did say this morning that I wasn’t going to write a ranty blog post today, but after a huge twitter uproar (well 4 tweets), I had conceded. So, here comes the mild, ranty bit. As you’ll know dear reader, I have been experimenting with sketchnoting/visual note taking. I’m enjoying it a lot, it makes me listen and think in a different way. But it is challenging me in terms of visual representation and drawing, and also making me “write” not type on my ipad. Like many people, my handwriting has got increasingly illegible as I tend to type more than write. @louisegault pointed me to this report about the use of minecraft in schools and the implication that no-one needs to hand write any more. Well unless you want people to write like the examples in my notes below, I think we should still be encouraging our children to learn hand write, it is still a skill we need, even if at time it seems we don’t use it that much.

June doodles — some doodles from this week

Shared services in HE – what really matters to you?

Last week I attended the Jisc Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group meeting in Birmingham. As ever this was a really well organised, informed, informing, collaborative experience. It was the 31st meeting and there really was a sense of community at the event. You can get a feeling of this from the tweets from the day

Sarah Davies, Head of Change Implementation Support for Education/Student, started the day by giving an update on the changes to Jisc, how it has been refocusing its activities in light of the Wilson review to achieve large scale impact based on sector driven priorities. Sarah’s slides give a good overview. Part of this involves developing new areas of impact, co-design methodologies with Jisc’s core community, regular reviews to ensure programmes/projects are “tightly steered and gated” whilst at the same time allowing Jisc to be agile and try “new things”. The inevitable “21st century challenge” for most organisations.

screen shot of Jisc Strategic Framework Impact Areas — Jisc Strategic Framework Impact Areas

Shared services are not new to Jisc, and they are still very much at the heart of their outputs and deliverables. Just what constitutes as a service can be a bit of a fuzzy area. Traditionally in IT and Jisc terms, shared services are focused on technical infrastructure. Being able to share development costs across the sector is of course a “good thing” and long may it continue. As we all know technical services can’t work in isolation, people and processes are what make any platform successful. This is where the other side of the shared services that Jisc provides such as information, guidance, synthesis of practice from programmes come into play.

Sarah asked if we could share examples of where/how we had used the guidance/information services provided by Jisc. Since starting at GCU almost six months ago I can honestly say that I refer to Jisc “stuff” almost daily. I realise I could be a perceived as being a bit biased having worked for a Jisc funded innovation centre for many years. However as you know, dear reader, I wouldn’t recommend anything if it I didn’t believe it was useful.

Just now we are looking at portfolio provision and Jisc resources have been invaluable as a trusted source for definition, as well as examples of practice to share with colleagues. I can’t accurately quantify how much time they have saved me, but I know we have been able to pull together things much faster than if I had had to search for trusted information. Similarly we are developing guidelines for e-submission processes. So the work from the recent Assessment projects and the new briefing papers on EMA are so timely for us. I think they will save us at least a couple of weeks of research and again, I can’t emphasis the importance of this enough, are based on current experience within the UK HE sector.

The Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group is a key example of a shared service and effective way for Jisc to engage with its core community as it starts to realise its new strategic framework. It’s increasingly one that matters to me and my working practice.

Five new publications from JISC

The JISC e-Learning Programme team has just announced the release of five new publications on the themes of lifelong learning, e-portfolio implementation, innovation in further education, digital literacies, and extending the learning environment. These publications will be of interest to managers and practitioners in further and higher education and work based learning. Three of these publications are supported by additional online resources including videos, podcasts and full length case studies.

Effective Learning in a Digital Age: is an effective practice guide that explores ways in which institutions can respond flexibly to the needs of a broader range of learners and meet the opportunities and challenges presented by lifelong learning.

Crossing the Threshold: Moving e-portfolios into the mainstream is a short guide which summarises the key messages from two recent online resources, the e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit, developed for JISC by the University of Nottingham, and five institutional video case studies. This guide and accompanying resources explore the processes, issues and benefits involved in implementing e-portfolios at scale.

Enhancing practice: Exploring innovation with technology in further education is a short guide that explores how ten colleges in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (SWaNI) and England are using technology to continue to deliver high-quality learning and achieve efficiency gains despite increasing pressure and reduced budgets.

Developing Digital Literacies: is a briefing paper that provides a snapshot of early outcomes the JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme and explores a range of emergent themes including graduate employability, and the engagement of students in strategies for developing digital literacies.

Extending the learning environment: is a briefing paper that looks at how institutions can review and develop their existing virtual learning environments. It offers case study examples and explores how systems might be better used to support teaching and learning, improve administrative integration or manage tools, apps and widgets.

All guides are available in PDF, ePub, MOBI and text-only Word formats. Briefing papers are available in PDF.

There are a limited number of printed copies of each guide for colleges and universities to order online.