The echo of teaching

I thought I'd have a go at answering the The Learning Circuits Blog: December Big Question - What did you learn about learning? One of the projects I have worked on this year, is the development of a tool supporting the Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL). It has been truly enlightening for me in many ways.

APL is going to be a core activity of a lot of Universities I recon. Content no longer seems to be the core business of the sector, as has been shown by initiatives such as Open Learn. Coming to grips with this is a bit like trying to understand Open Source business models I think, it requires a fundamental rethink of what is valuable. For most universities I think that value is going to increasingly lie in guidance and coaching on the one side, and assessment and accreditation on the other.

There seems to be a problem with accreditation of learning that has not taken place within the controlled environment of a course though. Very few universities are serious about APL, and I can't help but wonder why. Part of it, I am sure, is to do with fees and such, but not all. After some reflection I think we must also admit that APL exposes some critical weaknesses of our assessment processes. In theory our assessments are supposed to discriminate between those learners that have attained certain outcomes, and those who haven't. If that was all there was to it, then surely learners claiming APL could as simple as doing the regular assessment, but without attending the course.

The reason this isn't common practice I think, is that most assessments don't really assess the right outcomes. Most assessments I think are designed to trigger an echo of teaching, and not of learning. And of course our teaching is so good, that if the learner echo's a confirmation of our teaching, then surely that means the intended learning has taken place. But what if learning has not been a result of our teaching? Suddenly we cannot short circuit the inherent difficulty of assessing competence by resorting to looking for the echo of teaching.

I think it would be interesting to dig into assessment practices used by recruitment agencies. In a way they are asked to make assessments that employers aren't confident we have made. Furthermore, whatever they assess is always without the luxury safety net of knowing what has probably been learned and by which means.

Work-based Learning Futures

I had the great pleasure to attend the WBL-futures conference in Buxton last Thursday and Friday. I found the experience to be incredibly refreshing. The conference was relatively small, but with a very high level of quality amongst visitors. 63% of attendees actually also presented a paper, as did I, and so most guest had a lot to bring to the discussion. I also found the atmosphere to be incredibly constructive and innovative, and it made me wonder where true innovation in education is really taking place. Sure, technology is a wonderful enabler for many pedagogical development, but I couldn't help but think that the true innovators were to be found in this domain of work based learning. While I, and many of my colleagues in e-learning, are still debating personal learning spaces and social networks, here these concepts have been applied for many years, either with or without the help of technology. And many of the underlying pedagogy of applied personal negotiated learning is something I think will spread out across HE in the next few years. We will have to grow into our roles as coaches and assessors, and let go of the idea that there is a future in being an expert, a lecturer. For those keen to take some steps on this path, have a look at the abstracts. Most of these are discussion documents, a more concise publication is being prepared to be published in October.

I will try and collect and upload some of the presentations and such (including ours) as soon as possible... watch this space!

Assessing Informal Learning

I have the pleasure to be working on the e-APEL project on developing a way to help students assess their prior learning, in particular where that learning is experiential. It's a tremendously exiting field, combining developments in diagnostic assessments, e-portfolio's and informal learning. Especially the latter is a domain I wasn't intimately familiar with, but during the initial months of my involvement with this project, it has certainly roused my interest.

Informal learning makes assessments much more crucial, but it also emphasis questions and issues with validity and reliability. In formal learning, the trust in the quality of the learning activities already provides us with a degree of confidence in the outcomes it achieved in our students. We feel more in touch with the process and therefor are in a position to moderate any shortcomings of the assessment with that intimate familiarity.

I know this sounds rather awful, because obviously we are always supposed to have brilliantly valid and solid designs for teaching and assessment. But it isn't easy to create valid assessments; it's not easy at all. Still, it is a problem that needs addressing for various reasons. I will list a few:

• More and more universities are moving away from the business model where their knowledge or content is the added value they sell. Content is no longer a commodity, and learning content is no different. Anyone can look up the principles on general relativity in great detail without even going near to a university. This is one reason why universities are moving to making their knowledge publicly available, such as Open Courseware at MIT, and more recently Open Learn at the Open University in the UK. What they have realised is that the true value of the University, is in the guidance and support it provides around learning, and the accreditation (and thus the assessment!).
• Developments towards more simulation and game based learning raise questions about how to assess these less tangible and structured ways of learning in an appropriate and quantitative way. The same is true for assessing competences and skills in stead of knowledge and understanding.
  

Informal, or at the very least unstructured and non-linear, learning will increase in importance, and is the crucial unsolved challenge we face in the implementation of both our lifelong learning agenda, and the agenda of the knowledge economy (which, ironically, is turning out not to be about knowledge at all!). Unfortunately there is a deafening silence at most institutes on the subject, and the session on lifelong learning I attended at the JISC conference today didn't touch on the subject once.