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Excellence Gateway
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) South East on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education colleges, Sixth Form colleges/schools, training providers, Train to Gain providers, adult and community learning, work-based learning
Keywords: e-Maturity, e-portfolios, personalised learning, collaborative working, self-assessment, improving teaching and learning, improving responsiveness to learners, quality improvement, management of resources, learner support, recognising and recording progress and achievement, curriculum development, inspection preparation
Thanet College has launched the pilot phase of a scheme to create online ‘personal learning spaces' (e-portfolios) for all staff and students that are separate from the College's virtual learning environment (VLE). Commencing with 150 Pebble Pad accounts for all members of staff, these e-portfolios will enable assets to be stored, organised, linked and made visible as required for a multitude of purposes without imposing the institutional security, control and ownership needed in a traditional college VLE. e-Portfolio activities include: initial assessment, annual appraisals, continuous professional development (CPD), job applications, and the creation of a culture of co-mentoring and critical friendships. Everything in a user's online e-portfolio area stays personal until the owner decides to share it, thus overcoming problems of copyright, firewall barriers, unsuitable material and ‘non-academic' social networking activities.
Located in Broadstairs near Ramsgate, Thanet College is the largest provider of education and training in East Kent, as well as being a Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) in Catering and Hospitality. The College is able to offer an extensive range of full-time, part-time, distance-learning and community-based courses, as well as being experienced Corporate Trainers. With over 1,800 full-time students and 6,000 part-time learners, Thanet offers a range of training and education courses across the board, with a strong emphasis on employer-focussed training.
Thanet College aspires to be an example of an e-mature learning provider, with teaching, learning and staff support seamlessly blended within its VLE. The College believes that the next challenge is the creation of one or more ‘personalised learning spaces' (or e-portfolios) for each learner and member of staff. To this end, Thanet is providing all 150 tutors with an online Pebble Pad account from April 2008 in order to pilot the use of personalised learning spaces, with a view to extending the system to at least 1,000 students by 2010.
For Thanet College, an e-portfolio represents a personal learning space given to the learner and tutor for both personal and private use, to be used as a tool to aid, record, reflect upon and share instances of personal development and goal-achieving activity. There is a major emphasis on private reflection, as well as reflection with others, as a means to support and record learning. The key pedagogical issue for the College now is where the boundaries should be placed between College VLE activities and the personalised learning space.
Thanet feels that it has become necessary to separate e-portfolios from its VLE, thus avoiding what the College calls ‘VLe-portfolios'. The rational is as follows:
According to Geoff Rebbeck, e-Learning Coordinator at Thanet College, the big challenge with e-portfolios is to decide from the outset where the College places itself with respect to four key areas, each representing a position on four continuums:
These inform the model used by the College, the nature of content, and the degree and length of ownership and activity. Thanet has produced a hypothetical model described below.
Increasingly, students brought up with Web 2 technologies choose to produce assessable work using websites and software not available or accessible from within the College. The reasons for this are the students' own preferences and/or enforced security restrictions from Web nannies and firewalls operating within the organisation. The e-portfolio offers a solution as the ‘centre point' for learner work to which and from which all links and activity can be gathered or referenced.
Each of the College's 150 tutors has been given an online Pebble Pad account for personal use. Initial training and explanation of the project has been provided to all, backed up with relevant papers shared inside the Thanet community. Started in September 2007 to provide the opportunity for effective use and development of content, the project will run indefinitely. The use of these e-portfolios will be expanded to include Institute for Learning (IfL) Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills (QTLS) requirements in April 2008. The College will also complete an interim report at the end of March 2008 for Becta, showing how this work directly relates to e-maturity and the e-maturity framework.
Thanet has formulated several guidelines that have been born out of experience so far to help tutors adopt the new e-portfolios successfully during the pilot phase.
These guidelines include:
The College believes that these online e-portfolios will offer staff an opportunity to develop and share reflective practice with each other as a means of improving professionalism in the way they work and, as a result, increase capability amongst the teaching body in Thanet. This is seen as one of the critical reasons for the project.
Rebbeck observes, “This will be the major effort in raising the performance of the College. We also want to explore co-mentoring by this method and develop the idea of ‘critical friends'. We see this reflective practice as crucial to the success of raising the professionalism of teaching. It will draw in other College activities, such as appraisal, lesson observation, training evaluation, and reflection of formal College activities such as Study Days and Town Meetings.”
The College has devised a Thanet Model hypothesis in order to help with planning. Although unproven so far, these ‘ideals' are designed to achieve good pedagogy regardless of other factors and barriers. Examples of these model objectives are listed below:
Thanet College has a clear vision of the way tutors will use their online e-portfolios during the pilot phase and beyond. Anticipated scenarios are given below:
According to Rebbeck, the successful adoption of these e-portfolios by staff during the pilot phase is crucial to the successful implementation of personalised learning spaces throughout the rest of the College.
Rebbeck says, “First, staff must have and use e-portfolios for exactly the same purposes as learners. Once tutors have developed their own personalised learning spaces, then it will be the turn of the students. We have to understand them conceptually before we can use them on our teaching and learning.”
Rebbeck summarises, “Giving each learner a personalised learning space allows the greatest expression of an individual learning journey. Whatever technologies, software and approaches are used, the e-portfolio provides the common locator from which all activity can be ‘referenced in' or ‘pointed to'.”
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