“A teacher is a professional, one who must constantly seek to improve and to develop certain qualities or virtues which are not received but must be created. The capacity to renew ourselves every day is important.” Paolo Freire (1985) It … Continue reading →

In attending an event called YesWay, I had the opportunity to share some of my ideas around what the future of learning could look like, in particular around the documenting and charting of the pathways that learners may take. I call my concept the Sovereign Learner Record (SLR), an ecosystem that enables learners to create and craft a rich and diverse learning portfolio where multiple voices can share feedback and assess them in authentic ways.

There are already tools out there that play many of the roles needed to make the SLR a reality, and with the right audience such a tool could develop into a legitimate alternative to the static and antiquated transcripts that currently are the standard for most school systems.

This article serves as a bit of a roadmap for my thinking around a Sovereign Learner Record, sharing ways that I could imagine this concept turning into a reality.

First some of my design criteria:

The Learner Owns Their Record

One element I have never been at ease with in education is in who ‘owns’ a learners record. With few exceptions it is the institution that they learner studies under. I went to Park Avenue for Elementary School for a year, and my record of learning for that year is stored within that school. They transferred my record to the next school I went to, despite it only representing a single year of my childhood.

What if I had a teacher who did not like me, did not understand my needs or history? I had no control then over my record of learning, a fact that still remains true to this day with (nearly) all my learning records.

The role of any institution, education provider, or assessor (including oneself) can be as simple as delivering a record for the learner to decide how and when they present this information, and to whom.

The Platform Needs to be in the Creative Commons

For an SLR to exist, the tools and methods used should be as open access as possible. Such a system thrives when it can be federated, where data can flow across platforms seamlessly and the user is not held hostage by a single ecosystem or application. Furthermore, an open source backbone allows for other to adapt and grow the concept to meet their needs.

A High Degree of Customization

For something as personal as the learning journey we take, there is no one size fits all. Our current system of doing learning records is incredibly myopic, only shedding a thin perspective on one aspect of the learner. How interesting would it be if we could examine our learning through different lenses? One day a learner could look at themselves through a critical skills perspective, and then immediately examine their cumulative learning experiences through the lens of SDGs by changing the template. Furthermore, learners could create their own lenses that reflect themselves. We could highlight learning experiences as stories that dive more deeply into what makes us unique.

There Needs to be Beauty

This may sound a bit corny, but if we expect such a tool to be regularly used by learners it must be beautiful. UI design in schools is dead on utilitarian (albeit often non-functional), and beauty is glaringly absent in most learning records. It leaves me with little wonder why learners rarely dive into the details of their own records… it is largely text, rarely interactive, and simply does not tell the story of the learning that has happened.

It Must be Simple

We want something that anybody can pick up and just use. While there are many elements that could improve such a system, starting simple is a key.

So with a starter set of criteria in mind (I would love to hear more if you have them!) what tools and resources can we look towards to help develop such an ecosystem? The good news is that there are already a number of pieces in play…

What Already Exists — A Non-Exhaustive List of Cool Things to Explore

OpenBadges

This endeavor in my opinion has so many good qualities, and is already mature enough to be used across a range of fields. The standard creates portable records that have a lot of relevant information contained within a graphic image file. They can be aligned to standards if desired, tagged, narratives can be formed on them, and there are ways to stack them in the event that the learning in a linear fashion is needed.

There are dozens of services that allow you to create and issue OpenBadges, both paid and free. Here are a couple worth checking out:

• Badgr (Now Canvas Badges)
• Open Badge Factory
• Badge Nation

Moodle

I have been playing in Education Technology for a while, and ever since I started I have always found Moodle, an Open Source Learning Management System (LMS), to align deeply with the values I have. The LMS itself speaks to a content delivery system and an old way of thinking, but the platform does an excellent job at organizing student data. It also can issue OpenBadges automatically or manually.

Moodle could be modified to provide both a directory of learning experiences and a means to house sovereign learning records.

Open Recognition

This is more a concept than a tool, but one that I feel fundamentally fits into the SLR concept. As one can see they have a growing community largely focused around professionals who seek recognition rather than accreditation. This idea could also be extended to younger learners, where instead of purely institutional accreditation, anybody (themselves, their peers, their parents, and educators) would be able to add to the learning record. This Cooperative, We Are Open, has some excellent articles on what Open Recognition is in the workplace and how it could work there. Why not extend it to a younger audience?

Anyhow, I hope that provides a bit of food for thought, and perhaps even some pathways in which the concept of a Sovereign Learner Record could become a usable and real tool for the many independent learners seeking something new and different.

In conjunction with the concept of the SLR is a directory of experiences… I called my project Hifa (the Indonesian word for the hyphae, the strands of fungi that connect much of the plant world through the soil). Take a look at the App to get an understanding of what a distributed learning ecosystem may look like in the future.

Likewise, it is well worth checking out City as a School, another distributed learning ecosystem based in London. They have some really interesting technology in the mix which brings whole new levels of excitement and possibility to the concept.

I recently saw an inspirational type of social media post that stated that one of the greatest gifts we can give our children is the understanding that learning is a lifelong endeavour. A high school diploma or university degree should not signal the end of your learning journey. I whole-heartedly agree! I love learning new …

Continue reading "The Right Teacher, The Right Time"

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#ePIC22 Day 1 Day 2 was the day I noticed this helpful poster, which lays out the value of the recognition ecosystem that badges permit. The recognition of individuals and professionals are more likely to be discussed in our higher ed contexts here in BC, and I like that the notion of social capital, human capital and confidence capital were included as part of individual benefits. Less discussed here in BC are the bottom two: communities and regions/provinces. The inclusion of these as part of the badge ecosystem offers some interesting avenues for discussion and dreaming, and Day 2 would offer some tangible examples of those. Day 2 started with some research sessions, and one that stuck with me was a presentation by Sebastien Rollin, whose research highlighted the potential of using badges to recognise transversal competencies in higher education, which he helpfully framed as “hidden curriculum”. At the same time, the research showed that the biggest uptake was with high performing students, resulting in a risk of “privileging the privileged”.  I think this is an important message, given that this was also the case with MOOCs and is currently a question being asked about microcredentials.  Ultimately, who are badges for and what problem do they solve?    The next few presentations were clear examples of badges solving a problem. First up was Stella Porto from the International Development bank describing a community based badge project called HydroBID. This was clearly a case of badges being built with the HydroBID community, in a context where various levels of contributions are taking place in the community. The goal of the badge was to provide a way for community to recognize itself and the range of various individual contributions. Importantly, the badge wasn’t there to rank, rather everyone gets the same badge through telling their own story of contribution, which may take many forms. The process to get the badge involves reviewers who assess the evidence that individuals have uploaded upon applying for a badge. 2. Alissa Bigelow and Lyndsay Woodside from e-campus Ontario described the Ontario Extend set of badges that lead to a micro credential that then pathway to a program at Conestoga College. This was a helpful and tangible example of all 3 functioning as a group – badges, MCs and recognition. 3. HPass, a skills platform for humanitarians, with over 24k users earning badges from 30 different organizations. This was a helpful example of badging and recognition at both a sector and global level and presumably with 24k users is having tangible impact. HPass is being used by organizations to: recognize knowledge (badging courses) recognize participation (and counting towards a professional certification recognize behaviour recognize action While Day 2 provided lots of examples of badges in use, there were two notable presentation that focussed on recognition. First, the keynote by Nan Travers about Credentials as You Go, who similar to CLOCK from Day 1, began with a compelling case as to why we should care about recognition as a means to address the large numbers of people who never finish formal higher education, representing an invisible population of some higher ed, but no credential. She challenged us to think about both our communities and structures in terms of who they are leaving out and highlighted that there are people with and without power in any of these systems (a concern that I share anytime we romanticise community as a way of addressing power and gatekeeping). Credentials as You Go is trying to address both external and prior learning, informal and formal, incrementally awarded upon validation. This is highly appealing to those of us working in access-oriented institutions attracting more marginalized or adult learners. And for those of us who stuck around to the end of a very full day, we were treated to a mind stretching presentation by Susan Forseille on decolonizing PLAR in a BC context. I was curious how this topic would land in a European context and to be fair, there was a parallel stream of presentations running in French at the same time. Nonetheless, I got the sense there was a lot of interest in the project that Susan described, where Indigenous knowledge was honoured and PLAR’ed through a guided process of storytelling. This mirrored a message that seemed to be present throughout the conference of the importance of having the agency and empowerment to control one’s narrative or learning story, of being able to tell it in a way that can be counted or validated, and the importance of listening and creating room for these narratives in our systems.

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