What I've been up to ;-)

I keep being asked what I've been up to ? ,  or what I've been doing ? Here is a whistle stop tour of some of the highlights.  Thanks too to all my connections and friends across FE/HE/Schools and Work-based learning in Scotland , UK and internationally for harnessing my enthusiasm for learning and keeping me busy, by making full use of my breadth of experience,  expertise and networks.

If you follow this blog or keep up with my linkedIn profile or follow me on twitter you'll see what I get up to on a weekly basis.  Learning and development is an open activity ;-). and you can still make a living outside but alongside the institutional atrium's.  I liked this post from an old friend  Eylan Ezekiel  on the life of a freelancer.

There are still too many closed minds around, too many folks chained to the iron rice bowl, and not prepared to think out of the box, willing and able to challenge the established orthodoxies or speak to those who wield power.  Most of our leaders and policy makers  have little understanding of skills delivery in FE and nor of the development needs and motivations of those who work in vocational training sector. These folks are often badly in need of sage advice.

You can break the chains, keep smiling and make a positive contribution. (Chained to the Iron rice bowl is analogous of prisoners within a system, who just keep their heads down no matter what,  as they know any challenge to the orthodoxy will cut off their food supply - this depressingly from a senior colleague still working within education policy circles)

Recent substantive assignments - I can't list them all here ...particularly all the events I've talked at or chaired over the last 18 months.

Whitepapers and webinars for international VLE suppliers to support entry in UK educational and vocational marketplaces. Example 

Evaluation of the  Socio and Economic Impact of Massive Open On-line Courses with recommendation for future development models ( client  global UK University with courses on Coursera, MitX , and Futurelearn) Enjoyed working for Edinburgh University.

Bid writing and partnership building for a public tender for national on-line testing system for schools (client global e-assessment provider in need of curriculum advice to tailor product for UK market)

Papers , Workshops and Advice developed and delivered  for JISC  for Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. This spanned - advice on creation processes to enable digitisation of the national occupational standards development process ,  advice the creation of trailblazer standards to ensure  that they are open to on-line and blended delivery , guidelines to encourage the  creation of assessment standards to encourage best use of digital technology in assessment delivery and quality assurance, suggestions on better use of data management and the on-line rather than paper certification of apprenticeships, this  for the UK Vocational Reform Programme in England. ( client Jisc) I do think we are missing some tricks around how to make best use of the Employer Levy in Scotland and will keep trying to be heard.



Advice too on the adoption of suitable new standards for digital literacy for learning, life and work. Based around the excellent work of Helen Beetham and Jisc and in line with the new essential skills framework developed in Wales. ( For various clients )

Identification of suitable international consultants for design and delivery of range of international vocational learning projects for a range of clients including large UK based awarding bodies for assignments in  Middle east , Africa , China and within Europe.(clients international consultancies and international awarding bodies)

Advice and support for organisations around the SCQF Credit and leveling and the sourcing of credit and leveling services. ( international awarding body)

Partnerships and introductions around content development , campus apps , the development of digital learning spaces and associated innovative thinking for relevant Colleges and training providers. ( range of providers and clients )

Workshops for senior management teams - trying to find routes ahead for service delivery and for staff development in an increasingly on-line and cloud based world of learning.(Colleges, training providers and in company sessions) I'd like to do more of these.

There are far too few open practitioners in Scottish Further Education and it is a poor reflection of the innovation and great teaching practice that I know exists.

Pro Bono

I am enjoying the continued challenges :  as Board Member of Youthlink Scotland , ALT as Co-Chair in Scotland and  as a Board Member at  Glasgow's Kelvin College.

As Co-Founder of Open Scotland I continue to support any  initiative encouraging the open sharing of learning materials , collaborative learning  and the development of teaching staff and learners' digital skills and I am looking forward to contributing to Scottish Government's Information Literacy Community of Practice as an adviser.

This year I supported #oer17 and the UNESCO Global Consultation on #OER as a chair and contributor. Thanks to the generosity of ALT and UNESCO for their invitation and support..

I still feed  back where I can opportunities for  Scottish FE , to individual colleges and to organisations I have worked for in the sector. The focus needs to get back on to innovation in  life long learning.

It's been a fun 18 months and if you need to drive real change in your organisation  along with your staff ( driven with them not at them or over them ) and or have an interesting project that is around collaborating and improving the lot of learners in Scotland, UK or internationally and above all you are positive and fun to work with - I'm always on the look out for my next gig.

The Budget : The bits not reported in Scotland ! Vocational Reform.

CC/BY https://www.flickr.com/photos/mfa_lithuania/ 

Yesterday,  I read and heard various accounts of the Chancellor's budget in the Scottish media  . They all said that much of the budget focused on the national health service or educational reforms in England which were not of any consequence for the devolved administrations.

In fact,  we should be paying close attention to the vocational reform programme happening in England. There are some really interesting and challenging developments springing from it,  which should be shaping thinking in Scotland.

Here are some accounts from the English media

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/08/t-levels-aim-to-improve-technical-education-and-improve-uk-productivity

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39212506/t-levels-what-are-they

https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/education/t-levels-will-work/

I've a live Google Doc that keeps an eye on these developments from a Scottish perspective which I will update later.

The main news announcements in England show the continued shifts in thinking around what are now being called the T-Levels or technology level qualifications in England.  The Chancellor announced an additional £50 Million investment in Further Education. This based on increasing the contact hours for 16-19 year olds in Colleges from 600 hours to 900 hours per year.
This will make College courses almost 9-5 programmes , as  previously highlighted they will also have an up to three month work placement embedded in them. This will be norm by 2022. Initially this funding appears to be going into developing the new system.

In Scotland FE programmes still sit around the 600 hour mark - we have many of the same challenges around retention and achievement and the work readiness of FE learners. The additional funding and the approach of extending the hours for these learners is something that should be given every consideration in Scotland.  This model is moving the training hours closer to the systems in Germany and other European states - which matches the rhetoric around the future of vocational learning in Scotland.

In 2018/19  there will also be an additional £40 Million invested in 'Life Long Learning' a term that is familiar to us in Scotland but has not been used in England for more than a decade. This to support adult literacy and numeracy and improve work based skills in line with the Industrial Strategy. The expectation being that a series of pilots will use digital technology to deliver new skills into the workplace. This part of developing plans around future skills and life long learning.  So worth too having a dig into this.

The English system is in an incredibly disjointed state  - but we should be learning the best lessons from it.

I hope the  Scottish media start doing a better job of covering this reform programme and its implications for Scottish learners.

If you work in Scottish Further Education or with a Scottish Training provider you should tune into the English vocational reform programme.

Final call for #OER17: The Politics of Open. Registration closes 16 March 2017

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/scotland/ 

 
This makes a good follow up post to my last one on the UNESCO #OER consultation - I do hope everyone knows that we are all on a journey to a world of much more open practice and collaborative learning . Though I am sure there are a few individuals and institutions who will be determined to keep their knowledge locked up. You'll be wearing a creative commons t-shirt in no time !

Open educational resources are important because they allow freedom of access and enhanced opportunities to learn for all.



https://oer17.oerconf.org

The #OER17 conference takes place in London on 5-6 April, it provides an ideal opportunity for anyone interested in learning more about open resources, policy and practice to connect with experts and enthusiasts. We welcome delegates from all sectors to come and share knowledge and experiences, network and learn. 

 

With keynotes from: Maha Bali, American University in Cairo; Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK; and Diana Arce, Activist Artist and Researcher, Germany, and plenary panel with Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz and Muireann O’Keeffe plus over 100 sessions from the open education community we hope it’s the open education event you can’t miss.

 

The conference will be chaired by social and educational technologist and Wikimedia UK Trustee Josie Fraser, and Alek Tarkowski, Director of Centrum Cyfrowe, co-founder and coordinator of Creative Commons Poland. The conference themes this year are:

 

• Local, national, and international policy and practice
• Institutional/organisational politics
• Participation & social equality
• Open Party

 

Registration closes on the 16 March 2017 and tickets are available for single and two days. For more details visit https://oer17.oerconf.org/registration/

 

#oereumt UNESCO Regional Consultations for 2nd World #OER Congress 2017 #openscot

Europe Regional Consultation on OER 23rd-24th Feb 2017 Valletta

It was a great privilege to be invited as one of 70 participants from 25 countries gathered in Malta  to contribute to the UNESCO European Regional Consultation on Open Educational Resources in Malta. This to shape the inputs for the 2nd World OER Congress to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia 18th-20th September 2017.  I hope the remaining regional consultations  for the Middle East/North Africa, Africa , Americas and the Pacific Region are as productive as our gathering. The consultation events are ably supported by the Commonwealth of Learning and funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. You too can take part in the consultation by completing http://rcoer.col.org/surveys.html

 The theme of the World OER Congress is #OER for Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education ; From Commitment to Action. This to move the global education system on from the Paris Declaration of 2012 calling on all governments to make a commitment to OER. The aim to use OER policies and practice to meet the United Nations aims of achieving a set of sustainable development goals for Education by  2030.

We were tasked with :

1. Reviewing the progress of OER in Europe since the World OER Congress 2012
2. To identify strategies for maintaining OER
3 Agreeing  a set of action points to be presented at the next Congress in September

Our outputs providing strategies, examples and models for the creation of a sustainable open educational infrastructure and mainstreaming open educational resources will be fed into the Congress but will be published here as they are pulled together and there will be a collection of interviews from the consultation events published here.

I was invited as Co-Founder of Open Scotland and I carefully prepared our inputs with Lorna Campbell my co-conspirator and  Scottish colleagues from the Association of Learning Technology before setting off.

I'll share the key parts of my report here and some reflections from the group I worked with who were tasked to  focus on the barriers to the creation, sharing , use and re-purposing of Open Educational Resources at a national level.

In terms of Scottish approaches,  the formation of Open Scotland and the creation of the Open Scotland Declaration has positioned Scottish Education as thought leaders in building both grass roots support for open educational practice and for encouraging policy shifts at national and institutional level and this is still garnering Scotland and Scottish education with global recognition.

The OEPS project has produced some open assets that could do much to drive open practice across Scotland https://oepscotland.org/resources/open-courses/ While the Open University's broader offering for learners http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/ offers learners access to a rich set of online courses and allows providers the opportunity to build their own courses on the OU  platform.

There are some other green shoots around the UK. The continued healthy support across the community for conferences like #OER17 , the FELTAG coalition supporting  blended learning and the sharing of developments. Some set backs too,  it is hard as yet to see the new Jisc Content and App Store as a serviceable replacement for JORUM .

However, while Scottish Government investment has been made in the Open University led OEPS project and some large global institutions like Edinburgh University have taken up the challenge to embed both open educational resources and a broader set of open educational practices across their operations for the public good and some others notably Glasgow Caledonian University are forging ahead with policies that will support OER, momentum is slow.

Why is the case - these are my own thoughts on Scottish Landscape and updates the last review of Scottish activity from October 2016.

Some of the global arguments for the adoption of open educational practices and resources do not have the same traction in Scotland. Scottish Education is not a text book driven system in Universities, Colleges or Schools - so the economic case for the adoption of Open Textbooks or more open practice around the development and sharing of resources does not have the resonance it might have in other countries where national administration's buy text books.

The levers in Scotland have to be around our life long learning system, our belief in education as a social good, open to all and around the social benefits of OER to all in the system.

Universities continue to conflate OER with lots of other policy initiatives and developments - We have a MOOC so we must be making and sharing OER ( rarely the case). We have an open research policy and we have policies and practices around open data. ( no realisation that OER is different). There are few formal staff development programmes around the creation, use and repurposing of OER and only a few policy levers to encourage their consideration.

Colleges - Recently regionalised and finding their feet have forgotten traditions of developing learning materials collaboratively and when they remember they tend to do this in closed communities as content clubs. If you do a dig into the public contracts Scotland you can see a growing trend over last six months for Colleges to buy large collections of commercial content. They are trying to make more courses available on line and playing catch up,  by buying in the learning content. The entry level and CPD standards for lecturing staff are due to be refreshed but the current standards are weak around developing skills around embedding digital practice and make no mention of OER.

Schools - No real recognition that sharing learning materials is a good thing and to a degree still struggling with the notion that teachers create  learning materials. In Scotland we have a superb platform in GLOW a Scottish Schools Intranet with excellent set of tools to support learning but it lacks a learning object repository it is hard to find materials inside GLOW and there is no coherent approach to adopting standard open licencing like Creative Commons. In terms of development there is the recently published Digital Learning and Teaching Strategy this encourages the development of digital skills in both initial teacher training and in teacher CPD for continued registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland but it tends to focus on the use and deployment of technology and makes no mention of content creation or open educational resources.

Third sector and libraries - perhaps most progress is being made here. Libraries and museums are digitising their resources and releasing these into the public domain with open licences. Trade unions and third sector organisations realise that a sharing economy is the most effective way to support their stakeholders. Good signs here that the methods and approaches of the wikimedia foundation are being adopted.

Government, while the government has usefully made a significant investment in the OEPS Project, which it references in any enquiry about the progress of OER in Scotland, it still appears to view activity in this area as peripheral in meeting sectorial objectives.

The broad view of the administration seems to be  that policy around open educational practices is not required as initiatives in this space are being driven out by Universities fulfilling their charitable and philanthropic traditions  and that there is a lack of an evidence base around the benefits to learners that justifies a policy intervention.

The growing evidence base from other countries and global initiatives is counter to this view. A healthy open educational resource driven system needs both top down and bottom up support. The papers from this consultation and from the World Congress should allow an informed reappraisal of this position.

Useful Sessions from @A_L_T including "Course Design for Reflective Learning"

Don't Fear the Webinar image CC thanks to https://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/

 

 

I would not normally devote a post to a series of webinars but I think its important that FE staff in Scotland pick up on these and we move dialogue back to teaching and learning - in new ways !

 

With usual declaration of interest I am one of the ALT UK Ambassadors.

 

The FELTAG movement has moved on both the conversation and the delivery of learning in English Colleges and training providers it continues to prompt a multi-agency response to modernising learning practices.

 

I think all six topics are directly relevant to Scottish FE.

 

 

'New course design for Reflective learning'

Wednesday 22nd. February 2017 at 12.30pm. for one hour. 

 

This is our second of six webinars and is being led by Dan Scott, lately of Barnsley College and now working in e-learning development in the commercial sector. He will explore ideas and thinking around how e-learning design is now able to incorporate more reflection into courses as a means of learning, demonstrating achievements and characterising attributes.  

Dan will lead a ‘walk and talk’ webinar, exploring ideas on how reflection can be utilised more in online course design, drawing on his own experience as an expert in e-learning both in a college settings and in the commercial world.

He will be looking in particular at two questions:

• How do we increase learner responsibility for what they learn and what they want to learn next?
• How might  we design e-learning to enable this to happen?

This Webinar touches on another of our frontier themes; teaching the skills of self-employment, as we think about increasing the ability of all to self-manage learning and plot unique journeys through the learning. This is increasingly true for teachers in their own careers.

 

The FELTAG  reports are seen as the moment when e-learning became normative and an expected part of everyday funded learning in our Sector, rather than an excellent supplement or exotic add-on. For students, the need to turn their 'tech savvy’ knowledge into sound digital literacy is accepted as a discrete ability and as a part of the ‘employability’ mind-set that is now fully explored and understood. It has highlighted the importance for teachers of having their own literacy in using technology for purposeful pedagogy, rather than simply knowledge of it and is characterised by teachers being excited by articulating great teaching through technology, rather than simply using technology for its own sake.

 

Our 6 webinars are based on what we identified at ALT 2016 Conference, not so much as challenges but the new frontiers for us to cross. They are:

 

            • New course design for Reflective learning

            • Using technology to support unique Apprenticeship learning journeys

            • Digital literacy-in-action

            • Teaching the skills of self-employment

            • Utilising personal learning spaces in learning design

            • Using technology to capture and present soft skills

 

Registration details available now at

https://www.alt.ac.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=296&reset=1