Once upon a time, not so many years ago … the UK was swamped by a confusion of work-related qualifications based on classroom tests, attendance on courses and time-serving apprenticeships.

Among the main problems with the system were that:

1. Each of the assessment regimes has serious weaknesses. Even if all three (tests, attendance and time-serving) had been achieved, there was still no guarantee that the candidate was able to do the job, in real workplaces, to an agreed standard
2. The bodies that awarded such qualifications made their money from passes, so much of their energy went on balancing the credibility of the qualification with ease of achievement.
3. The bewildering selection of certificates, awards and diplomas across different qualifications gave no indication of how they related to each other and at what level
4. Employers were confused by the qualifications and so resorted to filtering out applicants for jobs by setting thresholds of the more commonly understood academic qualifications such as GCSEs, A-levels and degrees (which were usually achieved at age 16, 18 and 21 respectively)

Government funding of work-related training was the trigger for a restructuring of those old input-based qualifications, which assessed the training undertaken rather than the candidate’s ability, into a national framework.

Under the auspices of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (and its vocational precursor the National Council for Vocation Qualifications) each industry set its own National Occupational Standards (NOS) which described the outcomes of competent performance in specific functions. The training input was irrelevant, competence is judged on what people can do rather than which courses they had sat through.

NOS were expressed in “units” – chunks of work function commonly undertaken within the industry. The principle being that each unit could be achieved separately to build a portfolio of units which cover current, and perhaps future, job roles.

Of course, some functions, such as admin, were common across most industries, so existing units from other sectors could be incorporated into the NOS.

So far, so good. The NOS are really useful to employers as benchmarks of competence against which they can plan training, recruitment and business strategy. Sectors still set and review their NOS through a rigorous process of employer input and consultation.

It would have been possible to stop at that point. To provide the framework of competences against which companies too, can plan their own development and to enable people to build a portfolio of relevant unit certificates, the credibility of which are based on performance in real work situations.

But no. Our penchant for “big qualifications” ruled the day and the units were bundled up into National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). These were often a prescribed cluster of units to be achieved but often comprised a few core units with a requirement to supplement these with a set number of “optional” units taken from a wider selection.

• First point of weakness: Candidates for employment may each have the same NVQ from the industry but the employer has no way, initially, of knowing for which combination of units the candidate’s qualification is awarded and thus in which aspects of the job role they have demonstrated competence.
• Second point of weakness: Much UK vocational training is publicly funded. Funding is based on a combination of input and achievements. The most convenient measure of outcome is achievement of the agreed NVQ. Training is therefore designed to get learners to produce the most expedient portfolio of evidence that will achieve the NVQ, as quickly as possible. This usually means a standardised programme of evidence generation with little training as possible. Opportunities for learners to customise their NVQ unit collection to suit their skills and career plans are thus severely limited.

Now, we have the Qualifications Curriculum Framework which is described by the QCA:

“At present, it is hard to understand all the different types of qualification that learners hold – what level they are, how long they take to complete, what content they cover, and how they compare to other qualifications. The new framework will help present qualifications in a way that is easy to understand and measure.”

For me, the worrying item in there is “… how long they take to complete …”.

I have recently been helping a significant UK industry to define and agree an up-to-date set of NOS which meet employers needs for units of qualification which describe the skills, knowledge and understanding which come together in real work situations to demonstrate competence. Extensive consultation and negotiation has produced what is agreed to be a comprehensive and definitive set of standards and which are currently awaiting accreditation.

However, even before that process is complete, I have just spent a few days deriving units for the Qualifications and Credit Framework for the first time. It is too early to know whether the draft units I have produced are acceptable but the process has been one of progressively weakening the standard, becoming more concerned with testing the learning process rather than workplace performance and being advised to “make it easier for candidates”. You’ll understand that I’m concerned about this.

The benefits of the QCF are trumpeted thus:

Every unit and qualification in the framework will have a credit value (one credit represents 10 hours, showing how much time it takes to complete).

For who to complete? A 16 year-old apprentice or someone with experience who may be moving into the sector and bringing lots of existing skill, knowledge and understanding with them?

… looking at the title of a qualification you will be able to see how difficult it is … GCSEs (grade A*- C) are level 2, GCE A levels are level 3 and a PhD is a level 8

Note that the comparison is with academic, knowledge-only qualifications.

The principles of the QCF are very similar to NVQs:

• Unit-based allowing smaller achievements to be recognised and accumulated to gain full qualifications.
• Different combinations of units can make up the same qualification.
• Once achieved, units can be used towards qualifications in employment, education or training.

So far, so good, but it doesn’t appear to add much to how the existing NVQ system was conceived. However, by creating knowledge-only units it also allows for combining units from education and employment. I would suggest that this is not sufficient a benefit to warrant the wholesale upheaval of the system – at significant cost.

The credibility of NVQs with employers took years to establish. With QCF units often being derived, filtered and reformulated from the NOS, employers are not so directly involved. Credibility may be even more of an issue.

From what I have seen the QCF units don’t paint a picture of competence, rather they seem to tell a story of learning about some of the NOS content.

Perhaps I’m missing something. I’m very willing to have my scepticism overturned. So if you would like to put me straight, please, leave a comment.

I guess the big difference between the two is that in that latter case, I am all too conscious of the specific learning need and simply want a solution that will meet that need from the procedural “How do I …?” or “Where do I …?” Google searches are similarly foucssed – “Where can I find information about … ?”

In the case of interaction with colleagues the learning can be a bit more fluid. “I wonder if she can give me a few insights into the best ways to use …?” That sort of thing.

In most cases, the learning objective is pretty clear and self-defined and yet the learning process is correspondingly informal and even random.

I’m about to start (today) on a learning process for which I have no specific objectives other than to see what I learn and to make the most of what comes out of it. That’s a pretty informal objective. There are many who would argue that it is not really an objective at all, (not at all SMART) – more a general aim. Informal as that aim may be, the learning process will be the most structured that I have undertaken in quite a while.

Stephen Downes and George Siemens (see blogroll) are leading a course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge which is described as massive, open and on-line which will run for the next twelve weeks with possibly a couple of thousand participants around the world.

Although I actively promote connective learning and knowledge through the use of tools such as Moodle, the prospect of such a potentially huge undertaking is a somewhat daunting. For one thing, I am not at all sure that I will be able to find the time to do the process justice. I am incredibly busy this year and have a mass of deadlines stacking up in the period leading to the end of the year. My podcast (Suffolk and Cool) is taking off and demanding more of my time to deal with increased connections with musicians and listeners. The course introduction makes it clear that I should expect the programme to be confusing and overwhelming because more material and connections will be offered than I can realistically hope to keep up with. But that is precisely the challenge of much on-line learning today. The “drinking from the fire-hose” analogy may be overused, but that is because it is very effective in describing the sheer volume of good information that is available. Learning to cope with both confusion and being overwhelmed sounds very useful.

OK, so there’s learning objective number one:

to become more capable and confident in selecting just the most valuable items and streams to work with, to become discerning and able to identify those which best suit my needs and stylistic preferences. The objective is learning, not a sense of achievement from having read all the words.

I have been following Stephen and George at varying distances for at least a couple of years and have huge admiration for their thinking and articulation of the ideas they develop. They are among my most trusted sources. That bit is easy, I know I want to engage with what they have to say, because I know it will offer an excellent return on my investment of time. But Stephen and George are “only” the leaders of this course. Interaction will primarily be with others.

But what about the other participants in the course? I don’t yet know who they are, what they have to say, how open they are to exploring issues that most of us don’t yet have our heads around. I fear that most may be from a purely academic background, concerned with learning as an end in itself, whereas my history is in applied, work-based learning where the learning is only the starting point to developing understanding, fluency and mastery of skills. So maybe there’s objective number two:

to be open to connective working with people from apparently incompatible backgrounds, to monitor the productiveness of that working and to be prepared to cut the losses if it isn’t delivering what I need. “A proper selfishness.”

I know that I will be tempted to branch off into all sorts of interesting areas and discussions because that is what the best of learning really is, taking delight in wandering off the most direct path to explore the twists and potential of the by-ways, to make the connections with fellow participants as real as possible, to develop empathy, understanding and friendship. That is where the real buzz is but it may not be totally compatible with efficient learning. Uncomfortable as it may be, I may have to make that my third objective:

to maintain focus on the content of the course rather than exploring all the fascinating branches that connecting with people offers.

I suppose that leads, via a fairly circuitous route to a final and most challenging objective which is:

to ensure that by the end of the twelve weeks, I am keeping my head above water on the course and that I am learning about the processes and mechanisms of connectivism and connective knowledge through their practical application

At this stage, I am uncertain about how well equipped I am to “stay the course” but I’m sure that if I can do so, the rewards will be significant. Now where’s that reading list …

The industries are demanding revision because the current standards are outdated and no longer fit for purpose. They require people to be trained in processes, products, services and technologies which no longer reflect practice in the sector.

The issue for me is that the current standards were agreed just three years ago. But “things” are changing faster than the industry can foretell. The shift to on-line and direct travel booking, the trend towards customers creating their own travel packages and the availability of instant on-line information about locations, availability, prices and real customer reviews is causing customers to question what they need from the industry.

To be fair, the industry is aware of the situation and is adjusting as fast as possible. However, it sometimes struggles to find people with the right skills to deliver what’s needed. Hence the revision of the standards which will inform the curriculum.

The question is, what standards should we define as the basis for training future and current staff? Do we go for current skills and knowledge requirements and know that the new standards will be out-of-date within a year or two, or do we try to predict the future needs of the industry and risk getting it wrong?

Two recent comments by other people have been sliding into juxtaposition as we wrestle with this dilemma.

The first from Annika Small, Chief Executive of Futurelab, in Vision (issue 6) describing the effect of a rapidly changing world on curriculum design,

“We are at a point where we need to teach what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our students for what no one yet knows.”

She makes the point that what is required is no less than the transition from what is, effectively a 19th century model of education to something that is fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Secondly, Dave Cormier (on the excellent EdTechWeekly #64) describes giving someone a hammer for the first time without describing what it is useful for. Yes, they may see the nice wooden handle and they may feel the weight of the forged steel head but it will be useless to them until they catch their toe on a protruding nail, make the connection back to the hammer and recognise that it is near perfectly designed for driving the nail back into the floor.

Now consider some of the tools of social and collaborative learning such as Moodle and all those little devices that make life more connective (such as Twitter, Skype and UStream). A typical reaction from many educators will be “Yes, very clever and very pretty but I don’t see that it offers me any value in my classroom.”

I recognise that change is necessarily “a good thing” if I am instigating it, however, if someone else is saying that I have to change it is, naturally, “a bad thing”.

My concerns are that the world of education is, by-and-large and for whatever reason, one of the last great conservative bastions of resistance to change. The longer change to new approaches is resisted the more entrenched that resistance becomes, because the gap between old practices and attitudes and those that are needed now gets wider and more difficult to cross every day.

The commercial imperative for the travel industry to discover new tools which enable existing services to be delivered more efficiently and for new services to be made available is readily apparent. Shareholders will demand return on investment. Less clear are the motivators for educators to make such transitions.

Which brings me back to the travel and tourism standards. Small incremental changes to keep everyone onside, or radical reform to (hopefully) keep the standards credible for a while into a very uncertain future?

Perhaps the strategy should entail both overhaul of the standards and a programme of reform of approaches to learning in this field. Maybe some innovative yet palatable resources and progressive introduction of aspects of on-line facilities and global collaboration / connectivism might help prepare the ground with enough practitioners to create a critical mass. Perhaps.

There are multiple uncertainties there (I’ll resist the Rumsvelt reference) but without movement from industry and educators, I can’t see an alternative to missing the impossible goal of coming up with standards that will simultaneously:

• resonate with current industry practitioners and employers
• be fit for purpose now and for the next five years
• contribute to sector profitability and sustainability
• allow the skills knowledge and attitudes to be taught and developed in traditional ways.

Eggs may have to be broken.

Anyone seen that hammer?

The extent of coverage came as something of a surprise. No so much because of the story itself, but because this is the sort of response that could be expected in August – when we are treated to a month of silly stories because clearly, nothing much can possibly be happening whilst our glorious leaders are enjoying their villas in Tuscany.

The normally more balanced BBC led the frenzy of indignation under the headline “McDonald’s serves up Diplomas” According to the BBC News site:

“McDonald’s has won approval to offer courses which could form part of a qualification at the standard of A-levels or advanced Diplomas.”

Closer reading (and reference to UK qualifications regulator QCA) suggests that McDonald’s, the airline FlyBe and rail infrastructure operator Network Rail have each been approved as awarding bodies to offer in-house qualifications at level 3 as part of the new Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF), which is currently being trialled in a number of sectors.

Their qualifications are very much work-based and assessed on proven competence in the workplace. They also happen to be the same level (equivalence) within the overall qualifications framework as the new vocationally-oriented “Diploma” qualifications for 14-19 year olds which are launching in September. Diplomas are academic qualifications set within one of 14 industry sectors which, at advanced/level 3, also have equivalence with A levels. All Diplomas comprise sector-specific Principal Learning alongside Maths, English and ITC study, as well as Additional and Specialist learning which might include languages or other A levels as well as smaller industry-specific qualifications, a minimum of 10 days work experience and negotiated project work.

All Diplomas are delivered by local consortia typically comprising schools, further education colleges, training providers and (sometimes) universities.

The BBC asserts that: “students could combine units from in-house courses with others to obtain the new Diplomas.”

It may just be that some Diploma learners could gain credits towards such qualifications as part of their (limited) work experience and indeed, such qualification could be useful specialist learning supplements to the core topics in the Diploma. It is, however, something of a leap from reality to the assertion that the fast-food giant is serving up Diplomas.

Now this may be betraying confidences but since I’ve just been heavily involved in the process of assessing submissions from consortia bidding to offer the Diploma in Hospitality, which covers restaurants, hotels etc., I can assure you that no bids have included McDonalds as a partner.

The BBC site quotes comments such as “Can you see any of the better universities accepting someone because of their McGCSE results?”, alongside a poll asking whether McDonald’s should “serve up academic qualifications”; adding to the false impression that the BBC is striving to create. This seems to me to be a classic example of taking two items and carefully stitching them together to create an impression of a third, more attention-grabbing, story.

It does, however, reopen discussion about how the value of vocational learning can be recognised alongside academic learning and what choppy waters are to be found in the space between the two. Frameworks that incorporate both vocational and academic qualifications indicate a parity of esteem which seems only to exist in the minds of the regulators and those of us concerned with countering the inherent snobbery of both academia and industry.

It would undoubtedly be easier and less contentious to maintain complete separation of the constituencies, freeing them to look down on each other from a safe distance. However, that model became redundant when vocational courses started getting degree status and vocationally oriented 18+ colleges rushed to call themselves universities.

McDonald’s, FlyBe and Network Rail have not yet indicated any intention to offer assessment and certification services to anyone other than their own staff but, as awarding bodies, they are entitled to – that’s where the branding of their qualifications becomes an issue.

However flimsy the press coverage, questions naturally arise about the gradual privatisation of aspects of education and assessment. In the rosy-tinted glow of yesteryear the public sector managed the processes with fairness and integrity as their sole motivators. The reality is that awarding bodies have been in private hands for quite a few years and profitability is an imperative. Increased competition in the commercial marketplace is viewed, by politicians of almost all hues, as a universally good thing.

The McDonald’s exams will be good though: “You may turn your burgers over … now”.

For some reason, I put that together with the assertion that “Education is what is left when you’ve forgotten everything that you’ve been taught.”

For me this triggers fundamental questions about the purpose and place of school and education (because they are not necessarily the same things). In particular:

• Which aspects of what skills, knowledge, understanding and “education” are children acquiring in school and is school necessarily the best setting for such acquisition?
• With the development of learning technologies, are there better settings and processes for “teaching” parts of the curriculum than the conventional classroom?
• If the important stuff really is what’s left when everything you’ve been taught has been forgotten, why are we teaching it in the first place?
• Is school too valuable in terms all the social skills and miscellaneous qualities (education) that can be developed there for time to be wasted on teaching “subjects”? IF so, how would school and the learners’ experiences be better designed to deliver the most valuable outcomes?

I’ll admit to not having any neat answers but it has set me thinking about the purpose of school and education in an era when the distinctions between so called “formal” and “informal” learning are increasingly blurred by the potential of current education technologies.

It may be thinking the unthinkable but unless we do, we may find that school will be seen as increasingly irrelevant to the acquisition of the traditional factual knowledge and understanding and opportunities to reframe teaching to incubate the vital social aspects of education will be lost.

Discuss?

Now, along comes WiZiQ which offers a very much simpler interface (good) but also more limited features (no app sharing that I can see), no privacy and it seems to run a lot slower. However, it is free and can cope with up to 25 simultaneous participants.

The no privacy point is an interesting one. Teachers can offer public lessons through the system and make PowerPoint presentations available by uploading to a shared library which can be browsed by all members. You can even search for teachers or students who share your interest.

I suppose it’s a question of “You pays your money and you makes your choice”.

I like the ethos of making the content open but I wonder if system performance and uploaded content will be credible enough to satisfy demanding and increasingly savvy participants.
WiZiQ

technorati tags:WiZiQ, on-line, presentation, Elluminate

… children are considered to have different “learning styles” and instead of being taught by the conventional method of listening to a teacher, they should be allowed to wander around, listen to music and even play with balls in the classroom.

Greenfield takes a more measured shot at the simplistic questionnaire learning styles inventory approach to determine the “preferred learning style” of children.

It will be interesting to see whether there is any reaction from Ofsted (the UK education inspection body) who describe the use of learning styles questionnaires as “best practice”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/29/nteach129.xml

I tagged along and arriving a few minutes early noticed that there was an increasing number of people standing and strolling around, just like people do – tourists, office workers, etc. Quite a few had iPods plugged into their ears. Again, this is totally normal.

More people kept arriving. At a few seconds to 6.46, a countdown was started then, at zero, almost everyone turned up their music and started dancing (OK, we did too). A great and enthusiastic time was had by all then 30 minutes later the party dissolved again.

A few tourists were left looking rather bemused by the best part of 1000 people dancing to the apparent silence.

What particularly interests me is the mashup of social networking going on here:

• the mix of electronic viral connections through the phones, Skype, MySpace, sites such as www.dontstayin.com and word of mouth,
• the fact that real people actually came together in one location for a communal activity (and the synchronisation of the start was an important element),
• the almost complete lack of direct face-to-face communication (everyone having ear-buds jammed in their heads),
• the fact that everyone was dancing, as much “together” as they would be in a club, but to their own chosen tune,
• the way that the mob evaporated away at the end
• by 11 today (16 hours later) there are 773 pictures of the event at: http://www.dontstayin.com/uk/london/st-pauls-cathedral/2007/jul/19/event-131750

I wonder what parallels and lessons it holds for us about how we might engage people in collaborative learning and how we connect with each other in the 21st century.

It isn’t about oversimplifying complex issues, it is about giving the issues some colour and shape before delving.

He also went on the show a list of potential benefits from thinking about and applying appropriate filters to how we approach data. Here he reintroduced the vital concepts of networks, distributed knowledge and connectivism citing benefits (I’ve put my comments in parenthesis):
- Network models of learning are adaptive (because networks are inherently dynamic)
- Ecologies must be diverse and enabling (or we’re heading back to a model where we teach as we were taught not how different people might learn)
- Today’s information is tomorrow’s sense-making (I love this one. It brings to mind that when we ask for information there’s a moment when we realise that we’ve got an awful lot of stuff to make sense of before we can make use of it).
- Sane, digital life (in other words, not trying to take a drink of water from the fire hose)
- Complex, integrated understanding (again reinforcing the point that complexity is an integral part of understanding)
- Multi-faceted
- Multi-ontology

You can see a recording of the whole <i>Patterns and sense-making: Information visualisation</i> session at: http://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/playback