Ofsted’s careers guidance report pulled no punches in its criticism of schools. Nor did it come as a surprise to many in the FE sector. But now that it has arrived, so has the time to act — and to capitalise, says Ruth Sparkes.

Careers guidance in schools has come in for a rough ride this year from the Education Select Committee and the Mobility Commission — and now Ofsted is sticking the boot in.

Its boss, Sir Michal Wilshaw, is not at all happy with the careers advice that schools are dishing out.

I suspect that for most colleges this hasn’t come as a surprise.

However, the Ofsted report is a fantastic opportunity for colleges to show their mettle and raise awareness about what fantastic advice and guidance services they offer — and perhaps increase recruitment numbers at the same time.

Just days after GCSE results day last month, children’s charity Barnardo’s released a report with similar concerns.

As we know, A-level and GCSE results days are a period of intense anxiety and often distress for young people.

They could even offer advice from a caravan outside schools’ gates — there’s much that can be done”

They’re making what feels life-changing decisions about their futures, especially if their exam grades weren’t as good as they’d hoped.

There is a national shortage of expert advice and Berkshire College of Agriculture (BCA) decided to tackle this head-on. It’s a lead that I think other colleges can look at and adapt to their own audiences.

BCA decided that it needed to reach out to young people in ways that made it as accessible as possible.

The college decided to set up a careers shop (literally) in the town’s shopping centre and it wheeled out resident careers expert Victoria Sellens via Twitter; via a Q&A in the local paper; via a national blog; and, of course she manned the careers shop (and just so you know, she’s has had a nice holiday since).

‘I was very nervous about it all,’ she said.

‘I am a Twitter and blogging newbie, but it turned out to be an ideal way of connecting with young people, especially using social media. It is the ideal platform to offer the guidance they need in a friendly and informal setting.’

Now, I suspect those diehards out there are saying: ‘Harrumph – it’s not FE’s job to pick up where schools have failed. We don’t get funded for that … blah blah. Next we’ll be having to offer level two catch-up in English and maths.’

Ahem… Now, I know the excitement and trauma of results’ days are over for another year, but young people need advice and guidance all year round.

So, what’s to be done?

And what can colleges do?

Most colleges already offer good quality advice and guidance to their students and prospective students. Why not open this service up to anyone who needs it?

Colleges could work with their local papers (like BCA did) and offer another very valuable service to young people.

You could contact your local schools and offer your services, or if that’s a non-starter… Colleges don’t have to fight to get into secondary schools, they can use Twitter (BCA used the #AskVicki hashtag); they can use empty shops in their local high street, they can offer drop-in sessions on their campuses to coincide with schools’ home time, or Saturday mornings. They could even offer advice from a caravan outside schools’ gates — there’s much that can be done.

All of this is about offering young people good quality, impartial careers advice. But, why should you?

My first answer to that is because it’s a good thing to do, and, because you can – you have the resources.

My second answer is because you will come in to contact with students who may never have thought about your institution, who may never have even heard about it or even realised that coming to you was an option. You stand a very good chance of increasing your student numbers by doing something good.

 

Playing computers needn’t be seen as a waste of time that could be better spent learning — it can be a learning process itself if properly harnessed, says Helen Routledge.

Games-based learning or ‘serious games’ uses the power of computer games design techniques and mechanics to captivate and engage end-users for purposes other than pure entertainment.

Serious games use the underlying game mechanics and principles behind the incredibly successful commercial games market and aim to utilise these principles for education and training.

However, if you strip away all the techno-wizardry of the discussion and move to a psychological perspective, games are essentially highly experiential software applications which foster deep levels of cognitive activity, for example higher-level thinking skills such as conflict resolution or negotiation, emotional and physical responses.

Some of you may remember the growth of edutainment in the 1990s and may be asking how is this any different?

Edutainment used game play as a reward, or simply as a framework for the content.

What serious games aim to do is learn from the successful games industry and apply the engagement and behaviour mechanics that work, to education and training content.

Games are great at teaching you how to play and how to play well.

While we are playing, we are constantly making decisions, applying strategies, learning everything we can about the environment, and most importantly learning through failing and trying again.

Whether you are learning about how best to complete a stealth attack, remember a complex route through a maze, understanding binary code to crack open a lock, or combine the right mix of chemicals to complete a titration, games make you care about the tasks and instigate a desire to succeed.

While ensuring learners are engaged and motivated to keep trying until they succeed, the main purpose of a serious game is to develop new knowledge or skills and to ultimately produce a behaviour change.

This behaviour change is achieved through problem-based learning and constructivist learning strategies.

Serious games allow students to experience a problem first hand and make the decisions that feel most natural to them.

They can then see the impacts of their decisions on the game world and modify their strategy if required.

What’s most important is that games allow us to experiment and take risks we perhaps wouldn’t in the real world — we are then able to see why a decision did or didn’t work, receive immediate feedback and try alternative routes or methods to conquer a problem.

The benefit, beyond the initial impact is that these experiences may otherwise be impossible and/or undesirable to practice in the real world for reasons of cost, time, logistics and safety, such as chemistry lab practice or running a business.

The overarching structure of a serious game will focus on practice, repetition and mastery by using scenarios that introduce new concepts over time when the user is ready.

This approach leads to greatly improved effectiveness in the real world application of the learning.

However, it is important to remember that we do not learn in isolation, from one source. Rather, we learn continuously and from a number of sources and a number of events.

To that end, serious games should be considered as another option in a teacher’s toolkit and should be combined with other activities to extend learning.

A serious game should not be viewed as a silver bullet, as a one-stop shop for learning and development. Rather, it should be considered as a step along a journey, as a sandbox for applying knowledge and playing with concepts, ideas and approaches.

Helen Routledge, instructional systems design manager, Totem Learning Limited

Almost everything is available online nowadays it would seem — including educational materials. Dr Chris Pegler looks at whether the FE sector can benefit.

In 2001 Charles Vest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced it would make nearly all its course materials available free on the World Wide Web. If you spotted this at the time you may have wondered where the catch was in a too-good-to-be-true offer.

There have been limits, but MIT has continued its commitment to opencourseware, registering 125 million visits and uploading content from more than 2,000 courses to date.

Meanwhile the word open increasingly crops up across the UK education scene, albeit with contested interpretations.

The acronym Mooc (Massive Open Online Course) is now frequently subject to discussion.

MIT’s model, associating top universities with large-scale ready-to-learn open content activity, is a model preserved in Coursera and EDx Mooc initiatives and also in FutureLearn’s partnership of 21 top UK universities as Mooc providers.

And Martin Weller, talking about ‘big and little OER’ (open educational resources), has contrasted the contribution of high-finish formal opencourseware with the value of smaller scale home-brewed initiatives.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy suggested that the internet in Web 2.0 mode allows us to shift from read-only engagement to read-write participation, creating and changing content as well as simply consuming it.

What could be more suited for vocationally-rich FE practices?

Drawing on examples such as Coventry University’s Open Photography course and the groundbreaking DS106 Digital Storytelling course, here are some ideas about open which may be unfamiliar and could provide some food for action.

Open need not lead to cannibalisation — addressing perhaps the biggest concern about giving content for free, Coventry’s Open Photography PHONAR course led by Jonathan Worth teaches ‘remote students’ for free alongside fee-payers attending face-to-face.

Open can generate its own funds — we see crowdfunding in media projects, why not to create or sustain open education? The DS106 Kickstarter funded purchase of equipment (a server) to support its open activity.

Open leaves a legacy — content deposited into open repositories, whether as a teaching habit or a pre-retirement push, remains available after the course has finished. It’s also in digital, online, repurposeable format for others to use.

Open is open to improvement — open for comment, review, feedback, modification and translation creates potential to improve quality and also to extend audience and use. MIT’s 2,000-plus courses are perhaps less impressive than the 1000-plus translations of these by users.

Open is both micro and macro: feel the crowd — crowdsourcing content whether at the level of booksprints or Wikipedia entries, shows how individuals working collectively can create a stream of contextually-rich, informed teaching and reference content.

One of the persistent criticisms of open education is that it lacks a coherent and sustainable business model.

In Oriole (Open Resources: Influence on Learners and Educators) surveys, more than 90 per cent agreed they ‘fully support the idea of open content and open education resources’, yet in both 2011 and 2013 a substantial proportion also agreed ‘open content initiatives lack a coherent supporting business case’ (25 per cent in 2011 then 11 per cent fully agreed and 51 per cent partly agreed in 2013).

While the belief that we should engage in open education was very high, there are concerns about how to make this work in practice.

Referring back to conventional business theories such as Michael E Porter’s famous model of the five forces that shape competition we can see why.

Focusing on the power of suppliers and buyers or the threat of new entrants and substitutes assumes a zero-sum game for businesses which open education contests.

In the age of the internet open resource activity suggests the conventional business of education may now be open to question and perhaps even, in perception of supply and competition, redundant.

 

The FE sector’s record on research isn’t great and, as such, it could be miss­ing out on many benefits, says Emma Procter-Legg

Since becoming involved in the Jisc (formerly Joint Information Systems Committee) Advance-funded research project Students4webES (Students for Webinar Employability Skills), I have learned that participation in formal research is not very common within the FE and skills sector.

There are many reasons for the lack of research within FE — an absence of dedicated research time and funding being two of the more obvious ones.

Access to project funding for FE colleges is limited. The Learning and Skills Improvement Service, now gone, had small amounts of funding to support small projects and individual practitioner action research.

Until 2012, Jisc accepted bids for project funding from FE institutions with more than 400 full-time equivalent HE students.

In 2012 Jisc introduced the Jisc Advance funding programme, without the FTE higher education requirement, to enhance learning and teaching across the FE and skills sector.

The Students4webES project was one of the 33 accepted bids from this programme.

Few, if any, FE colleges have a research department.

Historically much of the research that has been conducted within the sector is carried out by higher education institutions or research organisations looking at FE from the outside.

I feel this approach lacks the insider knowledge, the implicit knowledge that those working in FE can bring to research.

Research in FE requires a different approach — the sector has different needs and areas that need to be understood and supported.

I was lucky to be approached to be the project manager of the Students4webES project run at Abingdon and Witney College.

I had previously worked at the college as a lecturer so found it relatively straightforward to understand the project and the nature of the issues that we might face running a project.

I brought with me some research experience having just finished working on an EU-funded project at the time I took on this role.

Understanding the requirements of a research project meant I could bring a great deal of enthusiasm and not be overwhelmed by the paperwork.

Indeed, without the dedicated time and funding and the invaluable support and training offered by Jisc it would not have been possible to run the project.

Not all research can be run as action research— as part of a lecturer’s continuing professional development, a teacher training qualification (be that DTTLS, a PGCE or other) or masters programme.

The funding allowed us to dedicate the necessary time to make the project work, to overcome the various barriers that occurred and to share our findings with others within the sector and beyond.

FE is a complex and multi-level sector, but it is also interesting and under-researched by those who know it best.

Action research or case studies are the normal contribution by FE practitioners to understanding their own sector.

These are useful and often shared, but properly run research adds value to a wider audience and may help the FE and skills sector, and the wider educational community, gain a more holistic understanding of education, teaching, learning and vocational skills that affects a large number of young people and adults in the UK.

The key to building a new culture of learning is to use the communication opportunities afforded by technology to foster and support innovation, says Sheila MacNeill.

What is an innovation support centre? And what does someone who works there actually do to support innovation? Well, as Facebook would say “it’s complicated”.

A central tenant of the Centre for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards has been to support and develop the effective use of educational technology standards.

So we have been involved in helping the uptake and adoption of such things as metadata (data about data) in learning resources, formats such as content packaging for sharing and exchanging resources.

We’ve also encouraged extending the use of virtual learning environments, through integration of widgets and the use of the learning technology interoperability specification (integrating different technologies), and most recently learning analytics.

But how do we do that? Well, there is direct contact with standards bodies that involves lots of pretty techie meetings and sharing back and forth actual practice via engagement with our community.

Regular face-to-face meetings have evolved and are increasingly supplemented by online communication and sharing, most notably through our use of blogs and other social media channels, particularly Twitter.

Sometimes I jokingly say what I actually do is type and go to meetings, as most of my life seems to be spent in front of my laptop answering emails, writing blog posts or on a train going to a meeting somewhere, where I usually sit in front of my laptop, tweeting.

However, there is more to it than that. One of the key elements of supporting innovation is fostering open cultures to share ideas and practice.

The growth of social media has been quite transformational in this respect as it makes sharing new ideas almost instantaneous as there’s no need to wait for a face-to-face meeting or to clog up people’s email boxes with updates on mailing lists.

I have found my own practice transformed through being able to keep in touch with people in between meetings through lightweight and informal services like Twitter.

At the same time, I’ve also had some really meaningful interactions with colleagues via Twitter, and have been able to nurture and extend my own professional network.

My blog has also become an increasingly important way for me to share my reflections on, for example, some of the truly inspiring and excellent work carried out by institutions funded through various Jisc (formerly Joint Information Systems Committee) programmes. It also provides a way to easily let people know of other developments such as new standards, and some slightly leftfield ideas I may have.

In many ways, blogs can become a place to store professional memory, and a key way to engage with colleagues in the sector. It is also a reflection of all the good practice I am able to “soak up” from the sector and then share back out, like a kind of innovation sponge.

I am in an incredibly privileged position in that I am paid to engage with many people in the sector, and share that experience without the added complications of teaching commitments.

Providing space (and funding) for this sort of work is essential for innovation to thrive.

But, as we are all too aware, our funding climate is changing and support for innovation is dwindling.

Our job now is to find a way to adapt and thrive in our changing climate to ensure innovation continues to be supported and shared.

Technology can change overnight, ren­dering college practices and programs obsolete. The answer is a more “agile and responsive education system,” according to Bruce Chaloux and Larry Ragan.

E-learning is proving to be a major disruptive force on education across the globe — from primary to advanced study.

This force is causing significant upheaval as it challenges long-standing norms of practice in the field.

This impact is being realized at all levels, including students, instructors, program, institutional, national and global.

Many of these forces are causing reflection and questioning of long-held beliefs of what constitutes a “traditional” educational experience.

One of the greatest impacts of e-learning on “traditional” educational models has been a reconsideration of the dynamics of the teaching and learning process.

Most directly, this has impacted the role of the instructor. There are two primary themes of change occurring that often get conflated in this re-envisioning dialog — that of pedagogy and technology.

New understandings of how we learn combined with the affordances of emerging technologies create new and exciting opportunities for learning on both the part of the teacher and student.

Leaders of educational systems must assimilate and accommodate these converging forces in order manage and direct the impact on their instructional resources.

For the learner in this rapidly emerging learning system, the world suddenly becomes accessible, open and increasingly less structured.

The opportunities presented by today’s complex learning systems require a higher degree of awareness of academic integrity, time management and collaboration — all skills which apply in today’s workplace as well. The systems and services institutional leaders provide to enable student’s success will determine the overall institutional health for the future.

Without a proper setting of the institutional context, students may seek alternative options for fulfilling their learning needs.

Many institutions are embracing the e-learning platform as a way to address the needs of today’s learners by offering new and flexible learning programs targeted towards specific learning outcomes.

Program directors will need to employ a flexible and creative mindset to frame their course of study as relevant, fresh and high quality.

The number of colleges and universities developing or expanding e-learning programming continues to grow at a dramatic rate.

Once the domain of ‘non-traditional’ institutions or units within institutions, some of the world’s leading academic institutions are developing e-learning programs to maintain competitiveness and to reach new markets.

Similarly, smaller institutions seeking to address declining enrolments in traditional campus programmes are turning to e-learning.

Through these changes institutions are seeking to address new challenges including faculty development and preparation, student learning environments, curricular change, student services, and a broad array of policy changes.

Those that effectively address these challenges will be able to effectively manoeuvre in the global market, while those that can’t will not succeed.

The traditional campus and time-based model, still predominant, is being altered, not only by how higher education is delivered, but also by what is offered, when it is available and how learning is recognized.

Programs are being designed to be more responsive to student demands and needs, with a clear emphasis on application. Global ‘executive’ programs at the graduate level are popular and expensive as ‘market pricing’ replaces more traditional tuition and fee structures.

Today’s rapidly changing global culture of learning presents a new set of leadership challenges.

In essence, the “rules of engagement” have changed and call for a more agile and responsive educational system.

What was once valued by the consumer will no longer be adequate to meet the needs of tomorrow’s learners. Today’s leaders of educational systems have a new selection of options to drawn upon in order to fashion a learning environment that is globally connected, nationally aware and learner-centered.