Achievement & Attainment
Europass provides a portfolio of standardised electronic documents for learners across Europe to use to record their achievements, skills and competencies including work-based experience which can be easily understood across Europe.
A number of key initiatives are driving forward a change in the way in which learner achievement is collected, recorded and presented to better enable lifelong learning, increase employability and improve transparency and recognition of qualifications.
The Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP) Learner Registration Service (LRS), launched in February 2008, will be capable of issuing a Unique Learner Number (ULN) to every person aged 14 and over in education and training in the UK, and will allow them to build a lifelong record of their participation and achievements. The Learner Record is an aggregation of records about an individual's learning that has already been collected by UK education bodies with an initial focus on qualifications. Although learners will not be able to change their record, they control who can access all or selected elements of it.
Although the use of HE Progress Files has become widely adopted in the English HE sector, the Burgess Report recommends a single, more comprehensive record of learners' educational achievements which will better support the skills agenda and flexible and lifelong learning. The Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR) will give employers more detailed information on the skills, progress and attainment of prospective employees and will provide the opportunity to record workplace learning and higher level skills developed as part of higher education programmes. Although the Progress File model is likely to evolve under the Burgess proposals, the diagram below shows how e-portfolios could support both reflective learning through Personal Development Planning (PDP) and associated evidence captured in the Progress File.
Adapted from a presentation by Peter Rees-Jones to a joint meeting of the CETIS Pedagogy Forum, June 2004.
Further Links and Resources
Case Studies
Both the 2005 DfES E-strategy (Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services) and the HEFCE Strategy for e-Learning (2005) propose the use of an electronic portfolio (or at least electronic media) to building a lifelong record of achievement skills and achievement. These initiatives and drivers provide significant administrative, technical and legal challenges at institutional and national level in terms of e.g. data management, interoperability, data transfer, authentication and data ownership.
In response to these challenges, JISC projects have focused on the technical frameworks which will enable data transfer and interoperability at critical learner transition points (e.g. school to HE, FE to employment etc) and the potential of e-portfolios to support these processes. The e-Portfolio Lifelong Learning Reference Model project tested a range of scenarios and developed a 'thin' e-portfolio model of services and workflow to reduce the complexity of data transfer between different data repositories. This is being taken forward in specific contexts such as admissions to HE (DELIA project) and at regional level (RIPPLL ).
