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Stepping stones to lifelong learning
An interview with Shane Sutherland, Pebble Learning
By Kim Thomas |
E-portfolios – software tools that enable learners to record their individual achievements and interests – are increasingly seen as an essential component of personalised learning. One of the outcomes of the 1997 Dearing Report was a requirement that higher education institutions should implement Personal Development Planning (PDP) by 2006. E-portfolios were clearly the best way of doing this.
PebblePad was developed because the University of Wolverhampton needed an e-portfolio system that was simple to use and easy to tailor to individual needs. The university already had a paper-based profiling system that helped it identify the students who might be at risk of failing when they first came to university. According to Shane Sutherland, now E-portfolio Coordinator at the university and Development Director of Pebble Learning, the forms would be filled in at the beginning of September, but the results would not be made available until December. “By which time,” he says, “all the students who were at risk had left.”
Shane and his colleagues in the Centre for Learning and Teaching looked around for an e-portfolio tool that would do the job more quickly, and which would also include some element of planning. They were disappointed: “Most of the e-portfolios we were aware of tended to have two faults. They tended to be very competency- or outcome-based, so they needed to be pre-populated with 430 things you needed to do to become a lawyer or a doctor or a surveyor or a plumber. And they were too complicated, or just unexciting.”
So the team came up with PebblePad, which, instead of using predefined competencies, would recognise the amount of learning students undertook outside the university: “What we set out to do was build a portfolio that allowed them to record anything they were proud of. And we wanted to make the system as user-friendly as possible, so they used it because they wanted to not because they were told to.”
Because Wolverhampton has 23,000 students, many of whom are working at home or on placements, PebblePad was developed as a web-based system that could be accessed anywhere. Shane and his colleagues made sure it was flexible enough to be used by lecturers as part of their Continuing Professional Development (CPD), believing that if they were using it themselves, they were more likely to use it with their students. Initially, PebblePad was used on six pilot projects and then, as Shane puts it, “released it into the wild”.
Since September 2005, PebblePad has been available to all Wolverhampton staff and students. Some lecturers have built PebblePad into their curricula, requiring students to use it to provide evidence of research activity. Other students have been asked by their tutors to use PebblePad to build an action plan, while others just happen on the system and start using it out of choice, either to record their work or to share ideas with others in the same way as ordinary social technologies.
To use PebblePad, users begin by choosing one of four pebbles, representing different activities. Clicking on a pebble brings up a sub-menu of options. Users can choose to create or edit, among other things, CVs, blogs, action plans or records of meetings. They can upload files, such as documents, presentations, audio files or video files. They can also link seamlessly to videos or photographs they have stored on YouTube or Flickr. It is a highly personal record, tailored entirely to the student – less an e-portfolio, says Shane, and more as a “personal space for learning”. Students can choose, through a flexible permissioning system, to give tutors or fellow students secure web access to the relevant parts of the portfolio.
This sharing and collaboration functionality is one of PebblePad’s great strengths, believes Shane. One Wolverhampton academic, Julie Hughes, introduced PebblePad to her teacher training students. “Now they’re all out and working across the UK, but they’re all still using the system, and they’re blogging with each other, sharing ideas and experiences, even though they’ve left the university,” says Shane. This, he points out, runs contrary to most research findings on such systems, which suggest that students usually stop using them once they leave the institution.
It has also had an impact on staff’s approach to teaching. Some Wolverhampton staff started using PebblePad to clamp down on plagiarism. The idea was that art and design students, instead of simply producing a sculpture or other artefact, would use the e-portfolio to note down their ideas and their initial sketches – the whole process that led to the creation of the artefact. Although the staff began by wanting to police what students were doing, they discovered by introducing the e-portfolio that they learnt more about the students’ experience of the learning process, and adapted their teaching strategy accordingly. On one module, says Shane, there was a high fail rate, and staff realised after introducing PebblePad that students misunderstood what was required of them. Those teachers, he says, are now among PebblePad’s greatest advocates: “Even though they wanted it as a management tool, I think you could pretty reasonably argue that it’s altered their perception of their role as teachers.”
PebblePad is now used in 30 universities in the UK. Instead of having to buy a whole-site licence, institutions can buy licences for a particular number of users, and then increase that number as necessary. Although originally designed for use in higher education, the system is now being used by Sandwell Education to support pupils in the transition from primary to secondary school, and by local secondary schools and colleges, such as Leasowes Community College in Dudley, as part of the JISC ePISTLE project to trial e-portfolios in schools.
To make PebblePad more appealing to primary school children, Shane’s team has developed a new animated interface, in which a personal ‘guide’ shows the user around a virtual room that contains the PebblePad features, such as the webfolio and the weblog. It’s turned out to be popular, not just with primary age children but with adults too. (Teenagers are less keen.)
What of the future? Pebble Learning, the company formed to develop and market PebblePad, now has 11 employees, all graduates of the University of Wolverhampton. Shane believes that the market for the product will continue to grow: what makes PebblePad different, he says, is that it is a tool for both ‘lifelong’ learning and for ‘lifewide’ learning. Students use it in their lives outside the institution, and he hopes that it will become part of a standard alumni package that enables them to carry on using it after they leave the institution. Shane is also optimistic that school pupils who adopt PebblePad at school will be encouraged to apply to Wolverhampton as they will want to continue using it there. It looks as if the PebblePad success story has only just begun.
Links
www.pebblepad.co.uk
www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/epistleFinalReport.pdf
January 2007
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