Derrin Kent: Portfolios in degree apprenticeships

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. My guest today is Derrin Kent from The Development Manager in the UK. He's back to share how he uses portfolios with apprentices this time and specifically with degree apprentices. Welcome back, Derrin.

Derrin Kent: 0:42

Oh lovely to be speaking to you again, Kristina. Hello.

Kristina Hoeppner: 0:45

Nice having you back on the podcast, Derrin. Last time we talked about the Skills Bootcamps and how you use portfolios with people who are looking for a new job opportunity. However, you've actually been using portfolios much, much longer than that in your degree apprenticeships and also regular apprenticeships. Since degree apprenticeships may not be something that is widely known outside of the UK, can you please give us an overview of what they are and what their difference is to a university degree and an apprenticeship?

Derrin Kent: 1:17

Yeah, good question. It's an apprenticeship with a university degree in it. With degree apprenticeships, if you're going to make one word a capital word between 'degree' and 'apprenticeship', I think the capital word should be'apprenticeship', not 'degree'. And I think it's often perceived wrongly by a lot of even in Britain, some university organizations think it's capital letters 'degree' with small letters 'apprenticeship', whereas I would say actually, it's an apprenticeship experience. Let's think about what the difference is between these two things. So apprenticeships have been over a long, long, long, long, long, long time. I don't know when they first started, but I suspect that when they were building Stonehenge, those stone miners were probably doing something broadly similar to an apprenticeship, which is getting people who were new to the trade to learn the skills from the masters. In Tudor times in Britain, you had guilds, which had slightly sort of misogynistic language, but you would have the apprentice, then the journeyman, then the craftsman, and the master craftsman. Women can also do these things - they could then, but they certainly can nowadays. But you've got this idea of this growth of the craftsman. Does that make sense? That happens in mentoring and under supervision. And so what you want to do is to set up a learning programme. Apprenticeships are very much interested in work-based learning. It's not just a work-based doing process. It's a work-based learning process. But the structuring of that learning is in response to what the employer means to happen, and what in the employment context needs to happen. Then you want an educational provision that broadens that experience and deepens it and accelerate in fact, so it makes learning faster, broader, deeper, better. But it's all in response to what that employer organisation is desperately needing. Then you look at the idea of the degree, relatively old concept and going on for quite a long time. But as big institutional degrees, they take off in massive scale, when I was taking them, they were about 8% of the British population taking them. They got more and more popular for 18 to 21-year olds. But it's the idea of putting people in to an institution. They're getting access to beautiful, knowledgeable experts who are in their field and the learner is in the institution, and what they're doing is they're learning what that expert researcher and that expert professor is excited about. That expert professor is really strong at this and sets some tasks and learning activities where they learn what the professor is excited about. So you can see that concept of the institutional programmes got all that benefit of getting that access to that amazing expertise from the professor is then set alongside the apprenticeship experience where it's all about learning what's relevant in the workplace. Those two traditions which are both equally as beautiful flash into what's called a degree apprenticeship. So back to what I'm saying at the beginning, I think what we need to do is to make our teaching and our lecturing subservient to the apprenticeship experience in that workplace and then react appropriately and responsibly to whatever the workplace needs in terms of the determination of what the most appropriate content coverage is, and that becomes a bit of a challenge sometimes. What they've done in Britain, which is quite useful, is an Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education have set up a standard. So there's a standard of knowledge and a standard of skills and a standard of behaviours. That helps us to give a kind of standardisation to what does get covered, but the problem is if the organisation's professors get too excited and start teaching what they think is relevant, it starts to jar and clash with what the employer organisation needs. It's bringing together of two beautiful traditions, and it really is. What's exciting here is things from the university tradition that have always been really, really useful are being brought into the apprenticeship delivery experience to improve it. So an example is the notion of a seminar and a seminar paper. Somebody goes away and studies something and comes back in a seminar group and a group of learners together basically engage in seminar together. The big notion of lecture of content coverage. Now, obviously, we don't want to bring everybody necessarily synchronously all at the same time together. We can record that video lecture and then bring people in a consolidation experience together. The way I explain it is this, when you're delivering an institutional degree, you have the luxury of people's time and the problem of real world experience. But when you're delivering an apprenticeship, you have the luxury of real world experience, but the problem of people's time. We're now with Staffordshire University, but when we first started, we were with the University of Wolverhampton. We've had over 40 people come through, they've all passed, only one has got a 2-2. All of the others have got first class honours.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:08

What's a 2-2?

Derrin Kent: 6:09

It's a second class honours in the second degree. So only one has got this sort of third tier of grade. Everybody else have got either a first class honours or a 2-1. Now, if you think about it, that shouldn't be a surprise because the apprentices when compared to their institutional colleagues are producing a thesis, which is very, very real.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:30

Mhh.

Derrin Kent: 6:30

So instead of saying, 'Oh, this is what I would do if I was doing this software development projects in the real world or this network engineering projects in the real world,' what they're doing instead is saying, 'This is what I've done, have a look at this, this is what happened. This is how this manifested.' And so the assessors if you like when they're looking at their work, are just going 'Yeah, that's absolutely fantastic,' and they're given them the very top grades because it's very real and very contextualised. So the challenge to the professor is to give that excitement of the excitement without making it selfishly on their own terms. So they can give that flexibility, that exploration, that collaboration, that intellectual experience by making it responsive to what's needed at work. It's not just data entry jobs, Kristina, it's really quite challenging, stretchy, digitally transformative projects that these guys are delivering in their workplaces in a very real way. But instead of being an abstraction of theoretical exploration, it's real and tangible. The challenge for the professor is to make it deeply enriching as well as real and tangible as a learning experience.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:37

They are really nicely complementary...

Derrin Kent: 7:39

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 7:39

... because the students learn skills in the degree that helped them in the apprenticeship like how to think, how to research because of course a company also does not want to be stagnant. They also need people to think, to innovate, to do a lot of research, a lot of times. That's where the degree part can come in. In other parts of the world, while they might not really be the degree apprenticeships, we do see an uptake of work-integrated learning activities that are now being promoted at the university level so that students do get that real world experience and know what to expect, get exposure to the job market, and know better how they can market themselves, what that job would be for them. So yes, it's coming more and more, just in a different way as well.

Derrin Kent: 8:28

Exactly that. We're at an exciting point in Britain, where the institutional university tradition, if you like, I've got books in my office from decades ago talking about work-based learning from a university level perspective. So it's not a new thing. But I suppose it becoming a heavily funded educational programme in the country is putting a lot of questions through to the two sectors. The skill sector and the university sector are now meeting up in conversation and challenging each other. What universities are not very good at versus what we've been good at as an apprenticeship sector is the notion of the individual learning plan (ILP). So the individual learning plan, and this is very much what we do, so as an apprenticeship programme deliverer what we do is we coach, we don't teach. We don't train, we coach. Obviously, teaching and training are contributory towards the process. I'm not saying they don't happen, they do, but our primary goal is to do what we call the tripartite, three party, highly individualised and personalised learning plan for that unique employee in that unique employment context in relation to the knowledge and skills and behavioural requirements of the degree apprenticeship standard. So it becomes a constant negotiation as to what we're going to do next? In the process, you're looking at what's coming up at work, and you just go right what can I learn in consequence of the tasks that come up at work that's relevant to the standard? And then sometimes you're looking at the standard, and you're saying, what are we going to do at work that's relevant to the learning that I need? You've got this constant negotiation around how we're going to make this a unified experience between the learning journey and the employment experience? Universities thus far, I'm sure we'll have listeners who are great at it, but in my experience thus far universities are still on that learning curve as to how to do that effectively. And they've got a lot to learn from the apprenticeship sector in those terms, whilst the apprenticeship sector, we've got a lot to learn in terms of the breadth of the quality of knowledge coverage that universities do and their ability to create learning outcomes and the clarity of learning outcome definition and the various methodologies they've got. That's kind of where the integration is happening. So where do portfolios fit in?

Kristina Hoeppner: 10:40

That's then my question, Derrin, because you've just mentioned the individual learning plans and that your learning is highly individualised and that you're not really teaching or coaching 100 people or 200 people, like you sometimes have in lecture halls, or many more, you have a very individualised programme because you look at every apprentice who's working at a specific company, doing a specific task or set of tasks, and create that individual learning plan. That's where I think the portfolio of course fits wonderfully since it is for those authentic learning tasks, documenting that learning, reflecting on that learning. So how does it all work together for you and for your apprentices?

Derrin Kent: 11:25

So that's why we've been doing ePortfolios for years. Funnily enough, in the apprenticeship sector, there have been a lot of tools, so called ePortfolio platforms that are available for the apprenticeship sector that are really not ePortfolios, Kristina. They're kind of drop boxes with a tracking system on top of it. They're not a showcase, reflective ePortfolio learning opportunity, which Mahara is. So I've always been very precious about Mahara as the core of how we do the learning. What they've done beautifully, certainly in our standards, is the endpoint assessment tasks that come through, and guess what? A professional discussion around an ePortfolio is the majority endpoint assessment task, and the second one is some kind of project deliverable, which they have to have done real work experience in order to be able to cope with the project because the demands of the projects are unpredictable. You can only acquire the skill to succeed at the project by having applied things in real world practice. It's not just a knowledge base, they're very hands on real world practice, kind of experiential projects, sort of simulation type things. So the only way to develop the people for success on these programmes is through that reflective journal. The ePortfolio, what it does is it allows our coaches every time they go into the ILP discussion to look at not just the aggregation of evidence of learning in practice, but also the reflection over that learning. SmartEvidence has been really helpful for us more recently because we can now sort of start to plan ahead what learning needs to be delivered, and then they can negotiate whether or not we've got that covered in practice. We can't grade it as pass or fail, but we can certainly use SmartEvidence to say 'There is some evidence of this or there's a lot of evidence of this,' and do you see what I mean, so we can start building that portfolio over time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:13

Because you can set up the apprenticeship standards and then map the content of the portfolios to those standards.

Derrin Kent: 13:19

The learner can.

Kristina Hoeppner: 13:20

Yes, so that's what's SmartEvidence gives you that you provide the structure for the portfolio, essentially, your standards available, and the learner can then check their evidence and say, 'Yes, these pieces of evidence are fulfilling this standard or a sub standard of it.'

Derrin Kent: 13:37

That becomes the absolute centrality of the learning programme as opposed to the sequence of lectures that we think are exciting as degree providers. So because that standard is the main central driver, the learner and their employer can go through together and think 'Oh, how are we going to learn, how are we going to prove this, how are we going to show this? How are we going to reflect around this?' Our coach can go in and say, 'Oh, I've got some good suggested learning materials that I can find from a content aggregator platform or a MOOC or something like that.' There are various and so you can just go 'Oh, here's some material you could study.' And that's it, and then we've also got our learning programme running in tandem with it where we can say 'Let's think about what we do at work to make sure this manifests as well and agree on those tasks.' So that becomes quite an exciting negotiation around that space. What's interesting now with the advent of AI is some of the old fashioned learning assessment methodologies are not very interesting any more. Example. What's happened to us is the university gives us modules and we have to do what we do. We're almost sometimes compensating for the university's modules at the moment in the way it's set up, I think. Over time, that will change because as I say, I think the portfolio assessment approach will be accepted. We'll get more adaptability from our university partner in terms of determining what good education looks like. We'll still have to subscribe to Office for Students Requirements, and I celebrate all of this. I don't regret any of that. But at the moment, for example, there's a module on cyber

security in the degree: 15:11

do a cyber security risk assessment, okay? They'll go into Copilot and ChatGPT [laughs] and get at risk assessment printed out, and they can do that. And they can also tweak it a little bit and make it look as if it's theirs by putting a few spelling mistakes, and it's compelling enough. That's not gonna cut the mustard though, isn't it? It's not okay. So what we're doing in response to that is we're saying, 'Right, that's the assessment method, but what we're gonna do is different. You're gonna have to produce that. But what we want you to do,' and we instruct them. We say 'Go to Copilot, go to ChatGPT, and go and look at a content aggregator platform. Let's get various printouts of risk assessments that are more or less right for your organisation. As a learning exercise, let's compare what the AI has given us and look at what we think are the most valuable outputs and which are the least valuable outputs, and then craft that into a real one by thinking about what's happening at work, and let's get an ePortfolio to evidence the reflective learning cycle and the application cycle and the discovery thing to bring that together, which will ultimately result in this crafted thing, which is going to get you your university grade. But the real learning happens as you continuously build and craft and reflect on that development process in a real workplace setting and getting feedback from people on it.' So the ePortfolio becomes central to the learning delivery model, if that makes sense.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:34

Yeah, and because you have the real world context, the risk assessment needs to be contextualised, and, you know, sure, the AI can give you also something that can be used because, of course, there are standards. So it will be applicable, probably in 60 to 80 to 90%, but there might still be a couple of items or more than a couple of items that are specific to that organisation that can then be brought in and therefore knowing how to draft certain analysis, rather than just picking the first one they get back from the internet through whatever measure, that's the learning. That's how they will also know in the future how they can put you standard. What I really love is that you ask them to reflect on that process.

Derrin Kent: 17:21

We want evidence of its application in workplace and evidence of discussion, which is captured in the Mahara pages and in the reflective narrative that they build around that construction of that assignment. So the real learning is the construction of the assessment, not the assessment and the gathering of the influencing content. So that's how we're balancing some quite old fashioned views as to what good assessment looks like. I know there are lots of universities doing really exciting things with concepts like the case study and the portfolio, and that's already happening in a lot of learning institutions. And it's been quite central to the way a degree is achieved. So you don't have to have a top down university professor determined diktat as to what content knowledge looks like. So here is a very practical example. One of the customers we work in with is Microsoft, and in the module on cloud, it's proposed very strongly that learners study Amazon Web Services. Well, you can imagine that Microsoft might not be quite so keen [laughs] on their learners studying what the university lecturer's decided is exciting for them. They'd prefer them to learn Azure. I'm sure, if we were working for Amazon, they'd have an alternative view. What I'm saying is the prescription of content coverage- the way that the IfATE describe the knowledge, the skills, and the behaviours is very clever because they put a lot of thought into this. They've gotten lots of employers together in what they call the Trailblazer Group from all different contexts. They basically had their arm wrestles, and they've agreed on a generic knowledge requirement that they can all agree on that isn't specific to one technology with one employer. That work got done over a lot of discussion and a lot of hard work as employers are all getting together. So when the university go in and become prescriptive over that, it's almost spoiling the party. It's kind of spoiling the hard work that was done. So as an apprenticeships provider, it's more useful for us to understand, and this is including universities as well as sort of more traditional independent training providers, for us to go in and say, 'Right, let's work backwards from what the endpoint assessment is going to assess. Make it relevant here and let's not impose the set of learning objectives over what's already defined very beautifully in the standard,' but I completely understand that we need a level of rigour in terms of Office for Students defined outcomes and that ability to sort of, you know, set a real development of human thoughts as they go up Bloom's taxonomy of thinking and they become a different type of Thinker over time. I'm not throwing that away, but what I'm saying is if we build our modules around an ePortfolio as an assessment method and still achieving the knowledge required on the standard and make the locus of control is over how that manifests more localised to the employer, it's very achievable. I've done it myself. We got an Ofsted 'Outstanding' judgements on that kind of approach. We had to move universities, so we've changed a little bit. But as I say, with time, I think we'll get back to this more ePortfolio centric approach to delivering the degree. It's done in business schools around case studies, so it is very achievable. That's the fun ahead.

Kristina Hoeppner: 20:29

It'll be good to see the how the new university that you're working with over time will also take on the concept of portfolios and find that balance also for themselves in regards to how much general knowledge do students need to know about different cloud providers in order to make comparisons, in order to think for themselves and realise what the differences are and why there are differences. Because yes, Microsoft prefers people to learn about their technology, however, the students still need to know the general field...

Derrin Kent: 21:02

...the basics of cloud, yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:04

Exactly. It will be good to see how the portfolio can permeate also into the degree.

Derrin Kent: 21:10

Exactly. A bit careful with myself, Kristina because I don't want to overstate any reluctance on part of our partner university. The opposite is true. I'm saying that we're all on the learning curve together here, and we're all positively impacting upon each other. Any clashes we have between organisations is beautiful and positive. Do they have ePortfolio as part of their programme? They already do. I'm not saying they don't. But I just think it needs to be much more central to the approach than it currently is, and that's the journey we're on.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:40

Let's come back in a year's time and see how things have developed.

Derrin Kent: 21:44

Yeah, let's see how it goes [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:46

Yeah[laughs]. So, Derrin, what do actually your students say about the portfolios when you introduce them to them?

Derrin Kent: 21:54

Remember, we do the whole journey. The idea is they start from Bootcamp, then they go through a normal apprenticeship, and then they become degree. So the people who have gone through that journey with us over time, they're kind of already on it by the time they hit degree level.

Kristina Hoeppner: 22:06

But if you get somebody who hasn't gone through the Skills Bootcamp?

Derrin Kent: 22:10

Right, it's hard at the beginning for everyone. So if you are used to an institutional education where you're effectively going to be taught something, then spit it back to somebody in the form of an essay [laughs] or a quiz or a test, when you've got an educational organisation like TDM coming up to you as a learner and saying 'Ah, rules have changed. You're in charge now. This is now your learning journey, and you're going to be a reflective learner and you're going to apply theory in practice, and we're going to negotiate with it we'll be your partner, we'll be your androgogy partner rather than a pedagogy partner. So in other words, we've been treat you as an equal adult, and we will collaborate with you in order to interpret how this standard and this knowledge needs to manifest in your workplace, and then you're going to do it, and you evidence, and you reflect on in as you create it.' As you can imagine, in the first six months of somebody trying this, there's a big expectation shift. Some people adapt to it very, very quickly. It's fish to water. But some people are just going 'Oh, this is nothing like I've ever experienced before and this is something entirely different,' and they don't get it. That's why we send in two types of coach. We send in the skills and knowledge coach who is very much attending to the standard. But we send a second type of coach who is called the performance and development coach. What they're doing, they're thinking about how this person is delivering at work, in other words, whether they're performing but performance is not this, oh, you know, carrot and stick and whips and you shall perform. It's not that sense of performance. It's more about this idea of mastery and role, which is something both the employee and the employer are looking for as a collaboration. So it's about getting better in their job role. So that's conversation number one and conversation number two is your development as a whole person, including you as the learner. The Mahara platform becomes very much part of that early conversation around the reflective practitioner, which is useful as employee, but also useful as learner. I'm not going to pretend it's all easy sailing'cause it's not. I mean, it's a big negotiation sometimes. But put it this way, those who succeed, adapt to this and enjoy it and benefit from it. Given that the endpoint assessment is predominantly a live project of being able to do something in a real world scenario and secondary a discussion around the reflective ePortfolio[laughs], they have to kind of get their heads around this in order to succeed. So it's a big requirements on them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 24:30

Your success numbers speak for themselves because they are really, really good. How do you bring the employers along that journey? Have they often already seen portfolios before, kind of the portfolios that you're asking your apprentices to create or did they also need a little bit of learning to understand what they're seeing, what's in front of them?

Derrin Kent: 24:52

It comes a bit of a shock to employers sometimes, but a clear message that we have to people is look, we're not the apprenticeship provider. Don't think we're the apprenticeship provider. We're not. We're just the training provider. You're the apprenticeship provider, employer organisation. Our job is to help you implement a work-based learning experience, which helps this person become the technical professional that we're all aspiring for them to become. And of course, we want to tailor this to your organisation, but there's also a standard that the nation requires that this person is going to reach and be able to evidence when they get to the end. To be honest, if employers don't adapt to it, we just stop working with the employers[laughs]. What we're interested in is the genuinely work-based learning that's relevant to you as an organisation, and we want to be your best friends in the world to get this person to become a better performing, more rounded, more effective employee for your place that's good at that trade. We give the employer two roles. Number one is the mentor. So we're the coaches, we send in coaches. They supply a mentor, who's effectively the line manager, but more important than that they're the learning manager. So they're the person who's managing that learning with that person, and they're available day in day out at work. And then we have our contracting employer who's normally the person from human resources, or it could be the business owner or somebody like that. That's another ally of ours. The mentor is as invested into the ePortfolio as the learner is. Is that a learning curve? Sometimes, yes. We try to be really clear upfront as this is how we approach it, and other apprenticeship providers are available, but if you want to work with us, it's going to work this way, and we're looking for impact now. The last survey we did, 85% of employers were delighted with our work and others were saying we were good. We get strong employer feedback, but we have to choose carefully the right kind of employer to work with. We have lost employers along the way, if I'm honest with you because they're not looking to work in the way we want to, and so it's a match thing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:52

Do some of your employers then actually also continue with a portfolio work in other areas? Because of course, while they are they taking on apprentices, typically everybody should continue learning lifelong learning and...

Derrin Kent: 27:04

Yeah.

Kristina Hoeppner: 27:05

... also as regular employee then to make it part of the performance review process or something like that.

Derrin Kent: 27:12

I would love that to be the case. We haven't strategically as The Development Manager made much of an effort in those terms to continue that conversation. However, somebody said something to me the other day that the penny dropped for me. You know, like IT businesses see themselves as a consumption business. They'll have a customer success unit. I bet you at Catalyst speak in these terms. I've realised that TDM need to think that way as well. It's a bit of a slow penny drop for me, but we need to understand ourselves as a consumption business for people. So yes, we've got the government funded apprenticeship programmes. But in terms of working with the Tōtara system, which is the other big platform we use and the Mahara system, we can actually see ourselves as a useful commercial organisation to help employer organisations deliver a more rounded talent experience and a set of learning journeys and stretch and challenge experiences. So to answer your question, have we engaged with that? The answer's no. Should we? We definitely should. It's kind of long overdue for us to start doing that work as people.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:19

I look forward to those conversations then and what your employers say and how they can make that reflective cycle and also not just having the reflective cycle in there, but really also making that learning and that reflection explicit.

Derrin Kent: 28:33

At the moment, if I'm brutally frank, the conversation with employers is around this is a great way of doing apprenticeships, but it's not become a great way of giving a talent experience and development process for your team forever as part of human experience. Yeah, that's a next step for us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:49

Derrin, earlier you mentioned that sometimes the portfolio is already used in the degrees that you of course, have it readily integrated into your apprenticeships, is there anything that you'd like to add to where you see the future of portfolios in degree apprenticeships?

Derrin Kent: 29:06

I do think that, obviously, given my context of England, really, and Britain, and I do think that is a fascinating and vibrant conversation that's well underway. So it's a relatively new thing. As I say, universities have been in work-based learning for years, but that formal apprenticeship piece is relatively new for universities really in this country. And us as training providers are putting the challenges across to the universities about some of their assumptions. So I think the future is - it's everything I've described is what I'm gonna say, really Kristina. We will become more excited by the application of theory and practice and the intelligent reflection over that than the coverage of theory with a sort of like saying, get back to the lecture. At the moment, the emphasis in universities is the university teaches something, gets people to read things, and then expects people to say it back to them. I think what will be happening is we'll be saying, we're actually far more interested in the self curation of content coverage, which is negotiated with the employer and yourself and then the standard, and then making sure you understand that and you learn that stuff, and then you apply it in practice. We'll be putting the assessment piece around your ability to be thoughtful in terms of choosing what to learn, when to learn, and how to apply it as opposed to just learning what the lecturer has told you to learn. I think degree apprenticeships are going to become much more around that excitement of application of theory and skills, knowledge in real life contexts. I think that's where it's going to go. I think that's where the debate will be. And particularly as I say, with AI. There is no other option[laughs] to assess competence than to make people be thoughtful now and to be contextualised. Because the idea of churning out knowledge is gone, hasn't it? So it's got to be contextualised and applied now. Otherwise, it's meaningless. The ePortfolio makes it unavoidably real because there's that genuine evidence. There's the artefacts and the evidencing of the artefacts, which an AI doesn't spit out real world artefacts. So reflection over real world evidence is stronger than a written piece.

Kristina Hoeppner: 31:19

That now takes us into the quick answer around. Derrin, so last time, you already mentioned three short phrases that you use to describe portfolio work. Those were 'learning journeys', 'show how much you have grown', and'strengthening your reflective capabilities'. Do you want to add another three words to that?

Derrin Kent: 31:40

Those concepts are when I was talking about Skills Bootcamps, which is kind of this early career entry phrase. At degree level, I'm going to change that to 'genuinely work-based learning','application of theory to practice' and 'learner ownership', and 'employer ownership'. So I've cheated a bit there and, but the last one is two things together [laughs].

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:01

That's okay.

Derrin Kent: 32:01

Learner ownership and employer ownership, the portfolio facilitate that ownership rather than institutional ownership, which becomes exciting in degree level.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:10

Thank you for these additional phrases. Now, what tip do you have for learning designers or other educators who create portfolio activities, especially in your context then of the degree apprenticeships?

Derrin Kent: 32:22

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the so called ePortfolio platforms are ePortfolio platforms. They're not. Mahara is an ePortfolio platform, PebblePad is an ePortfolio platform, but these other platforms are not. So an ePortfolio is a reflective showcase of evidence of work, but with a learning journey demonstrably evidenced above it. It's not a drop box [laughs]. It's a reflective account of growth over time. So this is the example I give with the creation of an assignment is interesting, and the ePortfolio is a great tool for telling that story much better than just the assignment, right? So it's a building of stories. So approach it that way.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:05

What is your tip for apprentices who create portfolios?

Derrin Kent: 33:11

Involve your mentor, actively. Use evidence from colleagues and customers and clients, don't just think it's something you do by yourself stuck in a corner. Continuously gather artefacts. Use voice recordings with people as you do in your everyday work and just capture, capture, capture all the time evidence. Know your standard, use SmartEvidence, know what you're trying to prove. But then every opportunity you get, just keep capturing this routine practice and then sit down every now and again in that quiet corner to craft all that aggregated evidence into a story. See it as a continuous effort, not as a weekly thing. It's a continuous thing.

Kristina Hoeppner: 33:54

Thank you for that tip. That of course does not just apply to apprentices but also to others. Thank you so much, Derrin, for this second conversation now for your second part where you use portfolios. We had talked about the Skills Bootcamps and now the degree apprenticeship so I appreciate that you have shared what you do there and how you use portfolios in that area. Thank you.

Derrin Kent: 34:19

Enjoyed it. Thank you, Kristina, speak again soon.

Kristina Hoeppner: 34:22

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Derrin Kent. Head to our website podcast.mahara.org where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. This podcast is produced by Catalyst IT, and I'm your host, Kristina Hoeppner, Project Lead and Product Manager of the portfolio platform Mahara. Our next episode will air in two weeks. I hope you'll listen again and tell a colleague about our podcast so they can subscribe. Until then, create, share, and engage.