Similar but different

I for one welcome the Australian Government’s proposal to establish a National Skills Passport.

Tabled last year via the Working Future whitepaper, the idea is “to help people more easily demonstrate their skills to employers and reduce barriers to lifelong learning.”

Bravo. But of course the devil is in the detail, and so far there hasn’t been very much of that (perhaps by design).

Indeed, the Department of Education and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations have jointly released a consultation paper which advances the idea a smidgen more. For example, “Stakeholders have long called for the creation of a tool to help Australians demonstrate their qualifications to prospective employers. A skills passport could combine a person’s qualifications across VET and higher education to more effectively demonstrate their skills to employers.”

As per that extract, the document frequently uses the word “skills” in conjunction with the word “qualifications”, and I fear they’re being conflated.

You see, they’re similar, but different. I’ve previously expressed my view in the context of digital badges – see The past tense of open badges and More than just a pretty face – whereby a qualification is a promise that you can do something; whereas a badge is (or more to the point, should be) a symbol that you have done it.

There’s the rub. If the National Skills Passport is to be a collection of qualifications, then it will essentially be a promissory note. Granted, the interoperability of it across higher education and industry will be attractive, but it won’t ever evolve beyond Curriculum Vitae 2.0 because its premise will be flawed from the get-go.

In the corporate sector our strategies are increasingly skills-first, and I suggest the government’s proposed solution should be too. Rather than accumulating your qualifications, the passport should represent your skills.

Certainly a qualification can lend weight to your claim on a skill, but only to a certain level, because doing a course on data science doesn’t necessarily mean you are skilled at data science – P’s are degrees! In a similar vein, your employment history and other work experience could also lend weight, but occupying the role of Data Analyst for several years doesn’t necessarily mean you were a good one.

What I’m getting at is to be validated, a skill needs to be assessed. And because by definition a skill is practical, what is being assessed must be its practice. Now I realise this is challenging and potentially unwieldy to do, so much so that I’ve suggested that universities pivot their awards accordingly – see Higher Assessment – while some providers have spawned a new service offering – see DeakinCo and RMIT Online.

And I also realise that some courses are practically oriented, with their completion predicated on the production of a dashboard or the presentation of a project, for example. That’s a shift in the right direction, as the assessment of practice is integrated into the learning experience.

However, if the National Skills Passport is to be a National Skills Passport, then it needs to be founded upon… skills. Evidence such as qualifications and employment history contribute to your record of a specific skill at a particular level (aligned to a standardised rubric) but only through an independent assessment of practice can you reach the terminal level.

That way, if I’m looking for a SQL programmer who can speak Japanese, I can find someone at the click of a button without wondering how capable they really are.

E-Learning challenges in vocational education

Yesterday I participated in an enterprise discussion panel at the eLearning08 conference in Sydney.

Topics under discussion were the emerging issues and key challenges facing e-learning in the vocational education sector.

The discussion was facilitated by Kate Carruthers (CEO, Digital Business Group), and my fellow panellists were James Dellow (Consultant, Chief Technology Solutions) and Catherine Eibner (Dynamics Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Australia).

Our role was to share our perspectives of e-learning in the industry sector with the conference delegates, hopefully sharing some knowledge, experiences and ideas that can cross over into vocational education.

Emerging issues

For me, one of the major emerging issues in both sectors is the rise of Web 2.0. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, wikis and other social media have shifted the role of the learner from a mere recipient of content, to an active participant in the production of content.

Likewise, Web 2.0 has shifted the role of the teacher from an authoritarian transmitter of content, to a facilitator of content exploration and generation. Sure, the teacher can remain the “expert” in their field, but their role today is not so much to tell you what’s what, but to guide, coach, mentor and assist you in using the tools at your disposal to find out for yourself and to share your own ideas.

Challenges

Three of the challenges that resonated with me during the discussion were: computer literacy (or lack thereof), assessment difficulties and information overload.

Companies and vocational education institutions share the challenge of a diverse target audience, particularly in terms of computer literacy. This tends to (but does not always) correlate with age. For example, more and more recruits into companies are being drawn from Generation Y, whose members are typically familiar with the Internet and happily use it in their everyday lives. In contrast, many of us among the existing staff base may never have heard of podcasting, don’t have a clue what Facebook is, and are totally mystified by the concept of a “wiki”.

A similar situation is experienced by vocational education institutions, which draw their students from all walks of life. Teachers also find themselves in this predicament: how can you use e-learning to its full potential if you don’t have the practical skills?

Assessment via e-learning presents other challenges. For example, can you effectively assess a skill like repairing a fuel pump remotely? Can you be confident in an online learner’s competency more generally? How do you even know the right person is undertaking the assessment?

With so many e-learning tools and technologies available to us today, and with it all changing so rapidly, how can we keep a handle on it all? We can’t spend our entire days reading endless news feeds and subscribing to a multitude of professional journals and magazines. After all, we have a job to do!

Further discussion

It’s clear that there are no single, simple solutions to these challenges, and any solution will depend heavily on context and circumstance. However, I’m sure we can learn plenty from each other and share some great ideas.