Learner Individuation and Work-based education

One trend in universities which is set to continue is the integration of the work-place into degree-level learning. Among the multiple drivers for this are:

• the costs of education mean that "earn while you learn" becomes attractive;
• employability is helped by employment-related courses;
• employability does not always follow a traditional degree course;
• continuing professional development is becoming a requirement within many professions;
• financial incentives by government are encouraging universities who might not have considered apprenticeship-style courses to adopt them;

However, when learners are mostly located in the work place, the coordination of learning conversations between them becomes an organisational challenge. With co-location of learners in a lecture hall, the intersubjective engagement can be more easily coordinated than it can remotely: it's the "seeing the whites of the eyes stuff" that teachers rely on either to organise group activities, or to see if students are understanding what is going on. Many work-based courses get around this by having days in the campus. 

But what when they are not on campus? What are the learning conversations? Where are the activities? This question is about the balance of organisational effort between that which must be done by the learner themselves, and that which can be coordinated by the teacher. 

The intersubjective context of the learner in the workplace is their immediate working environment. However, this environment is not always structured in the way that a teacher might to inculcate learning conversations. If the workplace experience is to be one of personal development, then often the onus is on the learner to self-organise. 

Universities provide simple tools to coordinate their operations of assessment and accreditation. The most basic of these is the e-portfolio. For many work-based competency-based courses, this amounts to claims about professional competencies being made (often by ticking a box or writing a commentary), and for these claims to be verified by an assessor. This data then feeds into the university's accreditation process. Naturally enough, students will seek the ticking-off of competencies as the means to achieve their certificate. But this can be a shallow and strategic exercise. 

The tools for self-organisation of learning remain crude - an eportfolio system does little more than provide a form to be completed. Yet the literature on self-organised learning presents much richer models. Sebastian Fiedler and I have been talking in some depth recently about Sheila Harri-Augstien and Laurie Thomas's work on Learning Conversations from the early 90s. Augstien and Thomas combined Pask's conversation theory with George Kelly's Repertory Grid analysis to create a framework for self-organised learning where students could analyse and track the emergence of their concepts as they experienced different episodes in their professional development. Augstien and Thomas used largely paper-based tools. We should revisit it as a means of rethinking the tools for self-organisation in the workplace. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the Learning Conversations work is that it explicitly treats learners as non-ergodic systems: that is, a system whose categories are both emergent and individual. Our e-portfolio systems see learning as basically ergodic - there is a fixed "alphabet" of categories or competencies determined by an expert committee. But no living system is ergodic! The Learning Conversations model sees (and explicitly tracks) categories of understanding in reflexive processes along a x-axis, whilst recording the development of these categories from one experience to the next (the y-axis). Thomas and Harri-Augstien argued that this enabled learners to organise their categories of understanding, share them with others, and gradually develop a more sophisticated view of themselves in their environment.

This is higher learning: it is a process of individuation within complex social and technical environments. It makes me think that the barriers to having a better education system are not snobbishness about work-based learning, but the tools we use.