INTRODUCTION
Knowledge alone is no longer enough. Successful graduates need to display a wide range of aptitudes, attitudes and abilities which demonstrate their capacity to make use of what they know in a wide range of contexts. It’s a big part of why universities across the globe are looking to bolster their learning ecology with tools to support and guide learning from experience, and bridge the theory - practice gap.
The next logical question to ask is what universities are doing to address this shift. Increasingly, universities are promoting active, authentic learning – within and beyond the classroom, with activities such as work placements, study abroad, research and collaborative projects and volunteering/community engagement.
Many universities are grappling with the challenge of how to roll out and support organisation-wide initiatives which don’t constrain individual creativity or limit learner-directed activity. However, all too often the LMS is too course and content centric to support personalised lifelong and lifewide learning journeys.
This is the reason we started a pilot with PebblePad. In this very short video you get to see PebblePad in a nutshell:
WHY PEBBLEPAD?
PebblePad does not only offer portfolio-building capabilities, but also design tools to help educators create scaffolded frameworks to support learning activities in any context, alongside a suite of tools to formatively assess and guide development.
PebblePad's key features that support student-centered learning:
- Portfolio Builder: The builder allows users to create beautiful, media-rich portfolios to demonstrate capability. Users can embed and link to any digital record of learning along with tools for secure sharing and collaboration.
- Activity Logs, Collections and Blogs: These tools help learners collate records by automatically pulling together records by type, for example - learning activities relating to a specific project or course.
- Built-in frameworks for reflection and planning: PebblePad’s out-of-the-box templates help learners reflect on any and every learning experience, on any device, even if the user is offline.
- The PebblePad Asset Store: In PebblePad, students benefit from their own personal ‘Asset Store’ which acts as a repository for any digital record of curricular or extra-curricular learning. An asset can be embedded and linked to within portfolios or any other framework for learning
- Templates and Workbooks: PebblePad's intuitive Template and Workbook Builders let users design and share frameworks for learning. From a single, reusable lesson plan template to a comprehensive professional development workbook, the possibilities are endless.
- The PebblePad Assessment Space: PebblePad’s assessment platform offers grading, scorecards, rubrics, standardised feedback, peer review, conversation spaces, archiving capability and LTI 2.0 compatibility.
Contact
All pilot licenses are currently in use. Contact us if you want to know more about PebblePad or stay updated about the outcomes of this pilot. If you want to know more about Pebblepad, you can also visit their website.