RAPPORT
Volume 3 Issue 1 (2018)
Atlay (2009) considers the importance
of the student being the owner of the
PDP process and sees PDP as a
mediation process, as a bridge between
learning and career. As a matter of fact,
this bridging role of PDP between
academic and career has had an impact
in the different ways that PDP has been
implemented in UK universities
(Quinton & Smallbone, 2008), as there
is no clear consensus over where the
responsibility for PDP fits within a
university. Despite this, for our
research, the fact that the PDP process
should be owned by the student was
absolutely fundamental.
The use of scaffolding activities
The variety and richness regarding PDP
implementation has also been
documented by Rob Ward and
colleagues with numerous case studies
from UK Universities (Ward, 2009). The
way we designed the activities was
following an embedded modular model
as recommended by Atlay (2009):
“These modules provide the main
support for PDP and may serve to
link with material studied in other
modules. They will also link to the
student’s Progress File. Such
modules may have a skills and/or a
subject focus as well as
emphasising PDP processes”
(Atlay, 2009, p.24).
Therefore the particular emphasis of
our PDP approach was to enable
students to see connections, and to
reflect on and experience the benefits
of linking the three areas (career,
academic and personal) in terms of
common and overlapping goals and
how they interrelate with the functions
‘identify, plan, record, review’.
We used the pilots to explore the role of
learning design, in terms of scaffolding
and support provided to students. This
included:
• The activities
• The ePortfolio tool.
Figure 5 shows an extract from one of
the activities. It was provided via the
bridge website. Note the structure
which reflects the PDP process.
Structuring the activities in this way was
found to be effective in the first pilot
(Perez Cavana & Lowe, 2017).
The use of a personal learning
ePortfolio
Through successive pilots we have
designed and refined our learning
ePortfolio prototype. For the first pilot
we used an ePortfolio developed by the
University of Bremen called EPOS.
Originally designed as a languages
ePortfolio following the structure of the
European Languages Portfolio, we
adapted EPOS specifically for PDP at
the OU by integrating the pedagogical
functions (identify, plan, record, review)
in the main tabs (see Figure 6) in order
to facilitate the visualization of the
pedagogical process involved in PDP.
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