Paul McLaughlin, Senior Lecturer from The University of Edinburgh spoke at PebbleBash 2024 and presented ‘ A portfolio at the core of distance learning programme.’ Click here to watch the video with the full transcript or if you’re having trouble viewing the video above.
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So my name is Paul McLaughlin, from the School of Biological Sciences here in Edinburgh, and I wanna tell you about an overarching portfolio we developed for an online master’s course.
And this was designed to be integral wall to wall and accounted for fifty percent of the total marks.
Now part time master’s students are mostly keeping down a job, and they have to keep their eyes on the ball. Accordingly, they must have a sense of achievement and progress.
So towards this end, we sought to leverage, the university’s graduate attributes, which Jon talked about.
So these attributes, focus on generic aspects of graduate ness that transcends the subject matter of the degree.
But in doing so, this is a challenge to students and makes them think and avoid trite reflections akin to what I did on my summer holidays.
So, here we see the, graduate attributes, at the top here, And, they’re embedded at at the top. There are 47 of these divided amongst four headings. And in typical PebblePad fashion, you can, both reflect, on on them, give evidence, and self self assess.
The actual engine, of the, the whole system is a blog which feeds these, the evidence for the graduate attributes, and, also, there’s some directed, reflection.
So in the example here, the students did an online, careers meeting. Not least this is a good way to give them a sense of place because the students were coming literally from Tokyo all the way through, to to to California. So give them a feeling of being here.
So, then, they had to write this up and, make an action plan based upon it, and give their reactions before and after. But they know that we’re gonna come back to this maybe in another year, in another course, because it is wall to wall.
So we hope that by this method, they’d be able to weave for themselves a kind of stout rope to pull them through the quagmires of, doing such a a master’s course.
But we needed, a capstone by which they could highlight, their experiences.
And we went back to this old idea of proposition. Now this is for the Dutch people. I want to bring you to Leiden in, 1610. Now one thing you’ll notice is a complete absence of women.
But in other ways, they were quite progressive. You can see that, they had stand up desks.
They also had, emotional support, animals as well.
But, they started with propositions and doctoral examinations, the students had to defend.
Now interestingly, these were more important. There wasn’t a thesis at that time. That was a German idea that came in in the early, nineteenth century. Oxford only had PhDs from about, I think, 1919.
But in the modern thesis in Benelux countries, and I hope I’m right about this, a PhD student has to make ten propositions, and these should be falsifiable declarative statements about what they’ve learned in their research.
And, we’re gonna show you, the manifestation. Here, we only ask for three proportionately because it’s a master’s.
Note the linkage that the student has done. And what is very nice and commendable is the student talks about taking what they’ve learned and the course actually through into their professional life because they’re working.
So now we have to ask you know, we have to practice what we’re we preach and sort of reflect on all of this, on what we have learned.
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