Go Places is a personalised ePortfolio [PebblePad] based resource for first year students in English, Media, Creative Cultures, History, Languages and Global Cultures in the School of Arts and Humanities. The students will have access to Go Places throughout their undergraduate study and also after they graduate enabling further development of personal and professional learning. I recently presented the thinking behind the project at the Teaching and Learning Conference at The London School of Business and Management – the full slides can be found here Go Places – LSBM 2017 but I have expanded on the key thoughts below. Note – there is a LEGO theme but other building blocks are available!

Go Places has been developed as an online resource which will be combined with face to face sessions. This flipped learning approach has been defined by the HEA as a “pedagogical approach in which the conventional notion of classroom-based learning is inverted, so that students are introduced to the learning material before class, with classroom time then being used to deepen understanding through discussion with peers and problem-solving activities facilitated by teachers.” (HEA, n.d)
three year blocks
The project is to run throughout the full undergraduate programme and has defined activities and purposes in each year; all with an reflective underpinning. All the activities in Year one and two are recorded in Go Places and are designed to build on knowledge and experience to help the student understand and articulate their ‘conceptualised self’. This self awareness culminates in the only weighted element of Go Places which is the synoptic assessment in the final year. However, the questions for this assessment are given from year one so students can build an action plan to develop knowledge for this assessment.
Personal tutor group sessions will build on the independent work undertaken by the student in ‘Go Places’, to explore and contextualise personal and professional development within subject areas.
A first year student
When our students arrive with us, they have all the right pieces to become successful graduates but it may take some reflection and some ‘aha’ moments for them to form a clear picture of what their graduate self may look like. The aim is that our Arts and Humanities undergraduates will graduate with an online portfolio where they have been able to explore their own ideas and develop and record the skills, behaviours and attributes that are above and beyond their academic transcript and HEAR. A place where they have been able to coalesce their learning from formal and informal opportunities and have reflected upon what this means to them in their life moving forward.
uncons comp student

Go Places will be launched in October 2017 and evaluated with first and final year students on a number of criteria – including technology usability and applicability but also the impact on cognition in relation to employability. Of particular interest is a mapping of the threshold concepts to move the student from unconsciously incompetent to unconscious competence in the development of their skills, behaviours and attributes.

Rachel Challen
Principal Lecturer (Learning, Teaching and Staff Development Manager)
Athena SWAN Champion
Ext: 83895 rachel.challen@ntu.ac.uk
MAE011(Clifton) DICe S04 (City)