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Denis Saunders, MD, Calibrand - Chair
Denis Saunders, MBA, BSc is Managing Director of Calibrand, the currency for talent® which he founded in 1991. Denis has spent several years working in both the Financial Services and Government sectors and has been involved in many skills and training related projects both in the UK and internationally. Calibrand, the currency for talent® work with 5 of the 7 largest Financial Services companies in the UK and Eire, have delivered over 3,000,000 online tests and are ISO 9001 TickIT Quality Assured to the 2000 standard. Calibrand provides the online software for the 'Life in the UK' Citizenship test on behalf of the Home Office. Although happy to provide a range of solutions, Calibrand believes that today, it is possible to deliver competence assessments securely to anyone, at anytime, anywhere and on any device and Calibrand solutions are designed to achieve this objective.
Andrew Davidson
Andrew joined Cognisco in March 2007 as Production Manager and is responsible for the planning, organisation, co-ordination and control of the production of the learning and assessment content. Andrew has developed training and learning materials for the past 10 years for a range of customers and organisations. Before joining Cognisco Andrew was Training Manager at Prolog working with British Airways to develop the customer service and IT training for the contact centre for British Airway’s frequent flyer scheme. He has also worked at Getronics in expanding their e-learning portfolio and management workshops in the UK and Ireland. More recently Andrew has worked as Programme Manager for Relate, a national charity delivering relationship and family counseling to the public, where he developed and implemented Relate’s graduate, postgraduate and masters level programmes with the University of East London and the University of Hull. Andrew also holds a BA (Hons) in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the University of Hull, a FE teaching qualification and is a qualified relationship counsellor.
Mike Dawe – City and Guilds
Mike Dawe, Manager e-Learning & Strategy City & Guilds. After work for companies in Southern Africa that train local communities to profit from their wildlife, Michael moved to City & Guilds in London. City & Guilds is a 125 year old organisation with a Royal Charter to provide access to vocational training in the UK, and delivers similar services in a further 100 countries. Currently City & Guilds registers 1.8 million learners per year. Michael’s first role in City & Guilds was co-ordinating government commissioned studies into the effects of funding structure on the quality of vocational training provision. This work lead him to managing work on use of new technologies for capture and distribution of knowledge on best practice in training delivery, and in enforcement of regulations. Since then he managed the introduction of the first large scale on-line testing programme to the UK funded vocational market with City & Guilds Information Technology suite of awards. Today Michael heads up the team that operates City & Guilds’ e-Assessment capability, accounting for 80% of all City & Guilds’ objective assessment, and continues to develop capability to make electronic assessment available to all City & Guilds’ learners.
John Kerr, Development Director, Edge. John trained as a lawyer and worked in media, the city with the London Stock Exchange and the FSA. He was a former CEO of Edexcel, and now develops high-impact projects to support Edge's vision
Barbara MIller and Mark Bedwell, Stoke on Trent
Barbara Miller is co-ordinator of the Stoke-on-Trent 14-19 BTEC Consortium, which is made up of 17 schools and 2 colleges. The quality assurance processes behind this consortium were cumbersome and slow due to the weight of paper and travelling involved. The BEEP (BTEC Electronic Evidence Portfolio) project arose following an approach to Mark Bedwell, Head of Research and Development at Stoke-on-Trent Children and Young People's Services. The aim was to see if information communication technology could help. This lead to the creation of an electronic portfolio based system. The system swiftly moved from merely an electronic file store to a quality assurance framework and a place for recording and sharing guidance. A complete BTEC on the web!!
Graham Snape
Is the Education and Training Sector Specialist International Trade Adviser for Team South East, part of UK Trade & Investment.This entails working closely with companies in the South East, who are engaged in the Education & Training sector and who are seeking to add an international perspective to their business plans. He has taken several Trade Missions to India, on behalf of UK Trade & Investment (Team South East) over the past year and also contributed to events in Dubai and Cairo. In previous roles he has experience of Africa, the Middle East, Malaysia, China, Japan and Brazil. This has mainly been concerned with Corporate Training and Curriculum Development but also led to a National Training Award for programmes in Water Supply and Sanitation for Developing Countries during the United Nations Water Decade. Graham also spent some years on the Council of the Mid-Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce and Industry, including a period as its President.
Robert Smart, MD PF Global Ltd
Robert began his interest in training and development in 1991 when he worked his way up to become head of training for First Great Western. After securing the position as Lead Assessor and Verifier For BMW/Rover group, then developed the worlds first awarding body accredited NVQ e-portfolio system in 1996 (City and Guilds and Institute of the Motor Industry). In 2001 after a successful management buy out from BWM, formed the UK’s first commercial e-portfolio platform “PaperFree”. This has enjoyed great success and was featured on the front page of the TES as saving FE £1 billion pounds a year (Evidence from LSC audit). Due to demands from overseas and the need to expand and attract investment opportunities, Robert then re-launched “PaperFree” as PF Global Ltd in early 2007. Since this time, PF Global has gone from strength to strength to include Clients: Rolls Royce, Honda, Saudi Oil Contract assessments, The Employment Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong (Government), First Group etc to established FE and Training Provider services in all sectors from care to Engineering. Now partners with a NASDAQ listed US company FutureMedia, PF Globals strategy is to build on its unique 3 platforms (on-line, Off-line and combined) and to cement its already unlimited capacity for any award at any time software solutions.
Graham Taylor, TestWise Development Manager, nferNelson
Graham Taylor, Testwise Development Manager, nferNelson Granada Learning, runs nferNelson's Testwise electronic assessment service having overseen its development over the past three years from a small scale server based VLE module to its current incarnation as a huge web based service which has delivered around 400,000 tests. He joined Granada Learning in 2000. He had a background initially in computer journalism and later in software development working as part of the Pearson Group with both Future Publishing and Rough Guides on web based versions of their magazines and books. Graham is married with two children Juila (13) and Stuart (15), and lives in Essex near Chelmsford
Matt Wingfield – TAG Learning
Matt Wingfield, Business Development Director, TAG Learning Ltd.,: Matt's background is as a qualified teacher with 7 years teaching experience at primary school level and 9 years further experience within the education ICT market. Prior to joining TAG Learning in 1997, Matt worked as a Centre Director and Director of Education for the Kingswood ICT Study Centre Group where he was tasked with both establishing and running a busy residential study centre in Norfolk, catering for over 19,000 visiting pupils per year, and implementing the ICT curricula taught at each of the Kingswood Centres around the UK. It was in this capacity that Matt was first introduced to TAG Learning, building a close strategic relationship between the companies, so as to facilitate the use of TAG software products within the courses offered by Kingswood. Matt is committed to continuing to helping TAG to develop and grow their range of innovative online assessment and moderation systems, software tools and peripheral products, so that TAG can continue helping teachers and pupils to gain the most out of using ICT as an integral part of education.
Peter Wilson – QCA
Peter Wilson works for NIACE as a Development Officer for Credit and Qualifications. From 1999 to 2003 he was seconded to Ufi as Head of Qualifications and Assessment, and since April 2004 he has been seconded part-time to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority as Principal Adviser to the team developing the new Qualifications and Credit Framework, where he has been responsible for leading work on the technical features of the Framework. As part of his work for QCA he is leading work on the development of e-assessment opportunities within the new QCF
John Winkley, AlphaPlus.
John is an experienced e-learning and e-assessment business manager with a track record of business growth in new media learning technologies. He has specialised in developing innovative systems for education and assessment, working with a range of public and private sector clients through the four companies he has helped to build over the last 12 years: BTL Group Ltd, The Virtual College plc., 3Square Solutions Ltd, and AlphaPlus. His consultancy work includes e-strategy projects for SQA (e-strategy, item banking, on-screen Higher Exams, the SOLAR project) BECTA (Recommendations on Govt strategy for e-Portfolios), JISC (the e-assessment glossary), QCA (various e-assessment development, delivery and regulation projects), Edexcel (accessibility), and ACCAC (e-assessment in Welsh). He has recently completed major projects with BECTA and LTScotland relating to strategy for e-Portfolios in schools and colleges. John leads the e-assessment consultancy function for AlphaPlus.
Paper Abstract: This paper describes some of the findings from work undertaken for clients including Becta, DFES, JISC and LTScotland around e-portfolios and their use in learning and assessment in UK schools and colleges. E-portfolios emerged from work to use ICT to enhance long standing and apparently well-understood learning processes. The current community of e-portfolio development shows immense diversity in form, function, scale, aspiration and technological approach, although there is substantial consensus about what e-portfolios aspire to be: an organised store for a learner’s work, managed by the learner, containing work-in-progress and completed items, and associated information (e.g. review and feedback, learner’s notes and reflections, curriculum and assessment information, achievement records, learning plans, etc.). This paper describes how we believe the e-portfolio functionality is segmented, how this is reflected in the products currently offered in the market, and the ways in which they are used, and the critical success factors faced by institutions in implementing e-portfolios for learning and assessment.
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