Plan ahead and tell your narrative with Learning Trips & Activities: the next step into facilitating the student’s personal story of their learning journey. As we all know, learning is not linear but multi-faceted. Therefore, representing that journey also needs to have the adequate dimensions to do justice to the learning experience. The advantage of Portflow as a powerful digital learning experience portfolio, is that it allows learners to do just that: represent the various perspectives on learning and its complexities. Discover how — after Collections and Goals — Learning Trips and Activities add a rich and powerful new angle to Portflow’s Collections. Whether you are anticipating on new plans for your journey or whether you want to set up your narrative afterwards, Learning Trips offer full flexibility for the learner and their coach.
Learning trips allow students to tell the narrative of their learning experiences within their portfolio. Where the Portflow portfolio represents the entire personal learning journey, individual Collections can represent different learning contexts (e.g., courses, modules, projects) along this journey. Within Collections, students could already collect evidence of learning experiences, organized by Goal (e.g., competency, outcome, objective). Thanks to the introduction of Learning Trips, students can now also organize their past and future learning experiences within that context in the form of a timeline. This trip (a smaller chunk of a journey) then tells their narrative in chronological order. Moreover, Learning Trips allow for planning Activities ahead as well as looking back on the original plan. By planning Activities, the student can indicate what next steps they will take. Activities can even be linked to Goals, to indicate what objective that learning activity aims to contribute to.
Tell Your Narrative
Learning trips provide a clear and chronological overview of all learning experiences within a learning context (Collection). Each activity within the learning trip can represent a past learning experience via a piece of evidence. This evidence can be imported from the LMS, uploaded from the computer or cloud, created within Portflow, refer to external content, or be an embedded video. Since every piece of evidence can be linked to one or multiple Goals, it is easy to see which goals each activity contributed to.
Plan Ahead
Apart from using Activities to represent past and current learning experiences, students can also use Activities to plan the next steps in their Learning Trips. This can, for example, be used as a learning plan, directly linking the next steps to the Goals within a Collection. By using the feedback request feature, students can even request feedback on their planned and proposed learning activities from their peers and coach. When learning is taking place, the student can easily add their evidence to an Activity, adding to their narrative.
Scaffolded Learning Journeys
To aid students in planning Learning Trips, or to help them know what to expect or choose from within a context, Learning Trips can be scaffolded as well. This allows for more granular guidance to help students get started in their portfolio, by suggesting Activities that contribute to the learning journey. Any template creator can add Activities that contribute to a Learning Trip within a Collection. Activities can be enriched with linked goals that it should contribute to. Moreover, by adding a description of the anticipated learning results of an activity, more focus can be given on the relevance of the activity than just what the activity entails itself. When a student imports a template that contains a Learning Trip, proposed Activities will be added to their imported Collections. They can then start collecting evidence of accomplished activities or set up their own Activities.
Embrace Unpredictability with Flexibility
Similar to how learning has multiple dimensions, learning is unpredictable, especially when we’re talking about personalized learning. Therefore, it is crucial to equip staff and learners alike with a flexible solution that easily adapts to unplanned changes in the learning journey. Students can easily reorder their evidence and planned Activities on their Learning Trip timeline, allowing them to tell the relevant story and present their updated plans at any time. And just like with any other part of a Template (Collections, Goals, Sections), Activities that were imported through a Template can be personalized by the student to match their actual experience and plans. With this flexibility built in, learners and staff can focus more on the learning process itself instead of cementing plans.
How to use Learning Trips in Portflow?
To make use of Learning Trips as a student, open any collection in your portfolio and click the new ‘Activities’ button. This will open the new perspective within Collections that allows you to build your narrative. Activities can represent past learning experiences by adding evidence or organizing existing evidence on your Learning Trip timeline. To plan new learning activities in the future, click the button + Add Activity to add new activities. You can directly link new activities to one or more goals.
To scaffold Learning Trips for students via a Template, open a Template (or create a new Template), and click the collection to open the new Collection card. Here, you can not only manage what Goals are linked to a Collection, but also what Activities you want to plan for this Collection. The student will have both linked Goals and the planned Activities in their Learning Trips once they import the template. If you wish to enrich an existing template that was already imported by your students with Activities, you can add activities to that same template and suggest that students re-import that template again. This will add the previously missing Activities to their imported Collections.
Tips and Inspiration
Join the Portflow user community Portflow Labs and discover how your peers are using Learning Trips and Activities. In addition, our experts are ready to help you out with making the most out of this new feature, so make sure to reach out.
About the Author: Pieter J. Smits
