Trent Batson, Ph. D., Executive Director,

The Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning, AAEEBL.org.

Abstract: As an academic association, AAEEBL must now turn to the theory that encompasses and gives form to the work we do with portfolios.  AAEEBL’s orientation is revealed in its name, but this orientation – authentic, experiential and evidence-based learning – has roots in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL, see http://www.issotl.org/).  Our orientation is also conceptually related to Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM).  AAEEBL and the AAEEBL community and affiliated organizations, would seem to already have precedents and potential colleagues in existing fields of study.  Therefore, we propose “Evidence-Based Learning” as the name for our scholarly field.

Introduction

In its first year (’09-’10), with the help of many people in the world portfolio community, AAEEBL created an organization, accepted 100 institutions in 5 countries as annual members, arranged for 15 vendors to become corporate affiliates, and, in July 2010, a year of community-building culminated with a world conference in Boston that brought the world-wide portfolio community together and from all accounts was a wildly successful community gathering.

This first year’s work, however, was just the first step.  We found, as we had thought, that portfolio interest is high, the number of practitioners is growing daily, and institutions and vendors are eager for AAEEBL to set a direction, help build the market, and create a scholarly field.

Why do we need to create a scholarly field?  The value that the portfolio idea brings to education and the promise that portfolio practices hold for the transformation of education must be realized.  Portfolio theory over decades of practice has shown its power:  it is a powerful theoretical set of methods embedded within a vibrant community and supported by a robust set of technologies, both proprietary and open source.  Portfolio theory has passed the test of time and is now more vital than ever.  It will become even more powerful when we name our field, and place ourselves within a scholarly tradition.  Printed books, because of their powerful extension of learning resources over time and distance, but also because of their limitations, defined the world of knowledge and learning for centuries.  Now, new technology tools define the world of knowledge.  The impact is not just increasing practical efficiencies in the print world, but a total and absolute re-structuring of the world of knowledge.

And now, because educational transformation in this re-structured world needs a compelling organizing concept and because of the promise of portfolio theory to become that organizing concept, AAEEBL will work with its members during this academic year to define the scholarly field we are part of.  That is the challenge for AAEEBL this year and I ask you to help AAEEBL’s leaders take up this challenge during the next 12 months.  This is not a challenge we take on lightly.  But AAEEBL is a professional association for the world portfolio community so we must now start to name and define our field and then build out the scholarly apparatus for the profession to operate.

Evidence-Based Learning

Higher education needs a new theory of learning arising from the reality – unique, without precedent – that we exist in now, post Web 2.0.  Web 2.0, as clichéd as that phrase has become, was in fact an apocalyptic moment for our culture:  our primary cultural interactions moved to the Web post 2005.  This was sudden, stunning, and all-encompassing:  it is hard to believe that Facebook was founded as recently as 2007, just three years ago!  The world we are in now resembles in no way the educational world prior to 2005.  The primacy of print ended in 2005.  Books and other printed matter remain vital and necessary, but are no longer appropriate as the starting point for all learning design, using the limitations associated with books as the conceptual framework for learning design:  a framework that assumes knowledge is scarce, is owned, a thing that is created within the hierarchical structure of knowledge domains and changed only very slowly.  In all respects, our current learning technologies turn all these assumptions upside down.

The predictions of an information technology revolution became common 3 or 4 decades ago.  But no prediction could have prepared us for the coming of the Cloud, the explosion of Web 2.0 capabilities, the Facebooks and Googles, the iPhones and Twitters, texting and photo-sharing, and the blossoming of the Social Web.

Before 2005, the predictions of an IT revolution seemed like hype.  After 2005, descriptions of the revolution that swept the land have been pitifully under-stated:  we don’t yet have the language to describe, or even fully realize or understand the sudden change that took place and its implications.  Much of human interaction, commerce, and, most importantly for us, learning resources and learning spaces, moved to the Web.  It is as if human consciousness has added an entire new dimension that did not exist a short while before.

This new dimension is, still, a largely undiscovered and infinitely-expanding country that educators are only beginning to explore. As many of us within the portfolio community have recognized, electronic portfolios are native to this new country.  Maybe they are, in fact, essential in this new country.

But why and how are they native and what is the learning/teaching/assessment theory behind portfolios that make them so seemingly perfect in the undiscovered country of 21^st century education?

In this highly-mobile, resource rich, life-long learning new country in which the coin of the realm is knowledge and learning, all citizens must be learners either in formal or informal ways.  We must be constantly presenting the results of our learning or research, our discoveries or inventions, and what all that evidence means.  In formal settings, we must link our presentations (in writing or graphically or mathematically or in multi-media formats) to the course of study in which we are enrolled.  In informal learning settings – our jobs or contract work or consulting work – we still must present results of our work.  Whereas in the last century a line existed between academically-constructed knowledge and the work of the world, in this century the line is gone.  Our entire culture is engaged in knowledge construction; our whole culture is a vast learning space.  The most significant factors are:  knowledge changing so fast that if you don’t pay attention you find yourself left in the dust and the distribution of knowledge and knowledge creation tools to just about anywhere.

Both in the academy and in the work world, similar learning activities are occurring.  As people engage in learning, either as students or as part of the workforce, they constantly work with evidence.  The similarities between working in the knowledge economy and working in the confines of a course at an educational institution are striking.  In both settings people collect evidence – from reading, research, experience, conferencing and collaborative work, meetups, field work, experimentation, and from listening to experts – and must synthesize, integrate, and interpret that evidence.  In the knowledge economy, old knowledge is challenged daily, and new knowledge constructed, a speeded-up academic process.  To process the flood of knowledge, people need a space in which to do the processing.  Therefore, portfolio practices of one sort or another are in play outside and inside the academy even though they are often not called that.

Portfolio theory in the academy is perhaps best described as “Student-Centered and Evidence-Based Teaching/Learning/Assessment/employability,” or simply “Evidence-Based Learning” a term that encompasses the other terms in the longer descriptor.  Portfolio theory for young children might be phrased differently, perhaps as digital story-telling, but still involves collecting and interpreting evidence.

As you read about Evidence-Based Learning, you may wonder how EBL relates to Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM).  EBM became a popular term in medical education and in clinical practice in the 1990s and is still an active movement within medical education and practice.  The idea was that a better course of treatment for a particular malady could be designed if all recent studies of treating the malady could be reviewed quickly before deciding on the course of treatment. The advent of the Web made such an approach possible.

In the case of EBM, however, the evidence referred to is “out there,” whereas in Evidence-Based Learning, the evidence referred to is the collection within the personal portfolio. Evidence-Based Learning (EBL) is a broadening of the concepts behind EBM because the collection is not applied to just one case of treatment but grows in value over time for ongoing learning, for assessment, and for career development.

The theory of EBL is that working with an evolving collection of evidence gathered for knowledge purposes, often individually collected but sometimes collaboratively collected, involving regular review of the evidence to interpret the evidence for multiple purposes, results in learning that is appropriate to the knowledge economy, creates opportunities for authentic assessment, supports experiential learning, influences course-designs that are problem-based, and ultimately produces learners who are more engaged with learning.

The Evidence-Based Learning Profession

This year, AAEEBL will launch a peer-reviewed journal that will help define our scholarly profession.  The working title is The Journal of Evidence-Based Learning (JEBL). JEBL will accept articles related to the theory of EBL that focus on learning, teaching, assessment, employability and other EBL-related topics.  The Journal will be housed at Virginia Tech University and will be an AAEEBL journal.  It will be online.  How it will be otherwise distributed an archived is under study. The editorial board will be constituted of those who are already theoretically grounded in EBL theory.

EBL has roots in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which was sustained and promoted for a number of years by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and subsequently by The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, founded in 2004: http://www.issotl.org/.  SOTL proclaimed the “odd” concept a couple of decades ago that teaching itself is a scholarly activity.  We believe that EBL is one kind of teaching/learning scholarship within the SOTL framework.  EBL adds a dimension to SOTL:  it takes into account our new learning technologies.  Just as we academics don’t study books as such (though making books is a fascinating trade), but do study text printed in books, EBL does not study the technology – portfolio technologies, as such – but does study the evidence within the portfolio technology.  As we change from one dominant technology to another, it is necessary to understand the tacit assumptions we have made about everything in academia based on our previous technology (print and books) and to discover what assumptions we must now make about everything based on our new technology.  EBL studies will help us in this endeavor.

EBL practitioners and researchers are all those involved with portfolio implementation and its uses in teaching, learning, assessment and employability.  EBL assumes the presence and use of current technologies just as we have assumed the presence of print or scientific tools for years.  However, since EBL’s tools are so immoderately enabled and still rapidly evolving, EBL must pay more attention to the tools, for the moment, so they evolve in ways that allows them to continue to support EBL theory.

The Impact of EBL

AAEEBL’s second annual conference July 25-28,2011, will feature presentations framed by Evidence-Based Learning.  With this new learning/teaching/assessment/employability theory for our program committee, we can better define our criteria for acceptance of proposals.  We will use similar criteria for peer-reviewing articles that will be published in the new AAEEBL Journal, JEBL.

The evolving definition of our core theory depends on those within our community commenting now, and in the future, on the ideas in this document.  Much of what AAEEBL does over the years will depend on our refining our scholarly field.  This is a critical task this year for AAEEBL.  Please join us in our effort to define our profession.

Our regional conference was my latest surprise in this regard:  the Mercy College team was led by the Associate Provost, Nancy Pawlyshyn, and their presentation focused on the success of their faculty learning communities and how much faculty had bought into the communities over the past two years, showing that an institution-wide implementation can also be a grass-roots kind of process.  Johnson & Wales Associate Provost James Griffin also talked about an institution-wide vision beginning with an acceptance that the implementation will involve years.  Speakers from Northeastern University, Plymouth State University, Roger Williams and the University of Rhode Island confirmed the new atmosphere of institutional understanding and realism regarding portfolios.  I was very encouraged.

Minnesota, along with Pennsylanvia and perhaps California are following the examples of Wales and Scotland in providing ePortfolio applications to all citizens.  In Europe and the UK, ePortfolio providers use the government as their “agent” to provide universal access, but in the U. S., providers use state university systems.  Almost all ePortfolio apps, therefore, are sold “wholesale” to an agent (government or educational institution) which does the work of providing most of the needed services to distribute access.

When will ePortfolio providers sell “retail”?  When can I download my own ePortfolio application from, say, Microsoft or Apple or Oracle?  I’m waiting.

Individuals are creating their own knowledge/learning virtual spaces and communities.  In this knowledge economy with the ubiquity of knowledge tools, students of all ages will already have constructed their personal self on the Web, will already have collaborative tools and be comfortable with them, in short will already be an informal student.

Think of the land-grant model:  sons and daughters of farmers learned agronomy and animal science and finance and accounting — they already had resources and tools and just needed better ways to intelligently manage their resources and tools.  Students today also come to college with a “farm” of a sort — their digital resources and social contacts.

The contrast between now and five years ago is stark:  campuses now know they need more “buy in” and they seem to know that is not by opting for an assessment-management approach.  Though the push to track student progress toward learning outcomes was the catch phrase five years ago, that whole movement is dying on the vine because it gains very little traction on campus because it does not engage faculty and students

Fortunately, now, I see academics wanting to learn more about the educational value of using portfolio practices.  The tide has shifted.  We are now where we should have been right from the start before accountability diverted higher education from the traditional uses of portfolios.