Employability and Badges 

  I’m just checking in – it’s the morning of day 2 at #epforall, the ePortoflio and Open Badges conference but already there have been some interesting contributions.   JISC are running a project to match employability skills and data to be useful to employers. Almost like a recruitment agency would identify skills of individuals.  The project has a short timeline but they are consulting at the moment and would be of interest to anyone involved in developing students skills.  I wonder what the employers really thing?  How involved would they like to be in designing our curriculum for a really transformative experience.  The other presentations this morning have been around ePortfolios in what was called ’employment centres’ which Inthink could be applied to our Careers services.  In our Uni we have a great Careers service, always forward thinking so I think they would appreciate a project where they worked with employers on the value of ePortfolios.   This was led by Alice Baldazzi a PhD student exploring this at the University of Bolgna.  The last presentation this morning was the New Buckingham Unis Employability award.  They are exploring its potential by using Open Badges and social media, but what struck me was that they should be focussing on developing skills for the students to make their own informed choices. 

Also great to catch up with Doug Belshaw and Bryan Mathers (City and Guilds) we talked Periscope and so we may be doing that later.  On to the next section of the day.