Smart Assessor e-portfolio – qtr 1 update 2012

This is the last quarter of our first year and what an unbelievable journey it has been. In just 9 short months we have taken our fresh and innovative e-portfolio software to market with more than 65 colleges and training providers now using Smart Assessor. 

 

Every time we have been compared to One File and Learning Assistant we have always been selected because, I’m told, we are easier to use, more stylish and have lots more useful features such as a skills scan, guided learning hours time sheet, integrated web conferencing rooms and comprehensive custom reports that show at a glance accurate learner progress which can be filtered by course, employer, assessor and gender.

 

In many ways it’s been much easier for us to create a successful Start up because we have had the experience of creating a successful technology start up previously in the education market and attracting venture capital investment to grow and exit that business.  Even so there have been many highlights in our first year and many frustrations too and this made me think about how I could help inspire our young generation of apprentices to think about starting their own business.

 

I’m going to be offering my services out for National Apprenticeship  Week to colleges and training providers who would like me to visit and talk to their apprentices about why I decided to start my first business over 20 years ago and how I went about creating a remarkable company only to lose it when our key. Client Rover Group collapsed and rebuild a second company which attracted £2 million investment before stepping down as CEO to create Smart Assessor.

 

What inspired me at the age of 26 to go it alone when I didn’t know anyone who had their own business? What drove me to pick myself up again after losing my award winning business when Rover Group collapsed and as a single mum I had to move my 4 young children into a rented house to use the equity from our home to start again? Why was I successful at winning the £1 million midlands investment challenge for my second company and then exit as CEO to create another start up?

 

How do you start a business from scratch if you don’t have a university education and family finance? Can it be done and how do you go about it?

 

If you think my story could inspire your young apprentices then please get in touch with me, I would be delighted to share the highs and lows of my journey in the hope that I can make a difference!

 

Fiona Hudson-Kelly – Founder of Smart Assessor

Telephone: 0845 460 4440

New updates to Smart Assessor – e-portfolio software

Smart Assessor, launched in April 2011, has quickly become the market leading e-portfolio software provider with 46 clients using the e-portfolio within just 6 short months.  Never complacent and always keen to work with their clients Smart Assessor are updating their software this weekend with some great new features which include:-

Mapping evidence
New colour coding to differentiate between assessor and learner mapping of evidence. Smart Assessor offer learners the facility to not just upload evidence but to map that evidence to the performance criteria within the qualification.  This enhancement differentiates their mapping.
On the Job and Off the Job Timesheet

From Monday you will be able to make alterations to entries in the timesheet to edit the information.

Emails and Email Alerts
To reduce the number of e-mail’s received by assessors from learners we are bundling the e-mails into a ‘once a day’ delivery schedule.
Learner Home Page
The initial screen the learners see when they login for the first time has now changed; they will either be taken straight to their Learner Dashboard if they are only doing one course or to the Overall Progress Screen if they are doing the framework or more than one course.

Formal Review Sessions
When you book a session for your learner you can now chose general review, induction or Formal Review. We’ve also introduced a flag on your assessor dashboard to let you know if you are not complying with the 12 week Formal Review guidance and you have any learners who haven’t had a formal review in the last 8 weeks and don’t have one schedule for the next 4 weeks.

Training & Assessment Plan
You can now upload documents to the learner’s training and assessment plan, it could be that you want to upload your formal review feedback – either scanned in with the learner’s signature or a PDF and you leave them an action to confirm its authentic and that they accept it which will save you scanning them in. SFA guidance 74 does state that they do accept electronic signatures.

We’ve also increased the size of the formative and summative session notes boxes and you can now use any characters in here, I know that some of you were having problems using comma’s and apostrophe’s.

Assessor dashboard
We’ve made a few minor changes to the assessor dashboard, if your learner has a learning difficulty identified in their details you will now see their name in bold on the dashboard, in the session column you will see the total number of sessions booked and which session this is (i.e. session 3 of 10) and the last one is if you are missing a formal review you will get a red box around the session box. Have a look at the notes attached for screen images of what these will look like.

Employer log in
You can now give your employer clients a log into Smart Assessor and they will be able to see the progress of their learners. They can’t make any changes to see the detail of the portfolio but they can see who their assessor is and their employee’s progress through the framework.

Session History Data
You can now export all session data to excel, useful for auditing purposes

 

To find out more about Smart Assessor visit our web site

QCF e-portfolio software update from Smart Assessor – week 8

With our new Task Library completed on time feedback from clients on being able to set tasks and map them to performance criteria has been delightful, many of our clients also link the tasks to workbooks where their learners study new content and are then assigned a task to demonstrate their competence in this knowledge area.

Assessors can then assign p.c.’s to the task and when evidence is uploaded by the learner for that task the assessor doesn’t have to remember which p.c.’s it references, this is automatically referenced for them taking the time and stress out of evidence mapping and reviewing.

With 12 new clients now in less than as many weeks Smart Assessor is positioned to shake up the QCF e-portfolio software market with their innovative ideas and solutions.

So with the technology changes successfully completed and implemented what’s next in the exciting journey of this entrepreneurial start up?

Daniel Taylor, Business Development Manager for Smart Assessor believes that the next opportunity is with the 2011 summer school leavers.

Training providers with contracts, or sub contracts, to deliver the Apprenticeship framework will be commencing their recruitment activites shortly.  Every training provider wants to attract the best apprentices who not just have good interpersonal skills and motivation but also an aptitude for the area of learning they have chosen.

With this in mind Smart Assessor will be launching a fabulous new online skill scan to assess potential apprentices current skills and knowledge against their chosen QCF course and plan to make it available free of charge from their web site for any training provider to use.

Launching for the 1st June we will post updates here on how to access it and how it works shortly.

To find out more about Smart Assessor visit our web site www.smartassessor.com

Week 5 – Smart Assessor update of a new QCF e-portfolio software

The current license we can offer clients to use our Smart Rooms restricted them to one assessor and one learner but under a fantastic new deal we are able to take of any restrictions on the number of learners that can come into a session with the assessor.

This means that assessors can continue to review progress of their QCF learners but they can also deliver training to groups of learners at the same time at no extra cost. 

Often assessors are repeating the same training across many learners which is time consuming but as apprentices are employer based it isn’t always possible to get them together at the same time in groups for training.

Now assessors can interact with their learners virtually in groups using the Smart Training and Assessing Rooms across the web without anyone having to leave their workplace.

The assessor sets up a virtual meeting through the Smart Assessor e-portfolio software at a mutually convenient date and time.  Invitations are sent to participants by e-mail with a reminder about an hour before their session is due to commence which has a link in.

All participants just click their own link and come into the virtual Smart Room.  Everyone can see their assessor/trainer and if the learners chose to have web cam’s they can also see each other but its not necessary to have a web cam to participate in the training. 

The Smart Rooms have their own VOIP (Voice over IP) which means that everyone can hear the trainer and speak without the use of telephones or 3rd party solutions such as Skype.

The participants can all see their assessor/trainers computer screen which means that anything on that screen is visible to them all at the same time whether that’s some PowerPoint slides, video playing, an image or just a document that they are discussing.

Participants can ask questions by chatting to their assessor either by messaging them or by talking, the session can be recorded and stored for the learner’s to review afterwards at their own pace.

Your session can last as long as you need it to although it is good practice to restrict them to about 45 minutes to an hour as learners tend to lose concentration after this length of time and you don’t have to ‘cram’ all the training into one session as you would if everyone had taken the time to travel to the training course because they are so easy and convenient to set up and attend.

The majority of assessing will, we believe, remain very much one on one with an individual learner working with their assessor but on the occasions you do need to invite more participants then you now have this flexibility.

If you think that delivering some of your assessing and training without having to travel face to face to learners could be of interest then click here to book an online demonstration with one of our trainers?

UK Plc lukewarm over apprentices, says CIPD

I’m wondering whether we are going to get companies in the Uk to take up the additional availability for apprentices?

Reading through the Learning & Talent Survey published by the CIPD yesterday only a third surveyed planned to recruit apprentices and of those that did recuit most were from manufacturing and production with 63% recruiting at level 2.

Do you think that the low take up for higher level apprentices and more sectors is due to the way the apprenticeship programme is marketed?

Can Apprentices help UK Plc?

Katerina Rudiger, skills policy adviser, CIPD, said: Demand for apprentices in England has always been very low, especially when compared internationally. The Government therefore needs to do more to make the business case to employers, highlighting the benefits apprentices can bring to organisations, such as relevant skills, loyalty, higher quality and greater productivity.

As training providers at the sharp end of recruiting employers and delivering the learning do you feel that the Government needs to do more to make the business case to employers?
If so what sort of things do you think will help you? Let me know by commenting on this blog and we would also be interested in finding out what sort take you are finding for level 4 and above amongst your own employer clients.

Week 3 – midweek update

The fun thing about being the ‘new kids on the block’ is that we arent playing catch up with existing competitors.

When you have created something new you can be innovative and bold. We know that we are being watched carefully now by our competitors who I am sure will be carefully working out where our new QCF e-portfolio solution is different from theirs and planning to catch up.

This doesn’t matter and is flattering because when you are different and innovative you are never going to stand still. Whatever we have developed today won’t meet the needs of our QCF/NVQ training providers tomorrow because this landscape changes so rapidly.

Just in the last 2 years we have seen NVQ disappear and be replaced with QCF, the Lsc end and the SFA emerge, Train to Gain – one of the previous Government’s flagship scheme’s abolished, Minimum contracts introduced and the changes go on.

Working to support our QCF training providers we completely understand that your world is constantly evolving and changing and so will our e-portfolio solutions.

Just this week we have commissioned 3 more development enhancements based on feedback from our clients, we have included an e-timesheet for learners to record infromla learning to add to the hours calculated from their formal sessions which is a new SFA requirement, provided a pop up box for learners to help assessors locate specific p.c.’s within evidence uploads and made it easer for assessors to feedback to learners against specific evidence files.

It’s fun being in your world and helping you to save time and money with your QCF delivery whilst improving the quality of the learning experience and we welcome any feedback and comments on how we can improve our solution to make life easier for you.

We’ve now started our 2nd FE college trial and will update you with the case study in July when this is concluded. If you would like a free trial of our solution then register your interest here.

An area I am concerned that we could overlook is the learners themselves. We provide lots of training and support for Assessors, administrators, I/V’s and External Verifiers but expect the Assessors to support their learners simply with our training materials.

Let me have your ideas and suggestions on how we can improve our support directly to your learners, maybe we could use our Facebook page to upload tips and materials to and encourage learners to interact with each other?

No technology solution is totally intuitive, regardless of what the suppliers claim, I learn more about my i-phone from my 14 year old daughter than I did by reading the manual.
We want you to love Smart Assessor and recommend it to your colleagues and contacts, we want your candidates to enjoy using Smart Assessor and use it so that you can see significant reductions in your delviery costs against other e-portfolio’s.

So please do let us have your ideas and suggestions of how we at Smart Assessor can make life easier for you by commenting on our blog.

For more updates follow us on Twitter @SmartAssessor or click on the twitter icon on our home page.

Week 3 of a new start up – nvq and qcf e-portfolio software

This week I want to share our experience of exhibiting at our first conference and a reminder of how things can go horribly wrong!

This week we exhibited at the e-assessment conference which was very well organised with good attendance.

This was a great opportunity for Smart Assessor, as a new e-portfolio software provider, to start to get noticed in the NVQ / QCF delivery arena.

We were invited to present at the conference and decided to make our key message about suppliers needing to make their technology products easy to use.

I think by now we all accept that technology is a key part of learning and isn’t going to go away. We now have a generation who don’t remember a time when computers and mobile smart phones weren’t a part of everyday life. In the UK alone there are 28m registered Facebook users and more text messages sent every day than the entire population of the planet.
What I did notice from the conference was that many of the speakers evangelising the latest technology products struggled when the technologies didn’t work as well as they had hoped in real time, when Smart Assessor presented everything went well until we opened You Tube and wanted to show a great clip to illustrate how we need to make technology simple. The clip was a sketch between Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield from the BBC One programme The One Ronnie.

We wanted to end the presentation on a light and humorous note and intended to use this clip live from You Tube. When we opened the clip before the presentation it loaded quickly and played smoothly. When we played this clip in real time at the end of the presentation the internet was so slow the clip kept stopping and pausing and we lost the effect entirely!
Fortunately our presenter is a professional speaker and kept her cool knowing exactly what to do. She had to stream it first which took nearly a minute before we could play it. A minute is a very long time to fill when you are on the stage in front of an audience! Whilst we tried to keep the momentum of the presentation going for that long minute we lost the impact we would have had; imagine if our presenter hadn’t known what to do when something live went wrong?

We are sharing this with you to illustrate our point that if we are really going to make progress in changing the landscape of QCF and NVQ delivery we have not only got to embrace the technology tools that will help us to do this but we’ve got to make these tools easy to use.

At Smart Assessor we are trying to change the way QCF and NVQ assessors work, not just by using an e-portfolio software that will reduce paperwork and give better access to candidates work but we are also trying to help you reduce the cost of your delivery with tools that will reduce unnecessary travel time and costs with our Smart Training Rooms which means it’s really important that we keep developing solutions that are easy to use.

This week we’ve completed training for our first two clients and now have our 3rd client’s training scheduled for next week. Feedback from the Assessors, Verifiers, Administrators and Centre Managers has been really positive, I think they appreciated not having to travel for training and to be able to take the training in small bite size time slots, including evening and weekends.

All of our training is delivered in our Smart Rooms virtually across the web which gives our clients the opportunity to experience the sessions for themselves before using them with their learners. To help improve the user friendliness of Smart Assessor we provide free and unlimited initial training and welcome feedback on ideas for improving the Smart Assessor e-portfolio software.

To conclude this week’s blog why not relax for a few minutes and enjoy the clip between Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield from the BBC One programme The One Ronnie.

It’s always good to be reminded of how technology can seem daunting and complicated to those who weren’t born with it.

To find out more about Smart Assessor visit our web site

New Budget Announcement for 40,000 Apprentices – are they using e-portfolio software?

Great news that the Government are creating 40,000 more Apprentices.

This bold plan can only work if Training providers have enough employers willing to take on the additional young people. Currently on the Government’s Apprenticeship web site there are some great brands who have supported the Apprentices scheme such as Honda, Accenture, Volvo, Citroen, Toyota, Carillion, McDonald’s and BT but can these companies increase their intake to take up the new availability?

The Department for Business Innovation & Skills estimates that there are >4.8 million private sector enterprises in the UK, however 95% of them employ less than 5 people. A recent client survey by small business marketer Fiona Hudson-Kelly revealed that less than .05% of small businesses were aware of the apprenticeship programme and only .01% had taken on an apprentice. Small businesses are the back bone of the UK economy, contributing more than 49% of the UK economy.