City & Guilds TechBac

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Chris Dunne, Digital Marketing Manager

City & Guilds enable people and organisations to develop their skills for personal and economic growth. Backed by a Royal Charter, they work with education providers, companies and governments in over 80 countries.

Project Background

City & Guilds TechBac® is an entirely new professional program designed to give 14 to 19 year olds an exciting alternative path towards an apprenticeship, higher education or employment.

A key feature of the TechBac® is the Skills Zone, a unique portal that brings together workplace skills training with a mentoring program, business challenges, and an online CV Builder. These different systems are linked together using the Experience API (xAPI).

Using this approach, City & Guilds are able to store learner’s progress in a Learning Record Store (LRS), unifying all of the systems into a single record of progress and achievement.

Choosing a Learning Record Store (LRS)

City & Guilds selected Learning Pool LRS, the open source LRS, to power their solution. Learning Pool LRS allows TechBac® to scale upwards of 50,000 learners with peaks of intensive usage throughout the year.

Learning Pool’s LRS advanced API is used to process and display data to both learners and their tutors, as well as reporting back usage to City & Guilds for analysis.

Learners visualise their work on the City & Guilds Skills Wheel; a personalised dashboard of progress. Learners can export this data to their own tailored CV, customising the information they present back to potential employers.

Learning Approaches

Integrates learning data from multiple systems, websites and apps.

Predictive learning analytics give tutors a view of who is likely to need extra help.

Combines xAPI with Mozilla’s Open Badges to create an evidence based recognition system.

Issuing Open Badges

Tutors track progress through the Performance Optimiser. The system helps predict areas of risk to the Learner’s progress and allows them to intervene at the right time. Tutors recognize the Learner’s competence in each of the seven skill areas by awarding a Mozilla Open Badge.

The Mozilla standard makes accreditation evidence-based and portable. Learners can export their Open Badges to their CV and the wider web as proof of their achievements.

This portability is achieved using the xAPI standard; the first solution to combine both xAPI and Open Badges into a production environment.