Assessment of prior workplace learning: a case study

Many experienced engineering technologists work at the professional engineer level and seek the formal qualifications to enable them to practice at this level. The Master of Engineering Practice is a distance education program designed to enable them to achieve this goal by using their workplace learning to demonstrate achievement of up to half of the defined graduate attributes. The program is accredited by the Institution of Engineers, Australia, which operates as Engineers Australia. The pedagogical design is based on principles drawn from the scholarship of learning and teaching, particularly from the fields of adult learning, reflective practice and the assessment of workplace learning. The first course requires students to use reflective practice to assess their learning against the graduate attributes and then prepare and negotiate an individual Pathway to Graduation Plan. As each student brings a unique set of learning experiences to the program the Plan is tailored to their learning needs and designed to enable them to demonstrate achievement of all of the required attributes. The student response has been extremely positive and the first students graduated at the end of 2007. This paper describes the program structure and assessment processes, and then discusses student and staff experiences with those processes. In particular, it addresses the self-assessment process which some students have found to be a complex and demanding process. The paper draws on the results of two student surveys and describes actions taken to simplify the assessment processes while at the same time enhancing the quality and efficiency of the processes from both staff and student perspectives