Right now, teachers who are guiding their learners towards specific qualifications will be assembling the relevant courses from the multitude available from a range of qualification bodies to create their curricula for the coming year.
Many of you, who are Earwig users, have told us how helpful it would be to be able to track and evidence progress against these using Earwig. It can be done but it is not what Earwig was designed for so it's a bit messy.
Therefore we have been working on a new module designed to provide you with an easy way to assemble a selection of these courses into specific assessment frameworks for each pupil or pupil group and then track progress against these in the same way as you would for any conventional assessment framework.
We ran a test on it last term and are now ready to make it available to everyone.
It works like this…
We have chosen a set of popular qualification awarding bodies and loaded hundreds of their courses into the new Earwig 'Accreditation Course Library'.
Earwig Admins can now dive into this library, select the courses they need and assemble these into a relevant framework for any pupil or pupil cohort.
The process can be repeated to create as many individual frameworks as their learners need.
They can then evidence, grade and track progress against each framework in the usual Earwig way and use this to inform teaching and to support qualification applications.
School leaders can then track progress, share with parents where relevant and manage resource deployment.
Although we have uploaded hundreds of courses into the Earwig system, these are only a small fraction of the thousands available. So if the courses or qualification bodies you want to teach aren't already on the Earwig list, just hit the 'Request a course' button to let the framework team know and they will get these loaded quickly for you.
Remember that in order to add a course to your Earwig account you will have to attest that your school has paid the relevant licence fee to the qualification body.
To enable this Accreditation Module for your school, your school Earwig Account Manager will need to go to the Account Management panel on their Earwig dashboard and add the 'Accreditation Module' to the suite of Earwig features they subscribe to. This is charged for in the same way as the Assessment Module, except that you get twice as many frameworks for the same cost.
The image below will give you an idea of how it all works…
Then it's Earwig as usual.
The beta testers loved it. We hope you will too. But remember it's still evolving, so any suggestions are welcome and this year you only pay half the usual licence fee.
