ICS Accredited Learning Pilot - South Africa

At the beginning of this year, my manager asked me if I could lead an ICS accredited learning pilot to explore any added value we could offer our volunteers by formally accrediting the skills they develop on the programme. As a big believer in the value of experiential learning opportunities (over and above formal education) I said yes, and set about researching and selecting our accreditation provider - Open College Network (OCN) - before making sure the various pre-requisites were in place in order to become a recognised centre for delivering OCN accredited courses. What I didn't know was that this also meant designing our very own OCN accredited course....

I still remember the conversation when I asked where to find their courses (naively assuming that it would just be a case of picking one 'off the shelf' to fit with the ICS programme). But no, that would be too easy. Instead, they offer a range of various units/modules that are built around learning outcomes and assessment criteria (kind of like a skeleton) and you have to build your course around them. While I've designed lots of volunteer training before, I had never designed an entire course that had to be signed off by an external provider. Fortunately I had the support and guidance of the consultant who had helped us select OCN as our accreditation provider. Together we selected 4 units from the OCN portfolio that were a good 'fit' for ICS: 1) Building a Personal Skills Portfolio, 2) Teamwork Skills, 3) Problem Solving Skills and 4) Presentation Skills. With such a diverse range of volunteers across the ICS programme, I also took the decision to write the course at two different levels of difficulty - Level 2 being about equivalent to GCSE standard and Level 3 roughly an A level. The challenge was I needed to write both (120-ish page) courses within 6 weeks so they'd be ready to pilot with summer cohorts of volunteers across 3 ICS agencies in South Africa.....

Once the courses were written and signed off by OCN, I developed a staff guide to accompany the learner guides and held a launch workshop to support agency staff in the UK in their implementation planning to roll out the pilot in South Africa to in-country staff and volunteers. Caroline (aka curriculum development consultant/all round accreditation guru and lovely lady) and I then recruited and trained 5 freelance assessors who would be responsible for providing distance learning feedback and assessment decisions for the volunteers. We also held interviews for a full-time Learning Support Officer who would co-ordinate the assessment process between volunteers, assessors and OCN, a complex juggling act of receiving and sending assessment submissions, assessor feedback and resubmissions on a remote basis across the 3 agencies. Fortunately our chosen candidate Jenny was an organisational skills whizz kid and a master of colour-coded spreadsheets.

With the course resources, team and systems set up in the UK I headed out to South Africa to support the in-country teams over-seeing the pilot and guiding the volunteers through the course. Starting in Port Elizabeth with Lattitude Global Volunteering I then headed to East London to meet with Restless Development before finishing up in Cape Town with Skillshare International. Less than 3 months after writing the course it was amazing to see it about to be piloted and to listen to the questions, concerns and suggestions raised by staff and volunteers. Back in February and March, sitting writing at my desk thousands of miles away it hadn't seemed real, but now it was in the hands of the people I'd been writing it for. Scary (but exciting) stuff....

Volunteers exploring learning opportunities on placement

Lattitude South Africa introducing the course to volunteers

ICS yoga?

A not-for-the-faint-hearted flight from Port Elizabeth to East London

But great views.

Restless Development introducing the course to volunteers

With Restless Development South Africa Team, - Sithembele and Bonga

Back in the UK we started to receive our first assessment submissions and prepare for our first standardisation meeting with the assessors (to establish a consistency of marking/feedback) as well as setting up our Internal Verification system (basically assessing the assessors' assessment decisions...) in advance of OCN's External Verification visit. It was an interesting insight into the layers of verification that happen in the world of external accreditation, but time was as tight as ever and I was so grateful for Jenny and Caroline's hard work on managing the various processes while I started to design the pilot evaluation structure and recruit another consultant to write the actual evaluation, that would also look at another accreditation model, implemented by one of our ICS agencies - Challenges Worldwide - and accredited by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). 

The pilot evaluation enabled us to extract lots of learning to explore the added value that accreditation may offer our volunteers, however the main overarching finding was that there is clearly no 'one size fits all' course that is suitable for the range of volunteers who take part in the ICS programme. Content that is interesting, motivating and challenging for a graduate who speaks and writes English as their first language is unlikely to be accessible for a volunteer who is just out of school, or speaks and writes English as their second (or even third language) or someone with additional learning difficulties such as dyslexia. So in my new role as Youth Learning and Development Manager (leading innovation and quality assurance of volunteer training and learning across the consortium) I'll be exploring how we can integrate a range of accredited learning options into the volunteer journey to meet the diverse needs of our volunteers.