The Learning Journey represents a collaboration between TAG Developments, Dudley Local Education Authority (“LEA”), FutureLab, the then Department for Education and Skills (now Department for Children, Schools and Families “DCSF”), and Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations (“OCR”) to develop and deliver a new online cross-curricular activity-based mechanism for KS2 and KS3 pupils to learn valuable communications, collaboration and thinking skills, to self-assess their own contributions as well as being assessed by their teachers.

TAG won this tender in Spring 2004 as a result of its collaborative approach to development (highly regarded by the team at Dudley LEA) and thanks to our involvement in projects focused on the creative use of ICT.

TAG worked closely in partnership with Dudley LA through the pilot phase of this project (beginning in Summer 2005) to develop this project which utilised an e-portfolio to assess the collaborative work of groups of pupils undertaking open-ended problem solving activities.  Over 140 individual assessment activities were prepared.

The Learning Journey has shown how a project can successfully transition from a more traditional paper-based learning experience into an online multimedia-rich technologically enhanced solution without disenfranchising teachers along the way. The Learning Journey also provided TAG Developments with another rewarding collaborative and iterative development experience and helped to prove the concept of the learner portfolio as an invaluable tool to manage both skills and capability assessment (e.g. assessment of and for learning).  Launched in summer 2005, the feedback from the pilot was used by the DfES in their research to inform the direction of the revised English National Curriculum