East Kent College: IMI E-Portfolio & Assignments

I’ve been feeling pretty ill this past week so I thought I’d give followers an insight to how work is now submitted at college. It’s a fairly big change this year and it’s now effectively “paperless” if you got a web browser handy. Last year our portfolios were all paper based, even if typed on word it all had to be printed and in a folder. Then even after all the marking is done and the students have left the college has to retain the portfolios safely for a couple of years, so you can imagine the hassle of archiving folders of peoples work especially over the top portfolios like mine. The screenshot above shows an example of what it’s like now, a web based UI with simple input boxes for text only.

For evidence photos/diagrams etc. we have an upload form towards the bottom after the input boxes. I think I’m the only person who even uses this but I like the feature, and you can never have too many photos of course ! AE06K is the name of the first assignment this year and is about vehicle electrical diagnostics. It’s quite odd because you have explain in around 1,000 words how you would go about diagnosing a specific electrical fault including rectification without necessarily carrying out the job in real life, so you have to really dig around online and through book’s, manuals to get together a strong write up (I mean type up) with correct explanations and evidence in the forms of wiring diagrams and other images to support your work.

I think these tasks are not too difficult for me personally, but It can be a struggle for students who are not interested in a specific car manufacturer or model. So here is why I went with the Honda Civic 96-00 for doing a central locking problem scenario:

1. This unit (and only this one) requires selection of a known vehicle either personally owned or from college including VIN, so I used the one from my old car,

2. the Honda Civic has always been my favorite (affordable) car for years, and information sourcing for this car is possibly if not the easiest on the web.

So after a few YouTube videos, a visit to NWP4life and print screens from some old Civic PDF manuals I already had one assignment pretty much complete. So I cannot stress how much of a difference it makes to base the assignments on a car you know well’ish at least, it makes the information sourcing very easy.

So I had central locking completed pretty quickly and I was stuck for a while on what to do for section two…

Our college technicians car currently has a problem with a rear heated windscreen, and since me and one of the apprentices had gone into much depth to fix the problem it was basically a matter of me typing out the job in depth and that was section two taken care of !

One aspect of ruling out a broken demister switch was pretty easy since we have another identical Vectra C at the college to swap parts over, sadly it wasn’t the switch that was at fault !

Students on Level 3 last year were pretty lucky only needing 60% to pass these assignments, but now on the IMI it’s 100% so they have to be pretty spot on to be accepted. I had mine handed back on 85% with corrections and information to add so I didn’t get it right first time. So with this assignment hopefully out of the way soon I can focus more on the first online exam which has been set for December, not looking forward to that !