This week I have been enjoying attending the biennial FLANZ conference being held at the Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin. The open keynote speaker on Wednesday morning was Adrian Woodhouse who began his talk with a personal story of how he, at age nineteen, left his chef’s qualification early because the job it was preparing him for arrived before the programme allowed. Years later, after his venison cookery won a national competition, he was invited back to finish his assessment. So he drove three hours to a campus to cook venison, on the institution’s menu and at the institution’s time, to prove what the industry had already recognised.
It was a funny story with a sharp edge, and it set up his central question – where does learning actually live? Adrian argues that we talk about flexible learning as if it were a delivery problem, a matter of technology, timetables and location. Instead, he claims it is really a question about where we believe learning resides. If it lives only inside institutions, flexibility becomes an issue of logistics. If it lives in workplaces, communities and lives, the task is to find it and recognise it. Adrian’s team at Otago Polytechnic has spent years doing exactly that, and found that experienced practitioners don’t arrive empty-handed. Institutions that happily build curriculum from their expertise struggle to see it when it turns up at the door.
As I listened to Adrian’s talk I felt myself wanting to push his question further, because it exposes something no single institution can fix.
Starting over at every border
What Otago Polytechnic has built is impressive, and provides a more welcoming ‘border crossing’ than most. But it is still a border crossing. Every provider that wants to recognise learning sets up its own, with its own forms, its own officials and its own definition of acceptable evidence. The learner meanwhile travels through many jurisdictions: early childhood, school, work, community, tertiary study, retraining, and back again. At every crossing they unpack their bags, re-establish who they are and what they can do, and hope the official on duty recognises what’s inside. There is no passport that every border honours.
Here in New Zealand we are currently reforming our education system (again!), yet the pieces are being designed separately (again!). NCEA is being replaced by new Year 12 and Year 13 certificates that record how many subjects a student has achieved. Meanwhile, recognition of prior learning is defined as a formal assessment of existing knowledge against a particular programme’s outcomes, to award credit towards that qualification. Whatever you make of each reform, they follow their own logic, serve different purposes and are run by different agencies. Nobody is designing the joins, and the joins are where learners fall through.
The question underneath
This all takes me back to reflecting on my own work on learner agency, and the central question I ask but the system avoids: “who owns the learning?” Three things are bundled together here. The learning itself is the learner’s. The evidence and record of it should be theirs too, to hold, govern and share. The certification of that learning is a judgement made by an awarding body, and it properly belongs to them.
Today the arrangement is upside down. Institutions hold the records, learners request transcripts, and recognition is a favour granted at the boundary rather than something a person carries with them. Learner agency is a hollow phrase if the learner owns nothing.
The missing infrastructure
Many of us who have spent more than twenty years thinking about the future of education have been describing this for a long time – a lifelong, portable record of learning, controlled by the learner, holding evidence from classrooms, workplaces, communities and cultural life, verifiable and readable by whatever framework needs it. Sadly, it has never been fully addressed at policy level. We have a persistent identifier for every learner but no lifelong record that belongs to them. We keep announcing learner-centred education and then building systems around institutions.
Without that infrastructure, “learner-centred” is rhetoric. It would need to be:
- Lifelong and portable, not locked to a school’s platform or a vendor.
- Learner-controlled, with real consent, especially for children. For Māori learners, whānau, hapū and iwi also have legitimate interests in how knowledge is held.
- Interoperable, built on open standards so any institution can read it and contribute to it.
- Verifiable, so each piece of evidence shows who vouched for it.
- Mapped to curriculum and qualification outcomes.
- A by-product of learning rather than another chore, or it becomes a burden that falls hardest on those with the least support.
This is public infrastructure, closer to a road than a product. Someone has to decide to build it, fund it and steward it.
Enter AI
Adrian’s team needs skilled staff to draw out what practitioners know but can’t articulate, because, as he argues, “I just know” isn’t evidence. This is where AI has the potential to change the economics. As a reflective partner, it can ask the questions that help a learner notice and name their capability. As a mapper, it can connect artefacts and experience to outcomes across frameworks, work that is slow and manual today. As a curator, it can organise evidence, spot gaps and reveal pathways the learner never knew existed.
The risks are real. If AI writes the reflection, the learner’s voice, and with it their ownership, evaporates. AI should ask, and the learner should answer. Machine-generated evidence is worthless unless verified, and assessment decisions must rest with accountable humans. And whose AI is it? A learner’s assistant has to work for the learner, not the institution that deployed it or the platform that harvests the data. Left to the market, the record will belong to whoever builds the best product.
The window
This year’s Year 9 students will be the first cohort through the new qualifications. The infrastructure decisions, or the failure to make them, will play out over the next few years. If we don’t build the foundation, we will get what Adrian wondered about at the start of his talk: the existing structures made slightly more flexible, with every learner still queuing at every border, unpacking their bags and proving who they are all over again.
So the question for FLANZ, and for the system, isn’t about looking to see how flexible we are. It’s about who owns the learning, and what we are building to prove it.
