I work in the schools sector. The framework was designed for school classrooms. I was surprised, in a good way, when colleagues in higher and further education started signing up to the site this term and using PICRAT to audit modules, lectures and lab sessions that look very different from anything I have ever taught. This post is for them.
The short version: the cell definitions hold across sectors because they describe what students are doing with technology and what the technology is doing for the lesson, both of which are sector-agnostic questions. The examples in each cell change. A 90-minute undergraduate seminar uses the same nine cells as a 40-minute Year 9 lesson, with different lesson artefacts. PICRAT stays small, observable and discipline-agnostic, which is most of why it travels.
Why PICRAT travels well to HE and FE
Three reasons make the framework portable.
It is small. Three rows, three columns, nine cells, two questions to answer. That fits inside a busy academic's working memory in a way that a thirteen-construct framework never will. A colleague can be using the grid by the end of a coffee.
It is observable. The questions PICRAT asks are about behaviour. What are students doing with the technology in this session? What is the technology doing for the session? Both questions can be answered by anyone in the room, including the lecturer themselves a week later when reading their own session plan.
It is discipline-agnostic. A medical-education colleague auditing simulation work and a humanities colleague auditing seminar discussion can compare notes using the same vocabulary. That cross-disciplinary comparability is rare in HE, where most pedagogical conversations are sealed inside the discipline by jargon. PICRAT lets you say "this is our department's IA workhorse lesson" and have a chemistry tutor and a history tutor mean broadly the same thing.
What changes from the school context, and what holds
Three things change.
Sessions are longer. A 90-minute seminar, a 50-minute lecture, a three-hour lab. The framework still asks the same two questions; it just asks them about a longer activity. In practice that often means a single session contains multiple placements: the first 20 minutes are PR (lecture intro), the middle 40 are IA (paired analysis on Padlet), the last 30 are CR (drafting a write-up). The honest reading is per segment, then summed for the session.
Class sizes vary by an order of magnitude. A doctoral seminar of six is a different proposition from a 200-seat lecture. PICRAT itself is indifferent to cohort size. Cohort size still affects which cells are practical: Creative Transform with twelve students is straightforward; Creative Transform with two hundred is a logistics problem before it is a pedagogy one.
Adult-learner autonomy reframes Passive. A student who chooses to watch a lecture-capture at 1.5x in their own time is making a deliberate revision choice. The session is still PR by classification; the learning behaviour around it is on the student. The framework still describes the technology choice honestly, and the autonomy conversation is a separate question.
What holds is the cell definitions, the placement test, and the trap. The trap matters in HE and FE too, and it is worth naming. The pull towards Creative Transform is just as real for academics planning a flagship module as it is for school teachers planning a unit anchor. The honest CT lessons in HE are powerful; the strained ones look impressive in a brochure and exhaust everyone involved. The argument in The Transformative trap applies cleanly.
Three short scenarios
One from HE, one from FE, one from initial teacher training. Each shows how the framework reads in context.
A 90-minute undergraduate criminology seminar
Eighteen second-year students. Topic: the use of CCTV evidence in court. The seminar runs in three movements. First, the lecturer recaps the relevant case law for fifteen minutes; students follow on their laptops with the lecture notes open in the LMS. Second, in pairs, students read three short case extracts on a shared Miro board, tag the procedural issues each one raises, and compare across pairs in the last ten minutes of the segment. Third, in groups of four, students record a five-minute audio clip arguing one side of a fictional admissibility hearing, briefed with one of the case extracts.
A three-hour BTEC engineering lab on CAD
Twelve level-3 BTEC students. The lab is a unit on parametric design in Fusion 360. The first hour is a guided walkthrough: the tutor demonstrates a part, students follow on their machines and produce the same part as the demonstration. The second hour is paired modification: each student takes a partner's file and changes one parameter to meet a brief, then explains the change. The third hour is portfolio production: students design a part to a printed industry brief, save it to their portfolio, and write 100 words on the design choice. The technology in this room is the discipline; PICRAT's job is naming whether students are using it like the discipline asks.
A 45-minute PGCE supervision conversation
One mentor, one trainee. The trainee taught a Year 8 geography lesson on river processes that morning and is in supervision after lunch. The mentor opens the conversation with the trainee's typed reflection on the iPad activity used in the lesson. They place the lesson on the PICRAT grid together, decide it was Passive Replace, and identify the one teacher prompt that would have lifted it to Interactive Amplify. The trainee re-plans the next lesson with the mentor present, holding the grid open as a placement check.
Why a school-sector framework belongs in HE and FE
Higher education has frameworks. TPACK names the three knowledge bases a teacher draws on and where they overlap. The Universal Design for Learning principles name the access dimensions of a session. SAMR puts technology integration on a four-rung ladder. Conversational frameworks describe dialogue between teacher and student.
The honest read of how those frameworks land in practice is that most academics use none of them when planning the next session, because the cost of using them is high relative to the time available. PICRAT is small enough to slip into the planning conversation without rearranging the day. That smallness is the feature.
It also gives FE leads, who already work with observation and audit cultures closer to schools than to universities, a vocabulary their school-sector partners and their HE-pathway partners can both read. That bilingual property is unusual, and it explains some of the organic adoption that has been happening on the site this term.
Same nine cells. Different examples. The framework travels.
What to do tomorrow
Pick one module you are running this term. List the sessions. Place each session on the grid. Read the heatmap.
Most modules audit at heavy PR with a sprinkle of IA. That is the default. The smallest move is to choose one or two sessions where lifting from PR to IA would change what students take away. That is where PICRAT pays back fastest. A Transform-everywhere overhaul is the wrong instinct to act on first.
If you want a faster start, open Generate. Pick a subject and an age range. Generate produces a 3x3 of nine activity ideas with their PICRAT placements. The undergraduate and postgraduate ranges are in the picker; the placements work the same way they do for school-age cohorts.
If you would rather audit a session you have already taught, drop the plan into Review. The output gives you the placement, a strength, a reflection, and the smallest next step.
Andy Perryer is the head of digital learning at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. The PICRAT framework was developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper in the CITE Journal.