THis group comprised team leaders and teachers from the Community Services Devonport and Small Business North/ Northwest teams. We started the year with a brief to explore WebCT and Toolboxes.

Today the group presented their project at the Showcase day. Cheryl has kicked off with a rundown on the problems that prompted the team to  consider flexible learning including some of the student characteristics. Using some of the flexible tools and resources are some of the options being looked at for next year - the program Cheryl, Ann and Leanne run is fairly new so still open to change and it is great to see this LearnScope project leading to real implementation in 2007. Ann’s just said - “we’ve got some inspiration from it” :-) Ann’s now showing the audience the Journals section of Designing elearning and one resource site she discovered in the last workshop. They are looking at it as a tool for helping develop the reflective process in student’s learning. There are two distinct groups - students who are looking to move into the industry what we call ‘career entry’ and then the experienced workers who are already employed in the industry and who are upskilling and having skills recognised. They are enrolled in a Certificate 4 course which is a challenge for many of the career entry group who may not really have engaged with school or study previously. Expectations are high!

I’ve just uploaded this photo from my mobile phone - just a small blurry one, but that is Ann at the front.

Mary and Wilma are now talking about the Small Business involvement. There are about 60% of students in this area enrolled flexibly already, but they wanted to do more. They knew they were losing students, and provide alternatives to the existing text based approach. The team was aware of a Small Business toolbox, but it didn’t line up well with the existing text resources BUT! working with both would be tricky, customising would be time consuming. The project question was to see what was needed to get it going. Various ideas came from the team - things like screen recordings of processes on the computer, video clips of talks etc. and there were problems of internet speed, time to create, accessibility. This team thrashed out a number of ideas and approaches, and then also did a bit of scouting about on the web and discovered TAFESA has developed a range of support resources to go with the toolbox.

Mary’s wise words - It’s going to be an ongoing issue, see what happens next year, students are aware of online learning and one had actually found the toolbox and started using it without any hassle :-)