The E-learning Innovations Program is about integrating e-learning in registered training organisations, across industries, in enterprises, and within organisations working with specific learner groups.
Last year, the first year of the Program, the focus was on embedding e-learning as part of everyday business and partnerships. At the heart of a successful project is a well developed partnership between the registered training organisation and their client or clients. The characteristics of a good partnership are mutual respect, excellent communication and thorough understanding of client needs.
This was demonstrated in the 2008 projects and the following video captures the essence of the eleven projects. Copies of the DVD are available by contacting Fiona Huskinson, Innovations Coordinator on (03) 6233 2140 or email: fiona.huskinson@skills.tas.gov.au
Transcripts
HACCP: The PFD Way
Equals
Rikki: We have 60-odd sites across the countryside. They are in remote areas (Wialla, Mt. Isa, Broome, and Port Maquarie, for example).
The business problem that PFD has been trying to resolve is the fact that we need to get the information through to our staff in regard to how the HACCP food safety program works.
What we needed was a tool to help get that message across in a better format and in a better way.
We had a lot of consultation between ourselves and Equals. They’ve really looked at what we’ve required for this program—to be simple, targeted, and effective.
The resource is very user-friendly. You can easily find, following the flow diagram, each step that’s required.
It follows on…it shows details of what it does in regard to how you should handle that product and what you should do with that product and indicates and shows you in great photographic evidence what you shouldn’t do with any product that’s received in the warehouse.
With our client, Equals has developed two tools within this process. One, of course, is for PFD food services, as we are a wholesaler. But there has been a version developed for food handling, for our customers. This will help our clients meet the requirements of their local food safety authorities.
The framework funding has enabled us to work with Equals to develop a very good learning tool, which we didn’t believe at the beginning we could do, but this has proven that we can, and we will be able to use it for other areas’ training.
e-Service Delivery
GlobalNet ICT
Ian: In our e-learning project, the organizations that were involved were CBS South and GlobalNet ICT.
The problem that CBS had, I guess, where e-learning could solve or certainly go someway to assisting them, was in relation to improving the level of awareness of service delivery and the components in the aspects of service delivery. The solution that GlobalNet has provided to CBS South is Moodle learning management system with customized and contextualized e-learning resources.
Lesley: As we got more and more information about how they operated on a daily basis, we changed the way that some of the training was happening. We changed the activities to try and fit in with the CBS staff and how they may use the training in the future.
Peter: The best thing to CBS in terms of the e-learning is that some staff in particular have taken this on with great enthusiasm, which means that they have been able to do a study that they wouldn’t have done otherwise, and for CBS, it is part of the suite of opportunities that people can take advantage of to increase their skills and knowledge.
Ian: What we’ve used is an SMS plug-in from a UK software company. The reason we chose this SMS plug-in is because it plugs into Moodle. The business outcomes for using SMS software within this project is because it was embedded within the e-learning, now it can be used to extend CBS South’s normal business context into things such as reminding people without Board meetings or alerting them to payroll.
Julie: E-learning has been a challenge, interesting, you’ve got to put in, but you also learn a lot about your business. I’m three-quarters of the way through and I’m doing far better than I thought; so anyone can do it.
Managers on the Move
Institute of TAFE Tasmania
Fiona: The project that we did for e-Learning Innovations was a project with three of our industry partners.
The industry partners were T.T. Line (they call themselves The Spirit of Tasmania for the purpose of this project), Henry Jones Art Hotel, and the Country Club Casino, and we were looking at Certificate IV hospitality units.
The whole idea is to try and create something that is going to be really customized and very relevant to that particular business.
The original resource that we used was the Hospitality Management Toolbox. I had to do a unit called Monitor Work Operations, which is a core unit for Certificate IV. That particular unit is all about the day-to-day work operations, and in particular, how they relate to the Spirit of Tasmania and what happens on board the ship.
Danny: What we tried to do with Drysdale was to develop an in-house course that is specific to our business, which is quite a unique business within Tasmania. Working on vessels as opposed to a land-based hotel, there are quite a few restrictions and other requirements that need to be addressed for our staff.
Fiona: A lot of the training happens when they are at sea, and with e-learning, e-learning is actually online, but they are not online when they are at sea.
Danny: Basically, we have had many consultations with Drysdale and they have actually come on board and looked at our facilities and checked out our different systems and procedures.
Janet: The program customizes resources, in this case, Country Club Tasmania, by using in-house documents from Country Club and because it’s basically a work-based assessment. It works on the practical things that are already happening here, and also we give some recognition so that students who are already doing these things don’t have to do them again.
Michael: What I am excited about with the project is that the e-learning resources are taking advantage of technology to enable a consistent message to be available 24×7 to all of our potential and existing supervisors.
Adrian: I was partnered with the Henry Jones Art Hotel and, in particular, with Matt Casey, the general manager.
Matt: I suppose we as a hotel (Henry Jones) have really customized what we want out of the project. If we look at a subject like interpreting financial information, we’ve used our materials there and the KPIs and the charts that we refer to, so it’s relevant to staff when they’re going through their certification.
Adrian: The partnership has been great. Essentially, it’s given me great insight into what a specific business needs.
Matt: We want to be a really good training provider on board, and we want the training to be relevant, and in doing that we believe that we can focus our recruitment on employing staff that have great skills. They have great ethics and great morals, but really are quite personable people and we can add the skills at a later stage.
The Way e-Forward
Banjo’s
David: The business problem that Banjos has specifically is that we’re a franchise, and we need consistency. We also have a problem in providing training to a number of our staff members who are working different hours. Being able to replicate that training is an essential part of being a franchise.
The solution to our training problem has been to bring all of this into an online learning platform. There’s text providing instructions. There are videos that they can watch, photos of step-by-step. And so they will do a number of things like drag and drops and multiple choice, we’ll send out promotional material and gut-feel, as we know that the stores that achieve the best promotions are the stores that have actually trained their staff.
Now with our e-learning project, we’ll definitely have the tool. We can measure it by region, we can measure it from the field consultants who are responsible for the regions, we can measure it right down to a store level, and now right down to an individual level.
The obvious benefit for that is that we’ll be able to feed back that information to franchisees, to show that the training does translate into pure, hard dollars.
The initial funding provided the impetus for the Board to release extra funds to us, and that would then contribute to an ongoing commitment to providing the resources needed to fund that project. That certainly wouldn’t have been considered had we not even had that initial investment. Now what it’s shown are the outcomes that we’re going to achieve, even right down to things like retention of our existing staff by having those types of projects on our books, and being able to roll them out means you’re at the forefront of best practice.
The engagement of an outsource provider was probably the most critical aspect for us in getting something ready to market in the shortest period of time. Superior Services has worked with probably eight to ten of the leading franchise brands, and all of that learning gets bundled into one entire platform.
Fil: The impact of this project is purely going to be the reduction in the amount of labor that we have to expend to actually deliver training to our franchisees and staff across the group.
David: The most amazing thing about this whole project is the ability now for any employee, any time, in any Banjos store, to log on and actually start contributing to their career progression.
Fil: We’re hoping that this form of delivering information to the staff members actually breaks down the barriers completely, and they have direct access to any information that we may want to disseminate across the group, and they can actually use that same portal to actually deliver information back to us.
Cold e-Logic
Institute of TAFE Tasmania
Tony: The refrigeration industry, generally located in the northwest of the state, is our major focus on the industry. The industry in the northwest wanted a more flexible training program. It’s been very hard for us, in certainly the refrigeration/air condition discipline, to find teachers because of the fact that it’s a skill shortage area, and I could give an example of that earlier this year. I advertised almost nationally for a refrigeration/air conditioning teacher, and I had no takers, no replies to that.
Fran: This is the first year that we’ve worked with Tony and offered students at Elizabeth College electrotechnology. It’s given the students the opportunity to access learning when they want to access it. It means they don’t actually have to attend the workshop and come out to Claremontmont every time that they have a class. I think for twenty-first century learners, it’s really important that they can do their learning when they want to do the learning.
Tony: The project was organized in several stages. We had our first evaluation and trial.
Sam: When we first did the trial run, as the first-off guinea pigs, it was sometimes a little bit difficult navigating our way through.
Tony: Then the second evaluation and trial toward the end of the program, and the feedback that we got from their final evaluation, certainly backed up the changes that we’d done from our initial research and our initial trial period.
Phoebe: It made you feel more independent as well; that you could do it by yourself, and not have people telling you what to do and you could actually work it out.
Tony: I’ve worked with our administrative assistant, Abby, in regard to the projects.
It’s been important to upskill Abby because she now has the skills to be able to provide that relief as far as helping teachers out.
But, I’ve certainly got huge plans in the future for certificate four, which is post-trade.
Rising to the e-Learning Challenge
Institute of TAFE Tasmania
Eric: The majority of our students work with their hands, they’re paid to work with their hands, they love working with their hands, so do I, but a requirement of the training is that there’s a knowledge component they need to know, and the way of assessing that knowledge is usually via the pen. They write something down; they do some kind of testing, so that we can have a concrete example of how they’re learning.
What we were trying to do was create another kind of learning style online to suit those students, so those students can find a way to get through training better suited to their style.
There’s a certain amount of text that we have to put in there—that’s the way it is—but we’ve tried to continuously keep the text to small chunks and then put videos in there and explain through video, through visuals, through clicking on things that expand out later on, through where we’ve used a magnifying glass to have a close look at what’s going on.
As a project manager for this, I made a decision very early on that I cannot develop the resources for doing this. I cannot be the computer expert.
Within TAFE, we have all those experts and Deardre Brown is the one who did it for us in that respect.
The partners for this project were…we have footage and voice-overs and talking to people from an artisan-style bakery; Banjos allowed us to go in and film the process that they use, and all around they were great with that. Crips has allowed us at many times to go out and film.
We already are the leader in book-based learning; we’ve been selling that to 25 odd RTOs around Australia. This is just a natural evolution. We’ve been refining those books now for eight years, and we’re very happy with them, and we won’t stop refining, but this is a natural evolution of that process.
This week, I was at the Australian Society of Baking as a keynote speaker, and I presented it to all the people there and got a lot of feedback, a lot of how we would go about doing it, where the future lies and all that sort of stuff. So its impact is that we plan to continue that process and have the full training package available.
E-learning, to me, is if you can dream it, you can make it.
Tooling Around with Power Tools
Institute of TAFE Tasmania
[power tool noises]
Paul: The business problem was twofold, really. The first thing was the safety side. We were finding and hearing about quite a few accidents in the industry, with the use of basic angle grinders, milling cutters, and the attachments with all the grinders—and not only with new apprentices, but also with people with more experience becoming a bit complacent.
Initially, the training for this unit of competence, which is the use of power tools, has basically been with a learning resource, which is all paper-based. We found it very hard to get some good video to help show the students the basic use of power tools. So being paper-based, if a student had a literacy problem, this was fairly lengthy for them to work through, and they found it a little bit boring. The resource is more visual because it actually gives you some video footage of actual live content of people actually doing the job.
Mainly one industry partner and that was Cat Underground Mining. We have taken some footage at Incat because they also use power tools and have quite a large instance of accidents down there as well.
We’re teaching a trade-based area, so all the work that the students do—it’s all hands-on. So, they’re all practical; they work with their hands all day. So when we come to the training here, we want them to also be engaged.
They can actually take it on the job as well, take the resource on the job. It lets them work at their own pace. It also lets them be able to take it home and work on it in their own time. We can put a bit of graphic images in there, especially on the safety side, because I think a lot of the young students that come through haven’t seen any serious accidents. So to have a little bit of that visual in there and say, “Well, if you don’t use it properly, this is what can happen.”
The funding has enabled us to actually start with e-learning in our department at the moment, because before that we were running a totally paper-based resource, so this has given us a start on e-learning.
E-Learning Portal
Master Plumbers Association of Tasmania
Adrian: E-learning, in the context of where we’ve come from, really suits the plumbing industry, because plumbers are time-poor, and it allows them to concentrate on their learning experience out of hours. It just makes for better use of their time.
Well, the objective, very clearly, from the beginning of this portal, was to combine the business and the e-learn.
Frankie: The estimate and cost work force are probably the one that they would come to, first of all. Once they come in there, then they have very clear instructions as to which part to follow. But if they choose to, if they like jumping around a little bit and playing around, then they can also do that as well. But we’d like them to stick through step-by-step.
Adrian: It became obvious to us that we need to be able to develop our business side of it, we need to control it. The best way to go about that was to have, I guess, a management system that would allow us to do the day-to-day. But, of course, we didn’t have the expertise or the wherewithal to do the e-learn.
Frankie: With the journey that Adrian and the Master Plumbers Association have had, it’s been quite an exciting one.
Adrian: That meant for me to go back to school, I guess, and embrace that.
LearnScope was the catalyst to get a heads up on what we could do.
We became familiar with the fact that there was already quite a bit of e-learning material out there, and various toolboxes. Frankie came on board, and we had an arrangement where Frankie, as a consultant, guides us on the principles involved in the e-learn and helps us on all the issues that come up from time to time.
Frankie: We’ve actually worked hand-in-hand more than anything else.
Steven: The funding has allowed us to develop a very unique package of training within the plumbing industry.
It’s a new innovation that’s exciting. I think it offers a lot to the plumbing industry, particularly those that are a bit remote.
Breaking Down Barriers
Institute of TAFE Tasmania
Ben: The project was seeking to solve two problems.
First, that the resources that were being used within the housekeeping training weren’t appropriately matched to the learning styles of the participants. Second, there needed to be additional resources for the people participating in the training whilst they were on work placement within the industry. The solution to the problems has been the creation of visual resources.
We have photographs that represent an aspect of a task that a housekeeper is required to do on the job. The photograph itself is actually tagged with something that allows a reader to sort of fire off video that represents the task in full; it’s much like a barcode scanner in a supermarket. All you have to do is pick up a card and swipe it over a box and you’ve got your technology in action.
Robin: Well, the exciting thing for me about the project, I think, is looking at alternative learning resources for some of our students who perhaps are disadvantaged.
Paul: It’s almost a de facto mentor because you’ve got one specific person in the whole video telling you what needs to be done. So you’ve got this point of reference that’s familiar, it’s constant, and it’s always there.
The relationship between Tafe and the Woolstore has been one of high expectations from both parties. They’ve worked with us to develop the program. The Woolstore has been able to converge all the skills that it needs to teach onto one disc, so this resource allows us to reiterate, even to staff who have been there for a long time, this is the way we would like it done.
The level of churn, as it’s called, has dropped down considerably, seeing that there is a more consistent model.
I think it works well on any learning level, on any person whether they have learning difficulties, or English as a second language, or they haven’t been to school for 20 years.
It cuts through all that and allows people to actually build a set of skills with confidence. I think that’s what it comes down to, and as a teacher, I like to see my students confident.
Telephone Counsellor Skills Recognition e-Portfolio
Lifeline
Good morning, this is Lifeline. How may we help you?
Christopher: Lifeline Hobart has 120 telephone counsellors, and we wanted to make sure that we had opportunities for volunteers to increase their skills.
Marcos: I heard about the Certificate IV when I was doing my training at Lifeline. Once I applied for the production to participate in the Certificate IV, I realized that there was too much paper-based information and it was too complex.
David: So it was very difficult in the old process to find the material and gather the material.
Marcos: We thought that it would have been great if we had an electronic version of the resources and of the structure of the Certificate IV.
Christopher: So we’ve been using Moodle as a platform to collect the data, so that we can actually give accreditation to the four units of competency. The e-portfolio section has seven assessment tasks or data collection points in there, which will collect everything from information on particular types of callers to managing emergency programs to doing self-care practices and OH&S practices.
The privacy issue has always been a major issue for us. The way we’ve gotten around that is that we actually have a code for all callers, so when a telephone counsellor takes a call, they get a log code for that, and we actually use that as a piece of evidence.
David: So it’s all in the phone script, which was very, very interesting because it brought to life looking through what we needed for the checklist of evidence of sources. It brought that to life, and it began to show us that where the material could be sourced, and it began to put a map, a very easy-to-use map, of what belonged to what and where each piece fitted in the pattern, as you went through what was required.
Judi: It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to be part of the developmental process as well as the end result.
Christopher: In many ways, I think there’s been a bit of a cultural look at this process that has led us to think a little bit more smart about the way we do things.
At a national level I can see this is a simple way that four units of competency can be covered by volunteers across Australia in minimal time.
DHHS Learning Technology Solutions
Institute of TAFE Tasmania
Lisa: The business problem at DHHS is that we’re a large organization. We’ve got almost 12,000 people. We have great challenges in getting learning and organizational development out to staff, particularly in the area of mandatory training.
The solution we chose this year was to not pick one topic for e-learning, but to pick many topics and embed the capacity for e-learning into the future across the department, and we did that by up-skilling 35 people.
[Scrolling Text]
The partnership with TAFE Tasmania has been everything to us.
We couldn’t have done our project without it.
Kirsty: TAFE Tasmania’s role has been to work with the DHHS participants in building their capability. We knew that for it to be sustainable we had to look at free and open-source tools.
Some of the free and open-source tools that we have used are eXe, which is an e-learning editor. We’ve used Windows Movie Maker, which was already available to department staff. We’ve used Audacity for audio editing, and we’ve used Arrid for building interactive activities.
Sandra: We’ve been working on an e-learning project for manual handling.
Nadia: This e-learning module enables us to reach a wider audience than we ever had before. Typically, all staff members in a hospital setting have to receive annual manual handling training, and that’s just not feasible when you’re talking about 1,000 employees.
Sandra: We try to show how an injury actually impacts not only the person who is hurt but also their family—everyone.
Sandra & Nadia: Their work colleagues, their dog, their husband, their softball team, etc., and we’ve tried to make it relevant to people.
Nadia: I’m looking forward to all the modules that we offer currently, at least at the Launceston General, bringing them into line with what is offered at the Royal, so we’re actually getting continuity across the acute care sector.
Ellen: We’ve been focusing on coexisting disorders, as in substance use disorders and mental health disorders.
We’re excited about the fact that we can now reach more people, seeing as we’re such a small unit and that we have at least 700 in the workforce out there that we need to get education out to, and this way it’s far more resourceful and it’s more cost-effective.
Marguerite: The other thing it can do is to give background information to people before they actually go to some face-to-face learning. So you can actually, instead of having a two-day learning program that is face to face, you can maybe make it one day or half a day, which means that the clinicians can actually get away to go to it.
Kylie: What we are doing in our project…we have put together some tools and techniques to help people in their workplaces to improve what they do in their processes.
We’ve got a toolkit of different charts and process maps—different techniques that they can use to help improve.
Sarah: We have built relationships with people from throughout the department whom we wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity to work with face to face.
Kylie: The next step for us is to keep going out there, selling the market, championing the project, telling people about what we’ve done and how fantastic e-learning is.
Lisa: The e-learning project we did last year on fire emergency awareness was released on our internal Intranet in early April, and it’s now early November, and we’ve had 2,500 staff go through that online and complete that online. So we couldn’t have possibly achieved that with face- to-face sessions.
Recent Comments