I had a great time getting together with a bunch of people yesterday to talk about how Peter Shanks’ Training Packages Unwrapped website can (and is) changing the way that we learn and help others learn here in Australia - simply by making our training packages easily accessible.
While chatting about possibilities, we talked about our own visions for how Training Packages Unwrapped can be utilised, expanded or integrated with other tools to enable new practises for learning and facilitation. I wanted to articulate my own thoughts while they’re fresh (which will of course differ from other peoples… let me know!), so for what it’s worth, hear it goes:
My vision as a facilitator is to connect learners directly with the training packages so that, with help of facilitators where required, learners can:
- Understand exactly what they are expected to be able to do for each unit of competency (and therefore hold their facilitators accountable to some degree),
- Choose the resources and/or projects that they will use to learn the required skills (including classroom activities provided by a facilitator)
- Plan milestones and execute their learning,
- Gather and record evidence of their skills as they learn,
- demonstrate the required skills using a combination of their own projects and relevant assessment items where necessary, but most importantly
- Begin a lifelong process of learning to plan, manage, assess and evaluate their own learning goals.
Sound great? Too idealistic? Well I can think of three major hurdles to overcome before this can work on a large scale:
- The target audience of the training packages is the assessor or the Registered Training Organisation - but not the learner.
- Our lack of experience in setting and managing learning goals for lifelong learning (this applies to the learner who stands up at the front of the classroom too)
- The availability and accessibility of fun, peer-reviewed learning and assessment activities for specific units of competency to enable facilitators to facilitate learning in this flexible way.
Here’s how I see these hurdles being overcome:
Hurdle 1: The target audience of the training packages
More often than not the language used for the performance criteria is, perhaps by necessity, technical and unhelpful to a learner (and at times, to assessors also). To be fair, I think the training package units are clearly targeted at people assessing the units, not people learning the unit. But of more importance is, how can we make each unit of competency and performance criteria more accessible to learners (and assessors)?
Back in November last year, while thinking about how we could help students learn and demonstrate their web design skills in a flexible way, a few of us started working on collaborative learner guides for each unit with the language targeted at the learner who is ready to learn that unit rather than the assessor (click on the image to see the full example or browse all the in-progress learner guides for the Cert IV Websites qualification in Australia).
The purpose of each user guide for a unit is to (1) describe the unit and what you will be able to do in conversational language (but linking to the official document), (2) Provide some starting points for how you can learn the required skills for the unit, (3) Provide some ideas for how you can demonstrate the unit (depending on your facilitator) (4) Optional ideas for grading where appropriate (and depending on your college, facilitator, etc.), and finally (5) Provide a space for discussion of inconsistencies or points of confusion in the unit where appropriate.
We’re currently using these user guides in both Certificate II and Certificate IV courses, together with a learner-friendly evidence sheet for each unit (that is automatically generated through data from the Training Packages Unwrapped website) to lead learners through the process of understanding the units of competency, learning the required skills and then collecting evidence to demonstrate their competence. But it’s not an easy process to learn when you’ve not practised it before… it’s a process that needs to be modelled and nurtured, which leads to the second hurdle…
Hurdle 2: Our own lack of experience in life-long learning
Unless we are incredibly lucky, most of us working in education did not learn how to plan, execute and assess our own learning or skills development through school or university - and we were robbed of an amazing opportunity! Even today John Marsden, an Australian author and educator, says that most schools are about “hothousing” kids through school and, if lucky, into university “to get a vocation that’ll earn a decent position at the salary trough” (see Western decadence and education, or for a school that breaks the mould watch the 9 minute interview with the director of Catholic education talking about the new learner-centred schools in Sydney.)
Once we “finish our education” we might continue learning haphazardly as we stumble across things that interest us or get involved in projects that require new skills or new jobs, but we are not used to the process of intentionally setting our own learning goals to work towards, assess and evaluate. We need to learn, practise and model this skill ourselves if we expect learners in class to do so - we must practise what we preach.
The great thing is that it is an intensely fun and incredibly rewarding skill to learn if it is not bogged down or controlled by policies and procedures. If we are encouraged to learn this skill and apply it to the context of our whole lives (including but not restricted to work-related learning) it has much more inherent worth to us - and so I’m much more likely to reflect on my progress throughout the year and keep learning. Last year I needed to create a learning plan for professional development at work (boring) so instead I created a personal learning plan for 2006/2007 that includes work-related learning, music, German language, Python programming, education etc., and it has been insanely fun! Not to mention rewarding to review my progress and reflect occasionally here about the strange ways that completely different areas of our lives can cross-pollinate our learning!
A lot of people have already said that a great way to get us educators learning and practising to manage our own learning could be to get us started upgrading our training and assessment qualifications. We would need to find out what’s required by the selected units (perhaps working with a learner guide for each unit together with the official unit of competency that we can find on Training Packages Unwrapped), evaluate whether we have evidence ready to demonstrate (recording our evidence on an evidence sheet as above) as well as plan and set milestones for the learning activities to fill any gaps in our skills.
Great idea! But let’s up the motivation and inherent worth by including these learning goals in the context of our own personal learning plans, next to the beer making or hang-gliding or guitar playing or bread making. Let’s become real learners - not just fulfil some audit requirement for professional development.
Hurdle 3: The availability and accessibility of fun, peer-reviewed learning and assessment activities for specific units of competency
In practise, I’ve found that the hardest thing about running a flexible learning environment where people can take more control of their learning (self-paced), while at the same time maintaining a social learning environment where we have fun learning together, is the difficulty of getting the right activity at the right level to the right person (or people) at the right time.
When we started our Web course this year, I posted an introduction to the course on our Web Design blog that enabled people to place them selves in one of three categories: (1) “I’m starting from scratch”, (2) “I know my way around HTML and CSS”, (3) “I’m very confident with HTML, CSS and even some Javascript”. Each category had a number of activities to get people started at the appropriate level and keep them going until I’d managed to organise individual learning plans. It worked well (I think!), but was only possible because over the last few years I’ve given up hiding the activities that I use behind closed doors.
We cannot create and edit, or even simply maintain all the activities that we need to facilitate a flexible class where learners have more control of their own learning on our own - well, I certainly can’t (and yes, I do make use of good text books where I can!)
In fact, even it it was possible for me to maintain all the activities that I use on my own and hide them behind closed doors, I don’t believe having those resource would make me a better teacher or make our Web Design course a better value course than other providers’ - the value is added in how we use these activities to create a fun learning environment that motivates and inspires learners to learn.
I need a reliable place where I can create/update activities where:
- learners can access them with ease,
- peers and learners can update and improve them with ease (as web technologies change faster than I can update my activities!)
- industry experts can edit them with ease, and,
- activities can be found easily by lots of people (to help with the updating and improving)
If you’ve followed any of the links so far, you’ve probably realised that that place for most of our Web Design activities is currently Wikiversity (a sister project of Wikipedia). It’s certainly not perfect, but it is a wonderful young project that allows us to create, edit, maintain and improve learning activities with other facilitators, learners and professionals in our field around the world. Most importantly, it allows me to to provide learners with maintained, relevant learning activities in a flexible self-paced environment. But there is no right or wrong tool here - I don’t believe everyone should start using Wikiversity. For some people, Wikispaces will be a better tool, or a blog. The important point is that the learning activities are available and accessible.
What Wikiversity and other collaborative tools don’t do well (yet) is, in my opinion:
- allow us to rate learning activities easily and reliably,
- allow us to find relevant learning activities for a particular unit of competency with ease (categories could be used for this)
- create interactive quiz questions that are reviewed and tagged (I hope Shaggy will write more about this idea of his!)
And these are areas where Training Packages Unwrapped could potentially be extended or branch out into separate tools as follows…
A use-case scenario
Imagine the following scenario:
Imra is planning to learn Business Administration at Pickle College in three months time but, due to the hectic life with 2 small children, would like to start her learning early and get a head start. When Imra enrolled in her course, her facilitator put together an email with links to three units on the Training Packages Unwrapped site for her to begin with.
In the quite of the evening (with the kids in bed) Imra takes a look at the first unit in the email which is Create and use simple spreadsheets. She reads the overview of the unit, but wants to understand more about what she needs to learn and how she can learn it. Imra notices that the Training Packages Unwrapped page for this unit tells her that two separate learner guides have been bookmarked in delicious for this unit, but the first one is much more popular (having been bookmarked 35 times by other people). She clicks on the link for the most popular Create and use simple spreadsheets Learner guide and finds lots of excellent information there, including links to a great set of tutorials to get her started learning.
Three days later, when Imra next has some free time, she wants to do a little recap of her learning for Create and use simple spreadsheets. Returning to the Training Packages Unwrapped page for that unit, she notices that there are also three del.icio.us bookmarks for quiz questions for this particular unit. Imra clicks on the most popular quiz and settles down in her chair to review her learning.
That’s my vision for connecting learners directly with the training packages and enabling them to plan, manage, assess and evaluate their own learning with help and guidance. Yep, it’s a long-term idea, but the tools are already there to start it! I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and visions!