Mixing it Up A journey into the electronic frontier of workplace and online learning

1. Bob Thurlow Senior Education Officer Learning Technologies Unit Western Sydney Institute of TAFE Tim Smith Head Teacher Information Technology Western Sydney Institute of TAFE Mixing it Up A journey into the electronic frontier of workplace and online learning

2. Richmond College of TAFE Richmond College is one of seven colleges in Western Sydney Institute of TAFE that deliver mostly face-to-face, on-campus.

3. In 2006 Richmond College won a contract to deliver a Help Desk course to employees in their workplaces. But we didn’t have many learning resources that were suitable for taking to students in the workplace. So we had to find ways for face-to-face teachers to take the learning to the workplace students. How Richmond College moved to online learning Help Desk courses

4. It was not practical for our teachers to go to the workplace to teach, and they still had to teach face-to-face. So we had to find ways to take the teacher to the student electronically. We had a few basic video resources, but our focus was on delivering learning, not on delivering broadcast-quality productions. Our teachers had face-to-face skills, not online or multimedia skills.

5. One part of the course was “Operating Systems Concepts”. We had no resources for that part, but one of our teachers, Michael Reifenstein, was an expert on the subject. So we made amateur video clips of interviews with the teacher and uploaded them to a website for the students. We recorded some simple video clips especially for the online students

6. Duplicating our teaching was not practical We didn’t have the time or staff to create regular video clips for online students while also creating different resources for face-to-face students. So we used Microsoft SharePoint as a way of making the same resources to available to both groups. http://wsitals.tafensw.edu.au/sites/RM_INFOTECH/default.aspx

7. We used wikis to bring students together Web-based wikis provided a way for students to collaborate in developing their own resources together. But just as importantly for us, wikis enabled face-to-face and online students to work together. We had found a practical way to combine the two groups of students. http://bobthurlow.com.au/wiki/index.php/Certificate_III_Core_Modules

8. Teachers continue to deliver face-to-face and online concurrently Nathan, one of our teachers is teaching a class at Richmond College right now. We’re going to attempt to join the class as in the same way online students would join in. http://webconf.det.nsw.edu.au/nathanweb/ And just in case we can’t connect with Nathan, here are some examples that were recorded by some other teachers: http://breeze.webqem.com/detconnectexamples/

9. Teachers used blogs towrite their reflections We asked the teachers to share their reflections and feelings about teaching face-to-face and online students at the same time. http://richmondit.com.au/blog

10. We surveyed the teachers to find out what they really thought We conducted a short survey of our small group of teachers to see how they felt about teaching both face-to-face and online at the same time. The teachers were given this survey to complete only last Friday, so this data is very fresh. http://surveymonkey.com

11. Conclusions: The boundaries will becomeincreasingly blurred Face to face students will relyincreasingly upon online resources. An increasing number of external students will want to study our courses online. Bringing the two categories of students together will not be easy, but we have new technology, new strategies, and our teachers will need to learn new skills.