ElectroFlex - The new electrical contractors’ course

ElectroFlex - The new electrical contractors’ course

Changes, Changes, Changes

In early 2009 there were a lot changes for the Electrotechnology area of the Tasmania Skills Institute.

  • The Tasmania Sills Institute had been formed as a new organisation with a new management structure and new agenda for state-wide co-ordination and some key staff who were looking after the contractors’ course were not working for the Tasmania Skills Institute.
  • There was a new training package and new competencies were required for the nominated managers.
  • The Tasmania Electrical Regulator had introduced new legalisation in the area.
  • Some of the old course had been offered online in the Northern part of Tasmania; all over the other parts of the state, students had come onto campus in the evening.

The solution

The Tasmania Skills Institute partnered with the Electrical Regulator and Workplace Standards, developed a business case and was successful in getting Flexible Learning Network Innovation grant.

The state-wide project team was:

  • Tony McKinlay who looked after the relationships with Workplace Standards and Aurora
  • Ralph Berry from the North
  • Ian Gough from the South
  • Michael Meldrum from the North-West
  • We helped with the project facilitation and design, development and testing of the course.

The course we developed is over 200 pages. It’s engaging, visually interesting and full of great tools and information for the contractors to build amazing businesses. The Electrical Regulator and the Aurora have had direct input into the project and are happy they know what is actually in the course.

Some of the ways we helped:

Developing the business case and project plan
We helped with developing the business case and the project plan. Working with the team was great. We brought our experience of working with eLearning and digital media projects and all the experience we gained while editing the 30 hours of innovation video to the business case and project plan. This also meant that from day one we were able help the team with the whole project, including the learning design.

Project Facilitation
As well as the design and development work we took on the role of project facilitation. In this project this meant organising and leading the workshops, getting the project moving and keeping it on target. A lot the focus in our meetings was on the learning design and review and giving feedback on the resources. We focused the learning design on the assessment tasks and then the rest of the learning experience flows from that.

Design and Development work
We are really proud of the work we did on this project. We brought together the old content, customised and changed the Toolbox content and developed a lot of new content into a comprehensive learning package that we think works well. Some of the new content we developed with input from the team included:

  • The overall visual look and feel
  • Video interviews with experts
  • Diagrams and graphical organisers
  • Stories that demonstrated the key learning points
  • Simple HTML content
  • Planning tools and business templates
  • Branching Stories - more on those below.

Branching Stories
One of the most exciting parts of this project for us was developing a series of branching stories/games with STEM. These included games where the learner had to deal with a series of business compliance projects and a series of games where the learner was asked be the mentor and coach for another business in an area such as marketing or finance.

What was great about these was that, yes, it could have just been a series of dot points or pages that the learners could read, but having to make the choices makes the experience deeper and more likely to be learnt.

Technical
As well as using STEM for the building of the branching stories, we used the content management system, Silverstrip, with our custom modules for exporting the content as standards compliant Learning Objects. All content and the technical stuff we used followed the VET eLearning content development guidelines and met the W3C standards and the Accessibility requirements.

Case Study
One the great things about the project was being able to develop the case study at the end of the project. This involved video interviews with some of the project members and a workshop on the case study with the team and then weaving those notes from the workshop into a case study. The reason it great was because the final workshop focused on the case study and it was great way to reflect on, celebrate and close the project.

The Result

The Tasmania Skills Institute now has a great new solution for their contracting students, that is engaging, flexible and relevant. We are proud to have been part of this project and we’d love to see some of the other states in Australia start to offer the course online.


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