Room for Improvement

The "Room for Improvement" team knew they wanted to use video in their project but they needed someone to make happen faster than they could do it themselves.

The "Room for Improvement" was exploring new and improved ways to support students with learning disabilities during work placements. These students often needed extra support during work-placement that businesses found that hard to meet. Also these students are often visual and kinaesthetic learners who needed a lot of reinforcement and repetition. We develop a video based learning experience.

The project was funded by the Innovation Program of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. The team included teachers from the Pathways and the Hospitality areas of the TAFE Tasmania.

The focus was on housekeeping skills. The idea was the learner would have a laptop with them while they were on a work placement, cleaning hotel rooms. When they were unsure of a task, eg how to do a hospital corner when making a bed.

  1. The student would look at the collection of cards they had and choose the one with a photograph of a bed.
  2. Then they would swipe that card past a RFID tag reader attached to the laptop.
  3. That then triggers an instructional video on how to do hospital corners on a bed.

This means the students almost have a workplace coach with all the time.

What we did

  1. The instructional video
    To develop the video we worked with the housekeeping teachers and a highly competent housekeeper from The Old Woolstore Hotel. Instead of scripting the whole video (which could have taken months) we developed a rough outline and then shadowed one of The Old Woolstore housekeepers for two days while she cleaned rooms. She talked through all the details of what she was doing at the same time. This was an effective way of rapidly capturing knowledge and getting the exact procedures in an accessible, visual medium.
  2. DVD and files for the RFID Learning Tables
    Then after hours and hours of editing we produced a DVD and the files for the RFID Learning Tables.
  3. Reworking the cards
    During the first trial of the system it was discovered that the large pile of cards with photos where quite hard to handle and it was even harder to find which one you wanted. We reworked the cards, by colour coding them, grouping more of the media together and binding them together in a different way.

In the End

The students found the DVD really valuable. They loved being about to take it home and watch it repeatedly!!! They saw the fact that it was exactly what they would be doing during their work placements to be incredibly valuable. The RFID Learning Tables could have worked better if it was running on a mobile device instead of laptop, making it more portable.

There was huge amount of editing involved in this project, and it would have taken a teacher a significant amount of time to complete while they were juggling other commitments. We really accelerated the progress of the projects.

The second stage of the Room for Improvement project was the Your Hands project.