Description: Award winning e-learning designer Tom Worthington will discuss how to equip professionals for the technology challenges of the 21st Century. At this session, Tom will detail how to provide formal postgraduate education to students in their workplaces via mobile devices. He will discuss his own experience as an international student using an e-portfolio to provide evidence of skills..

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Tom Worthington is an independent consulting Certified Computer Professional and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at the ANU. He writes on education issues as "The Higher Education Whisperer" and more generally as "The Net Traveler". Tom is leading an ANU Grand Challenge team to provide m-learning to 200,000 students across the indo-pacific region.

Professionals seek learning for more than just to get a new job. Before designing a "course", consider what the potential student is seeking. They may want to maintain their professional status and seek contacts through relatively informal events. As an example, the ACS offers events for this in cities. But what events are offered outside the cities and for thos who can't attend in person?

The Skills Framework for the Information AgeSFIA provides a table of defined skills for IT professionals. These are used by employers when designing jobs and by the ACS when accrediting education programs. Rather than making up what the student will learn from scratch, I use the definitions from SFIA when designing learning materials. The skill and skill level can be selected to align with industry requirements and this make accreditation easier.

The ACS Professional Year (PYear) provides graduates with training and an internship to prepare international graduates of Australian universities for the workplace. Completion provides 5 points under the Skilled Occupation List (SOL).

The ACS provides the mySFIA web-based application for applicants to self-asses against the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).

A graduate is likely to need a collection of certifications for employment. A general e-portfolio tool tracking competencies might be used to support similar industry schemes and certifications. For example, Moodle Competencies plus Mahara Annotation.

SIFA includes training and education skills for computer professionals. One of the six SFIA categories is "Skills and quality". This includes six skills definitions, with five from the "Skill management" subcategory and one from "People management".

The SFIA Skills Definitions (Assessment Portal, 2016) would not on the face of it appear to relate to what the typical computer student learns or does in the workplace. However, many of the basic skills, such as preparing documents, giving presentations and collecting feedback, are common to IT development and education. A small component of training specifically on learning skills should be sufficient for the typical computer degree graduate to meet the SFIA Level 3 requirements. However, preparing the documentation for this, without the use of a tool, could be onerous.

Education Related Skills Definitions in SFIA Version 6

Category Skills and quality

1. Learning and development management (ETMG): The provision of learning and development processes (including learning management systems) to develop the professional, business and/or technical skills required by the organization.

2. Learning assessment and evaluation (LEDA): The assessment of knowledge, skills and behavior by any means whether formal or informal against capability and qualification frameworks such as SFIA. The evaluation of learning or education programs against defined outcomes.

3. Learning design and development (TMCR): The specification, design, creation, packaging and maintenance of materials and resources for use in learning and development in the workplace or in compulsory, further or higher education. Typically involves the assimilation of information from existing sources, selection and re-presentation in a form suitable to the intended purpose and audience. Includes instructional design, content development, configuration and testing of learning environments, and use of appropriate current technologies such as audio, video, simulation and assessment. May include third party accreditation.

4. Learning delivery (ETDL): The transfer of business and/or technical skills and knowledge and the promotion of professional attitudes in order to facilitate learning and development. Uses a range of techniques, resources and media (which might include eLearning, on-line virtual environments, self-assessment, peer-assisted learning, simulation, and other current methods).

5. Teaching and subject formation (TEAC): The specification, design, development, delivery and assessment of curricula for computing and for information technology (including electronic communication), at any level of the education system from primary through to tertiary (all age ranges) and in the workplace. The topics addressed are those of the fundamental and more advanced areas of computing and the common skills needed to make productive use of computers and IT systems for both computing and IT professionals and competent users of IT based systems including the ideas of computational thinking and the application of computational concepts to everyday and professional life. Special attention is paid to the methods, techniques and pedagogy (the study of being a teacher, tutor or lecturer, and the process of teaching) of computing & IT education.

6. Professional development (PDSV): The facilitation of the professional development of individuals, including initiation, monitoring, review and validation of learning and development plans in line with organizational or business requirements. The counselling of participants in all relevant aspects of their continual professional development. The identification of appropriate learning/development resources. Liaison with internal and external training providers.

SFIA Skills Definitions from: Assessment Portal (2016). Retrieved from: http://assessment-portal.azurewebsites.net/SFIAv6Index/SFIASkillsDefinitions(v6).aspx

Designing an on-line course is much the same as face-to-face. This is illustrated with the four pictographs by Carlos Sarmento (from the Noun Project CC BY 3.0 US), used on the cover of "Digital Teaching". The instructor needs to:

1. Provide ebooks and other curated content on the topic;
2. Facilitate discussion between the students;
3. Provide tools and techniques for the student to explore the topic; and
4. assessment, including formative feedback, to help them learn.

The instructor can get away with making up a face-to-face course as they go along, but an on-line course needs to be carefully designed and tested in advance.

Keep in mind that what students like is not necessarily the same as what helps them learn, or what they will actually use. Offered the option of face-to-face lectures, students will say they want them, but most will then not turn up. Students prefer high quality videos, but video quality make no difference to learning.

The book "Digital Teaching In Higher Education Designing E-learning for International Students of Technology, Innovation and the Environment" is available free online. It is a collection of essays from the work I did for a Masters of Education in Distance Education at Athabasca University.

A common way to provide professional e-learning is with a distance education course, typically of 12 weeks. Such courses are adapted from traditional campus based university courses and may, in some cases be offered in the same calendar to campus based students (ICT Sustainability is run this way at ANU.

Courses will typically be delivered via a Learning Management System (LMS), such as Moodle. An e-book, videos, quizzes, group work and assignments will be provided via the LMS. A human turor per 20 to 100 students is usually provided.

Such courses have the advantage of being easy for university to fit into existing administrative processes. However, this can be frustrating for students and instructors who are used to more flexible courses. The course is typically designed in advance, without input from the instructor and the instructor can't change the course material.

Most of the course will be conducted in asynchronous mode, with the instructor and students leaving messages for each other, via the LMS. These messages may be video, to make them more personal than text, but even so lack the interaction of real time conversation. Some real time sessions may be offered, but are limited by the difficulties of arranging times.

a major problem with such courses is that students have an expectation of personal interaction with the instructor, in part built up by institutional marketing and part by the ease of on-line communication. However, instructors are typically paid for only a few minutes work per student per week.

Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCS) began as low cost variations on traditional DE courses, with less instructor input. These are now tending to be shorter (four to six weeks). Automated tests and peer assessment are used in place of human marking and there is usually minimal instructor assistance.

Short modules, equivalent to one or two hours study are typically provided as a set of audio annotated slide shows, with automated quizzes (using technologies such as SCORM). These are undertaken by students individually, self paced. An alternative approach is taken by the ANU Online Coffee Courses. The coffee courses are very short traditional format DE modules, undertaken by a group of about twenty students over one week, fifteen minutes a day. These courses have a human tutor providing daily feedback. The coffee courses have no assessment, but students receive a certificate of completion for posting on all days.

One of the difficulties with smaller and smaller components of learning made possible by technology is to provide evidence of having mastered a coherent skill set. One way to provide that coherence is with a capstone using an e-portfolio, using a tool such as Mahara.

The e-portfolio approach is used for formal university qualifications, particularly at the masters level. It is also used for industry certifications, such as the Higher Education Academy Fellowship. However, without adequate scaffolding completion of an e-portfolio can be daunting for a student. Also without technical support, it can be very time consuming for assessors. Both students and assessors need formal training in what an e-portfolio is and how to prepare and assess one.

An example is the Athabasca MEd Capstone e-portfolio. This requires the students to reflect on their learning using five artifacts, which usually are a subset of the assignments already submitted in coursework (Hoven, 2015, p. 23). Rather than just leave the student to work this out for themselves, the e-portfolio is structured as a course, with an instructor and deliverables. Students receive feedback from the instructor and provide comment on each others draft e-portfolios. In addition most students will have already undertaken a course where they are required to practice using an e-portfolio.

The Athabasca MEd capstone option requires the student to present for an hour, with thirty minutes presentation and thirty minutes answering questions, via a webinar (video conference).

The most useful aspect of being an on-line student of education is "dogfooding", a term coined by Harrison (2006) for the practice of those who develop a product to use it. In the case of education courses, the designers, and instructors demonstrate that the technology they are advocating works and the students learn what it is like to be a DE student, before being an instructor or designer. Each course reminded me how crushingly lonely being a student can be, especially a distance student and even more so for an international student. As a result, I take additional care now to ensure my course instructions as well as content are very clear and try to avoid cultural confusion. However, the experience of being a DE student can also be liberating, compared to a part-time, after-hours, campus student.

Much of what is proposed under the banner of digital, electronic or on-line learning is not new in concept. Access to ubiquitous digital technology makes it much easier to implement.

This semester I am tutoring a team of ANU Techlaucher students in a program devised by Dr. Shayne Flint. This provides a model which could be used more generally for teaching "soft" as well as hard skills to professionals. This can be applied to any program where the students are learning skills which can be applied in the workplace. The use of on-line project management tools allows for teaching of techniques of virtual teamwork and can be used with on-line distance education students.

There is now a demand for students to learn "soft skills" and "Innovation". But can this be done online? To answer that question I design a student project, to take the materials on innovation I prepared during my MEd and turn them into an on-line, mobile based course. The results should be available in late 2017.