2007_032


 * PROJECT TITLE

MANAGER** Alison Wood, Assistant Director Educational Programs, Randwick College TAFE NSW. alison.wood@tafensw.edu.au //Click my name for my personal page//

Brian McLauchlan, Chief Education Officer, Randwick College, TAFE NSW. brian.mclauchlan@tafensw.edu.au //Click my name for my personal page//
 * FACILITATOR**

The Randwick College e-cology project aims to connect and develop the isolated pockets of flexible and e-learning activity within the college into a college-wide, multi-relational learning community. We will use the existing strengths of e-learning leaders at Randwick College to create a new ecology utilising the community-building potential of Web 2 technologies.
 * SUMMARY**

Students will be actively involved in the project to ensure that outcomes are enriching and learner-centred. E-learning technologies that engage disengaged/disadvantaged students at the “edge” of the campus community will be explored as well as technologies attractive to apprentices, up-skillers, career seekers and other vocational students.

Teachers will be encouraged in mutual mentoring across discipline boundaries to enrich teaching skills and client outcomes. The project team will also be mindful of the changing environment so that technologies that it explores and develops will be adaptable to future potential such as broad use of wireless technology.

[|Randwick College] is part of Sydney Institute of TAFE. We provide delivery in many pre-vocational and vocational areas in a variety of ways from traditional face to face teaching, workplace delivery and a range of flexible delivery. Although about half of our students come from the immediate area, small numbers come from all parts of NSW. We also cater to International students and have the only Dental Technician delivery area in NSW.
 * CONTEXT**

The project will focus on educationally disengaged or disadvantaged students who are enrolled in a range of programs at Randwick College. These include:
 * TARGET GROUPS**


 * Students in the City East @ Randwick program - a targeted program for 300 students from 15 – 19 years old and identified as youth at risk. Students have varying backgrounds that may cause disengagement and/or disadvantage in education including ATSI, juvenile justice, High School expulsion, teenage mothers etc.
 * Students with a disability that require special support to access e-learning material
 * Students from non-English speaking background
 * Students with literacy and/or numeracy problems.
 * Mature age students that have computer literacy challenges

Although this is the specific focus, through the planned partnering of teachers across disciplines there will be ‘spin off’ benefits for all students in developing e-learning skills and strategies that are well-focused on student needs, but especially learner engagement, involvement in collaborative projects and greater learner satisfaction.

The current team members are: (note pages are created for each person but are not active yet 17/7/07) Christine Wright - Librarian Kara Whittingham - Teacher Languages John Friedman - Teacher Carpentry and Joinery Peter Poulikakos – Teacher Dental Studies Marea JordanWatt - Teacher Disabilities Marianne Wagner - Teacher Languages Vivian Cassar-Patty - Teacher ABE Karen Gosse - Teacher IT Judie Cross - Teacher Languages Anthony McGann - Teacher IT Perry Tzamouranis – Teacher Health and Rec
 * TEAM**


 * KEY DATES**

College Wiki
We expect our College Wiki will be live after having a few last tweaks. We will be reporting our ups and downs with our internal wiki on this site.

**eBazaar**
The eBazaar is a showcase of elearning technologies presented by a number of teachers who have used these in practice. It allows those who are uncertain, curious or interested to "taste test" many of these technologies with support and encouragement over a short period of time. The eBazaar will also launch the e-cology Learnscope project and the college wiki. We are hoping to do some sort of e-casting of the event.

Wiki Training
We will have a session with team members to get them started in using the college wiki and the Learnscope wiki.

Begin Mentoring Sessions
Cross Discipline mentoring is a major part of this project. Using the College Wiki we will be setting times and sessions individually to provide mentoring opportunities.

Mentoring Progress report
Our team met on 22 October to review progress, especially with mentoring. The outcomes are listed in this document:



1,2 November Showcase
The team attended the Learnscope Showcase at UNSW Roundhouse. Here is our poster to add a little colour to this page:

27th November Final Team Meeting
Our last team meeting is expected to be held at the end of November. This will be a review, critical analysis, debrief and celebration of achievement!

December College Showcase
We will end the project as we started with a showcase to our colleagues on campus. This will encourage further staff involvement, especially with our college wiki.

=Project Plan= Our current project plan is shown below. This is created in MS Project and will be updated as required through the project.

We expect to bring the team together initially to review their skills and needs by discussion and using a survey. All of the mentoring will be workbased as it will aim at the solution of immediate learning needs and learning delivery issues. The deliberate sharing of issues and solutions via the local wiki will hopefully support further involvement of other slow adopters of e-learning. The e-cology label is intended to highlight the organic nature of the learning where it will be where is, as is as needed, probably just in time and maybe infecting others as it is growing. It is also intended to be very dynamic with feedback into the wiki to support new ideas, development and improvements.
 * WORK BASED LEARNING STRATEGIES**

We would expect that each team member would be using a vehicle of choice (blog, wiki, website etc) to reflect on their learning journey as the project unfolds. If this seems a little unstructured it is quite deliberate so as not to constrain the team members too much in their learning methodology.

We intend to also involve students in the learning process so that they can provide feedback on preferences, needs and quality of the e-learning we develop.

Learners will be part of the project from the very early stages with direct design involvement and providing feedback on the content and use of the e-technologies. We would envisage the involvement of representative students as advisors in the team and assistants with content, structure and presentation and for comment on the success or otherwise of the e-learning material.
 * ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES**

Learners with a disability will be involved in trialling adaptive technology to ensure that it provides positive benefits and access to Web 2 learning material.

Student feedback will provide qualitative data on both their performance and perception and Module Completion Rate data can measure changes in student success rates.

In the main this project will involve learners in the project at the design and testing phases. We expect that the learners will be selected by team members after project initialisation.
 * CLIENT / INDUSTRY ENGAGEMENT**

Our initial assessment will be of the effectiveness of the mentoring program. We have designed an online staff survey ( [|Survey Monkey] ) that we will use to assess the value of the program for both mentors and mentees. We expect that we will use our normal student evaluation processes to test the impact of our e-learning improvements but this might be at the end of Semester 1 2008 when enough e-learning material is available to our students to make a meaningful evaluation.
 * IMPACTS ON LEARNERS / CLIENTS**

**Mid Project Report**
Please click here to go to the Report

**Final Project Report**
Please click here to go to the Report