Bracken, E. & Hunter, C. (2018). A personalised approach to building workplace readiness skills. Paper presented at 43rd International Conference on Improving University Teaching, 27-29 June 2018, Port Macquarie, Australia.
In Semester 2, 2017, I collaborated with Liz Bracken, Sub-Dean (Workplace Learning) through part of my role as Faculty Lead of the Online Learning Model Scaleup to enhance BUS110, a first year subject designed to build employability skills for business students through work placements. This conference presentation represents the first publication emerging from a SoTL research project regarding that work.
What prompted this work?
In our initial conversations about design requirements, Liz raised the issues she was facing in ensuring the subject met the needs of both school leavers and executives with 20 or more years of business experience. Naturally, our design conversations moved towards options to personalise the curriculum, while still ensuring consistency in outcomes.
I conducted a scoping review of the literature which revealed a number of models for personalised learning. Corbalan, Kester & van Merrienboer’s (2006) personalised task selection model represented a compromise between complete task personalisation by the learner and systems-based personalisation through technologies such as in adaptive learning. The model focuses on a learning-task database, from which learners select appropriate learning tasks to suit their needs. This empowers learners to make decisions about goals, priorities and ways of achieving these, while avoiding the cognitive overload that often comes with complete learner autonomy.
I’d often admired the use of Alan Levine’s SPLOT templates in open courses such as ds106, and could see the advantages in replicating that use in this context. As a result, we set up a WPL Challenge Bank site that enabled students to filter and select appropriate alternative challenges (all of which attracted crowd-sourced ratings) based on employability skill, discipline, level or graduate outcome. My role involved the technical development of the site, while Liz and I collaborated equally on its conceptual design. Given her role as context expert, Liz contributed (and will continue to contribute) the majority of the challenge activities. Importantly, the template choice also ensures that others are able to (and did!) contribute new challenge tasks.
How are we extending our scholarly approach to curriculum design?
While it is one thing to set up a space for personalising the curriculum, we also needed to know what kinds of challenges would address the diversity of employability needs of these students. Liz’s research area is focused on employability skills, so we knew that little had been written about the diversity of student perceptions regarding which employability skills students should develop to become more employable, or which they have found necessary during work placements. It was entirely possible that potential employability skills were being overlooked.
If the Challenge Bank was to meet our vision for a personalised workplace learning curriculum, it needed to have challenges that met the diverse needs of students during work placements. We used an action research methodology (Carr and Kemmis, 1986), including a survey and focus groups, to help us understand those needs and thus accurately target the challenge tasks. Liz and I have played equal roles in the research design, data gathering and analysis of our findings.
Feedback on the early results of this research shared at our Faculty Learning and Teaching Symposium as well as this international conference (the focus on this post, slides below) has affirmed the value of this work to others beyond the current team.
What’s next?
While the ultimate contribution of the research is to help the WPL team develop further challenges that will effectively meet the diverse needs of their students, there are also potential research implications. We hope it will address the existing gaps between our understanding of the employability skills employers seek and those students wish to improve upon, as well as provide a more compelling and arguably more accurate insight into student thinking and motivations across diverse cohorts than currently exists within the literature.
We’re currently working on the final analysis and writing up an initial paper related to this research.
If you are interested in this work, both Liz and I would love to hear from you. In addition, this example has been provided as one way of sharing a collaborative project while acknowledging shared and separate roles in that project. If you have other examples, these would be warmly welcomed by the SoTL Working Party.
References
Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming critical: Education knowledge and action research. London: Falmer Press.
Corbalan, G., Kester, L. & van Merrienboer, J. (2006). Towards a personalized task selection model with shared instructional control. Instructional Science, 34(5), 399-422.
