Last week saw the VE Design Team present a variety of sessions at RMIT’s Internal Vocational School of Design and Social Context Learning and Teaching conference Turning the Kaleidoscope which explored the notion of flexible and applied ways of learning in Vocational Education. Our presentation ‘Online with impact’ showcased an approach to developing a course from scratch using templates already available within the institution. A straw poll at the start of the session indicated only 30% of participants had used Canvas Commons, a template and content repository for sharing and distributing content within the Canvas Ecosystem. A helpful insight, this showed there was a need to connect VE staff with a system that contains prebuilt resources that will save them time in developing learning experiences. Online with impact, the prefilled course showcasing a variety of interactive digital experiences available to RMIT Canvas authors The workshop stepped through searching and downloading a prepopulated course from Canvas Commons – one which contained a collection of examples and types of content backed up with a pedagogical or engagement focus. Co-presenter Rebecca Summits, Senior Learning Designer, explained course and content structures that would enhance the student experience and how a scaffolded approach to course design supports effective learning. The workshop concluded with best practice examples of different integrations of content to […]
Interior Design Course Uplift
Several lifetimes ago, when working in a fine wine store surrounded by the great marques of beautiful vineyards, I found it difficult to avoid an attachment to the bottles on the shelves. Labels would take me to 17th century family run vineyards in tiny pockets of France and Italy. “They’re shoes, Jack,” my manager would reinforce to clarify my relationship to them. They were units with a sales margin, and we had to move them to keep the shop running. So, when the VEDT began work on six new units in interior design, I couldn’t help but think of the interiors I had visited – Robin Boyd houses, Marion Mahony Griffin interiors, and afternoons in antique furniture auction houses. Beautiful things, sumptuous and austere. But with the shoes analogy in my head, our team got to work unpicking the units of competency so they’d meet the required VE standards for a compliant delivery. American ‘Shaker’ style interior The VEDT normal approach is assessment-led design, which allows us to inform our content from the assessments, ensuring students don’t miss any content when they’re being assessed. The white-knuckle fear of getting to an assessment question that you have no recollection of covering […]
Our workflow
Now part of the Education portfolio, the Vocational Education Design Team (VEDT) are one of the operational groups that supports course development and uplift at RMIT. The team has been busy building educational environments and products for internal, external and industry partners. A constant throughout these projects has been the workflow process – Plan Design Build Review. The team is primarily learning designers and multimedia designers, with essential support and leadership from a program manager, an editor and project coordinator. Plan Planning is key to a successful project, and ensuring scope and methodology is articulated early comes to the roles of the project leads and the coordinators. Understanding the outcomes of the project, the compliance requirements and the stakeholder needs form what is mapped during the stages. Although all of the team are involved in each of the stages, accountability of tasks and involvement changes across these stages as per roles. Content gap analysis can provide some insight into required resourcing, especially if some resources have been available but it’s not clear if they are relevant to the competency. This task is typically the role of Learning Designers, though scoping of the learning materials required can help guide the multimedia […]
Visit to Vision Australia
On a windy Friday 13th the VE Design Team were lucky enough to spend the morning at Vision Australia’s recently redesigned headquarters in Kooyong. The chief activity was to experience their virtual reality activity; to see what’s possible and effective for building Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) experiences into our courses notably the VR experiences our team are creating for the Future Social Services Institute project. The activity Vision Australia developed used an Oculus Rift to offer a seated activity which simulated different degenerative and visual impairments. Vision Australia’s Cate Keane walked us through the scenario and what it aimed to achieve. Using analog methods to recreate eye conditions, the 3D immersive activity provided us with an experience, and greater understanding, of vision impairment. The task required us to assume the role of an older man with macular degeneration who was trying to contact his daughter via Skype. It brilliantly illustrated this as a difficult task, attempted in a typical living room with poor lighting. The activity required us to then attempt the activity after several assistive technologies and improved lighting had been applied. These interventions are typical of the recommendations Vision Australia would make to improve the accessibility of the […]
Rich Content Page Builder
As part of the journey of building for the Certificate III in Individual Support we realised our team needed to build a large suite of inter-activities for text heavy content. Six months ago, RMIT was rolling out Instructure Canvas university wide, the implementation was in it’s infancy, and very little customisation was available that would give content the appeal to keep students engaged. Despite being an online learning system, Canvas permits the embedding of limited front end technologies. These are the things that make online content sing. Simple click and reveal events were permitted but not others. The Canvas WYSIWYG editor will strip most css and javascript and only permit text, images and tables. From a learning design perspective, this is difficult. Especially for the subject matter on ethics, law, regulations and procedures in aged care and disability services. Some of this content is quite dry, but important to deliver as part of accreditation requirements. Making it engaging was our mandate. We decided to build our interactive content and embed directly into Canvas using iframes. We built a system to make iframes work cleanly in Canvas (you can read about it here), and went to work building a page builder […]
Thinking inside the box
Our brief when building the Certificate III (Individualised Support) was to build rich interactive experiences. After discovering certain limitations in RMIT’s Canvas program that would restrict the choice of technologies available for use; and considering the limited support available to program coordinators following the build process, we elected to build our custom interactivity in an RMIT hosted WordPress instance and drop them in using iframes. Iframes? Eugh. This was supposed to be the future! Yes. Those in the know will regard iframes a contentious methodology for serving content. Forgive them, they have their place. Iframes are a way of embedding content from another site — most users will be familiar with Youtube videos being embedded in Facebook pages, for example. It’s a mature and well established system used throughout website front end services. While Canvas already imbeds content from other sources (ARC, Youtube etc.) we find the Iframe to be a better method: It ensures the content is sandboxed from accidental edits by the program administrators and does not ‘break’ when Canvas updates are rolled out. “Frames allow a visual HTML Browser window to be split into segments, each of which can show a different document. This can lower bandwidth […]
