We built a hospital! Well sort of. We built a simulation of a fictional hospital called Bagwan Health. Bagwan is a Woiwurrung/Boonwurrung word which means ‘life’. The virtual hospital consists of a realistic staff intranet and a virtual tour of the hospital. How did it get started? Simulation of a workplace environment is often required for workplace training and assessment. Many courses create scenarios to simulate workplace environments, but they often lack the realistic connections with a workplace to meet auditing and assessment. The Vocational Education Design Team (VEDT) had investigated some examples of virtual workplaces to meet the requirements for course content, however they were not scalable and shareable across units, schools and courses. That is when the idea of creating a fictional health care facility came about by Elissa McKenzie and Jack Dunstan as a way to provide a broad range of services delivered by qualified staff whose competencies match with RMIT’s educational delivery model. In April 2019 Elissa and Jack successfully pitched the project entitled The Virtual Workplace at the RMIT Education Innovation Pitch Tank. The successful pitch gained access to $50,000 to fund the project. How was the virtual hospital created? A co-design approach was taken […]
Rapid building a course
Earlier in the year the Vocational Education Design Team (VEDT) were given the challenge to create two courses with an extraordinarily short timeframe of just eight weeks. To meet the challenge, VEDT pulled out a few tricks to get both courses finished on time. To kick things off, VEDT held a short design sprint session which helped to stimulate everyone’s creative ideas. From here, the best ideas were sorted to find ones that could be achieved within the timeframe, and the course content was planned out between VEDT and the Media and Communications School. The Media and Communications School created the assessments while VEDT designed and built the course content. One of the main challenges was to make the courses engaging and interesting for students and not just a content dump into Canvas. To get around this, a simple narrative about a fictional workplace was created to give the student the experience of how the course content might be relevant in a real workplace. The student participates as a character that has started their first day at a small design studio. Wulan the studio manager guides the student through the day and points the student to the policies and procedures […]
Design sprint part 1
Earlier this month, the VE Design Team ran its first Design Sprint to collectively come up with a new and innovative way to deliver a section of the CNC machining course using Augmented Reality (AR) technology. CNC stands for computer numerical control machinery and is a manufacturing technique used to create all sorts of precision components for engines, medical products and computers much faster than a human possibly could. The question posed to the team was: “How might we get users to interact with an AR model?” The use of AR technology in education is rapidly growing as it can render images or concepts into a real environment using a smart device making it easier for learners to grasp abstract and difficult concepts. Leading the sprint was James Ratsasane who guided the team through the process and ensured the sprint was focused, structured and timely. Why have a design sprint? The Design Sprint is a five-phase process to help create or define an idea which is then rapidly prototyped so valuable real user feedback can be collected quickly. Quick feedback from real users early in the process, identifies which areas of the idea are on point and where you can […]
Think Tank Series – Student motivation
The VE Design team held another think tank session on November 15, to provoke and provide new ideas on improving the quality of vocational education. The topic this month focused on student motivation and engagement and the proposed question to the panellists was: What are the best methods or strategies that can be used to engage and motivate students in the changing world of VET, industry and skills training? The panel experts included: Naomi Holding – General Manager of Didasko Group Justin Cruickshank – Design and Production Manager of The Learning Hook Mark Newhook – Teacher at Box Hill Institute Tony Valance – Learning Specialist at Department of Education and Training Victoria Naomi Holding – Didasko Group To tackle the issue about student motivation, Naomi looked at what interferes with a student’s motivation in the first place. Some of the key factors Naomi has observed are anxiety, self-doubt, busy lives and boring subjects. To help combat this, Naomi and the team at Didasko use the 4MAT learning and communication tool (shown below) to structure their courses. Why? – Why is the student doing the course? This gives personal meaning making sure they’re correctly matched to a goal. […]
