The development stage
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Prepare assessment resources
As the content expert, I worked closely with the instructional designer all the time - I do half and half, ideas and content. We had to:
- write all the tasks in the appropriate language
- make sure instructions were clear
- put it all together so that it was a good solid assessment which could be easily done.
This is where we had the most scope to be the most creative. What sort of use can we make of virtual environment to give learners an opportunity to demonstrate that they can do this?
- For example we took a video tape of the inside of a retail store in 360 degree virtual reality. The learners had to scan around this video and find the hazards. There was a checklist to be completed as they identified each hazard.
Prepare assessor resources
The Toolbox has a teacher’s guide with it so we put in a lot of suggestions. Because you are limited to what you can actually provide in the Toolbox you have to take a one-size-fits-all type of approach. We put a lot more effort to thinking about suggestions for teachers ( …if this doesn’t work try this, or here’s another way you could do it).
Trial, revise and modify tasks assessment tasks
As we were developing the tasks we were also trialling them with learners
as part of the overall trials we were doing. There were different groups
of learners who went through the retail course in both my college and a
TAFE in Victoria.
We were pretty careful to select the value adders who were already a bit
savvy with using online technology. We did trial it with some who were not
that competent just so we could ascertain how hard it was for a person who
was not really IT literate. That was a minority group in the overall testing.
hen we looked for patterns and modified accordingly.
We also used the Industry Training Board (ITAB) and the steering group.
Provide PD for teachers
We had an implementation team and the first thing that we identified was that we needed to do some kind of formal PD. We actually took the whole retail team through training which we did under LearnScope funding. WebCT training, online training, training how to use discussion boards and that sort of thing, getting to know the Toolbox. We did that with about five staff.
Then we actually did an implementation project that the College funded and
that was at the actual delivery stage.
