As part of my LearnScope 2004 project I posted three threads in the Community General Forum:
- Tips and Tools for Online Forums
- Solutions to Training Nationally
- The AQTF Audit Experience
I have put together summaries for each of the topics in the area below.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to my threads – it is great to get input from the wider community.
1. Tips and Tools for Online Forums
The question: Do you have any great tips on how to keep participants interested in an online forum – free games, ideas that have worked for you?
The answers:
- Get commitment from frequent posters.
- $$$ or prize incentives or accolades.
- Choose titles for the forum topics with care and seek those that make the viewer interested in reading.
- Provide some provocative leading questions or statements within the topic to stimulate the desire to respond.
- Brainstorm the content of a series of postings with your team to get a real ‘conversation’ going.
- Allocate roles in the forum to confident members – perhaps related to their area of expertise.
- Do some preliminary needs analysis or evaluation, eg:
• What do people want form the forum?
• How much time can they allot to it?
• What topics would they like to explore?
- Be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort particularly in the early stages.
- Make the forum environment warm, comfortable and one that allows for ‘easy sharing’.
- The moderator should give VALUE to people’s postings: acknowledge them.
- A guest speaker is a good idea.
- Keeping a topic within a specific time frame
- Be prepared to change tactics to suit the mood of the community.
Useful sites:
2. The Solutions to Delivering Training Nationally
The question: Are you part of a national organisation delivering training throughout Australia? What difficulties have you experienced and perhaps overcome?
The answers:
- We deliver the national health training package for paramedic students, volunteer and patient transport officers. We are currently going through our first review. Some of the lessons learned include:
• we overassessed using too many “written assessments”
• our delivery groups were originally too large to be effectively managed
• we are currently organising an assessors network as a Reframing the Future project.
- We have encountered a number of problems including the differences in interpretation and implementation of the AQTF standards across States and Territories by the various State and Territory training accreditation bodies.
- Royal Life Saving are a national organisation but have established separate RTOs in each State and Territory. This has assisted us in solving some of the issues of national delivery, but creates a number of new challenges such as maintaining consistent standards across RTOs, cooperation among the State RTOs etc.
3. The AQTF Audit Experience
The question: Do you have any tips for RTO’s who are about to be audited? Did anything work well for your organisation?
The answers:
- A trick is to contact the people who conduct the audits and ask them for their advice and ideas. They have seen so many different approaches they are probably best placed to advise what works best in any given context. I have also found that most auditors want the audits to go well, so it is in their interests to do what they can to help an RTO.
- Other tools can be found at:
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/productsandservices/qualityauditingguide.htm
Although the tools and checklists there were originally developed for audits of elearning programs, we found the basic principles apply across the board.The auditor induction kit and guide for auditors work well in any context.
- A National Project focussed on the use of Games Based methodology for induction into the AQTF and you can now locate information about the project and these games at:
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/projects/professionaldevelopment.htm
- We tend to try to have examples of everything organised in advance.
