TAFE SA is the largest provider of vocational education and training (VET) in South Australia, delivering more than 1000 courses to an average of 80,000 students per year at 37 campuses across the State. TAFE SA offers training across more than 80 activity and industry-related areas with a wide range of courses and flexible study options. BYOD is currently implemented to vastly different degrees across the varying campuses for a range of purposes. This case study combines information about the applications of BYOD at Tonsley TAFE Sustainable Industries Education Centre, Regency TAFE and TAFE Adelaide City Campus.
“If you want to enroll in a TAFE SA course, you don’t just enrol at the institute, do your assignments, readings, and then log off. It’s almost like a campus life. BYOD is a critical part of it. Also, just being able to discuss and engage with other students, that’s really important”
Kym Schutz, Director of E-learning, TAFE SA
At the time of writing, Tonsley TAFE’s state-of-the-art Sustainable Industries Education Centre had opened recently, with learners attending training on site, with construction ongoing around the centre. The concept was developed in partnership with Flinders University. It applies the most modern technologies across the facility in every aspect of training and assessment, both in face-to-face settings and via remote and asynchronous learning.
BYOD is embedded into the vision for Tonsley, with provisions for mobile learning incorporated into the plan for learners’ day-to-day interactions with their courses via the Learning Management System (Moodle), other learners and their teachers and with the physical facility itself. A “super app” is under development, which will enable learners to book rooms at the campus, adjust environmental conditions such as lighting and climate control, see their class schedule and any changes, contact collaborators in their course, navigate around the campus and upload rich content for storage for syncing to the LMS.
Efficiency was a key driver for the investment in applications that would enable and encourage the use of mobile devices, enabling learners and lecturers to access necessary resources from anywhere on any device. Many of the learners who are studying at Tonsley are in the constructions trades and their workplaces are widely distributed and changeable. A BYOD approach was considered to provide an efficient and accessible solution for remaining engaged with the distributed learner group.
Early signs have shown that learners are highly engaged with their learning and the leadership team at Tonsley TAFE are impressed with the impacts of the ambitious technology rollout.
“It all comes back to the educational brief. You're working with educators who're prepared to look outside the box, and have the support, not only of their management, but also the executives, and right up to the board. All those things allow us to look at things differently.”Peter Nolan, Tonsley TAFE Campus Director
In order to gain benefits from the significant investment in technological infrastructure, the training and assessment team and library staff needed to be confident in the use of the tools. The trainers and assessors had varying levels of skill and interest in the use of digital tools, from highly competent to absolute beginners.
The first step was to determine the skill level across the large body of staff, which was carried out via a self-administered online digital survey. Staff members were asked to rate their skills in a range of areas. As a response to the results, around half of the staff have undertaken a Certificate II in IT to develop their basic digital literacy. The greatest identified need was for training and assessment staff to gain skills in delivering e-learning, rather than to interact with the User Interface of the RTO systems, which are simple, intuitive and largely use touch screens. Professional development in e-learning continues to be offered. The management team expressed that if they had their time again, they would have commenced this process earlier, as developing skills in this area has proved to require considerable time and effort in a large workforce.
An exciting way that this issue has been addressed, though perhaps out of the price range of most RTOs, is in the purchase of a laptop vending machine. It will allow TAFE students to swipe their student card and loan a laptop for the day while on campus.
Lockable lockers have been designed with power points inside to allow learners to plug their device in to charge during breaks.
Library staff have been provided training in basic troubleshooting to provide a degree of basic support for people who are struggling with using their devices for learning. They have instruction manuals for around 30 of the most commonly-brought mobile devices, as well as a good working knowledge of the TAFE LMS and “super app” system. This practice is reported to solve the majority of minor problems with little fuss, keeping learners engaged with their courses with less downtime.
Issues were faced with aspects of this ambitious technology project running late, which had a demoralising effect on some of the teaching and learning staff members. The solution was to revise the timelines and to manage stakeholder expectations by avoiding making concrete promises about when particular aspects would be available before testing and trialling had taken place.
Many of the technological innovations being employed are so new that there was little prior understanding of how they work or what they do in the wider stakeholder group. This made illustrating concepts and gaining support difficult, particularly as there was rarely access to demonstration models. This was addressed through assembling as many of the available resources as were available and describing the applications of the technology as thoroughly as possible.
Regency TAFE is TAFE SA’s lead campus for Hospitality and Tourism studies. Under the National VET E-learning Strategy’s Emerging Technology Trial 2012-2013, Regency piloted a project that looked at Mobile Video Assessment. A presentation about the project is available online here. The project explored the possibility of using people’s own devices for capturing video of learners performing practical skills for assessment and uploading the video to the Learning Management System. BYOD is used across Regency TAFE for browsing and accessing the LMS (Moodle).
TAFE project team members explained that they expected the learners engaged in the pilot project to be keen to use their own devices. They were surprised to find that several were not, either because they were unsure of how to take video footage, store and send files, or because they were concerned about their privacy being maintained when there was video footage of them being transmitted over the internet. This issue was addressed by slowing the project down and teaching learners how to perform these functions and allowing plenty of time for practice and revision. Learners who objected to being videoed for assessment were given alternative options for assessment, generally direct observation and third party testimonials.
This proved difficult, with different video file types unable to upload to Moodle for viewing and marking. A plugin called “Video Slimmer” was trialled, while worked on videos that were 5 minutes or shorter, but they still took a very long time to upload, which was impractical. An external consultant was engaged to create a Moodle plugin that would remedy this issue. Detailed information about the trial and the plugin can be found here.
BYOD is used extensively across the three Adelaide CBD TAFE campuses, with all types of mobile devices able to be added to the network for internet browsing communications and accessing the Learning Management System (Moodle). The BYOD rollout commenced a few years ago, with the ICT director taking the decision to start phasing out maintaining the fleets of desktop computers and refocusing energy on developing strong BYOD infrastructure. He decided to reallocate ICT budgetary spending to improving the wireless networks around the campuses so that they could handle the increased density of connected devices. IT spending has not changed much, as more devices connecting to the wireless network has diverted spending to purchasing more data and wireless routers.
“Make sure that your business strategy for BYOD and your ICT capability are aligned with the same vision in mind to make sure that everyone gets what they're looking for.”
- Nick Stott, Manager of Quality Services, ICT Services TAFE SA
No support for people’s own devices is offered at TAFE Adelaide at this stage, with the exception of initial connection to the network.
Extensive consultation across all business units and management levels was necessary to understand the key business drivers for implementing BYOD. This was also valuable for managing people’s expectations of what could realistically be achieved within the timeframe and budget. Changing the system over to a stronger use of BYOD successfully relied on all staff members understanding what could be gained and why they would be needed to participate in the changes, in order to secure people’s co-operation and enthusiasm. This process took around six months and has been largely successful.
TAFE SA has more than 2,500 Units of Competency in their LMS. Converting the learning and assessment instruments to formats that can be used successfully on mobile devices has proved to be a slow and detailed process. This issue was addressed with TAFE SA working with a consulting Instructional Designer who created over 150 templates for Moodle that could be used on mobile devices. Units of Competency are being reviewed and updated in an ongoing fashion to convert anything that requires Flash players to the new, cross-platform templates.
With a large workforce, and a high reliance on sessional teachers, one challenge has been ensuring that new and casual staff members have the capabilities necessary to work with BYOD. The response to this has been the development of a strong induction procedure, where new staff members are taught basic skills in using Moodle and understand who the key points of contact within the organisation in case of problems with using their own devices or designing learning and assessment materials.
Transcript for following video.