In line with “Shaping our Future”, Australia’s national strategy for vocational education and training (VET), innovation in VET teaching practice plays an important role in delivering to a client-driven culture.
Registered training organisations (RTOs) need to increase their knowledge base and skills of their staff, teachers and trainers because of the critical role they play in realising student aspirations and achievements.
Flexible learning
Flexibility is a key concept underpinning the national training system. It is a philosophy and an approach which expands choice on what, when, where, and how people learn.
Employers benefit from the ability to integrate training into their workplace in a way that suits their operations, while learners can access training that best suits their learning style and helps them balance their work, life and education commitments.
Flexible learning includes a range of delivery modes such as:
Moving to flexible learning delivery
The Flexible Learning Framework recognises that the introduction of e-learning requires RTOs to undergo significant change, a challenging process which takes time.
In addition to having a vision for the change and an appropriate organisational culture that supports transition, a key component of change is providing support to people as they engage in the adjustment process.
The Framework has developed resources, which offer support to RTOs and practitioners undertaking the move towards the adoption of flexible learning.
Flexible learning toolboxes
A toolbox is a set of web-based learning materials that can be installed on a server by an RTO and used to deliver endorsed Training Package qualifications online. Toolboxes focus upon effective teaching and learning activities, supporting teachers and trainers who can adapt and contextualise the materials for their own audiences.
Toolboxes assist RTOs in making a cost-effective move into online learning. By implementing online learning, RTOs can provide training services to a wider audience, attract new clients and markets and offer greater choice to new and existing learners.
Reframing the Future
Reframing the Future is a national staff development and change management initiative funded through the Australian Government. It aims to assist VET practitioners to become highly skilled, and VET organisations to become high performing to enable Australian industry to thrive in the local and global economy.
Emerging Futures - Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET (pdf-778K) is one of Reframing the Future's many publications. It demonstrates more frequent innovation is now needed in VET teaching and learning practices.
Innovation in teaching and learning in VET is ideally non-linear, customised, inclusive and transferable. Innovative teaching:
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takes account of individual learners’ differences
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responds to the contemporary push for all organisations including educational ones to be customer-centred
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fosters lifelong learning
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moves VET away from the ‘content model of education’ based on a teacher-designed curriculum to more fluid and interactive learning processes.
This moves both student and staff members into a new and different experience of VET.
Innovative teaching can be shown to assist students to develop not just technical skills and a common core of generic skills, but to support a wider range of capabilities, which can assist the individual in the wider world of work and the community.
Innovation in assessment, particularly in the workplace, is emerging as a strong new trend in VET and is driven by client demand for customised assessment.
Employability Skills
Employability Skills are skills that apply across a variety of jobs and life contexts. They are sometimes referred to as key skills, core skills, life skills, essential skills, key competencies, necessary skills, and transferable skills. Industry's preferred term is Employability Skills.
Employability Skills are defined as "skills required not only to gain employment, but also to progress within an enterprise so as to achieve one's potential and contribute successfully to enterprise strategic directions".
Employability Skills replacing Key Competency information from 2006
In May 2005, the approach to incorporate Employability Skills within Training Package qualifications and units of competency was endorsed. As a result, from 2006 Employability Skills will progressively replace Key Competency information in Training Packages.
Background to Employability Skills
Employability Skills are also sometimes referred to as generic skills, capabilities or Key Competencies. The Employability Skills discussed here build on the Mayer Committee’s Key Competencies, which were developed in 1992 and attempted to describe generic competencies for effective participation in work.
The Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), produced the Employability Skills for the Future report in 2002 in consultation with other peak employer bodies and with funding provided by the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) and the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA). Officially released by Dr Nelson (Minister for Education, Science and Training) on 23 May 2002, copies of the report are available from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) website.
The report indicated that business and industry now require a broader range of skills than the Mayer Key Competencies Framework and featured an Employability Skills Framework identifying eight Employability Skills:
- communication
- teamwork
- problem solving
- initiative and enterprise
- planning and organising
- self-management
- learning
- technology
