This year I was fortunate enough to be granted a VET Development Centre Specialist Scholarship. Specialist Scholarships are available to non-teaching staff who wish to develop their skills, capability and professional standing within the VET system. Among the services provided by specialist staff are student support, student administration, human resources, learning design, records management, purchasing, learning resources, information technology, occupational health and safety and financial management. The Specialist Scholarship Program focuses on the professional development of non-teaching staff in the context of high level administrative and specialist tasks required of them by internal and external stakeholders.

How am I using my scholarship?

I’m using my Specialist Scholarship to attend the AR Studio Augmented Reality Camp (ARCamp) at the Inspire Centre, Canberra in May 2013. Attending ARCamp will give me the opportunity to develop my practical skills in designing and building augmented reality learning experiences; access to technology, equipment and expertise to prototype augmented reality concepts and evaluate augmented reality as a technology and then determine how it can be best applied to new and existing learning contexts.

By the completion of my scholarship in late 2013, my goal is to have developed a number of marker-based and location-based augmented reality experiences that can be used and then customised by trainers and learners inside the institute and those outside in the wider vocational education community. My goal is to develop these augmented reality experiences in conjunction with enthusiastic teaching staff and teaching centres to make sure the augmented experience accurately represents real workplace activities. The types of real workplace activities I’m currently exploring for augmented reality experiences include hazard/risk identification in the workplace, apply control measures to a hazard/risk in the workplace and fire drill training.

What have I been doing?

Recently, I’ve been researching tools that I can use to develop my augmented experiences. For the moment, I’ve decided to use Aurasma to create my marker-based experiences and Layar to create my location based experiences. During this time I’ve also been using my iPad and a booklet of AR markers on loan from a colleague to explore a number of different marker-based AR experiences.