Today was Showcase #3. Much like Showcase #2, I showed some examples that demonstrates how our learning is designed to meet the unique needs of our learning cohort – our stuff is designed especially for working professionals, leaders, teachers, or even trainers.
Tech education for clinical educators, or EDTECH as we refer to it, is a great example of a course where we invite participants to bring their own professional context to the course.
Over each week of the course, participants learn about the how and why of particular technologies e.g., video, visual media and interactivity, but also the explore the underpinning learning theories of instructional design and how people think and learn.
Participants leave the course with an artefact of their learning that’s applicable to what they do for a living as clinical educators – it’s a lesson plan that describes a piece of tech-enabled learning that they can deliver.
Design Thinking Now is designed for anyone, particularly those in organisations who want to develop their skills in the process of Design Thinking and ready themselves to apply their newfound skills to a situation (in their workplace) that’s meaningful to them.
Each week of the course is mapped to the Design Thinking process, where participants find out about the underpinning principles, theories and approaches, hear from experience practitioners and complete learning activities to cultivate their emerging skills.
It’s not just Design Thinking there’s a lot of Design Doing – throughout the course a series of Design Thinking templates are used by participants to explore their ideas and practise their Design Thinking in real life, resulting in a final presentation and reflection.
Civics and citizenship, also known as CIVCIT, is a course designed especially for Victorian secondary school teachers to increase their understanding of Victorian Curriculum Civics and Citizenship education.
The content is rich and generously laced with live facilitated-workshops, weekly ‘office hours’ with the course educators, research-based learnings and in-depth interviews and video reflections from secondary school teachers who share their experience of their own CIVCIT journey.
Like Ed Tech, participants leave the course with a personalised lesson plan that they can their use in their teaching.
As the title of the course implies, the Compassion training for healthcare workers course is designed especially for healthcare workers.
Compassion is known to benefit the patient but research now shows that compassion is a positive state of mind, increasing the wellbeing of the giver and protecting against burnout.
Participants make their way through four weeks self paced online content that covers what compassion is, the science underpinning it, how to transform empathy into compassion to avoid empathic distress, barriers to compassion, how common humanity can strengthen universal unbiased compassion and strategies so that compassion can be sustained in daily life.
Again, thinking about our cohort we intentionally designed the course to have a modern feel. We wanted the participants learning experience to be calm, warm and welcoming.
Each week of the course is carefully chunked and sequenced to make it easy for participants to identify where they are in the course, navigate to where they want, and also track their progress – this enables them to dip in and out of their learning as need and then easily pick up where they left off.
We’ve designed for the learning to action-based and practical, encouraging participants and inviting them to actively engage in the READ, WATCH and DO.
Because this course is all about developing skills that can then be applied to a professional practice, there are many opportunities to practise compassion exercises as listening and reflective activities.
By the end of the course, participants will have the knowledge and skills to engage in their professional practice with greater compassion.
On reflection, this wasn’t the greatest showcase for us – low energy and a mixed and muddled message mean we didn’t cut through, although the feedback from the audience was positive. We’ll definitely need to work on it before Showcase #4 and Showcase #5 rolls around in April.
