I subscribe to Seth Godin’s daily blog. Each day my email inbox is treated to a short – and wise – message.
In this recent post, Seth covers some useful assumptions for teachers that I thought spoke volumes with few words.
I found it worth reading.
And no, I do not have a working relationship with Seth Godin. I just thought this post was good enough to pass on to other educators.
Registered training organisations (RTOs) with TAE40122 on scope are now in various stages of preparing for and commencing delivery of TAE40122. This process begins with choosing 6 elective units that are appropriate for their target learner cohorts, then deciding if and how to cluster and sequence TAE40122 units for delivery.
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‘Skills Urgency’ is the title of the Australian Industry Group’s most recent report on the skill needs of Australian employees. The report aims to prompt discussion about big changes the AIG suggests are needed to build employee skills in Australia. The AIG states that:
“A cocktail of factors is converging to create an urgency to skills formation and development.”
AIG, 2021, Skills urgency: Transforming Australia’s workplaces, key considerations.
Read the complete report here.
I think we vocational trainers can help adult learners gain the skills they need for today’s constantly evolving world of work by focusing on the foundation skills learners will need to do the jobs we are helping them prepare for. We should focus on foundation skills when:
When I hear people speak about foundation skills, they most often speak of language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) skills. But foundation skills include both:
And here is where things start to get tricky. In Australia, LLN skills are clearly described in the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF), but employability skills are described in different ways by different people. This makes it hard to get clarity on what employability skills are, and how to train and assess them.
Some popular terms we see used to describe employability skills include:
Personally, I use the Core Skills for Work (CSfW) developmental framework to identify employability skills that my learners may need.
The graphic below shows the full range of foundation skills:
The Skills Urgency report identifies “a positive attitude and soft skills” (pp.19-20) as the most important factors in recruitment:
I think there are two reasons for this:
When people think of foundation skills, they think of ‘low level’ and may wrongly assume that their learners don’t need explicit foundation skill instruction. I often hear trainers tell me, “My learners don’t have any LLN gaps, therefore LLN and foundation skills aren’t relevant to me.” We tend not to associate these ‘low level’ skills with the far sexier idea of ’21st-century skills’, or ‘skills for the modern workplace’.
A 15-year-old working at a fast-food restaurant needs oral communication skills to ask, “Do you want fries with that?” A hostage negotiator will need far high higher levels of oral communication skills to negotiate a peaceful resolution. Both need oral communication to do their jobs, just at different levels, and both would benefit if their trainer could explicitly teach the oral communication skills they will need to do their jobs.
Foundation skills are context-based. That is, the foundation skills people will need for one context are not the same as the foundation skills needed for another context. For example, I have an English degree and was previously an English teacher. So, I’d like to hope that my language skills are reasonably high and are sufficient for many work contexts. However, if I wanted to change careers and become an accountant, I would have a language gap—I don’t understand the language of accounting or when, where, or how to use it. In this context, my language skills are not sufficient.
The Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (TAE for short), requires all participants to complete the unit, TAELLN411 Address adult language, literacy and numeracy skills.
TAELLN411 helps us to learn how to teach LLN-based foundation skills but doesn’t cover employability-based foundation skills. This is a bit like icing half a cake.
The LLN and VET Meeting Place website has information and links to resources to help trainers incorporate a focus on foundation skills into their vocational training programs. I hope you find it useful.
We, educators, hope that people will learn something from us, remember what they learned, and ultimately use what they learned to improve or extend their performance—at work, in their personal lives, or both.
Lately, I’ve had the good fortune to apply the Learn→Remember→Use concept to myself. I have recently met, heard, trained and collaborated with various people who know a lot about universal design.
In this post, I present the five most useful tips I learned, remembered, and now use, to make my learning materials more universally accessible.
The concept of universal design applies to anything we design. This includes furniture, machines, workspaces, learning materials, and more.
To me, universal design means designing anything so anyone can access and use it. This is a simplistic definition. To learn more, have a look at the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design (CEUD). CEUD offers:
Vision Australia has produced a Document Accessibility Toolbar (a DAT) that we can download and add to our Microsoft Word toolbars. The DAT consolidates all the tools in MS Word that promote accessibility. This means I can access everything Word offers to help me make more accessible documents, from one place.
Here’s what the DAT looks like, once installed:
I’ve started using the DAT to easily access functions such as Alt Text (see Tip 2 below).
Alt Text is short for Alternative Text. It is text that we embed behind an image, to explain what the image is. For example:
Alt Text helps people with a sight impairment make sense of images used in our learning materials. Images may include photographs, infographics, company logos, decorative banners, charts or icons, to name a few.
People with a sight impairment often rely on a screen reader to make sense of learning materials. When a screen reader gets to an image, it will read the Alt Text embedded behind the image. Therefore, well-written Alt Text will help people understand the information or concept that the image conveys.
We can also use Alt Text to identify images that are decorative and do not add meaning to the text. For example, the discussion icon below doesn’t add meaning, so should be marked as decorative:
Screen readers will pass over images marked as decorative, rather than trying to interpret them.
In MS Word:
When writing online publications such as this blog post, simply select the image then use the edit tool to add Alt Text.
To save time, add Alt Text to the master versions of images that you use often—for example, your logo or a discussion icon. Then, copy and paste the master image throughout your document. This way, you only enter Alt Text for a popular image, once.
In May this year, I attended the Association for Talent Development’s International Conference and Expo for 2019 (#ATD2019) in Washington DC.
I attended a session by Maureen Orey called, No learner left behind: designing inclusive learning programs and materials.
I picked up many ideas from her session, but my number one takeaway stood out because it was SO simple—capitalise the first letter of each word in a hashtag.
So instead of writing #greatideasforhashtags, we should write #GreatIdeasForHashtags
If we capitalise the first letter of each word in a hashtag, screen readers will identify each word in the hashtag. But if all letters are lowercase, the screen reader will try to read all the words in the hashtag as one word… and that won’t end well!
High contrast between text and background colour in a document makes any learning resource easier to read. For example, against this white background:
I’ve recently learned about this contrast checker. It checks the font colour, size, and background colour of any text within a document and will tell you how easily (or not) people with a sight impairment or colour-blindness can read it. I have found this very useful and have already started changing the colours and font sizes to make sure anyone can read materials that I write.
We know that captioning helps people understand video content, but I am a one-person operation with limited time and budget, so had always placed captioning in the ‘too hard’ basket.
Things have changed.
In June, I attended the Australian Institute for Training and Development (AITD)’s 2019 Workplace Learning Conference (#AWLC2019). One session that resonated with me was delivered by the Learning Uncut team of Michelle Ockers, Karen Moloney and Amanda Ashby. The Learning Uncut website offers recordings of conversations with leaders in the learning, development and performance field. Michelle, Karen and Amanda have ‘day jobs’ and created Learning Uncut just because they wanted to. So at #AWLC2019, they shared how they produce their recordings—with transcripts—on a budget.
The Learning Uncut team made me think, if they can do it, perhaps I can, too. So, I investigated how to add captions to videos. My research took me to a video recording program which let me add captions so easily that even I could do it!
To create captions in this video, I let the software interpret and transcribe what I said. I was amazed by how accurate the transcript was. The only error was the spelling of my name—Chemène. However, since most people struggle with my name, I forgave the software for getting it wrong. Once I corrected my name, the captions were good-to-go. I was surprised by how quick and easy the process was.
The free version of the program I used does not allow people to add captions to videos, but the paid version does. With a cost of just $1 per month, I decided that investment in the paid version was worthwhile!
These five tips have helped me begin working towards more universal learning materials. I hope you’ll find them useful, too. Of course, there remains much to learn—#LifeLongLearning!