“Hi Talia, Ben from TasTAFE in Hobart!

Over the last 2 years we have seen enormous growth in the use of My Profiling across many qualifications.

This has happened to the extent that in many qualifications more students use My Profiling as their logbook than any other logbook in Australia.

We appreciate the enormous responsibility that places on us to consult with industry and continue to improve the profile for qualifications and the activities which evidence is collected against.

Starting in March we will be advertising online forums to which each of our RTO customers can attend along with an employer and student involved in the qualification being discussed.

The agenda will be advertised and adhered to quite strictly so we achieve what we set out to achieve and don’t get side tracked.

As an outcome of the validation meeting My Profiling will provide to each of the participating RTO’s a report on:

1. Attendees
2. Continuous improvement outcomes
   1. Validation of unit profiles
   2. Updating of new, changed or superseded categories.
   3. Updating of new, changed or superseded activities.
   4. Updating of new, changed or superseded descriptors.
3. Validation of assessments for those using Assessment Matrix
4. Validation of checklists for those using Assessment Matrix
5. Validation of cluster assessments for those using Assessment Matrix
6. We also anticipate that the forum will provide feedback to Skills Service Organisations for further development of Training Packages in the future.

I am looking to add a bit of a twist to these forums where by we can meet in a dedicated Virtual Reality Space verses a conference call or video conferencing option.

I am anticipating a release of both software and hardware in early 2018, which will make this affordable and achievable.

At My Profiling we pay particular attention to building a targeted and purposeful Engagement and Adoption strategy.

The most important part of creating this strategy is understanding the way your client operates. For us at My Profiling, we invest considerable time and effort to learning the current processes of our client, understanding how these processes map into our software and then working a strategy from this.

Whilst it is critically important to have a strategy that meets the need of the client, it is even more important to monitor and ensure the progress is as expected.

The key for successful implementation is continued communication and clear understanding of your clients needs.

When Trish from TAFE NSW, Sydney (Ultimo Hairdressing) emailed me last month to say how much her trainers and students love My Profiling, I was over the moon. The My Profiling suite was born out of a desire to see RTOs reach their full potential when it comes to recording, managing and being accountable for on the job evidence recording in vocational education. So when we hear glowing reviews like this one it really does make us smile – we are doing it! We are improving lives, and helping people out. No student will be left behind to struggle or miss out on chunks of experience needed for the apprenticeship.

Truthfully, +Profiling is transparent for a reason – because this transparency helps keep every party accountable, and not track. It truly does create a much more controlled and systematic approach to vocational education.

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My Profiling staff attended the 2017 National VET Conference by VELG in Sydney. It gave our team great opportunity to further their experience and attend some of the fantastic sessions being run.

Whilst we were there, Graham presented and showcased “An organic look at units of competency” through some of the Virtual Reality (VR) resources My Profiling have developed. It was a fantastic and exciting way to delve into Units of Competency in an organic way.

At the conference Graham talked with a number of RTOs about the idea of VR Classrooms – a place where a teacher can book a “classroom” for their class and students, login and use the environment to either explain concepts or allow students to complete tasks. You can read more about it here.

You can watch a bunch of our live videos over on our Facebook page (don’t forget to give us a “like” while you’re there!).

We had a visit this month to Western Australia to meet with Clients. Here Graham Rodgers is photographed with staff from South Metro TAFE WA. He & Melody toured the impressive campus at Rockingham.

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I am exploring the next steps in developing Virtual Reality learning environments.

As much as I would like to create an end-to-end task based learning strategy, I think my next step will be individual environments for different trades, with a gradually increasing number of scenarios to participate in.

A Teacher can book a “classroom” for their class and students, login and use the environment to either explain concepts or allow students to complete tasks.

Each “classroom” would have “scenarios” (essentially a task that you want the students to participate in) and the teacher can select a “scenarios” from the menu. Alternately you could set up different “scenarios” for different students working in the same environment. Login and you find yourself at the train station and you need to walk to work. You will probably meet your classmates or other students going to work in other locations.

Example of classrooms:

• Hairdressing salon for Hairdressers
  • Scenario 1: wash hair/dry hair
  • Scenario 2: colour hair
  • etc
• Commercial kitchen for Chefs
  • Scenario 1: Prepare Soups
  • Scenario 2: Prepare desserts
  • etc
• Automotive workshop for Motor mechanics
  • Scenario 1: Dismantle gearbox
  • Scenario 2: change oil
  • etc
• And of course my favorite domestic installation for electrical.
  • Scenario 1: wire house.
  • etc

Here are the current challenges I am investigating:

1. Multi player environments and hosting
   • The multi player environment allowing for up to 10 students in a class; managing login credentials; hosting.
2. Understanding each of the scenarios and determining correct responses.
   • By this I mean that if you ask a student to do something we need to know what the correct response looks like so that we can determine if the student’s interaction was successful. In addition, understanding the correct response determines the types of materials within the environment that need to be interacted with.
3. Interpreting fine motor skills.
   • There are going to be tasks that require fine motor skills to complete the task successfully. Two options for achieving this are the use of Haptic gloves or using a Leap motion sensor. We have done some experiments with leap motion and are yet to experiment with Haptic gloves.
4. Providing learning support
5. Assessment
6. Accessibility

Understanding each of the scenarios and determining correct responses is where the VET community can contribute. I am looking for interested people to provide tasks and correct responses to use as scenarios. You get credit for your work, which can be used as player time. There will be reasonably strict guidelines for submitted scenarios but we are happy to work with people to develop the skills.

I am working through a couple of options for learning support.  The easiest would be text based learning material mapped to the scenarios. This would be part of submitting a scenario that it would come with learning support. Alternately I am looking at video. Same mapping concept but there is some good research on gaming apps that use video to encourage in app purchases that they can increase participation and uptake. “Give your gamers an incentive to engage by offering them rewarded video ads – that enhance gameplay and become part of the story.” This will need a bit of thought but would make a lot of difference to user engagement.

Assessment is self-fulfilling. If you end up with the correct result then you completed the assessment. Again understanding the correct response for the scenario becomes pretty important.

2018 should be the year of affordable all in one head set. No cables and worth approx. $500 each. I will let you know more as this evolves.

How do you get involved:  call me! 0413316373

Its simple, if you want your trade to become available then you need to talk to me and we can work on how we get things up and running. We start small because there is a reasonably steep learning curve in understanding the pedagogy of VR.

Creating your commercial kitchen, hair dressing saloon or automotive workshop isn’t the problem. Including all the necessary bits and pieces that respond in the correct way is where the challenge lies.

The big project around the employer area is nearing completion and we have been contacting RTOs to discuss updating ABN information. We are committed to working with RTOs to get the employer accounts updated because the benefits will be a better way to manage supervisor and GTO accounts for all.

The WPSA outstanding report is now WPSA status report as we have expanded the filters to include filtering on Agreed WPSA and Not Yet WPSA responses as well.

Clients will be pleased to know we have updated the Unit Profile Printouts to now include Performance Skills graphs info and uploaded photos.

As part of our ongoing continuous improvement, we are currently undertaking some revisions to the +RPL interface. These changes to improve the user experience will be completed during September and I will details these in next month’s newsletter.

Finally, the usage report that we use to track subscriptions for billing purposes automatically discounts any student accounts that are marked as demonstration only. Please advise admin@my.edu.au if you create demo accounts so that we can note this on the account.