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About 30 staff and trainees from Conran Restaurants Ltd., Guy's & St
Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and trainees from Westminster Adult Education
Service participated in the four pilot rounds of InterAct.
Starting point.
In the UK, it is important for learners to have an individual learning
plan (ILP), which should contain information about an individual, and
their learning needs, before, during, and after a specific piece of
learning.
Before the course began, each participant completed an ILP, which
identified and agreed the following:
-
The long-term aims of
the course (Eg to gain confidence in order to apply for a supervisor
role)
-
The specific
short-term aims (Eg To learn how to access the internet and conduct
internet research)
-
Prior learning – (Eg I
can use a mouse and keyboard, but I can’t use ‘Microsoft word’
The ILP is a very useful reference tool for reviewing learning both
during and after the course. Many organisations have developed their own
ILP template.
For tutors, it is equally important to have a clear plan of the course
that the learner will undertake (a lesson plan). For each of the
InterAct sessions a lesson plan was devised to ensure that the
objectives of the course (drafted as deliverable outputs) would be met.
To an extent this was made easy because the InterAct programme had
distinct objectives for each week. These objectives were broken down,
and timetabled into the day, together with statements of:
-
assumed previous
knowledge
-
materials and
equipment needed
-
how and when
learning will be assessed
-
key skills being
taught
Throughout the training
Participants completed the online evaluations when required to
do so, as did the tutor. Whilst doing this, they also referred back to
their ILP, agreed what learning had taken place and made adjustments
as necessary to re-align the learning still to be done. This was
essential to ensure that a learner was continually reminded of what he
agreed to learn, and focused on that learning, so that at the end of
the programme there was a better chance that he will have achieved his
learning objectives.
The weekly online feedback by the learners and tutor was immediately
available for all to see and allowed two-way communication with the
course administrator, project team members and the webmaster, thereby
allowing discussion and adjustment to the programme for the following
week or subsequent programmes if need be.
The tutor could email the administrator if an immediate problem arose.
It quickly become apparent that this immediate response mechanism was
a vital piece of quality assurance particularly when technical
problems arose which prevented the students from carrying on.
At the end of the training
At the end of the course, participants completed the final on-line
evaluation form and were given the chance to make any comments about
the course both verbally and in writing.
Students also returned to the ILP to agree exactly what learning has
taken place (eg Before the course I could not use power point, now I
can create a power point presentation), and identified next steps to
allow the individual to maintain their motivation and thirst for
learning, by agreeing a progression route.
To reinforce the learning and support the progression route, the UK
team have agreed to introduce an end of course summary booklet
for each learner. This booklet will graphically describe the processes
and the agreed learning which took place, and suggest routes to
further learning, in order for participants to continue to practice
and develop their newly acquired skills.
After the end of the training
Four to six weeks after the end of the course, a final evaluation
was conducted using a semi-structured interview. The interview was
based on a questionnaire (see example); the first part of which was to
gain personal information about the learners, while the second part,
to establish how much benefit the individual gained
The weekly evaluation sheets asked beneficiaries to rate various
outputs on a scale (very little – very much) and add comments where
necessary. (Eg How much have you learned during the past three weeks?).
While this was good for recording thoughts at that moment, the final
evaluation allowed beneficiaries to respond to questions after a
period of reflection. It also allowed the interviewer to tease out
answers in a group situation, which may not have been forth coming
from the individual evaluation forms. (Particularly where poor written
English prevented feedback).
This gave us:
-
An accurate
description of the beneficiaries including:
-
Target category
recruited (see questionnaire)
-
Age group
-
Whether English
was an additional language
-
Their main home
language
-
How long they
had been studying English
-
How long they
had lived in England
-
Whether they
planned to stay in England or move on
-
How long they
had been working for their employer
-
Whether they
planned to stay with their employer, or leave.
From this we
could compare and establish how accurately we had recruited the
target group defined by the InterAct project.
-
Probed
specifically what they had learned or achieved in terms of each
agreed output of the programme For example:
-
Negotiation
skills
‘Saw how effective using nice words was in putting your
message across’
-
Team working
I will be a lot more confident in a group situation in future’
-
English
language and communication skills
‘Learnt a lot of new words and improved the flow of English.
Understand better how to translate to English’
-
Numeracy
Understand how to use excel’
-
Problem
solving
‘Working as a team, you could see the problem from several
different points of view and different ways put forward of how
to solve problems’
-
General ICT
skills
‘I have learned a lot like saving a file and evaluation sheet,
saving through the computer, adding to a favourites list’
-
Intercultural
awareness
‘It is a great opportunity to ask people from other countries
about their jobs and life in general for example learning about
Norwegian or Spanish medical health
-
Motivation
‘The programme was very motivating, each week there was
something completely different and interesting’
-
We also asked
‘Is the learning a permanent change?’ Again the period of
reflection meant that this question could be answered more
accurately than would have been the case immediately after the
course.
-
And finally we
asked ‘how, and in what circumstances could they use their newly
acquired skills in the workplace’, and ‘how they could be
applied in their general lives’.
Eg. ‘Can readily apply negotiation, tact and diplomacy to the
job of waitering and in normal life’
Note - Actual
student comments appear in italics.
Some of the processes described may be familiar and used in your
own organisations. We found this combination of quality
assurance measures worked well with the InterAct model and
provided us with comprehensive feedback from both beneficiaries
and tutor in order to promote further learning and fine-tune the
programme for the future.
David
Evans.
30 June 2006 |
