flexible learning in ACE

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Communities to assist learning

RecruitNet Career Skills

E: mail@recruitnet.com.au

RecruitNet Career Skills has provided training and employment services to the community since 1984.In that time, the organisation has earned a reputation from governments, employers and participants as a provider of high quality training and consulting services.

Our services include programs to assist unemployed people who are disadvantaged educationally or in the labour market. We provide a range of innovative programs on behalf of government, as well as providing training services to the commercial and community sectors.

RecruitNet Career Skills operates from nine offices across metropolitan Melbourne, ensuring a broad geographical coverage.

Under the Language, Literacy and Numeracy Program funded by DEST, we have a large contingent of ESL and Literacy/Numeracy students undertaking the Certificate of General Education for Adults at many of our sites, with a wonderful multicultural mix of students aged from 15 to 65 years of age. Some have low levels of literacy, having attended only a few years at secondary school. Others have completed secondary school and need to increase their English skills to find a job or do further study. In some cases, ESL students have completed tertiary education in their country but need to improve their English. Within this group of students, we have had doctors, lawyers, accountants and teachers with overseas qualifications in our classes.

We have numerous resources available for students’ use and try to introduce them to computers quite early in the course. Whilst pursuing conventional teacher-led training, we recently adopted the concept of using My Connected Community as an additional teaching strategy to assist the acquisition of English language skills.

This strategy has been an enormous success, as it has allowed the students certain autonomy in using the many aspects offered, such as chat and uploading articles onto the shared files’ section. The “invite a friend” section is popular as new people join the class and they are encouraged to introduce themselves in the Guestbook. They can either write something personal, or simply type their name (for first time users).

Work for the day is put up as a file in the shared files’ section with activities and instructions and I often get recipes from around the world or an extract from ”The Daily Burble.” A photograph album has been set up under “Photos” and comments and essays are invited from the students.

The biggest challenge was to get the trainers to look at the My Connected Community initiative. Although staff acceptance took nearly a year, once one trainer had seen how the program benefited her students and began talking and demonstrating how it could be used to aid teaching, others decided to explore it and we now have two classes using mc2 very successfully.

Internet access was sometimes slow and this led to some initial frustration. To counter this concern, the teachers were resourceful and organised the students to type up items of interest to put into the shared files section whilst waiting to ‘chat on line’.

Limited time in the training room. Since introducing mc2 the demand generated has been much higher and arrangements are being made to allow more time for this program.

When students with low level English skills participate in a community through mc2, students become aware that what they have written, mistakes and all, will be viewed by others, albeit in the same class, and it will be there for some time until it is deleted. It takes a high degree of self-confidence to take this step, but we see improvement on a daily basis as students confidently ‘chat on line’ and navigate the forum.

Teachers are students too, until trained. Initially, we were not directive enough in the training of the teachers. I assumed that if I showed them the site and told them about it, that would be enough, but more suggestions as to how to conduct a class, or running a selected ‘pilot class’ would have enabled them to see how it would work more effectively.

It was also assumed, erroneously, that because students are in the same room they would not want to join mc2 and utilize the chat function as they could easily talk to each other. This was not the case and we found that students enjoyed learning the logistics of managing the chatroom and all the other features.

We are implementing the mc2 program into all our sites, as trainers learn how to incorporate mc2 into their teaching strategies and we anticipate that this will be an important resource of the CGEA curriculum at RecruitNet Career Skills for a long time.

We are hoping that as our students become more proficient with computers and acquire them in their homes that communities will be formed with family members overseas.

Incidental Story from Lesley Maher
I am the project manager of the mc2 contract at RecruitNet Career Skills and my son is a new intern at the Caulfield Hospital. Recently he was attending to a patient and explaining to her husband about her medication when he remarked on the gentleman’s good English skills. The man became very animated and said that he learned English through this wonderful program called mc2, and my son, quite taken aback because he recognized the program, said, “Well, my mom does that!”