In collaboration with AEShareNet, I am co-hosting a seminar in Sydney on Monday 6 March, Creative Practices for a Connected World, with guest presenter Euan Semple.

Euan is a UK digital innovation expert and ex-Director of Knowledge Management Solutions at the BBC.

For more information see: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/Semple_seminar.asp

If you want to improve your work practices, your organisation and your service delivery in a connected world, this is the event to attend in 2006. The seminar will cover key issues for managers, teachers and support staff in education and training including:

• Using collaborative tools for innovation, networking and knowledge management
• Developing advanced capabilities in social computing, using blogs and wikis, RSS and folksomonies (no previous experience required!)
• Performing new roles and forming new relationships with learners and partners in a digital environment.
  

Australia’s economy depends on fostering the creativity and innovation of its workforce, and education and training is a key to achieving this high-skilled workforce. The Euan Semple Seminar will provide you with concepts, practices, strategies and tools to help transform education and training.

Early bookings are strong and the forum will definitely go ahead, so be quick to book to ensure a seat.

I have not posted new items to the blog for the last three months, while I prepared a new book: Ideas for practitioners: a professional development guide to growth and change in the VET sector.

The book is available from http://www.ibsa.org.au/pubdetails.jsp?publication=6137

Based on over sixty of my articles in Campus Review, with the addition of hundreds of questions and numerous suggestions for further reading, the book identifies key issues for the future for VET educators and promotes reflection on current practice.

The book holds potential value for all stakeholders in the sector – from industry trainers and assessors to institution-based teachers and educational managers, workplace supervisors, industry personnel, public servants and policy makers. Everyone in the sector needs to develop new ideas, says the author.

The eleven chapters highlight core issues in the sector: innovation, policy, industry needs, industry partnerships, RTO structures, leadership and strategy-making, change management, workforce development, new work roles, e-learning and e-business, and teaching, learning and assessment.

The book is nearly 70,000 words and there are 66 articles, 231 questions and over 150 references for further reading: enough material for twelve months of professional development activities.

For a strong and vibrant VET sector, leaders are needed who have a clear vision and innovative strategies. One such national VET leader is Malcolm Goff, Managing Director of Challenger TAFE in Western Australia, whom I interviewed recently for my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 5 October 2005.  Following is an excerpt from the interview.

Does Challenger aspire to high-performance?

High-performance is embedded in our culture. We committed ourselves to it some six years ago because we recognised that even with public funding there are no guarantees these days. Our public funded activities depended on our performance in the marketplace and of course increasingly our income is depended on our commercial work. Increasingly public money is being put out through competitive processes.

Is Challenger future-oriented?

Our vision is to be a high-performing, visionary organisation and that is reflected in our strategic and business planning processes. We are always thinking about futures. Yes we learn from experience and so forth but we are focused on positioning, repositioning and positioning ourselves. We live in a changing world and we need to be a changing and a dynamic organisation.

What are the leadership principles within Challenger?

Leadership can’t be formula-driven, but it goes something like this. It’s about understanding the policy directions of government. It’s about understanding the needs of your clients, be they individuals or industry, and positioning your organisation to deliver against those. And most importantly communicating and discussing those directions within your organisation, and in so doing empowering staff to deliver against the needs of clients. It is not about directing. Yes of course, there are certain checks and balances that every agency has to have in place, but within those parameters it is about an individual staff member seeing an opportunity that is part of core business and knowing they can go for that opportunity and it is the right thing to do.

Is leadership at Challenger a team effort?

No one person can have all the knowledge or all the skills and therefore your executive team is a very important part of the ultimate performance of the organisation. We as a team spend a considerable amount of time in any one year in discussing and debating environmental issues then coming to a consensus about what are the key strategies and business actions we need to take to take into account in this environmental analysis. It is not just a one-off: it is a continual and ongoing activity.

What is your greatest satisfaction as Challenger’s managing director?

Leading an organisation to where we have today, where people are initiating, and creating and achieving without any direct involvement of myself.

What will a large TAFE college look like in the future?

If you can conceptualise a large TAFE college of the future as one that is built around having big campuses, then that’s a mistake. The future is about de-institutionalising. It’s about looking for industry partnerships, and they will manifest themselves in different ways: it must not be a one-size fits all. A very one-dimensional view of an RTO-industry partnership is that the RTO offers training to the industry. An RTO-industry partnership is about joint ownership, it’s about sharing, it’s about jointly contributing.

Some responses to addressing skill shortages are simple and short-term, such as increasing the number of skilled migrants. In contrast, the NSW Department of Education (DET) has taken up the complex challenge of creating healthy ‘skill ecosystems’, capable of sustaining skill formation and use. Following is a brief discussion on the concept, from my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 21 September 2005.

Originally the concept of skill ecosystems was used to explain the growth of the IT industry’s high-skill cluster in Silicon Valley, California. Following developments in Silicon Valley, skill ecosystems came to be seen as clusters of inter-related skills and knowledge within regions or industries. These ecosystems are driven by factors like technology, competition, culture, structure, regulation and the organisation of work.  

“Now we are extending the idea of skill ecosystems to understand and support more robust learning and employment clusters across all skill levels,” says Leslie Loble, Deputy Director General, Strategic Planning and Regulation, NSW DET. Over the last two years, Loble and her team have tested the theory through projects across Australia, with support from the Department of Education, Science and Technology (DEST) and the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training.

According to Leslie Loble, a skill ecosystem perspective has the following characteristics:

• focuses on industry economics and the workplace context of skill development and use
• sees a set of common interests uniting organisations in the cluster or supply chain
• views the training provider as central but part of a diverse group of workers, employers, researchers, technology suppliers, industry regulators, contractors, consumers or purchasers
• believes that skill formation strategies must go beyond traditional training responses.

Each of the funded projects is taking a different approach to creating skill ecosystems, explains Loble: “Some are exploring ways to connect part-time and casual jobs across a whole industry so the jobs become full-time equivalent in hours, earnings and security. Others are linking training providers early and directly to other innovators, to get faster diffusion of new technology to skilled workers who can use it.”

New policy settings and new VET practices are possible, says Loble: “If we get it right, we just might have a policy and a process that will produce the mix of skills and jobs, productivity and prosperity that mark sustainable skill ecosystems.”

How innovation can be fostered in large training providers is the focus of my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 14 Sept 2005.

For the column, I interviewed Box Hill Institute of TAFE CEO John Maddock, following his Institute being awarded, for the second year in a row, Victoria’s Large Training Provider of the Year.  Some excerpts from the interview follow.

How does innovation start in your institute?

Innovation springs from the way we manage the whole of the institute and the way people within the institute operate and behave. The innovations are supported at all levels, but the ideas come from our people and they get developed up and it’s really a team effort. We go out of our way within the institute to set up mechanisms for individuals and teams to get the opportunity to put forward new ideas and then we look for ways to provide support. We strive to create a climate where all staff are leaders.

How do you involve your clients in innovation?

The staff become extremely passionate not only about the innovation but about the client group they’re doing the innovation for, and that passion then starts to flow over to our client group who also start to become passionate. And then what happens is that the relationship between the individual staff members in the institute and our client base or the enterprise or the community or the student becomes more powerful: it creates an energy that is very hard to describe, and that is what we are trying to achieve all of the time.

Do you have a planned, systematic approach to innovation?

Our planned approach to innovation is deliberate. We believe that if we can set the plans in place at the front-end and make sure we have a balance between the management of the operation and the strategic directions we want to take, then what you’ve got is a platform for reacting when you need to react, for being opportunistic when you need to be opportunistic. But if you don’t have a good plan in place at the front end, what happens is that people continue to do the same things all of the time and they’re not constantly challenging what they’re doing.

How do you sustain innovations?

We work very hard to sustain innovations, and so do our partners. We look at what we need to do to reinvest. We don’t just look at a new approach and say it will be alright, for all time: the whole philosophy of continuous improvement is something we really believe in and we work hard at trying to do it. I talk to my staff all the time about the one-percenters, how important the one-percenters are and how each and every one of us has control over those one-percenters. It is that sort of philosophy and the hard work that staff do in identifying and then making it happen, in doing those one-percenters, that keeps the improvements going and sustains the innovation. 

From this interview and from my other research, I have found that innovation has the following benefits:

• Re-invigorates the organisation
• Refreshes its products and services
• Improves its customer responsiveness
• Delivers its customers superior value
• Demonstrates its staff capabilities
• Increases its uniqueness
• Underpins its sustainable competitive advantage.

One of the perennial quests for TAFE institutes in Australia is to find an organisational design that suits a demand-driven sector. A compelling new institute structure has just emerged which demands examination across the sector, because it challenges some long-cherished organisational designs in TAFE.

The new organisational model is all the more compelling because it is being implemented by the Large Training Provider of the Year in both 2000 and 2002, the Institute of TAFE Tasmania. This best-of-breed organisation also commands attention because, as CEO John Smyth points out, “In the NCVER report released last month, Tasmania was the only state where VET enrolments didn’t go down last year.”

While most TAFE institutes have many goals, TAFE Tasmania has just two, and the new structure is built around them. The two goals are, firstly, the provision of training that is driven by Tasmanian enterprises, and secondly, the provision of career courses aligned to Tasmania’s economic and skills development needs. John Smyth explains: “Rather than the traditional structure of a learning manager, a corporate manager, a business manager, we have two general managers, focused on each of the institute goals.” 

Features of the restructure include:

• customers, clients and the board are at the top of the organisational chart
• staff teams are in the middle of the organisational chart
• the CEO and support units are at the bottom of the chart
• some traditional layers of management are removed
• the 500 full-time teaching staff are organised into 80 enterprise-focused teams
• industry training is underpinned by research into each enterprise
• teams are empowered to negotiate directly with enterprises
• the 80 staff teams are supported by an Enterprise Development Team.

To achieve the institute’s goal of meeting the needs of enterprises, the institute abandoned the traditional faculties, department or school structures and organised the staff into numerous small teams, all with an enterprise focus. Each of the teams is a response to an identified industry need. This use of enterprise-based teams is “a thorough approach to repositioning the organisation to think about clients first,” says General Manager, Enterprise Development, Jules Carroll.

Carroll finds that identifying enterprise needs is challenging: “It takes some guts to look at the demographics, at the environment you’re servicing, and to really ask the hard questions about what’s important here, what’s going to make a difference, what’s going to support growth in this environment and how can we contribute to that.”

From this research it is apparent that attitudes within TAFE Tasmania are as follows:

• An agile enterprise provides learning opportunities that satisfy customer needs
• Foster a strong industry focus
• Make every customer contact matter
• Deliver a great learning experience
• Build a resilient business.

Compare these with the historical TAFE attitudes:

• A quality institution helps students to meet the teacher’s expectations
• Foster the institution’s reputation
• Ensure students appreciate our service
• Deliver a great teaching performance
• Build on our proud heritage.

I extended this story in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review, 17 August 2005.

One of the challenges to registered training organisations is to provide consistent, high quality services to enterprises that have branches across Australia. This challenge is particularly difficult for staff in long-established technical and further education (TAFE) Institutes who are only used to delivering in TAFE classrooms or campus workshops, at times and in ways that suit the trainer, rather than the enterprise client. 

This challenge confronted staff at the Geelong headquarters of the Gordon Institute of TAFE in 2000, when the Institute’s managers signed an agreement to deliver traineeships nationally to 650 Spotless Services staff. All the training was to be delivered in the many and varied workplaces of Spotless staff, not in Geelong.

Spotless is Australia’s largest provider of hospitality and domestic services, employing 35,000 people around the nation. Spotless also has a Defence Force contract to deliver all non-military services at sixteen military bases spread throughout Victoria, including services such as catering, warehousing, cleaning, laundry and housekeeping.

“The Spotless training contract marked a fundamental change in our business focus and in the way we deliver training,” says the Gordon Institute Director Martha Kinsman. “The contract signified a shift from a supply driven to demand driven approach for this 118 year old training organisation.”

The Gordon now focuses on delivering national workplace training services in the waste management and retail industries. Workplace training is delivered nationally to waste management companies such as Visy, Collex, Theiss and Cleanaway and to retail companies such as Jaycar Electronics and Bowens.

Today the Gordon maintains offices in Sydney and Brisbane with management and training staff sited locally. On any given day – weekends included – the Gordon has up to 135 trainers operating in the workplace. And there is a significant resource and administrative support network in place to ensure operational efficiency.

Tips for delivering nationally include:

• Align the training organisation’s strategic plans to fit the needs of national enterprises
• Develop relationships with enterprises that understand the business benefits of training
• Specialise in servicing enterprises from a small number of national industries
• Be client-driven in organising the training around the enterprise’s requirements
• Recruit or retrain staff who are able to deliver training in ways the industry clients prefer
• Ensure the workplace training is always high-quality, supported by customised resources.

I expand on this strategy-making story in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 10 August 2005.

Increasing the ‘voice and choice’ of VET students is the focus of a pioneering activity being conducted this year at Macquarie Fields, in Sydney’s south west. This activity is the subject of my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review, 3 August 2005.

The Macquarie Fields TAFE College pilot is one of eight being undertaken around NSW TAFE as part of project called ‘Personalised Learning: Improving Student Outcomes’. The project is managed by the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) Centre for Learning Innovation on behalf of the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training.

The intention of the pilots is to propose, develop, test and evaluate specific practices that would result in significant and beneficial change across the VET system.

I am evaluating the pilots for NSW DET. The evaluation involves identifying those aspects of the pilot project that provide a replicable, generalisable and sustainable model for significantly improving VET outcomes through the application of personalised learning approaches.

The personalised learning project was prompted by research in the UK. Leslie Loble, Deputy Director-General DET, says that personalised learning is what student-focused teachers do when they recognise and address the needs of individual learners. “It builds on the principles of flexible delivery and quality teaching to support individual students as they travel along their learning journeys.”

Elements of personalised learning include:

• a culture that embraces high expectations of students
• structures and technology that promote greater focus on the learner
• teaching strategies that reflect clear standards yet can be differentiated for individuals
• students taking responsibility for their own learning
• involvement of and collaboration between parties such as industry and the community
• workforce development that promotes personalised attention to students.

Currently I have completed a 22,000 word interim report on the project and will prepare a final report by mid-October 2005.

Given the current national debate about industrial relations, it is timely to explore the nature of the work required of the VET practitioner. The brief exploration below – based on my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review on 20 July 2005 - indicates that the work required of the VET practitioner is becoming more diverse, more subtle and more complex, as the world of work changes.

A swathe of research reports in the last few years consistently shows that changes in the world of work are forcing changes in the way training is delivered in Australia. Changes in the world of work include the need for skill development that is timely, occurs in the workplace where possible and assists organisations to achieve a competitive advantage. Hence, VET practitioners need to develop new ways of working, in response to such changes in the world of work

In the NCVER publication ‘The vocational education and training workforce. New roles and ways of working. At a glance’ (2004), Guthrie notes that reforms in VET over the past ten years have had a significant effect on the work of its staff. VET staff now operate in more competitive markets and face increased demands from their various clients for higher quality and more relevant programs. Understanding and keeping up with these changes and working in new and more flexible ways are major challenges for the VET workforce.

To meet the demand for customised workplace training, Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine in ‘Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET’ (2003) found that one result of the industry-led national training system is that detailed and customised workplace training demands on VET are potentially as varied as there are enterprises in Australia. This is bringing about new and intensified professional, technical and educational roles for VET practitioners especially at the frontline, and particularly for teachers, workplace trainers and assessors, workplace mentors and supervisors.
 
In response to the increased number of settings where VET practitioners need to provide training services, Chappell, Hawke, Rhodes and Solomon (2003), in the Phase 1 report for the High-level Review of Training Packages project, suggest that VET is increasingly reliant on highly skilled VET professionals with a raft of new skills. They find that VET must rely more than ever on learning specialists who have an appreciation of the full pedagogical choices that are open to them and which are consistent with the context, clients and learning sites in which they work.

According to Chappell et al. ( 2003), new skills of VET practitioners include:

• have and choose from a sophisticated pedagogical repertoire
• use more learner-centred, work-centred and attribute-focused approaches
• eschew traditional transmission pedagogies
• can work with multiple clients, in multiple contexts and across multiple learning sites
• assist in the integration of learning and work in the contemporary work environment.

Dickie, Eccles, FitzGerald and McDonald in ‘Enhancing the Capability of VET Professionals Project: Final Report’ (2004) describe the environment in which VET professionals will work in the future. It will be an environment characterised by increasing diversity in the client base; increasing sophistication in client expectations; change in products and expansion of options for training delivery; changes in employment, work roles, team structures and places of work; increasing competition and increasing demand; and globalisation of the training market.

Simply put, to meet the demand for customised industry training, VET practitioners need to perform new and multiple roles and to develop a repertoire of pedagogical approaches. Numerous descriptions of VET practitioners performing different roles and developing fresh approaches to their profession are provided in a report recently released by Reframing the Future that I co-authored with McKenna, Perry and Bald, called ‘New ways of working in VET’ (2005). This article is based on the new report.

‘New ways of working in VET’ is available from http://reframingthefuture.net

Can VET providers do it all? I am constantly asking VET senior managers whether their organisations can continue to do everything: that is, to find the raw materials, to manufacture products, and then to market, sell, deliver and support those products. In VET terms, these activities roughly equate to preparing learning materials, and marketing, delivering and supporting training programs.

In other industries, it is becoming increasingly common for organisations to outsource some of their functions, particularly by forming relationships with multiple suppliers. For instance, retailers like Myers source their clothes from a raft of clothing manufacturers and the major banks in Australia commonly use mortgage brokers to find new borrowers. But in VET, many providers are used to doing everything and are finding it hard to relinquish some traditional functions.

I find that many VET providers are reluctant to outsource the preparation of learning materials and the delivery of training. Preparing learning materials is, for some, sacrosanct: it is the purest activity an educator can undertake. For others, it is impossible to contemplate delegating to outsiders the delivery of training.

These long-held attitudes are coming under intense pressure in contemporary VET from two unrelenting new forces. First, the emergence of a demand-driven VET sector means that providers are being asked to cater for the training needs of each and every enterprise, and Australia consists of literally millions of enterprises. Second, the emergence in Australian society of a consumer attitude that services need to be shaped ‘just for me’ and made available when I want them is now being applied to VET.

The truth is that VET providers can’t meet these rising demands on their own, so they need to develop innovative strategies to continue to satisfy their customers while constantly refreshing their product line and maintaining quality. One strategy is to stop providing some services: that is, to reduce the product line. And another strategy is to outsource some existing functions.

Some guidelines for outsourcing are:

• Determine those functions that can be outsourced
• Assess the costs, benefits and risks of outsourcing those functions
• Identify suppliers who are reliable and expert in providing the functions
• Develop quality control mechanisms to monitor the suppliers
• Require the suppliers to regularly refresh their services and products
• Actively manage the supplier relationships in a collaborative manner.

I extend these ideas and provide an example of a niche supplier to whom registered training providers outsource in my regular ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 27 July 2005.

I have just prepared with three colleagues a publication called “Critical Issues. A draft literature review on critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment in vocational education and training, version 26 June 2005”. My fellow researchers are Clive Chappell, Andrea Bateman and Susan Roy.

The draft literature review was developed by the above researchers as part of the Consortium Research Program: ‘Supporting vocational education and training providers in building capability for the future’. This program is funded by the Australian, state and territory governments through the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) and managed by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER). The draft will be finalised in November 2005.

The purpose of this literature review is to highlight recent thinking and research at the national and international level that can inform the development of teaching, learning and assessment practices in the VET sector. The review may encourage VET practitioners to develop enhanced services to meet the increasingly varied demands of individuals, employers and industry. The review may also encourage VET organisations and systems to identify resources required to support the provision of these new services.

The review begins by indicating what the literature is saying about the environmental factors that are driving the changes and creating challenges in VET teaching, learning and assessment.
Although there is broad agreement in the literature concerning the drivers of change in vocational education, there are diverse suggestions regarding appropriate responses. In order to make sense of the diversity of suggested responses provided in the literature, this review poses a number of questions. The questions are:

1. What do individual learners and industry clients want from VET in terms of teaching and learning experiences, and services and support, and how can these best be met?
2. What skills are needed by VET practitioners in the design of learning programs and resources and in the provision of assessment services to meet the needs of different client groups, and how might these be developed most effectively?
3. What are the critical success factors – individual, organisational and systemic – for VET providers in developing and implementing innovative approaches to teaching, learning and assessment, and how might models about good practice be most effectively transmitted?

The full review is available at http://consortiumresearchprogram.net.au/html/

Please send any comments to Principal Researcher. Dr John Mitchell johnm@jma.com.au and/or join the online forum at http://consortiumresearchprogram.net.au/forums/index.php#2

Indigenous communities in Australia often face chronic unemployment, lack of housing, poor health and low school attendance. Resultant social issues include high unemployment, imprisonment due to offending behaviours, exclusion from the education system, youth homelessness, and a high incidence of suicide and poor mental health and well being. These social issues are exacerbated in regional areas by fluctuations in the economy and geographical isolation (see http://www.refs.com.au/pathways.htm).

Clearly, Indigenous communities need access to alternative post-school education and training employment and business options. One response is the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), which aims to improve overall Indigenous employment levels.

To complement the Federal Government’s CDEP, the NSW Government cleverly created a major program for improving the health and living standards of Aboriginal communities in NSW. The Aboriginal Communities Development Program (ACDP) is investing $240 million over the ten years to raise the health and living standards of selected, priority Aboriginal communities. ACDP allocates funding to Aboriginal communities to provide new housing, repair, or to renovate or replace existing housing stock and upgrade or replace existing outdated water and sewerage systems or other essential infrastructure. CDEP with ACDP is a strong combination.

Benefits of the Aboriginal program ACDP include:

Each year, over a quarter of a million secondary school students leave school before completing Year 12. Many do not re-engage with education and find themselves unemployed for the long-term. These early school leavers become disengaged for different reasons, including homelessness, substance abuse, financial hardship, low self-esteem, mental health problems or lack of basic language and literacy skills.

The scale of the problem is reflected in the following statistics:

• the number of teenagers not in full-time study or full-time work in Australia is higher than at any time in the last six years (Dusseldorp Skills Forum Key Indicators 2004)
• two-thirds of the 270,000 young people annually who leave school early will become unemployed, or employed only in casual jobs (BCA 2003)
• over 50,000 young people who leave school early each year will never gain further qualifications (BCA 2003)
• the cost to Australia of young people leaving school early is estimated at $2.6 billion each year (BCA 2003).

To identify the support required by disengaged youth to enter training or employment, the South Australian (SA) Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology (DFEEST) undertook extensive research last year. Guided by similar initiatives by TAFE in NSW and Victoria, the research also investigated what related partnerships are required with the community and business.

The research focused on an initiative called  SA Works ‘Learn to Earn’, which offered youth the opportunity to participate in up to 1,000 hours of full time training in a trade-based area experiencing a skill shortage. The program went beyond trade skills, says DFEEST’s Project Manager Annie Fergusson: “The program set out to give participants employability skills as well as life skills.”

In the 2004 intake of 107 young people in the ‘Learn to Earn’ program, 74% were early school leavers. All were drawn from disadvantaged groups: 7% were disabled; 7% were from a non-English speaking background; 15% were Indigenous; 22% were long-term unemployed; and 35% were from rural areas. The program was conducted by TAFE SA at Whyalla, Gawler, Elizabeth, Port Adelaide, O’Halloran Hill and Tea Tree Gully.

A feature of the program was ‘project-based learning’, enabling participants to learn as the same time as contributing to projects that benefited the local community. For example, the O’Halloran Hill project pursued an environmental theme and involved the restoration of a trailer for a local wildlife protection organisation.

Fergusson’s research indicates that multiple strategies are required to address the needs of disengaged youth, such as the facilitation of project-based learning, the creation of “youth friendly” learning environments, the use of individual case management techniques and the development of durable partnerships. As training involves more than just mechanical skill building – in drawing on both values and emotions – Fergusson finds that one of the challenges for TAFE SA staff delivering programs for disengaged youth is “compassion fatigue”.

Going beyond the economic benefits and underlining the essential humaneness of assisting disengaged youth, SA Premier Mike Rann believes that “the best thing” about the program is that it gives young people “new skills, self-confidence and the ability to work constructively with other people.”

I explore this story further in my 'Inside VET' column in Campus Review, Wed 15 June 2005.

One Australian industry that needs to withstand intense global competition is the food manufacturing industry. However, in attempting to provide world-class products, food manufacturers face challenges such as maintaining a high quality level and overcoming the shortage of skilled staff during peak seasonal periods.

New ways to address the demanding training needs of food manufacturers have been developed by the Innoven Food Industry Centre within the Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE in northern Victoria. Innoven’s Manager for Manufacturing, Sandy Powell, explains: “If training is not going to get performance benefits for a manufacturer, then they simply won’t do it. So Innoven’s not interested in delivering training unless we’ve identified how it’s going to help the manufacturer.”

Innoven’s focus on client performance is part of a broader Victorian Government plan to keep Victorian industries competitive internationally and to build the workforce’s knowledge and skills. Innoven is one of eighteen TAFE specialist centres established with seed funding from the Victorian Government that are helping to build Victorian TAFE’s capability to meet the skill needs of industry.

Innoven’s new approach to training has netted it partnerships with some of Australia’s biggest players in the food industry such as Nestle, Kraft, SPC Ardmona and Tatura Milk Industries.

Innoven’s Powell sees the new TAFE approach as a business-to-business relationship: “While business managers recognise TAFE as a provider to the community for training, we also want managers to see TAFE as a provider of services to industry beyond traditional training, by jointly working to deliver measurable performance outcomes,” says Powell.

“We find that industry will invest in training and pay fee-for-service if we get the relationship right and value add continuously,” says Powell. “Industry is happy to invest in training that has a measurable return on investment.”

The traditional model for industry training is provider-centric, characterised by the following actions:

• Advertise the attributes of the training organisation
• Promote the availability of accredited training
• Deliver ‘one size fits all’ training in the classroom
• Produce graduates who may or may not be able to improve their enterprise.

In contrast, Innoven’s model is enterprise-centric and learner-centric and includes these steps:

• Research the industry and each individual enterprise
• Establish and maintain relationships with enterprise managers
• Determine each enterprise’s needs and issues
• Identify individual learner’s needs within each enterprise
• Provide teaching and assessment in the workplace
• Assist individual workers to obtain relevant accredited qualifications
• Deliver a business improvement for the enterprise.

Not surprisingly, around 95% of Innoven’s training is on-the-job learning, not traditional full-time training at the TAFE Institute. One of Innoven’s trainers is “embedded” within Nestle, delivering training at Nestle’s premises in Sydney and in Melbourne.

I develop this case study further in my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, in the issue dated 1 June 2005.

On 14 April 2005 I delivered a paper on ‘Effective VET networking with industry in the marketplace’ at the eighth Australian VET Research Association (AVETRA) Conference in Brisbane. Following are some excerpts.

Abstract

Increasingly, the VET marketplace requires vocational education and training (VET) practitioners to network with industry representatives. ‘Networking with industry’ is a new catch-cry within VET, but more research is needed to understand the complexities and benefits of such networking. This paper is based on research conducted over two years, 2003-2004, of forty networks funded by Reframing the Future. The paper builds on a report entitled Building Industry Training Networks (Mitchell 2004), and shows that networks are complex and can be difficult to manage, as participants’ needs and ambitions can constantly change. To be sustained, networks also need to continuously provide value for all members. The paper provides the VET sector with guidelines of how to effectively build networks that impact positively on the individuals and organisations involved and that enhance VET’s achievements in the marketplace.

Summary points

A summary of the key findings is provided below and a fuller description is provided in Mitchell (2004).

• The trust, goodwill, innovation and collaboration in industry training networks can support the national training system
• The need for industry training networks is increasing, as VET organisations become more aware of their dependency on relationships
• Open or loosely structured networks suit the diverse and dispersed membership of many industry training networks
• Building industry training networks is made challenging by factors such as inexperience in networking and the limited resources of small business to participate
• A deep knowledge of VET and high-level facilitation skills help industry training networks function effectively
• Efficient information sharing processes help industry training networks function effectively
• Industry training networks generate new knowledge about practices and possibilities in the national training system
• Individuals, organisations and systems benefit from industry training networks
• The achievements of the 200-2004 industry training networks are impressive given the complexities faced.

Conclusions

This research indicates that it is possible to effectively build and manage industry training networks in VET. The stories of human, organisational and systemic collaboration set out in Mitchell (2004) provide hope for the positive future development of the VET sector. Further encouragement is provided by additional accounts of the 2004 networks set out in Mitchell, McKenna, Perry and Bald (2005; in draft).

To sustain the achievements of the 2003-2004 networks, continued effort is required by the members of each network. All the networks will need to keep revitalising themselves, as members’ goals and ambitions change and external conditions shift. Effective networks are like every other type of healthy relationship in that they need continual care and attention. Ford et al (2003) caution that networks can easily become burdens and liabilities, if not managed effectively.

References

Ford, D., Gadde, L-E, Hakansson, H. & Snehota, I. (2003), Managing Business Relationships, Second Edition, Wiley,  West Sussex
Mitchell, J.G. (2004), Building Industry Training Networks, ANTA, Melbourne
Mitchell, J.G., McKenna, S., Perry, W. & Bald, C. (2005), New Ways of Working in VET, ANTA, Melbourne (in draft)

For a copy of the paper email me at johnm@jma.com.au

The creation of a one-stop-shop, primarily for the distribution of training packages and related materials, is one of the changes to the VET system proposed by DEST’s Skilling Australia and supported by the subsequent consultations. I investigate issues related to this shop in my ‘Inside VET’ column in Campus Review on 18 May 2005.

A national VET expert in learning materials believes that a shop that sells products is too narrowly focused: the shop needs to embrace the online trading of learning materials by teachers and trainers across the sector. “Simply selling a training package or related materials is a no-brainer. VET has a golden opportunity to revolutionise teaching in Australia, by embedding the new practice of online trading of learning materials,” says Dennis Macnamara, Business Development Manager for AEShareNet.

AEShareNet is one of the success stories of VET in the age of e-education, quietly constructing an effective online database of over 20,000 learning materials that can be bought and re-used by teachers and trainers. Macnamara advocates that AEShareNet’s “new-age practice” of trading learning materials should be fully endorsed and utilised in the proposed new VET one-stop shop.

The value of trading learning materials is potentially huge in the multi-billion dollar VET sector, says Macnamara. “At the recent AVETRA conference in Brisbane, an ANTA paper suggested that VET is an $8 billion business per anum in Australia,” says Macnamara.

“Let’s put that figure of $8 billion pa together with the fact that the standard VET teacher spends 20-30% of weekly time on lesson preparation or preparing assessment materials,” says Macnamara, “and you start to see that the development of learning materials consumes many hundreds of millions of dollars every year in VET.”

Twenty years ago a TAFE teacher needed expertise in using an overhead projector and operating a video recorder. Ten years ago the same teacher needed expertise in preparing PowerPoint slides. Five years ago the teacher needed expertise in receiving and sending emails and pointing students to useful websites.

“Today – in the age of customisation and just-for-you services – the teacher needs skills in producing learning materials and assessment tools to suit each and every learner, but can’t keep up,” says Macnamara.

There are two extreme models for developing learning materials. The old model is as follows:

• teacher/trainer hopes that uniform learning materials will suit groups of learners
• teacher develops own learning materials from scratch
• teacher unaware of who else has developed similar materials
• teacher doesn’t know how to buy and sell learning materials.

A new model for developing learning materials is:

• teacher analyses the learning preferences of each learner
• teacher decides what learning materials are to be built and what need to be bought
• teacher accesses online database to identify available learning materials
• teacher pays a modest license fee to use and modify available materials
• teacher decides which learning materials built in-house will be traded.

“There is a lot of reinventing of the wheel going on out there. Practitioners often don’t realise what learning materials already exist and how to get hold of them and legally adapt them,” says Macnamara. On the other hand, Macnamara’s research shows that “practitioners will remix stuff if we make it easy for them to do so”.

The solution is straightforward, says Macnamara: “Practitioners need to assess what resources are available for trading and to take out a licence that allows them to use, and if necessary adapt, the resources to their particular students’ needs. This trading gets materials into learners’ hands quicker."

There is increasing pressure on VET providers to find ways to link more closely with industry, to plan and deliver customised training. One my ongoing research interests is to identify different ways these links can be formed.

Forming such links is all the more challenging for large TAFE systems conducted by States or Territories. These systems are historically structured around a retail model of training delivery, where industry is expected to come to the TAFE campus and buy the training solutions that are sitting on the shelves.

These systems find it hard to change their supply-driven model, because the model is based upon historical factors such as the availability of campus facilities that are expensive and long-standing, industrial conditions such as the number of hours staff spend teaching in classrooms and records management such as counting the number of hours students spend in classrooms.

It is even more challenging for TAFE systems to form links with industry where industry is using new technology, because the TAFE providers need to design and deliver training in new fields.

This issue of TAFE-industry links in areas of new technology is the focus of my column ‘Inside VET’ in Campus Review, 13 April 2005. The column profiles an initiative by the Victorian Government, in funding specialist centres within Victorian TAFE Institutes.  The specialist centres established by the Victorian Government over the past two years support industries such as food processing, transport logistics, motor sports, engineering, printing, biotechnology, manufacturing and hospitality.

One of the nineteen centres established by the Victorian Government is Swinburne University of Technology’s TAFE Centre for New Manufacturing (CNM). The Swinburne Centre was established to collaborate with businesses in the manufacturing technology industry, focusing on new and cutting-edge technologies such as nano-technology, micro-technology and computer aided engineering.

Swinburne’s Centre has now developed alliances with over ten engineering companies including DMG, Festo, Headland Machinery and Marand Precison Engineering. This collaboration has resulted in a high standard of equipment being made available within the Swinburne workshop, enabling students to be trained in the use of the latest technology.

Recent examples of initiatives taken by the Swinburne Centre’s in linking with industry include:

• conducted training needs analysis with Precision Engineering and developed a course for laser operators
• conducted training needs analysis with an industry partner in advanced manufacturing control systems and manufacturing OH&S
• developed courses for company-specific needs: for example, Asi Field Bus Network donated $10,000 for the development of a customised course
• partnered Marand Precision Engineering, MiniFAB and Unidrive to host teachers in industry on release programs
• assisted a research company to develop a sophisticated wire cutting device.

I and others will continue to monitor whether the TAFE Victorian specialist centres, either in their original format or in modified formats, are effective long-term structures for TAFE-industry linkages. The Swinburne model is encouraging.

The Federal Government’s proposed twenty four Australian Technical Colleges represent one model for introducing senior secondary students to industries experiencing skill shortages. However, a model that potentially could have a wider impact than the Technical Colleges was recently launched in South Australia.

The model is the focus of my column Inside VET in Campus Review on 30 March 2005.

The model involves the joint delivery by University SA and TAFE SA of a new course, the Bachelor of Education (Design and Technology Education), which prepares teachers to provide design and technology subjects in secondary schools. The degree course commenced this year and sets a precedent with the delivery of the education methodology components by Uni SA and the technical competencies by TAFE SA.

UniSA Program Director Denise MacGregor says that the program meets a need identified by industry to invest in the education of young people so that they are suitably skilled and knowledgeable to contribute to the economy in areas such as electronics, engineering, building and construction. The new teachers will deliver a range of programs including ‘VET in Schools’ and the ‘Doorways to Construction’ program so that Year 11 and 12 students will see opportunities in the construction industry and other industries.                                                                

According to TAFE SA Manager Dianne Baron, the initiative aims to produce for schools “a new generation of what were formerly known as technical teachers …to implement or expand technical studies at a secondary school level”. The teachers will expose secondary school students to a broad skills base so secondary students can “make informed decisions about their career paths and opportunities in the future,” says Baron.

“Long term the program will not only assist the skills base of students in schools but will assist skills bases related to those trade sectors,” says Baron

Features of the SA model for producing ‘new generation’ secondary school ‘technical teachers’ are as follows:

• Demonstrates ability of three tiers of education to collaborate
• Enjoys strong industry support including scholarships for trainee teachers
• Addresses shortage of ‘technical teachers’ in schools
• Meets senior secondary students’ needs to undertake industry-related courses
• Assists senior secondary students to enter technology-based occupations
• Enables trainee teachers to acquire combined VET and higher education qualifications
• Accesses TAFE’s advanced workshop facilities
• Attracts strong support from schools especially in rural areas.

As a comparatively low-cost way to introduce senior secondary students to technology and related industries, the SA initiative complements the Australian Technical Colleges strategy and provides an alternative model that could be replicated nationally.

This example of an innovative response to skill shortages is expanded upon in my Campus Review column.

Australia’s manufacturing industries contribute over 10% of Australia’s GDP but are subject to intense global pressures, especially from countries with lower wage levels.

The urgent training needs of these industries were the subject of my column Inside VET in Campus Review, published 23 March 2005.

Bob Paton, CEO of the newly formed national Manufacturing Industry Skills Council, describes these pressures: “Manufacturing industries have certainly been the backbone for both domestic and export markets in Australia (but) many of them have been challenged in the last thirty or forty years by global markets and more significantly and more recently by the tightening up of subsidies and tariff regimes, to the point now where many manufacturing industries are competing without any tariff protection or without any favour from government.”

In addition, there are critical skills shortages for trade-based positions including cabinetmakers, electricians, furniture upholsterers, metal fabricators, metal fitters, metal machinists, refrigeration and air conditioning mechanics, sheetmetal workers, toolmakers and welders.

Features of manufacturing industries that contribute to skills shortages include:

• decreasing supply of available young people
• above-average age of employees
• inaccurate perceptions of manufacturing as a career option
• increased choice of career options for all ages
• increased labour mobility
• need for reconfiguration of training opportunities.

The newly formed Skills Council – Manufacturing Skills Australia – is the voice of over 75,000 businesses employing almost one million Australians, and co-ordinates research on manufacturing skills needs. The Council’s activities help the key Australian manufacturing sectors of metals and aerospace, process manufacturing, and textiles, clothing and footwear and furnishing to continue to play a pivotal role in the national economy. These sectors are determined to work smarter, says Paton: “In the last five-ten years there has been a strong focus on working smartly and finding the clever niches that Australian manufacturing can serve. We’re trying to compete with very cheap labour markets from overseas.”

A major response by the Council to the challenges of the global marketplace is the promotion of the new Competitive Manufacturing training package which covers ‘manufacturing practice’ and includes system management skills used at all levels in manufacturing, culminating in the skills needed by people such as manufacturing team leaders and operations managers.

The new training package typifies the Council’s whole-of-industry perspective, says Paton. “We will have a stronger focus on a more of whole-of-manufacturing approach to things and the competitive manufacturing initiative …is really coming home for us now, where we’ve got a range of new qualifications and competencies for people that are applying manufacturing practices across manufacturing, irrespective of the sector.”

Despite the international importance of the tourism and hospitality industry, there is a worldwide shortage of qualified and experienced staff. France urgently needs 30,000 cooks and waiters and Switzerland is facing “insurmountable problems” with a shortage of cooks that is “threatening the security of many hotels and restaurants”, according to Derrick Casey, Associate Director TAFE SA Adelaide North Institute, Regency campus. Australia has similar problems, says Casey.

Two common Australian responses to these problems are to train more young people entering the industry or to import qualified staff from overseas. Neither of these strategies has met the more urgent need of addressing the shortage of experienced staff. “There is a shortage of experienced chefs capable of holding a middle to senior kitchen management position, not of new trainees or graduates,” stresses Casey.

Significant numbers of experienced chefs are leaving the industry.  “While we appear to be training sufficient young cooks, we are not retaining them in the industry for long enough to ensure we have a reasonable pool of well experienced chefs or kitchen managers. 50% are lost prior to completion of their apprenticeship. A further 40% are lost within the first 8 years of their career, growing to an estimated 65% within 10 years,” says Casey.

With the support of key industry bodies and leaders, Casey is spearheading an innovative response to this skills shortage. The key strategy is the provision of long-term and structured training for young chefs promoted to the level of kitchen manager or above, as part of a “Young Leaders’ Program”.

Other strategies include changing the way funding is expended on each individual’s training, to better match the learner’s specific needs; the use of an electronic training plan for each learner to monitor individual progress; and the appointment of case managers to design a training plan for each chef.

Casey is confident that these multiple interventions will help retain more experienced staff in this critical industry for the South Australian and Australian economies.

I develop this story further in my Inside VET column in Campus Review - issue of 23 February 2005.

In 2005 I am the lead researcher of a national project called 'Analysing critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment' in VET. This is one of nine projects being undertaken by our consortium on behalf of the NCVER from 2005-2006. The focus of the research program is an examination of 'Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) of the Future'. My fellow researchers in the project on teaching and learning are A/Prof Clive Chappell, Andrea Bateman and Sue Roy.

Introduction

This is the consortium’s major project on teaching, assessment and learning – the core business of providers. The project acknowledges the challenges for VET practice identified by recent projects such as the Enhancing the capability project and the High Level Review of Training Packages project and the challenges reported in other recent research on VET pedagogy, both in Australia and internationally.

The purpose of the project is to identify critical issues in teaching, learning and assessment, in order to inform and influence VET practice. The project will examine learners’ preferences for how they approach their own learning and the implications for teaching practice. The project also will identify examples of good practice and the factors that help and hinder innovation in teaching, assessment and learning.

The research activity will:

• Identify what individual learners and industry clients want from VET in terms of teaching and learning experiences, services and support, and propose how these can best be met.
• Identify the skills needed by VET practitioners in the design of learning programs and resources and in the provision of assessment services to meet the needs of different client groups and propose how these skills might be developed most effectively.
• Summarise the critical success factors – individual, organisational and systemic – in developing and implementing innovative approaches to teaching, learning and assessment in VET providers, and propose how models about good practice might be most effectively transmitted.

Products

• Literature review that examines international and Australian trends in teaching and learning policy and practice
• Discussion paper as the basis for four focus groups
• Commentary on developments in England and Scotland in teaching, learning and assessment
• Description of major VET networks and how they contribute to building and promoting good practice in teaching, learning and assessment
• Fifteen case studies from Australian VET that demonstrate good practice in teaching, learning and assessment
• Two mini-conferences
• Final research report that summarises the findings of the research.

Benefits

VET practitioners will benefit from this research by:

• Finding out about the latest thinking around learners’ preferences, teaching practices and assessment strategies
• Increasing their awareness of the existence and value of networks in VET that focus on teaching, learning and assessment
• Comparing their own experiences with those recorded in the fifteen case studies
• Understanding factors that affect innovation in teaching, learning and assessment.

Simple ideas are often underpinned by sophisticated principles. This statement applies to a staff development initiative that commenced in 2004 at one of Australia’s high profile RTOs, TAFE NSW Northern Sydney Institute (NSI). The simple idea was to design, promote and conduct professional conversations among teaching staff.

Margaret Dix, the Institute’s R/Manager, Staff Learning and Development, explains the strategic need which led to the series of conversations: “Our Head Teachers expressed the opinion that there was a need for a greater emphasis on quality teaching and learning. Teacher’s practices needed to change and they particularly needed to embrace student-centred learning. But teachers were so busy actually doing their jobs there wasn’t time for learning how to do it better.”

Dix was also aware that teachers wanted to change, but lacked the time: “Practitioners have continually lamented that the quantity of planning and doing means that there is little time for them to check and act. There is little time to complete Kolb's experiential learning cycle by being what Schon calls a reflective practitioner,” she explains.

Having identified the willingness for change, Dix set out to find a strategy that would “allow teachers the time and space to talk to each other and to share their stories and practice across the Institute.”

With change agency funding from Reframing the Future and support from her Unit, Dix invented and implemented a strategy she called a “conversation space”, where members of the Unit regularly facilitate structured professional conversations at lunch time, around the Institute’s campuses. “The sparks that we use to encourage the conversation focus the conversation around topics that are current and sometimes challenging for VET delivery and assessment,” she says.

The conversations range over subjects such as holistic assessment, key competencies, the competitive VET market, funding, new qualifications and adult learning theory. 

There are immediate benefits, says Dix:  “Teachers feel energized. A conversation space introduces teachers to their peers and creates a network for sharing. It is reflective. It is based on goodwill. It enables teachers to review their practice about what they are doing and what they might do.”

Research and NSI’s experience shows that structured, professional conversations enable practitioners to:

• collaborate, reflect and clarify
• analyse challenges and identify solutions
• share successes and examine lessons learnt
• create the conditions for change and transform practice.

I extend this story in my Inside VET column in Campus Review, 16 February 2005.

Industry skills councils set up by ANTA - mostly in late 2004 - are an important part of the fabric of the national VET sector.

The councils are starting to develop innovative new products and processes to assist industry training. For example, Innovation and Business Skills Australia (IBSA) has already commissioned a report on identifying the link between the digital content industry and national training packages. The digital content industry ranges from digital publishing to interactive multimedia, virtual reality and website development. As a result of the report, IBSA, in conjunction with industry and other stakeholders, is reviewing all the training packages units with digital content, within its portfolio of eleven training packages.

IBSA’s cross-industry approach to digital content is made possible because it has assumed the responsibilities of five former national industry training boards, covering finance, printing, business services, information technology, telecommunications and the creative industries. IBSA has also taken responsibility for the fundamental industry in VET, education. IBSA’s response to the digital content industry exemplifies IBSA’s strategic mindset.

Another major initiative of IBSA is the creation of an integrated framework of competencies and qualifications, that appears very different to the linear list of competencies set out in a training package. For instance, in the creative industries, an employer or an individual could look at the integrated framework and decide to focus on a combination of sector-specific qualifications, say in multimedia, balanced by some other units, such as in small business, administration or sustainability. IBSA’s CEO, Sharon Coates, believes this integrated framework will enable industry to structure training in ways that are relevant to their immediate needs and will also accommodate industry’s changing skill needs in the future.

I develop this story further in my Inside VET column in Campus Review, edition 9 February 2005.

Here’s my roundabout Christmas message.

Currently I am preparing newspaper articles on the following aspects of vocational education and training (VET):

• the innovative use of coaching to assist complex staff development needs in a geographically distributed registered training organisation (RTO);
• the insights of a VET thought-leader who heads up the training division of a large organisation that is bearing the brunt of global technology changes;
• the subtle skills of a VET HR manager in the use of professional conversations;
• the determination of a middle-level manager in an RTO, in championing nationally the cause of language, literacy and numeracy.

I will attempt in these articles to reflect the values, energy, skills and knowledge of some very different VET practitioners.

These inspired VET practitioners deserve public recognition and respect, as they are a key to the future vitality of the VET system. While we need policies and structures, buildings and equipment, the most valuable asset in the VET system is the group of practitioners who inhabit it. Let’s particularly celebrate the leadership provided by those outstanding VET practitioners, like the four I am writing about, who demonstrate what is possible.

Over the last three months I assisted a State-wide educational organisation to develop a strategy for knowledge management. Today we held the final workshop for the project, at which I tabled for consideration the final draft of the strategy.

It was an inspiring workshop as it contained all the elements of high-level professionalism: passion, commitment, debate, determination and the shared value of assisting students to learn.

I mention these cultural issues because developing a KM strategy is much more than a mechanistic or technological undertaking, as it requires participants involved in the development of the strategy to consider what might be, for them, new practices, such as:

• examining one’s own tacit knowledge and attempting to make it explicit
• sharing, not withholding, knowledge
• generating new knowledge in concert with others
• trusting that the new knowledge will be treated with respect, not exploited
• accepting the uncertain outcomes of developing new knowledge
• networking with others, not running a solo race.

Some lessons I draw from this particular group of professionals are as follows:

• knowledge management, involving systems for generating, sharing and storing knowledge, is first and foremost a human activity
• knowledge management as a human activity is more about emotions, thoughts and relationships than about technological systems
• as a human activity, knowledge management will be approached differently by each group of people
• and as human knowledge is fluid, changing over time and in different people’s hands, knowledge management needs to be a continuous activity, and energy and commitment are required to sustain it.

This analysis will frustrate those who hope to find simple keys to knowledge management or the five easy steps to knowledge management. But this analysis will encourage those who see in the individuals and groups in an organisation the potential for managed knowledge to drive innovation and the continuous improvement of service provision.

Today I spent four hours in conversation with a good friend visiting from the UK who is the head of staff development in a very large international organisation. I had the pleasure of recently undertaking an assignment for his organisation in London, so I was keen for an update.

What struck me about this conversation was its similarity with a conversation I had yesterday with a Melbourne-based Australian in a similar role to him – a conversation which I summarized in my last weblog. This similarity indicates a number of things:

• that industries are becoming increasingly similar around the globe, so challenges in London are challenges in Melbourne or Sydney;
• that Australia is very much part of a global economy, so our work skills and quality levels and work outputs need to be world class, or we will fall behind. 

The conversation was invaluable for checking with him on the pressures on his organisation and the implications for learning and development. He indicated that the pressures on the creative industry in which he works are multiple and include the following:

• increasing competition from other suppliers
• increasing expectations from the government and other stakeholders
• increasing demand from customers
• increasing options made possible by new technologies.

A number of other points he made included:

• if his organisation stops innovating it will quickly become redundant
• creating new knowledge is critical to innovation
• to be innovative, organisations need to be driven by values and vision
• skill development is not a luxury in his organisation and in his creative industry: it is a necessity
• leadership continues to be a critical issue in his organisation, for without it the shared corporate vision will flounder
• change management that has 'heart' is essential in a vibrant organisation
• creating a coaching culture amongst managers is one of the most powerful ways of exchanging knowledge down the line.

He also commented on the value and success of coaching within his organisation – a major organisational focus over the last year. While he values mentoring and provides mentoring for a number of mentees, he sees a difference between coaching and mentoring:

“Coaching is non-directive, asking the person I am coaching to describe his or her goals, realities, options and likely responses and therefore owning the goals and targets by allowing the coachees to work it out for themselves. Mentoring is more about using your experience and knowledge as a mentor to help the mentee see the way forward and giving him or her the confidence to make different decisions or the breadth to see a more rounded context for work.“

The overall message from this conversation is that Australian organisations need to continue to improve both their skill levels and creativity, to ensure a viable future. Indeed skill development and creativity should go together: one is an indispensable adjunct to the other.

Today I interviewed the training manager of a large national organisation for a series of articles I am preparing on thought leaders in vocational education and training (VET) in Australia. She shared insights which are in stark contrast to the politically-based thoughts of those who would prefer to worry mostly about the bureaucratic arrangements in VET. 

Refreshingly, she talked about:

• her organisation as a knowledge enterprise that needs to foster a culture of innovation and creativity if the organisation is to meet increasing customer demand
• the need for her organisation to achieve sustainability and renewal
• the need for all Australian enterprises to encourage innovation, to ensure we become or stay world class
• the necessity for organisations to benchmark with others, to measure organisational growth
• the benefits of balancing quality and flexibility in the provision of training
• the need for her organisation to balance the development of technical competencies with the development of generic skills such as problem solving and communication
• the challenge of managers providing leadership
• the challenge of facilitating meaningful workbased learning.

The interviewee is excited about the potential for change through education and training and is confident that organisations like her own could bring about change, but is mindful of the complexities involved. Her mindset and the quality of her thinking are vital to the future of not just Australian industry but also of the VET sector.

The Commonwealth Government’s recent initiatives indicate that industry will have a much higher profile in VET decision-making. While industry obviously needs and deserves a prominent role in VET, an ideal arrangement is that all the stakeholders have a voice, as VET is like an ecological system containing many interdependent components. Interdependence means that we need each other.

The interdependence of industry clients and training providers is one of the key issues which emerged from research I am currently completing. The research project was funded by the Applied Research Program of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, and the report’s title is ‘Implementing flexible learning in workplaces’. This 2004 research study set out to identify the strategies used by a registered training organisation (RTO), the Central West Community College (CWCC), to implement flexible learning in the workplaces of two enterprises, a prominent food processing plant in Bathurst and a large abattoir in Wagga Wagga. The study also set out to identify the collaborative partnership model between the RTO and the enterprises and how that model assisted the implementation of flexible learning.

The report describes the multiple contexts in this VET study, including the regional context, the industry context, the enterprise context and the training provider context. The report demonstrates that the different bodies involved in these contexts – such as regional industries, local enterprises, local training providers and regional development organisations – are inter-dependent: that is, if learning is to contribute to a stronger regional economy, these different parties need to work together. A potential benefit of such collaboration is the design and support of learning activities that address industry skill needs and can be provided at times and in locations that suit local enterprises.

I develop this story further in the issue of the Campus Review to be published on 10 November. The full report will be available later this year at http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au

I have just drafted my column for Campus Review, due for publication on Wednesday 3 November, on issues around VET in Schools. The column makes the point that, no matter how well the Government’s new technical colleges perform, there will continue to be a need for a range of models for providing VET in Schools, to meet the breadth of demand. A variety of models for providing VET in Schools that result in VET-qualified, highly-motivated and employable school leavers will be highly valued around Australia.

The column discusses an outstanding example of VET in Schools in Queensland, between a high school and a private Registered Training Organisation.

The column shows that multiple success factors underpin this effective model for VET in Schools, as follows:

• First, the State Government provided policy-level encouragement for schools to find new ways to provide VET programs for their students.
• Second, the school formed a partnership with an experienced external provider that has a track-record of equipping students for the industry and has a philosophy that young people can learn while enjoying their learning.
• Third, the external RTO not only has extensive experience in the child care industry, it also has the skills to collaborate with school personnel.
• Fourth, real jobs are available for students with the nationally accredited qualification in child care, inspiring the students.
• And finally, the VET program was specially adapted by the school and the RTO to suit the specific cohort of learners, to ensure its relevance to the school students.

Such strong examples of good practice are very important to promote in the VET sector, to assist with the continued improvement of VET in Schools programs.

I have just drafted my column for Campus Review, for publication next week, 13 October 2004. The column focuses on the challenge of how to embed an innovation in a training organisation. To illustrate the many different strategies that are possible when supporting an innovation, I focus on WA’s Challenger TAFE, which is currently embedding sustainability principles in the delivery of Training Packages.

The definition of sustainability guiding the Challenger TAFE initiative is provided by the Western Australian Government, which defines sustainability as meeting the needs of current and future generations through an integration of environmental protection, social advancement and economic prosperity.

When Principal Lecturer Christine Cooper commenced work on the sustainability issue within Challenger TAFE, she noted that staff were not fully conscious of the issues involved:

From my observations and discussions with teaching staff within the Institute, it appears that many teachers already embed sustainability principles into their Training Package delivery.  It seems to be intuitive and ‘common sense’, but there is no record of what they do, when, or how they do it.

So she set about recording their practice and helping them become more aware of what they do.

The column cites a range of different strategies used to support the innovation. This snapshot of Challenger TAFE demonstrates a range of factors that need to be attended to, if an innovation is to be successfully implemented and maintained:

• Factors driving the innovation that are external to Challenger TAFE include industry support; state government policies; the ANTA National Strategy 2004-2010; targeted research commissioned by NCVER and various state governments; and national networking and collaboration enabled by funding from Reframing the Future.
• Internal factors supporting the innovation include executive-level support within the RTO; skilled facilitation; and a supportive culture for developing improved teaching practice.

As I reported in the ANTA-funded report in 2003, Emerging Futures, Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET, ultimately an innovation in teaching and learning requires student support and the VET managers and teachers/trainers need to exercise judgment, knowledge and sensitivity. The Challenger case study effectively encompasses all of these many success factors, and clearly demonstrates the high-level skills needed to embed an innovation.

I am preparing a presentation to be delivered next week on systemic strategies to stimulate innovation in VET.

To stimulate innovation in provider organisations, the actions that can be undertaken by a systemic body such as a State or Territory Training Authority (STA) are many and varied, from top-down funding or policy initiatives to making funding available at the grass roots so that innovation emerges organically. To stimulate innovation, an STA can perform many roles, including adviser, broker, advocate, promoter, services provider, researcher and funding body.

Some of my research findings about possible systemic strategies for stimulating and supporting innovation include the following:

• provide teachers with generic advice about where to access existing information sources on innovation in teaching and learning
• provide brokerage or mediation services, putting teachers in touch with other like-minded professionals
• provide customised advice and specific services, catering for the particular interests, setting and context of individual VET professionals or organisations
• conduct research and development on innovative teaching at all levels of VET
• provide incentives to promote higher levels of ‘innovativeness’ in all teachers
• generate support to build the ‘innovation capacity’ of all VET communities (in Mitchell et al, 2003, 'Proposal for a national mechanism for promoting and sustaining innovation in teaching and learning in VET', ANTA, Melb).

The one thing an STA cannot do is control all the variables.

My ongoing research into innovation in VET teaching and learning shows that VET teachers and trainers need to quickly move beyond conventional roles of designer, developer, deliverer and demonstrator, to becoming knowledge systems experts, learning brokers, learning strategists and facilitators of learning.

My research to date also shows that:

• There are considerable social, economic, political and technological drivers for innovation in teaching and learning in VET.
• Continuous innovation is needed in teaching and learning in VET, to meet the expanding demands of customers, clients and communities of interest who are all shifting their requirements towards much more customised and relevant training and training experiences.
• Students need innovation in their learning to better engage them as self-directed individuals and to encourage them to acquire the skills to meet the pace of change in industry and thrive amidst the changes in the world of work.
• Innovation is needed in teaching and learning in VET to cater for the trend towards lifelong learning, with the emphasis on self-directed, portable, timely, flexible and collaborative learning.

VET teachers and trainers need the capabilities to match the above. An important element is giving them better access to knowledge about the kind of professional teaching and learning practices that can help them fulfil their future roles. Continuous staff development, networking and other collaborative activities will help VET teachers and trainers meet these future roles.

On Wednesday last week, 1 September 2004, I enjoyed a long conversation with an outstanding VET practitioner who is a participant in a structured program I am currently mentoring. The practitioner is Margaret Dix, Manager Staff Learning and Development, Northern Sydney Institute.

Margaret set out for me the concept of a ‘conversation space’ that she has implemented in her very large TAFE Institute: ‘A conversation space is an opportunity for a professional conversation, for people with a passion for teaching and learning’. The features of the practice are as follows:

• In her Institute, a conversation space is created by offering colleagues the chance to discuss for an hour or so a topical issue in teaching and learning – while staff have their coffee and sandwiches.
• These conversation spaces are convened by the members of her Staff Learning and Development Unit and are attended by small groups of around 5-10 staff.
• The participants in the conversation space are normally challenged by a controversial quotation which sparks off conversation.

The initial motivation for the creation of the conversation spaces was that ‘teaching and learning often seem to be forgotten'. So she has asked her staff to spread the practice throughout the Institute, encouraging teachers to ‘talk about being a TAFE teacher’. Interestingly, many of the practitioners disclose that ‘this is the first time they have had the chance to think and talk about what they do as teachers'.

One of her initial findings from the conversation spaces is that the contemporary TAFE teacher needs to have an ‘eclectic range of skills and knowledge’ beyond skills of instruction and knowledge of an industry. For instance, she finds that ‘teachers need to be able to offer advice to students on a range of issues including career opportunities’. She also finds that the recent reports on VET pedagogy provide a useful framework for  understanding the breadth of skills and knowledge identified in the conversation spaces.

The discussion with this outstanding VET professional reminded me of the concept of a ‘professional learning system’ proposed by Hoban (2002) which I referred to in my unpublished report to ANTA in 2003 on a national – but locally implemented – mechanism for innovation in teaching and learning in VET. Hoban (2002, pp.68-69) suggests that a theoretical framework for a professional learning system should be based on the conditions required for teacher learning, discussed below:

• A conception of teaching as an art or profession, indicating a dynamic relationship between students, other teachers, school, classroom, curriculum and context. Because of these interactions, there is always uncertainty and ambiguity in changing teaching practice.
• Reflection is important - as teachers need to become aware of why they teach the way they do and to focus on understanding the patterns of change resulting from the dynamic relationships in which they are involved.
• Teachers need a purpose for learning to foster a desire for change and so content should be negotiated.
• The time frame is long term, as changing teaching means adjusting the balance among many aspects of the existing classroom system.
• A sense of community is necessary - so that teachers trust each other to share experiences such that topics for inquiry and debate may extend over several months or longer. As a result of this progressive discourse, teachers theorize and discussions are generative so that new ideas are always evolving.
• Teachers need to experiment with their ideas in action to test what works or does not work in their classrooms.
• A variety of knowledge sources are needed as conceptual inputs to extend the experiences of the participants.
• Student feedback is needed - in response to the ideas being tried out in the classroom.

The use of ‘conversation spaces’ for professional dialogue fits will with Hoban’s framework for a professional learning system. Sometimes there are good practices in Australian VET that are world class, such as this use of conversation spaces, but receive little recognition.

I am preparing a presentation to a State/Territory Training Authority on how the STA can assist innovation in its VET sector. Before it develops any strategies, I will be advising the STA to consider the following discussion of the definition of innovation, from my ANTA-funded 2003 report Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET (Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine).

There are numerous definitions of innovation in the literature. However, in the Emerging Futures project, a scan of the literature did not provide us with a satisfactory definition of innovation in teaching and learning for VET, so we adapted a working model based on Williams (1999) and West (in King & Anderson 2002).

Innovation is sometimes a renewal

Williams (1999) defines innovation as follows:  

the implementation of new and improved knowledge, ideas, methods, processes, tools, equipment and machinery, which leads to new and better products, services, and processes (p.17).

Williams (1999) points out that the word innovation is derived from the Latin innovatio (renewal or renovation), based on novus (new) as in novelty. Note that innovation is about the implementation of not just new ideas and knowledge, but also of improved ideas and knowledge. Hence, many of the case studies and vignettes in Emerging Futures are about the renewal or renovation or improvement of an existing educational service.

A sequence over time

Williams’ (1999) model shows that discovery and invention, as outcomes of creativity, lead to the process of innovation and the implementation of the innovation. Our study, Emerging Futures, attempts, where possible, to describe this sequence of activities in each of the fifteen case studies and vignettes.

Because of this sequence that starts with creativity, an innovation may take some time to be implemented. Many of the innovations described in Emerging Futures took some years to unfold. In adapting this model and in framing the report called Emerging Futures, the view was taken that innovation in teaching and learning needs to lead to improved outcomes. So the implementation of the innovation in the case studies and vignettes has included evidence of the reported benefits in each.

Types of innovation

Williams (1999) identifies different types of innovation: for example, product innovation; new and improved services; new and improved work operations, processes and methods; new and improved machine design, engineering and layout; new markets and marketing methods; synthesis; and replication. The case studies and vignettes in Emerging Futures are primarily of the following four types, or combinations of two or more of these types:

• new and improved services;
• new and improved work operations, processes and methods;
• synthesis – when existing ideas, products, services or processes are combined in some new way so that an improved idea, product, service or process results;
• replication – copying or duplicating or learning from others or applying someone else’s idea or invention in a new situation.

While developing a new service is more original and often more visible than improving an existing service or copying someone else’s, each type of innovation is of value.

Distinguishing features of innovation in action

The work of West and others (in King & Anderson 2002) provides further valuable assistance in the recognition of innovation and its distinction from organisational change in general. These authors characterise organisational innovation as follows:

• an innovation is a tangible product, process or procedure within an organisation;
• an innovation must be new to the social setting within which it is introduced, although not necessarily new to the individual(s) introducing it;
• an innovation must be intentional not accidental;
• an innovation must not be a routine change;
• an innovation must be aimed at producing a benefit;
• an innovation must be public in its effects (King & Anderson 2002, pp.2-3).

Taken together, the above thinking about innovation provided the Emerging Futures study with a basis for recognising innovation in VET and for making a selection of 15 case studies and vignettes.

The STA I am advising would do well to consider the above discussion and its ramifications for a sector. Managing innovation requires, first of all, clarification of the meaning and dimensions of the concept.

I am currently undertaking a research project funded by the Flexible Learning Advisory Group (FLAG) as part of its ‘Policy and Research Program - Engaging Industry in Flexible Learning - Applied Research Projects’. I began the study in June 2004 and will complete it in November 2004.

My project’s title is ‘The identification of transferable flexible learning strategies and models for the Meat and Food Processing Industries – in regional Australia’.

Part of the context for the project is that Australia needs vibrant regional and rural communities and economies that are attractive to new migrants and to other Australians. To be attractive, regional and rural communities need world-competitive industries providing sustainable jobs and security for their populations. Cost-effective, flexible training in regional industries is one of the keys to realising this vision for regional Australia.

This research study will identify transferable strategies and models of VET-related training and assessment in the workplace, arising from the evaluation of a range of flexible learning initiatives to be undertaken by Central West Community College (CWCC) in 2004.

CWCC has the full support of the enterprises involved, Simplot (food processing) at Bathurst and Cargill (meat processing) in Wagga Wagga, as well as the relevant industry advisory boards.

The focus of the research is

• to identify new and transferable strategies of VET-related training and assessment practice in the workplace for the meat and food processing Industries, involving the use of a range of flexible learning methods
• to identify models of how RTOs can engage with industries and enterprises in the meat and food processing industries in regional Australia, to apply flexible learning solutions to business problems
• to identify barriers, especially policy barriers, to the take-up of flexible learning in the meat and food processing industries in regional Australia and how can they be overcome.

In focusing on the above three issues, the research will monitor a range of flexible learning methods to be implemented in 2004 at Simplot and Cargill by Central West Community College. Data on innovative approaches will also be obtained from Burrangong Meat Processes in Young.

This week I am visiting Bathurst twice, interviewing staff of the CWCC and of Simplot and viewing operations at Simplot.

I have been asked to give a presentation in October to a State/Territory Training Authority (STA), which will remain anonymous, on what an STA can do to foster innovation in its vocational education and training (VET) community. This is a fascinating topic, not least because innovation cannot be prescribed or dictated. It is also an interesting topic because STAs are one step removed from practitioners, who need to lead any innovation in teaching. 

On the other hand, my research provides some clues about what STAs can do to facilitate innovation. Consider the following research findings.

Firstly, innovation can be stimulated by deliberate, intentional activities, such as conducting group discussions between VET practitioners and others to generate new ideas and to encourage research and reflection. Much can be achieved by creating a climate conducive to risk-taking and facilitating the sharing of ideas. My research finds that VET practitioners often stimulate innovation through the use of action learning sets, structured staff discussions, presentations from guest speakers, participation in conferences, or visits to other establishments where they may observe or benchmark. In addition to these structured approaches, innovation sometimes benefits from a contributor’s incidental or informal learning. 

Secondly, innovation can be facilitated or hindered by a range of organisational factors such as the organisation’s structure, culture, planning strategies and communication systems. For instance, innovation can be assisted if organisations remove rigid, bureaucratic hierarchies and develop cultures that value leadership, creativity, trial-and-error experimentation and thinking about the future and how it can be realized differently. Innovation sometimes can be assisted by structured planning and other times by a flexible approach to planning which leaves open the possibility of responding to unexpected changes. Communication systems can assist innovation, where innovative suggestions or ideas are shared across teams and organisational units, with a minimum of censorship.

These are just two of the findings from my research which STAs can interrogate, in developing a systemic approach to fostering innovation. If you look inside the above paragraphs, they present direct challenges to Registered Training Organisations and indirect challenges to STAs. However, fostering innovation in a VET system is critically important to the vibrancy, health and future development of VET, so this STA is to be commended for investigating the topic.

See also my posting on 11 August on defining innovation.

There are numerous models available for explaining how innovations are adopted, but one of the models that grabbed attention at the start of the 1990s was promoted by Geoffrey Moore. You may remember parts of it, such as the terminology he popularised - 'early adopters' and 'laggards'.

Moore first set out his model about ‘the technology adoption life cycle’ in Crossing the Chasm in the early 1990s when he suggested that different people adopt a technology or innovation in the following sequence:

• innovators (technology enthusiasts) adopt the innovation first
• then early adopters (visionaries)
• then the early majority (pragmatists)
• then the late majority (conservatives)
• then the laggards (skeptics).

The ‘chasm’ that he refers to in the title of his first book is the gap – or period in time – between the adoption of technology by the early adopters and the early majority. Mostly Moore was referring to different market segments, not people in your organization.

In his second book, Inside the Tornado (1995), Moore saw a time-split in market acceptance of a technology, as follows:

• in a first stage, the new technology gains acceptance among early majority (pragmatists) in one or more niche market
• in a later stage, the technology has passed the test of usefulness and is now perceived as necessary and standard for many applications.

Guess who are Moore’s major reference sites? Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, PeopleSoft etc. Starting to worry that Moore’s ‘technology adoption life cycle’ has little to do with either your organization or your customers?

In the most recent edition of Harvard Business Review (July-August 2004), Moore has extended his earlier theories in an article entitled ‘Darwin and the Demon: Innovating within established enterprises’. The article suggests that 'innovation comes in many forms – products, processes, marketing, business models, and more. Which kind of innovaton should you be pursuing? It depends on where you are in your product category’s life cycle'. Moore now tacks on to the ‘technology adoption life cycle’ a ‘market development life cycle’ and advocates that companies ride the market life cycle. Companies need to determine where they are along a time sequence as follows:

• Disruptive innovation
• Application innovation
• Product innovation
• Process innovation
• Experiential innovation
• Marketing innovation
• Business model innovation
• Structural innovation.

From the brief description I have given, does this expanded model appeal to you? On the one hand, there is probably some value in aspects of his expanded model, in that products such as Microsoft Office go through stages in the market, so different types of innovation are required at each different stage. On the other hand, most of us work for or with companies that do not sell Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes or Apple Macs, so the value of the model starts to decline.

In my experience, Moore’s models appeal to the need in us for answers and solutions. These models can make us feel more in control during the chaos that often accompanies innovation. While the models offer fragments of value that may be useful in our situations, overall the models distract us from confronting the awkward reality that markets and individual people vary in their responses to new technologies. Sorry to disappoint. Or perhaps you have already bought the dream and I can’t dissuade you.

TAFE frontiers is continuing its series of online discussions around the report I wrote in 2003 with Berwyn Clayton, John Hedberg and Nigel Paine, Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET.

See details of the July 2004 forum at the following site:

http://www.tafefrontiers.com.au/networks/emerge.html

The July 2004 forum focuses on a topic from the report: 'lifelong learning provides a rationale to be innovative'. The forum uses as its starting point the following ideas from page 31 the report:

The lifelong learning model provides teachers with a rationale to be innovative.

Lifelong learning is likely to become an expectation or entitlement, with individuals considering the right to continue learning as important as the right to work. Adult education will move away from the ‘content model of education’ based on teacher-designed curriculum. Educational programs will include technical and, generic skills (i.e., learning to learn, problem solving) as well as the opportunity to develop personal skills and attributes unique to the individual. Lifelong learning will provide the individual with renewable competence to address the future of work, respond positively to personal and social change, and have a much stronger sense of community.

The July online discussion forum in the TAFE frontiers special series is hosted by: Cathy Papalia, Swinburne University, TAFE Division.

The July forum will share some of the challenges and benefits of fleximode delivery. Full-time employed learners, enrolled in the Diploma of Business Human Resources at Swinburne TAFE Division, enjoy the benefits of project learning on weekends.

To participate, join The Source now and go to the forums at:

http://source.tafevc.com.au/forum_panel

I recently visited Scotland to compare the findings of my Australian research for Emerging Futures:Innovation in teaching and learning in VET (Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine; ANTA, June 2003), with Scottish research on innovation. The Scottish Further Education (FE) system undertook an extensive action research project on innovation called Focus on Learning: New Approaches to Improving Learning and Achievement.

The Focus on Learning - Final Project Report (May 2003) explains that:

• the two-year project was funded by the Scottish Further Education Funding Council and led by four Scottish FE colleges
• the primary purpose of the project was to develop, pilot and evaluate strategies designed to enhance student retention and achievement
• the principal aims included motivating staff to explore new approaches to raising achievement; raising staff awareness of recent developments regarding effective learning; and enhancing staff skill levels with regard to change and to planning, delivering and evaluating effective learning for their students.

These purposes and aims have some similarities with those of the Australian project, described below.

Scottish FE staff were encouraged to develop their own proposals for the project and fourteen interventions were planned and implemented during the two year project. The projects were entitled:

• A case study for electronics non-advanced provision – emotional intelligence, thinking skills and computer-aided learning
• Developing personal effectiveness and emotional intelligence
• The effects of physical factors and learning styles
• Think Positive! – emotional intelligence and professional studies for design students
• Can’t Remember – memory and recall
• Integrating study skills in the classroom
• Learning styles and achievements in Information Technology
• Using emotional intelligence and students with learning disabilities
• Facilitating adult learners to achieve
• Early intervention to increase student motivation and achievement
• Practical approaches to electronic engineering
• Study skills
• Physical factors and learning in media studies
• Thinking skills in business management programmes.

Many findings emerged from the fourteen projects. For instance, to raise the quality of student achievement FE staff can do the following: use emotional intelligence and reinforcement to build and support students’ self esteem; make students aware of their own learning preferences and styles and help them learn how to learn; and empower students to manage and assess their own learning.

Other findings include the value of helping FE lecturers to recognize the consequences for their own learning, of their learning preferences and style; to recognize that a narrow view of assessment and learning outcomes can limit achievement; to recognize that ‘soft outcomes’ and the ‘distance travelled’ as learners are real, if difficult to measure, achievements; and to understand the impact of emotional intelligence on the motivation and capacity to learn.

Finally, the Scottish study found that the FE system can be harnessed to help students and lecturers to recognize and overcome potential and actual ‘barriers to learning’ and help staff and students to re-focus on learning.

The Australian study, Emerging Futures, was funded by ANTA, managed by OTTE and published by Reframing the Future.

There were two aims of the Australian VET project:

• First, to provide a national review of good practice in innovation that is drawn from current provider activity and achievements. This aspect is addressed by the report Emerging Futures.
• Second, to investigate the development of a suitable national mechanism for ongoing information and support for the dissemination of teaching and learning practice and to strengthen and broaden innovation in the future. This is the subject of a second report which is with ANTA. 

The final report of the Australian project, Emerging Futures, is organised around six key questions: 

• Why is innovation in VET teaching and learning an issue?
• What is innovation in VET teaching and learning?
• How does innovation occur in VET teaching and learning?
• What fosters or impedes innovation in VET teaching and learning?
• Who gains from innovation in VET teaching and learning?
• What can be done to further support innovation in VET teaching?

Similar questions were asked in the Scottish study.

The titles of the fifteen case studies and vignettes in Emerging Futures provide insights into the breadth of innovative activity in the VET sector and are as follows:

• Learner-focused, continually-improved programs for 15-18 year old youths at risk
• VET in Schools program delivered in the workplace
• Assessment and training customised to meet the client’s strategic goals
• Re-engineering the teaching of textiles
• Simulation for assessment in trade areas
• An integrated approach to supporting and motivating distance students
• International benchmarking underpinning the assessment of key competencies in electrotechnology
• Multi-faceted innovation in teaching heavy vehicle mechanics in regional Western Australia
• Use of workplace-based mentors for training delivery of across a region
• Embedding innovation across the organisation
• Managing innovation in teaching in response to photography students’ and industry’s needs
• Simultaneously fostering multiple innovations
• Innovative training solutions in the metals area for trainees with cerebral palsy
• Innovation in teaching remote Indigenous students about mining operations
• Best practice delivery led by a national enterprise.

The titles of these fifteen case studies and vignettes show that the Australian study was different from the Scottish study in focusing on existing examples of innovation, while the Scottish project was based around new interventions. However, the findings from the two studies were similar, particularly that there is no one way to be innovative and there are multiple needs for innovation.

Copies of Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET are available from http://reframingthefuture.net (click on 'Publications' and then click on 'General Publications').

The central importance of professional judgment by practitioners emerged as a key finding from 2003 reports in Scotland and Australia on innovation in teaching and learning in vocational education and training.

The two reports were Emerging Futures:Innovation in teaching and learning in VET, which I prepared with Berwyn Clayton, John Hedberg and Nigel Paine (ANTA, June 2003) and Focus on Learning: New Approaches to Improving Learning and Achievement (Scottish Further Education Union, May 2003).

Emerging Futures found, like the Scottish study, that pressures for change are flowing with increasing force into teaching and learning practice within VET. As a consequence of this ongoing change, wider, deeper and more frequent innovation is now needed in VET teaching and learning practices.

However, as with the Scottish study, the Australian report shows that there are good grounds for optimism about the quality and scope of innovation in teaching and learning practices in VET. Positive futures for VET are emerging, as a result of practitioner innovation, in both countries.

The Australian and Scottish reports imply that the challenge for Further Education (FE) and VET is to work with and manage its practitioners in such a way that innovation can be supported to ensure new or improved outcomes for FE/VET’s constituents, including FE/VET organisations themselves.

The findings from Emerging Futures provide the basis for a conceptual framework for understanding and supporting innovation in VET teaching and learning. The framework shows that innovation in teaching cannot be reduced to a formula of step-by-step actions, as innovation in VET teaching and learning cannot be reduced to simplicities.

The framework demonstrates – as do the findings from the Scottish research – that extensive professional judgment, improvisation, experience and wisdom are needed by practitioners contributing to innovation in FE/VET teaching and learning.

The Scottish and Australian research projects show that:

• both further/vocational education systems are aware of the importance of not just identifying but also promoting innovation in teaching and learning
• there is value in understanding the complex nature of innovation and of highlighting the features of good practice
• we are at the start of a long journey in embedding and sustaining innovation across whole sectors.

One key message that emerges from the two national research projects is that innovation in teaching is a necessity if we are concerned with improved student achievement. Another key message is that a range of models for staff development is needed to engender innovation in teaching, as innovation has many dimensions.

A copy of Emerging Futures:Innovation in teaching and learning in Australian VET is available from http://reframingthefuture.net (click on 'Publications' and then click on 'General Publications').

A fascinating article appeared in the national press today, Thursday 15 July 2004, about Australians’ habits in using web news sites such as News Limited’s www.news.ninemsn.com.au and Fairfax’s www.smh.com.au

The article called ‘The way the web was won’ by Sheena McLean featured in The Australian’s Media and Marketing section, pp. 17-18.

McLean notes that the web is unique in that news editors can measure what stories are being read and how long people spend reading them. The results 'can challenge conventional judgments about news values’. My mind is focused on how the insights from sources such as these can be of relevance to educators.

Research released last week by Fairfax’s f2 shows that online news has come into its own as a significant source of information for a growing number of Australians during the working day. There are 5.3m unique visitors a month to the f2 sites and 4.8m to the News Limited sites. This includes all sites, not just online news. In the light of the survey, f2 sites are being updated at least 100 times a day and are incorporating more breaking news.

One industry representative commented on users’ habits:

The big thing about the web is choice…I think it is a more serious medium. Five years ago there were a lot more quirky stories at the top… to me it’s done a total reverse. The regular audience that keeps coming back to us every day is coming back for news.

But users want news of all different types: news about politics, sport, entertainment and science. Readers want both hard news and lighter entertainment.

Some other findings from the research are:

• news online is mostly used by people in their office, with lunchtime a peak period;
• the belief that online readers prefer shorter stories is confounded by the new evidence;
• preferences of online news readers vary markedly from Brisbane to Adelaide to other capital cities;
• Australian stories that get picked up by Google news in the US get massive hits.

One interesting finding about our values is that an article about a woman’s struggle with depression is news.com.au’s top story nationally so far this month.

How can educators use this intriguing information about people’s habits in viewing online news? I am not sure. But at the very least it is an encouragement for educators to revisit their market research about how students like to use the web and whether their tastes and habits are different from a year ago. There might be significant implications for the design of online learning.

I completed several years ago for the Flexible Learning Advisory Group some extensive market research around preferences of online learners which now could be revisited and extended, given this new evidence that online users’ habits are changing. 

See http://flexiblelearning.net.au/national/np_news.htm

In 2004 I am mentoring an educational manager who is developing an innovation strategy - in teaching and learning - for her large, metropolitan technical and further education (TAFE) Institute.

Developing an innovation strategy is a fascinating topic but it raises a raft of issues, which we are exploring together. Just one of the issues is what motivates practitioners to be innovative.

One of the findings from research I have undertaken recently is that innovation can be influenced by practitioners’ motivations or personality traits or sense of personal or professional identity.

My research indicates that VET practitioners have varying motivations, personalities and identities. For instance, VET practitioners may be motivated in one of the following ways:

• by a desire to model originality;
• or by a determination to provide improved services; 
• or by a desire for deserved recognition from peers.

Personality traits influencing innovation can include a preference for being unconventional; or a preference for operating in an ambiguous and challenging situation. A practitioner's sense of identity – say, as a humanist, an industry specialist or as an oracle or facilitator – may also influence her or his response to a proposed innovation in teaching.

The critical role of motivation has significant implications for an innovation strategy and for those managing such a strategy.

I discuss these and many other challenging issues around innovation in Mitchell, J.G. Clayton, B., Hedberg, J. and Paine N.,(2003), Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning, ANTA, Melbourne (available at http://reframingthefuture.net click on 'Publications' and then click on 'General publications')

It is interesting to see the way the corporate sector is quickly discovering the value of an email database, while the education sector remains hesitant.

I recently arranged for a speaker from an online marketing company to address a group of senior educational managers. The speaker explained how his company helped a large hotel chain acquire an email database of 110,000 Australians in a number of weeks, mostly by offering people the chance to win free accommodation for a weekend. A raffle. People submitting their email addresses were asked twice whether they would be happy to receive future emails, promoting special offers from the hotel chain. Transparent process. Voluntary participation. The customer can choose to be removed from the database at any time. No tricks.  

One of the senior educational managers I work with followed the advice of the marketing expert and placed a similar promo on his college's website, offering visitors to the website the chance to win a voucher to an educational course. He collected 525 email addresses in the first nine days. He is now using these email addresses to market new courses to his database of customers.

This same educational manager, Gerard Newcombe, Executive Director, Manly Warringah Community College, had 40 people on an email database three years ago and now has 5,000. Gerard has reduced his college's annual expenditure on coloured brochures by around 33% and, for almost no cost, emails sections of his brochure to people on his database. He only sends them the sections which they have previously expressed an interest in. Personalised service. Everyone wins.

See the website of Manly Warringah Community College at the following URL: http://www.mwcc.nsw.edu.au/docs/index.php

A challenge I am working on is to persuade other educational managers that compiling and using a database of customers can be undertaken in an entirely ethical manner, while delivering the customer with services he or she wants, and helping the educational organisation achieve more efficiencies and enrolments. But as I find with much of my work, education organisations are often more conservative than their customers.

While it is interesting to see the term innovation appearing in more strategic plans and in more duty statements, there is a concern that the complexities surrounding innovation may be underestimated.

The complexities of innovation are being addressed directly by a current initiative in Victorian TAFE. I am pleased that the report on innovation for which I was the lead author, Emerging Futures: Innovation in teaching and learning in VET (Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine; ANTA 2003) is the focal point of a practitioner network in Victorian VET. Each month, this network organised by TAFE frontiers is taking a key idea from each chapter of the report as the basis of online discussion. See http://www.tafefrontiers.com.au/networks/emerge.html

The discussion in late June was around some ideas in Chapter 2  - What is innovation in VET teaching and learning? - of the report:

In response to the pressures for change, VET has established a reputation for being sensitive to shifts in community and industry needs and providing flexibility of educational content and provision. The scale, magnitude and diversity of ongoing change has created a need for wider, deeper and more frequent innovation in VET teaching and learning practices. The sharper focus is on learning that leads to better outcomes and performance for learners, including ensuring relevance, ensuring personal service, providing 'just for me' training, supporting 'learning in context' and supporting performance support systems.

In June 2004, two case studies were discussed online, in relation to the above ideas. Over a one week period, staff from the Fashion Department at Gippsland TAFE shared some of their innovative methods for engaging students. This forum had particular appeal to teachers involved in assessing practical subjects. Over a second week in June, another forum was based around a series of Gippsland TAFE case studies that have been compiled for TAFE frontiers.

By unbundling and dissecting specific innovations, Victorian TAFE practitioners are teaching themselves more about the variable nature of innovation in the world of teaching and learning. This analytical approach will set them up for future success in fostering and sustaining innovations.

TAFE frontiers is to be commended for the way it has constructed this focused practitioner dialogue.

The report ‘Emerging Futures’ is available at http://reframingthefuture.net (click on Publications and then click on ‘General publications’).

A focus on innovation in teaching and learning is growing in popularity within educational organisations.

I am currently preparing a presentation on innovation for a conference to be convened by CURVE (Centre Undertaking Reseach in Vocational Education) and held in Canberra on 8 October 2004. The conference is called "New Thinking on Teaching and Learning" and more information is available from Thea Fisher at CURVE: Thea.Fisher@cit.act.edu.au

The title of the presentation is 'Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET: what we can and can’t change'. The title is a deliberate play on the title of the well-known book by psychologist Martin Seligman, What you can change and what you can’t, in order to emphasise the complex challenges of deliberately seeking to bring about innovation in VET teaching and learning.

The presentation will focus on key findings from the ANTA-funded OTTE-managed project that resulted in the 2003 report Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET (Mitchell, Clayton, Hedberg and Paine), particularly the finding that managing innovation in teaching and learning requires high levels of knowledge and skills, including extensive professional judgment, experience and wisdom.

The presentation also draws on findings from my recent research for Reframing the Future in two related fields: how VET practitioners can develop skills in change agency and how VET practitioners can improve their practice.

Key references:

Mitchell, J.G., Clayton, B., Hedberg, J. and Paine, N. (2003), Emerging Futures: Innovation in Teaching and Learning in VET, ANTA, Melbourne (see particularly Chapter 6)  (http://reframingthefuture.net click on Publications, then click on General Publications)

Mitchell, J.G. (2004), The Skilling of VET Change Agents, ANTA, Melbourne (http://reframingthefuture.net click on Publications, then click on Sub-program 2)

Mitchell, J.G. (2003), Effectively Structuring Communities of Practice in VET, ANTA, Melbourne (http://reframingthefuture.net click on Publications, then click on Sub-program 4)