Sponsor/year: Faculty of Science, Engineering & Built Environment, 2016.

Project leads: Dr Adam Cardilini, Dr Karen Young.

Aims: Better prepare students for employment through integrating career development into curriculum.

Underpinning theories/literature:

• Flipped learning toolkit: research and resources for creating ‘flipped classroom’ learning.
• Digital game-based learning: it’s not just the digital natives who are restless: introduction to game-based learning.
• Universal Design for Learning in higher education: website with explanations, examples of how UDL is applied in higher education.

• Cloud-based: The units are fully cloud-based, so students can access them wherever they live or are located on work placement, and at whatever time they please.
• Logically sequenced: Elements are selectively released in sequence as a student completes activities, to provide a logical pathway through the unit.
• Constructively aligned: The assessment, learning activities and resources rigorously align around the overall aim of preparing and supporting students while on a work placement, so students immediately see the relevance and importance of their activities.
• UDL design: The design is based on Universal Design for Learning principles and provides streamlined information and activities in a variety of modes: visual, audio, text and interactive.
• Accessible: The unit resources are fully accessible, with captioned videos and accessible fonts, colours, styles and images. They were thoroughly user-tested before full release.
• Feedback in multiple modes: Feedback on activities is a mix of automated-immediate for some activities and guided peer review for others. Peers use rubrics and online discussion postings to comment on each other’s work.
• Prompts to encourage and motivate: Automated ‘intelligent agents’ prompt and encourage students at key points, to help motivate them to complete their tasks and stay on track in the unit.
• Personalised, expert feedback: Deakin’s graduate employment experts provide personalised feedback on students’ resume assessment, which requires students to have a resume of professional standard.
• Reflective activities: The major assessments encourage students to reflect on their past, current and future employment opportunities and thus build their preparedness for work in their chosen field.

Unit assessment and learning activity structure

An alternative format may be downloaded here: Unit assessment & learning activity structure (DOCX 14KB)

• Increased student confidence: Pre and post tests show significant improvements in students’ confidence with different aspects of WIL (interview).
• Exemplar: The units provide a working exemplar of an inclusive, scalable, stand-alone and self-paced online learning design, which was developed through collaboration across faculties and divisions and now informs many future developments across the University (interview).
• Capacity building: Project staff and collaborators developed technical, pedagogical and content-related (career preparedness) skills through their involvement in the units’ development, which have been applied in many subsequent e-learning projects (internal report).
• Whole-of-faculty WIL: SEBE now has a scaffolded whole-of-faculty WIL approach embedded as a core unit (interview).

• Willems, J, Young, K, Cardilini, A & Teychenne, S 2016, ‘WIL: fully flipping online: A novel pedagogical approach in STEM (PDF 1.29MB)’, ASCILITE Conference, November 2016.
• Young, K, Willems, J, Cardilini, A, Kimber, S 2016, ‘Cloud innovation: renewing a fully-online unit for engaged learning (PDF 1.36MB)’, Deakin Learning & Teaching Conference, November.