E-learning is helping refugees and overseas students studying in Australia to expand their knowledge of the English language to increase their training and job opportunities.

A number of innovative e-learning projects are focusing on Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to help refugees and foreign students adapt to the Australian way of life.

In Victoria, the Mainstreaming E-learning @ AMES Project is helping refugees to integrate into the Australian way of life, and also gain employment to support themselves.

The Adult Multicultural Education Services (AMES) has set up the Intermediate Labour Market program, through which AMES clients are employed and gain valuable local work experience.

These include Settlement Information Officers who support refugees from countries like Burma and Sudan with basic information, such as how Medicare works, how to find a doctor and how to enrol children in school.

The Settlement Information Officers are studying the Certificate III in Business through AMES to ensure they’re further qualified for the job market. The training is carried out face-to-face and the project uses web 2.0 technologies to help them with assessments.

AMES E-learning Project Coordinator, Josie Rose, said the project is showing students how to use the technology before encouraging them to have a go themselves, supported by a teacher and a peer mentor.

“So far we have shown them how to put text on a wiki page and their mentor is showing them how to do other tasks with it. They will use the wiki as a knowledge management tool, recording what they are doing in their studies, and to develop valuable contact information to help them to support their communities.”

The students will also be assessed on their interviewing and recording techniques via MP3 files. This means they will have a strong e-portfolio to demonstrate their skills to potential employers.

In the ACT, the Canberra Institute of Technology has been finding that more of its students need support with language skills, particularly those from Africa, India, Japan and Hong Kong.

But it is not just conversational English that Canberra Institute of Technology’s Science, Forensic and Engineering Centre is looking at. The Science Language Project is specifically addressing terminology commonly used in chemistry, biology and genetics.

Currently, about 15-20% of students studying the Diploma of Laboratory Technology and Diploma of Animal Technology are from non-English speaking backgrounds.

These students can be disadvantaged by their lack of exposure, not only to common conversational English, but to the technical and scientific terminology essential to successful study.

As a solution, Canberra Institute of Technology is creating a CD-ROM that will introduce a specific term and allow the student to hear the pronunciation as many times as they wish.

The subsequent exercises provide the student with the opportunity to practice recognising the pronunciation of the term, spelling and fitting the term to the correct definition or explanation.

Education Manager, Anne Brown, says that once the template has been completely tried and tested it will be an easily transferable resource to other industries.

“There are a lot of migrant agencies that help people with basic English but sometimes these students need more than that to complete their studies and get a job. We are already looking at using this resource for trade students and I can see it will be of great benefit to other areas.”

In a project which spreads across a number of registered training organisations (RTOs), the NSW-based Adult Migrant English Service (NSW AMES) has set up the JobEquip2 Project. It is using the internet to connect students in Sydney, Coffs Harbour and the Northern Territory.

The students are studying Certificate III in Spoken and Written English plus a range of other vocational education and training courses, including children’s services, business administration, aged care work and Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander primary health care.

Students can take part in weekly activities, online classroom sessions and chat through interactive course management software Moodle.

Traditionally, these courses have all been delivered face-to-face. Resources, activities and assessments are being put online, including video resources developed by the team and those from the Flexible Learning Toolbox (Toolbox) Repository.

NSW AMES Online Learning Coordinator Dorothy Waterhouse said the online resources would take pressure off face-to-face delivery.

“These courses are very intensive so we wanted to take some of the workload out of the classroom so students could study in their own time. It makes the classroom time more valuable and gives students the opportunity to accelerate their learning if they want to.”

Other innovative e-learning projects with a TESOL focus include:

• In South Australia, the TESOL Online Project, led by Tabor Adelaide, is working with a variety of disadvantaged learners, including rural and remote, mature aged workers and learners with low language and literacy levels, as well as those from a non-English speaking background. Tabor Adelaide is evaluating e-tools and developing interactive resources to enable synchronous and asynchronous communication between lecturers and students, including asynchronous online audio assessments.

· In New South Wales, the E-learning @ Your Library Project is working with two groups of English for Further Study students who plan to go on to higher education, either through an RTO or university. In order to do this, they need a better understanding of how to use the library system effectively and efficiently, evaluate the information they find and use the information in an appropriate way to complete assignments.

As a solution, TAFE NSW Sydney Institute has come up with the concept of ‘i-lectures’, which it is creating using Adobe Captivate and Adobe Presenter. They are also creating 10 podcasts looking at topics such as plagiarism, copyright, library resources and photocopying. These will be available in Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish and Arabic, as well as English.

These projects are being undertaken with funding and support from the national training system’s e-learning strategy, the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework).

For more information about these and other innovative e-learning projects, visit: http://flexiblelearning.net.au/innovations

For regular updates on these and other innovative e-learning projects, visit the E-learning Innovations Blog at: http://flexiblelearning.net.au/innovationsblog

For more information about the Framework, its products, resources and support networks, contact: (07) 3307 4700, email enquiries@flexiblelearning.net.au or visit http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au.

This is in contrast to the highly disciplined-centred approach recently announced by the Commonwealth Government for a national curriculum beginning with English, History, Maths and Science.

Speaking today at the Desert Knowledge Symposium in Alice Springs today, Gregor Ramsey from Teaching Australia said that learning how to function successfully in both the indigenous and the wider Australian society is critical.

“Rather than saying that education and learning is divided up into traditional disciplines, whose names we know are hundreds of years old, an alternative is an approach based on themes.”

“For example, we don’t get up in the morning and say we are going to do physics or going to look up history; what you say is that you have a problem or a job to do and search out what the things are that will best help to solve that problem.”

“So rather than having silos of knowledge, the idea is for students to learn in a way that best suits how they might have to face issues and problems on their own.”

“The first and most important theme is Language and Culture; not just indigenous language and culture, but English as well. Both are important in the way they guide young indigenous people in the world.”

“Indigenous language defines, describes and allows indigenous people to interact with country, whereas the English language internationally, is the key to the global economic world. So anyone denied English is in a sense denied access to the economic world.”

In fact, Gregor believes that there is a strong case for teaching every subject using techniques based on how English as a second language is taught. Separate studies in traditional language and culture should still be maintained.

“I would like to see that English becomes as important to Indigenous people as their natural language.”

“It is important that indigenous people have both in order to successfully thrive in both worlds.”

VET Reload version two is based on the popular RELOAD (Reusable eLearning Object Authoring & Delivery) open source tool and has been customised for Australian VET users.

VET Reload is used for packaging and describing e-learning content. The tool enables content to be packaged so that its structure and navigation can be interpreted and applied across a range of learning management systems.

It can create SCORM or IMS content packages to the standards required for contribution to LORN (Learning Object Repository Network).

VET Reload also enables users to check and validate their packages and metadata for errors.

This open-source e-tool was developed by the national training system’s e-learning strategy, the Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework).

The Framework’s E-standards for Training Business Manager, Owen O’Neill, said VET Reload provided a one-stop shop for developers of learning objects.

“It’s an easy and efficient way of packaging content that conforms to national e-standards, making your product more accessible and user-friendly,” he said.

For more information about VET Reload or to access this resource, visit: http://flexiblelearning.net.au/e-standardsnews

For more information about the Framework, its products, resources and support networks, contact: (07) 3307 4700, email: enquiries@flexiblelearning.net.au or visit: http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au