It’s time to redesign how I do my training. My company, Adult Literacy Education & Consulting Limited, otherwise known as ALEC, has been doing some pretty successful work in the literacy and numeracy space for the last couple of years. It’s time, however, to rethink how we’re delivering this.
The course that we deliver is called the NCALNE (Voc). This ridiculously long acronym stands for the National Certificate in Adult Literacy and Numeracy Education (Vocational/Workplace). Basically, we deliver a train the trainers course with a focus on embedding literacy and numeracy. The idea is that trainers and teachers of all sorts really need to deal with the literacy and numeracy in the context of their own training.
In other words, it’s not literacy and numeracy for everything. It’s the literacy and numeracy that their learners need for their field of expertise. For example:
- The specific and technical vocabulary of a particular trade or vocation.
- The particular formulas or calculations required for this kind ofwork.
- Reading and writing certain kinds of texts.
What we provide in the training is a particular way of thinking about training that encourages (or forces) people to work out the literacy and numeracy demands of their training, and then compare this with where their learners actually are. The difference between the two is where they need to pitch their context specific literacy and numeracy training interventions.
So, that’s what we’ve been doing. Now, what about the redesign? Well… we’re working on it. But whatever we do we need to deal with these issues and assumptions:
- Government funding for training is not sustainable.
- Many tutors are geographically isolated and cannot join larger groups for face to face training.
- Tutors and organisations are looking for customizable training solutions that can scale up and down according to need and budget.
- Some organisations have situations where some tutors are trained and some are not.
- Other organisations have some tutors with all the skills but not the qualifications. These people don’t want a course in the traditional sense.
- Timeframes need to be flexible (including very quick and very slow).
- Professional support for participants in professional development needs to be flexible and needs based.
- Evidence-based portfolio approaches are the way forward, especially when combined with professional conversation assessment, verifier attestation, recognition of current competency (RCC), and recognition of prior learning (RPL).
- Maintaining quality control over the whole process is also critical.
- Any solution needs to be cloud-based, always on, and available on any device any time.
Watch this space for further news of the NCALNE (Voc) FastTrack… Coming soon to a website near you.
