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[Carole - off-screen] Hi Pauline. Can you introduce yourself please?
Hi I'm Pauline Farrell from Box Hill Institute
and my official title is Executive Manager of Blended E-learning Solutions.
[Carole] And what is this GPS program?
GPS learning pathways is effectively a student induction orientation program.
GPS can stand for a couple of things:
one is for global positioning, so where are you in your career? Where are you in your life?
It can also... one of our clever teachers suggested it could be
Goals plus Planning equals Success.
The program is something that so far 5600 students have gone through
and they do it hopefully within their first
week to two weeks of commencing at Box Hill
if possible within the first two days
and they come into a classroom for four hours
and that's integrated with the ACER testing as well
for our literacy and numeracy benchmarking
and they go through a series of tasks.
But effectively it is structured around
a personal plan, an education plan and a career plan.
[Carole] And how are the e-portfolios being used in that program?
Well Julieanne was very clever, and actually came up with the idea
of integrating some of the key assessment tasks into Mahara e-portfolios.
So we all feverishly worked away to ascertain which was the most appropriate
and it was very quickly included within the GPS learning pathways program.
It was part of our strategic vision of introducing both,
but we wanted to make sure that we had the opportunity
to introduce the students to both of those systems on the first day.
Now the primary outcome of the GPS learning pathways program
is not introduction to systems - that's a secondary outcome.
What we very much look for is context.
Why would they come in and sit there and learn to use Moodle?
So we made it all about them.
and as I've discussed with you in the past
the whole of the GPS program is designed against pressure points
within the student satisfaction surveys.
So what we did is we took an analysis of
the things that cause dissatisfaction or stress
- pressure points -
things that could be potential exit points for leaving Box Hill.
Some of them were really interesting,
some of them were things like: the computer room's not working,
not being able to get onto the system, not being able to access support when they needed it,
things that usually I would have not associated as being such a high priority.
So what we did was we went through the survey
and picked out all of those key pressure points
that could be merged into an induction program
that was consistent across the whole Institute,
because one of the pressure points was
that students felt that they weren't always
inducted appropriately into the Institute -
they may have been only inducted into a small component
of the larger entity that they were actually enrolling in.