Using digital methods to enrich apprenticeships

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Using digital methods to enrich apprenticeships

This video highlights some of the key advantages to using digital throughout the apprenticeship journey.

The trainers and apprentices in the video clearly enjoy the ease, speed, creativity and reduced paperwork that digital can provide for them. Practitioners still analyse what their apprentices need and then work out what they will respond to. Importantly, they are always thinking from the point of view of the learner.

An apprenticeship programme should make use of digital methods as a natural part of what the learners are doing, to:

  • motivate learning
  • prepare learners for using them in the digital workplace
  • improve the way learning and assessment fit with the employer’s needs as well.

In the ‘Future Apprenticeships Toolkit, section 10: Curriculum Design’ suggests three particular issues you might want to consider. These are:

  1. Making sure that the early stages of a programme are sufficiently engaging to retain apprentices through into end point assessment
  2. Finding innovative, effective and contextualized ways of meeting minimum Maths and English requirements
  3. Integrating technology, or using distance learning to support achievement.

When encouraging apprentices to record evidence for their portfolios, you and your apprentices should always be aware of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ensure that these are complied with at all times. You can find out more about this by visiting the EU GDPR website in the See Also section below.

It is worth noting that while you may ask learners to produce a portfolio demonstrating their skills, this does not form part of their End Point Assessment (EPA), and is only to be used as a guide to show when a learner is ready to undertake their EPA.

Have a go:

We have combined these highlighted elements in a draft for a digitally-enriched learning design. So your task is to:

Create your own version of a digitally-enriched learning design for a session that should ’engage learners in the use of digital methods for their working practice’.

To help you with this, you can link to an online design tool specially developed for teachers and trainers called the ‘Learning Designer’. If you’re not sure about using this site (it’s free and open to all), just follow the instructions below or read through the ‘Learning Designer Guide’ link in the See Also section.

  1. Go to the Learning Designer website and register or log in.
  2. Click on the ‘Browser’ tab at the top of the screen and select the Education Sector – ‘Vocational Education and Training’.
  3. Search for and open the design ‘Using video to showcase a skill’.
  4. Read through to see how it would work.
  5. In Learning Designer, click on ‘Turn Editing On’ to contextualize the design to your own learning context.
  6. Click on ‘Save’ to save your design to your personal workspace (no-one else can see this).
  7. Click on ‘Export to MS Word’, to save the text version of your design to your computer.

You can also edit the Word version of this design in the Downloads section below.

As you create your session plan, consider the following:

  • your own learning context
  • the time given to each activity
  • the learner numbers in each group
  • the wording of activities.

You now have an initial draft of a digitally-enriched learning design that could address some of the issues mentioned earlier.

To share your learning design, go to this Padlet and post the url (simply copy and paste its web address), with a title that describes your specific context. Then you can look through other participants’ designs, to see what they have done with the same idea.

Have your say:

  • Was this activity a useful way of thinking about your learning design?
  • Discuss in the Comments how you can use or adapt good ideas in other participants’ designs for your industry.

Share and discuss your thoughts with other learners in the Comments.

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