Active Learning Partners

All the very best to everyone for our holiday season here in Australia; enjoy your holidays if you celebrate Christmas and New Year, and to all our clients, colleagues and friends, we wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous year in 2018.

It has been a pleasure working with all of our clients and colleagues during 2017. Some highlights have been catching up with international friends and colleagues at the IMCA seminars and the European Diving Technology Committee meeting in Europe, assisting with ADAS Train the Trainer training in Australia and New Zealand, working with the Dive Supervisor Training Simulator, and finishing up with running the face-to-face component of the Dive Project Management course in Byron Bay, near our hometown, where we enjoyed meeting new people with an array of interesting experience, and renewing old friendships with our guest speakers.

We will be taking a little time off between Christmas and New Year, with our office closed from 22nd Dec through to 2nd January. We will also be unavailable from 4th to 17th February taking a much-needed break on a cruise ship, so we won't be contactable by e-mail or phone during much of that time. We will check e-mails occasionally, but if it is urgent, please send a text message as well to 0439842237 - although there may still be a few days delay. If it is urgent and related to our work with the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme, please contact the ADAS office instead - contact details at their website www.adas.org.au.

Once again, best wishes to all for a happy and healthy New Year.

Professor Grant Campbell in the Chemical Engineering Lab at Huddersfield University

We received a personal guided tour of the Huddersfield University Chemical Engineering teaching lab while visiting my brother Professor Grant Campbell in late September, on our recent visit to the UK. I was thrilled to hear recently that Huddersfield University has achieved international accreditation for their Chemical Engineering degree program through the Institution of Chemical Engineers. Congratulations to all involved. Here is a link to the announcement https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/icheme-accreditation-huddersfield-chemical-grant-campbell/

I also have the good fortune to have many opportunities to discuss education methods with Grant, which has led to some great innovations and different approaches. Grant won the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) Morton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Engineering Education, and has published some very interesting papers on education, including "Encouraging engineers to read: A book-based final year assessment" and "Setting up new chemical engineering degree programmes: Exercises in design and retrofit within constraints" as well as contributing to various books. I find Grant's ideas and discussions inspirational and try to ensure that my students in the diving industry, and particularly in the Dive Project Management course also benefit from his ideas.

Thanks Grant for the continued inspiration, and good luck with the future of the Chemical Engineering program at Huddersfield University.

Here I am in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, a few hours out of Shanghai. Enjoying the springtime, and watching the blossoms and the greening of the willows along the canal on my ride in to work at the Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power.

I'm teaching Marketing Management on behalf of the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. A great experience, lovely students, a beautifully landscaped university, fantastic canteen and a lot of fun learning how to read and say a few words in Chinese.

The main learning with teaching in another country and culture - be flexible, continuously update your approach to find out what works, and have faith that the students will rise to the occasion. Treat them as your customer, find out what works best for them, and try to inspire them to learn. Take advantage of their smartphones - it is a great way to communicate! I've set up a Moodle site so that they can message me, find the materials and even respond to surveys in class in real-time.  Learn to speak clearly, slowly and use international English (lose the idioms and colloquialisms), and most of all, be patient.

Last but not least, get out and see the countryside, interact with the people and enjoy the food.

We were thrilled and relieved to hear that all the qualifications for ADAS have been approved and added to the scope of delivery. After a very lengthy project spanning 18 months and involving several very large documents submitted to the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator ASQA (Australian Skills Quality Authority), this news is welcome indeed. For more detail on the qualifications themselves, visit the ADAS website at www.adas.org.au.

The complexity and breadth of the offerings from ADAS in the hyperbaric operations field gave rise to the challenge of developing and updating nearly 100 enterprise units of competency and reviewing and incorporating many nationally endorsed units from a range of training packages. These contribute to qualifications in diverse areas including commercial diving and supervisor; remotely operated vehicle pilots and technicians; supervisors and simulator operators; hyperbaric tunnelling workers and lock operators;  project managers and diving managers.

Active Learning Partners was responsible for coordinating industry consultation both nationally and internationally, undertaking job analysis, reviewing, writing and rewriting units of competency, redesigning the qualification structure to incorporate specialisations with a common core and preparing all of the materials for the application process and the extension to scope project.

Having been responsible for this process from the beginning in the year 2000 and through every renewal since then, we have seen the massively increased complexity and cost of compliance over the last 20 years in the vocational education and training area. While there is no doubt that this has enhanced the quality and consistency, there comes a point where too many training dollars are diverted into compliance instead of into the student and learner experience. Here's hoping that things will settle down in this sector, and we can streamline the compliance requirements and focus on our core business of providing a quality student experience.

Great to be teaching in my original home country. Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology has provided me with the opportunity to teach Human Resource Management and Principles of Marketing in their international program for their post-graduate course. With students primarily from India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, there were many new ideas and experiences to share.

Watch the video to see how dive supervisors can improve their language, literacy and numeracy using the ADAS Dive Supervisor Training Simulator.

The ADAS simulator is a great place to practise language, literacy and numeracy skills needed by the dive supervisor. In this very hands on environment, the dive supervisor can practise communicating using realistic communication controls, apply the calculations for breathing gases and decompression times and test themselves against the "correct" settings for the dive.

Active Learning Partners was part of the team that designed and built the simulator. Rob Gatt from Active Learning Partners was the Project Manager, and Bronwen Campbell was the Instructional Designer.