Premium Cloud engagement in social work: “[it] left me wanting more”

This presentation will showcase a collaborative, innovative and media rich approach to curriculum design in a Social Work Program at an Australian University. It emerged from a rigorous review of the student learning experience in both cloud and located learning sites. This review highlighted ‘room for improvement’ in authentic assessment design and the constructive alignment of learning activity across the program. The course teaching team collaborated with the Learning Design Pod, a multi-faceted team of academic, multi-media and video production colleagues, to reconceptualise the curriculum and incorporate high quality digital artefacts to better engage students in their learning. The result was Evelyn’s Story a high production value, Simulation resource that creates a multiplicity of ‘learning layers’ across the course. Evelyn’s Story provides a holistic and integrated approach to scaffolding and deepening student learning across a range of units in the course. The resource simulates a number of challenging but authentic scenarios predicated on the professional practice experiences of Social Work academic staff. This enables students to actively and authentically engage with threshold learning concepts relating to complex risk factors which cause social difficulties. Engagement with Evelyn’s Story exposes students to the plethora of issues confronting clients whom they will inevitably encounter in their course and future career. The redesigned assessment tasks enable students to put themselves in the role of the social worker and to explore their own assumptions and values in relation to key concepts such as family violence, addiction, and mental health. The simulation script was developed and refined by Social Work academics who collaborated with Pod academics to map it to course themes and learning outcomes, while Pod production staff worked on translating it into an iterative story-board until a media rich, authentic and complex case scenario emerged.