ACS Business Skills On-Line Pilot Program

The Austrlaian Computer Society is running an ACS Business Skills On-Line Pilot Program. I was selected as one of the initial students. The pilot is from mid April to the end of July 2011 and I have to do at least 3 courses (there are 80 to choose from). These are short one to four hour web based units, with multiple choice questions.

This will be an interesting process. While I am a course designer and tutor for the ACS Computer Professional Education Program, that runs semester long postgraduate university style units, each taking about 120 hours. I did briefly consider the idea of chopping my Green ICT course up into very small modules, this was not feasible. While the course is designed with a topic each week, each of these is still ten hours work, larger than the typical short course. Also the material is designed to build week by week, so it would take considerable work to make the topics stand alone. Also the teaching method for CPEP relies on student group collaboration. This differs from the typical short course which can be done in isolation. In addition my green ICT course uses mostly tradiitional text based material (admittedly in e-book format for laptop, tablet computer or iPhione). The typical short course uses lots of visuals and lamination.