The Deaf Society NSW began using aXcelerate’s student management system after they discovered that their growing service offerings and increased use of blended learning tools, had outgrown the capability of their previous management systems.
Background
Over the past one hundred years, the Deaf Society has been the leading provider of specialist services for deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people and their families. During this time, the organisation has grown considerably and now have offices throughout NSW, including Parramatta, the Central Coast, Coffs Harbour and the Illawarra.
The Deaf Society provide courses for deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people in literacy and numeracy. They also provide courses for hearing people who want to become interpreters.
The Deaf Society’s literacy and numeracy courses use the CGEA and are designed for deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people with minimal or no formal education, fractured learning experiences and/other disabilities. These learners may be from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and may have disengaged from formal schooling. These courses are also some of the most popular courses offered by the organisation.
Meanwhile, Auslan courses are for those people working in or interested in the disability and/education sector, as Auslan is the sign language of the Australian Deaf community. It is also the learning pathway to those wanting to become qualified interpreters. These courses have become more prevalent now with the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which demonstrated a huge skills shortage of qualified Auslan interpreters.
To provide greater flexibility, the Deaf Society provide a blended learning experience for all of their accredited Auslan courses. This means that the majority of theory based subjects are offered online, through the organisation’s Moodle e-learning platform. Their language acquisition is provided in block weekends, face to face.
The Deaf Society also provide a range of community services. They are the leading and only provider of specialist employment support services for deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people looking for work. These services include helping individuals find jobs, transitioning from school to full-time employment and providing support to organisations looking to employ a deaf, deafblind or hard of hearing individual.
Because of the varied types of services and courses they were running, the Deaf Society were initially using a combination of different platforms and spreadsheets to record student information and government data. This meant that staff were forced to manually enter data to each different platform in order to properly track and monitor their varied database. This exercise was extremely time-consuming and was less than ideal for reporting.
In a quest for more effective processes, the organisation went in search of a new student management system. Furthermore, because Moodle had become such an integral part of the Deaf Society’s training delivery, the organisation required a company that could seamlessly feed information through to their Moodle platform and vice versa. It was through this process that the Deaf Society came across aXcelerate.
Solutions
Because there are a lot of added complexities when using Auslan in a blended learning environment, the Deaf Society had very specific requirements in regards to both Moodle and their desired student management system.
Consequently aXcelerate worked closely with the Moodle platform to ensure that the unique courses and marking sheets the organisation needed, could be transferred between the two systems seamlessly. This allowed the organisation’s teachers to use Moodle to upload and mark assessments and provide video feedback in Auslan; all of which then gets transferred into the Deaf Society’s aXcelerate system. This integration eradicates the need for the teachers to upload anything a second time within aXcelerate, creating a more efficient process.
Since implementing aXcelerate, the Deaf Society have also noticed increased efficiency within their enrolment processes. Because of aXcelerate’s CRM functionality and its ability to link contacts to a workshop or course, enrolling and tracking a particular student or class only involves a few clicks.
This has also saved the organisation considerable time when reporting as it is much easier to find and report on students throughout NSW, from the one database.
When reporting, the Deaf Society has also been able to utilise aXcelerate’s USI verification process and the report building feature. Both provide automated guidance when errors relating to the USI or AVETMISS reporting have been made. Because all of this information is stored within the one system, the Deaf Society can then easily gather and download these reports to be sent on to ASQA and the organisation’s funding bodies.
aXcelerate and the Deaf Society have also worked together to develop surveys that can be used for reporting purposes and overall quality improvement. Surveys play a significant role within the organisation, as they are integral to the further development of their Auslan courses.
Because of this, the staff at aXcelerate have guided and supported the Deaf Society on using the inbuilt Learner Engagement and Employee Satisfaction surveys. These can then be sent in bulk by class, semester or student depending on the specific needs of the Deaf Society. Having these surveys at their fingertips makes gathering results and uploading them to ASQA a simple process.
Looking to the future
As the Deaf Society continues their partnership with aXcelerate, a key focus will be on finance. Currently, the bulk of the organisation’s finances for courses are set up on excel sheets and transporting this information into aXcelerate is a time-consuming process and prone to error.
Because of this, the aXcelerate team will be working closely with the Deaf Society to integrate their aXcelerate system with the financial platform MYOB. Once this has been achieved, financial data will only need to be entered once and can then be transferred through to their aXcelerate system.
Another key focus for the Deaf Society is to have full automation for their student enrolment process, particularly in regards to government funding requirements. Due to the very specific requirements for funding, the Deaf Society use paper enrolments for these students which are then entered manually into aXcelerate.
The goal is to create a full application process online that allows the students to enter this data themselves, which will then get fed through to aXcelerate.
Both of these ongoing developments will ensure the Deaf Society can continue to focus on delivering quality training while spending less time and energy on the administration work involved.
To find out more about the Deaf Society and the services they provide, visit their website.
You can also gain a greater insight into the fascinating language Auslan, in a promotional video for the Australian Broadband Network ‘NBN’. The video features two of the Deaf Society’s key staff!