different procedures, and this created further confusion and inhibited their sense-making experiences. There was little they could do to address this dissonance in their sense-making with the adult educators, as the adult educators visited them only once during their four weeks’ clinical attachment. The learners were not required to return to the classroom after the attachment to give feedback, share and discuss their workplace experiences to deepen their sense-making collectively. In addition, learners found that during the workplace attachment, there were few opportunities for them to communicate with their workplace supervisor about the different techniques and procedures encountered due to the workplace supervisor’s busy working schedule. Figure 8 captures learners’ sense-making experience in this healthcare course.
Figure 8: Therapy Support learners’ sense-making experience in blended learning
The above fragmented sense-making experience of Therapy Support learners was mainly caused by the following reasons. Firstly, the perception of the training provider was that there was no opportunity to update the curriculum content (10 years old at the time of data collection) and that the accreditation body also required the practicum to be placed at the end of the classroom experience. The placement of the clinical attachment at the end of the classroom learning means a long gap between what happens in the classroom and practice spaces and the opportunity to apply what was taught at workplaces. The relevancy of the content in the curriculum was also greatly limited by the highly prescribed competency standards, deemed and understood as necessary at the time of accreditation about 10 years ago. Even though the curriculum designer put in a lot of effort to improve the currency of the curriculum content by consulting with industry practitioners, in response to the rapid evolvement of practices and technology in the healthcare industry, the training provider explained that these updates were not part of the curriculum which needed to pass the auditing process by an accreditation agency. The belief on the part of the training provider that they could not change what they described as outdated and irrelevant in order to pass auditing processes, is in fact at odds with the agency’s requirements at the time of data collection. There is a tension here between the mapping to outdated competency standards and curriculum design decisions. This likely explains why the learners noticed a lot of differences in the technique and procedures between the classroom and workplaces. Secondly, the training provider’s manpower constraints and challenges in establishing partnership with the industry could be another reason causing the somewhat fragmented sense-making experience of therapy support learners. For this course, most of the adult educators were working part-time with the training providers. They spend most of their time running their own business outside the school. Only full-time adult educators
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