learning with highly authentic case scenarios reminded her of the daily HR routine of dealing with different colleagues in the organisation. At the same time, this created an authentic learning environment for her to move seamlessly between classroom discussion and workplace communication. In summary, the enablers for a seamless sense-making experience are listed below based on the findings from the above case studies: •
Strong partnership between training providers and industry partners, e.g. jointly developing the curriculum, ongoing updates of the curriculum keeping abreast of industry standards and changes, industry experts involved in the teaching and assessment of the course, so that learners could be able to link classroom learning and workplace practices more smoothly;
•
Design authentic assessment tasks, e.g. how the learning can address the learners’ workplace issues, so that they can take immediate actions to apply to and solve realistic issues;
•
Reinforce learners’ retention and application of the knowledge and skills by facilitating practical/hands-on/simulation sessions after classroom learning, so that the connection between theory and practices could be enhanced;
•
Encourage adult educators to share their real-life industry experiences during teaching to help the learners to contextualise the theory as much as possible in classroom settings so that learners can build connection between theory and practice more easily in their sense-making; and
•
Designing workplace-related assignment to help learners make timely application to realise seamless sense-making.
This study revealed how industry context (e.g. the involvement of industry partner, updated industry standards in the curriculum) and TAE arrangement (e.g. accreditation and regulations of the course, adult educator and training provider’s beliefs in learning) contributed to the curriculum design and the pedagogies developed and adopted in the course. This is on top of taking into consideration learners’ needs in BL. A good alignment among these factors tended to better enable a more seamless sense-making experience for the learners.
4.3 Conclusion This chapter presents the findings on the possible direct and indirect factors affecting the quality of adult learners’ sense-making in the six case studies: directly, curriculum design of and pedagogies used in BL; indirectly, the interactions of industry ecology and TAE ecology that impact curriculum design and pedagogies, which in turn affect the quality of learners’ sense-making. Chapter Five will summarise the main findings of the present study in the sequence of research questions. Following the summary, some practical recommendations will be made for relevant stakeholders to consider and adopt.
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