The voluntary sector has many learning needs in common with commercial organisations and has to comply with the same set of legal requirements as any other employer or organisation. However, the sector faces some specific challenges that video is particularly good at addressing.
Firstly, national and international organisations must train, inform and motivate their staff and volunteer, in order to meet their statutory obligations, to develop competence and to develop the people to improve their performance, but with people often scattered all over the place, doing this through face-to-face training is difficult and expensive, whilst funding for it is limited and is often set against delivering the work that is the core purpose of the organisation.
Therefore some form of distance learning and/or e learning offers big advantages in both cost and time to the voluntary sector. This could be via a DVD, or e learning through a broadband delivery. Here are three examples of how this has worked for different types of needs.
The Scouts need to train and support Scout Leaders across the country, ensuring that all the legal and best practice requirements for health, safety and child development are fully taken into account in all scouting activities.
Their approach has been to commission a number of e learning courses, then deliver them via the public internet to scout leaders across the country. Video played a part in addressing a number of learning points to cover issues like cultural diversity, structuring activities and in providing emotional communication in learning. The video was produced using a combination of volunteer camera operators and members of the Argo video team to shoot and edit the more complex elements of the content.
Head Teachers and Industry is a charity working to improve education for those with learning disabilities and to increase their chances of employment on leaving school. Surveys of employers and those working with these young people revealed that a lack of awareness of emotional communication in general and what has come to be known as "emotional intelligence" is a key factor in causing social and learning problems and in preventing people with learning disabilities getting jobs that they are perfectly capable of doing.
"What's Next?" was HTI's response to this need. A highly interactive course covering emotional intelligence skills, but presented as a scenario-driven video game, where learners see a scenario unfold, then have to comment on and react to the feelings of the characters involved in the game.
From a learning perspective, it was felt that the "game" feel of the learning needed to be bedded in and related to the real world, rather than avatar-type cartoon characters, so a module of the course features interactive interviews with young people in their lives. The Argo Media video team put together the small groups at a local secondary school and carried out the interviews, which deal with some very hard issues, like a young man's feelings and reactions to the death of his mother when he is barely in his teens.
HTI Game
The National Trust required an e learning induction programme to support their national workforce, many of whom are in isolated locations as well as the huge number of volunteers that give their time to the trust. Additionally, there is a large seasonal workforce that is recruited every summer, to support the peak visitor loading in shops , cafes and the properties themselves.
Argo provided the video element of the content, shooting a large number of structured interviews in a representative cross section of different types of properties. There interviews were then used to populate a "virtual" property, where learners can visit different parts of an online trust property to hear about their area of activity and what it is like to work for the trust in that role.
Over twelve hours of material was shot and then edited down to 50 minutes of footage clips, which were then inserted into the relevant web pages for streaming delivery through the Trust's national e learning network. In parallel to the staff induction project, a volunteer induction DVD/CDROM was also developed using the same core material, but with additional volunteer interviews that will be used in small groups led by a local trust manager to provide the induction training.