What is CONTEXTUALISATION?

When we develop a learning program, we do so to meet the needs of a learner – or set of learners. These are the target audience of our program. So it would make sense that the course fits their purpose and meets the needs of their workplace or industry.

When we customise the program to meet these needs, we call it ‘contextualisation’. Some examples of contextualisation include:

• Using the specific industry to develop case studies, questions or scenarios for the training

• Change wording in the training materials to align with typical industry or workplace language

• Create learning and assessment activities that make use of real workplace scenarios specific to the learners

• Use workplace policies and procedures to develop the learning and assessment content

But there are limits to contextualisation to which you must when you are creating these materials. These limits apply if you are contextualising the training and assessment materials with the intent of offering a nationally accredited unit, skills set or qualification. The limit of your contextualisation can best be put in this way:

“Any change made to the materials must NOT affect the validity of the assessment” 

A valid assessment is one that sufficiently covers all performance and knowledge requirements of the unit/s of competency. An example of contextualisation that might breach this limitation is:

A particular unit requires that the learner produce two documents (for example – two project plans), but the workplace you’re contextualising for doesn’t operate with projects, so you decide to develop an assessment that requires two standard operating procedures instead. 

This does not meet the performance evidence requirements of the unit, and is therefore not VALID.