Connected Learning will be particularly valuable to students for their future life, study, and work. It offers the opportunity for students to learn about how to be, grow and flourish in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. The course builds critical reading and analysis skills that are vital to future study.

This course provides students with opportunities to explore arguments and evidence about balanced and meaningful living, the value of giving to self and others, building positive relationships, and living an independent life. Students will explore and develop dispositions, understandings, communication, collaboration, and project management skills that will enable them to build positive relationships, personally and professionally.

Students in this course learn how to find, critically analyse, and use reliable information to understand themselves and others, to set goals for their life, and to adopt frames of mind and behaviours that contribute positively to their lives, personally and professionally. They learn how to be adults in charge of their own health and well-being, and how to influence the well-being of their communities as active citizens. Most of all, students engage in the ongoing debate about what it means to live a ‘good life’ and a ‘meaningful life’ for themselves and others. In doing so, students develop the life skills, resilience, and self-knowledge necessary to weather the complexity of our changing world.

The course builds practical skills in communication, planning, information literacy, and building and maintaining relationships that will be useful for any pathway or in any workplace students may wish to pursue in the present and future.

The Connected Learning course is written under the INTEGRATED LEARNING FRAMEWORK 2017: BSSS INTEGRATED LEARNING Framework.

Achievement Standards for INTEGRATED LEARNING courses can be found within the Framework.

Courses written under this framework promote interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. Students will learn how to transfer capabilities such as the research process, information management, critical thinking, creativity, effective teambuilding, leadership, collaborative decision making and communicate with a diverse range of people. Courses written under this framework are suited for students with diverse abilities, and learning styles including students preparing to enter the workforce, as well as those planning to study at university.

Finding Balance

Students analyse the principles of good health and a balanced life in several domains. They examine and reflect on their own and others’ lives and approaches to good health and balanced living across cultural, psychological, and socio-economic contexts. They formulate plans for developing healthy and effective habits for living their life. Students analyse effective ways of approaching their studies for life-long learning and assess its significance in their lives.

Giving and Meaning

Students analyse and assess different ethical systems that drive the institutions and community life in which they operate. They consider ethical and sustainable practices and ways to improve their life and contribution to society. Students examine the connections between giving, meaning and happiness, including the impact of context on those connections.

Students examine and employ a project management system to plan a project for bettering their community. They study and employ effective means of communicating their ethical intentions.

Relationships and Communication

Students assess arguments and theories about respectful relationships. They examine the legal regulation of personal, social, economic, and ecological relationships, including how reform in these areas has changed people’s lives in the past and present. They examine strategies for effective communication within different types of relationships and contexts. Students examine examples of relationships and consider communication strategies that would educate people about respectful relationships and thus enhance and improve relationships. Students use their learning to reflect on their intra and interpersonal relationships.

An Independent Life

Students analyse different ideas about an independent life. They consider their own situation and ‘quality of life’ metrics. Students undertake life and work planning. Students analyse the costs and benefits of different ways of managing personal finances. They research and analyse the costs and benefits of their choices and possibilities, considering and assessing metrics such as consumerism, happiness, and sustainability.

They analyse ideas and information about household management and learn how to accomplish basic household skills and communicate their learning to others.

Independent Study

An Independent Study unit has an important place in senior secondary courses. It is a valuable pedagogical approach that empowers students to make decisions about their own learning. An Independent Study unit can be proposed by an individual student for their own independent study and negotiated with their teacher. The program of learning for an Independent Study unit must meet the unit goals and content descriptions as they appear in the course. Students must have studied at least THREE standard 1.0 units from this course.

Connected Learning A/M (513 KB)

Connected Learning A/M (282 KB)