Textile and Fashion Training Center (TaF.tc) is a fashion school that offers fashion-related courses and programmes to help prepare their students for the fashion industry. The topics cover marketing and merchandising, apparel design, and even industrial engineering. TaF.tc aims to provide quality and holistic instruction to help their students grow.

Already the first Continuing Education and Training Centre (CET) for the textile industry in Singapore, TaF.tc continues to push boundaries and set its sights on becoming a global fashion school. With that in mind, TaF.tc recognized the need for digital transformation, not just to help them scale their programmes, but also to improve the overall learning experiences of their students.

Features: Blended Learning, Story-based Learning, Tutorial and Training Videos

Understanding TaF.tc’s objectives, Zionext knew that the task at hand called for the digital conversion of TaF.tc’s face-to-face instructional materials. However, there were two challenges:

Firstly, the heterogeneity of the international populace. Students come from varied backgrounds and cultures, being of different nationalities, ages, and learning environments. As such, they have varied learning requirements and would approach content differently.

Secondly, the courses included hands-on technical skills, which would be difficult to impart through the digital medium.

To tackle these challenges, the Zionext team worked hard on designing the necessary content, integrating various pedagogical theories, such as Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning, to ensure that content could deliver the same quality of instruction regardless of who accessed the course. It was also determined that digital content itself would not be able to completely impart or teach the necessary technical skills. Therefore, the courses would be conducted through a blended learning approach, with some instruction taking place in the classroom.

Zionext has combined digital and traditional learning methods to craft a blended learning approach. Coursewares mainly cater to visual and auditory learning modalities; while face-to-face activities, case studies, or group presentation help support the kinaesthetic and tactile learning modalities.

There were training videos of the process of sketching fashion designs, which allowed students to revisit at their own time, as well as tutorial videos which help students visualize the production of footwear eg. the components of a platform shoe and how each of them came together.

To balance the technical curriculum, Zionext also employed a story-based learning approach to deliver the content. Stories are effective in transferring tacit knowledge such as organizational culture, value and managerial systems. They let employees enjoy new experiences, form opinions, make judgments, and develop their own beliefs and attitudes. The contexts in the story-based approach engaged learners by helping them follow along and solve the problems of our protagonists.

With the project progressing smoothly and the digital transformation still ongoing, TaF.tc is in a strong position for the global expansion. TaF.tc has begun using the digital courses in their curriculum in Singapore and improvements like increased learner engagement have already been observed. Stay tuned for more updates!