A real digital skills program, run by the staff you already have.

Who this page is for

Employment services providers — Workforce Australia, Disability Employment Services, Transition to Work and the local job-start programs beside them. Disability and NDIS providers running capacity-building groups. Neighbourhood centres, libraries and community hubs. Aboriginal community controlled organisations, and multicultural and migrant services. Youth and re-engagement services. Community RTOs and adult education providers. Councils and place-based collectives buying on behalf of several of the above.

Everything on this page is a commercial arrangement, not a free resource. The free things ParkSyde makes are on the other page, and they stay free. Schools and Departments have their own door, because a school buys this in classes and terms and you almost certainly do not.

The bind

Every funder now expects digital literacy, and almost nobody can staff it. You cannot hire an AI educator. The workers you have are capable and committed and have never been trained in this, and putting one of them in front of a group to teach AI is not a reasonable thing to ask. So the program either does not run, or it runs thin — a worksheet and a computer room — and everyone in the room knows it is thin.

The other half of the bind is that the people in front of you have usually done this before. They have sat through employability workshops for years. Something that is merely compliant will not hold them, and something that holds them but produces no evidence will not survive an audit.

What it is

A ready-to-run ten-week program. Weekly two-hour sessions, ending in a showcase where every participant stands up and presents something they built themselves.

Two weeks on why, two on what, two on how, three on building, and the tenth week is the showcase — the same understand → apply → create arc as the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Students.

The spine

Eight ParkSyde AI Competencies, mapped to the Australian Core Skills Framework and the Digital Literacy Skills Framework, with three evidence levels — Developing, Capable, Confident. Written to ACSF Level 3 reading standards. These are the frameworks your funding agreement already speaks in, which is why this page leads with them rather than with the word AI.

The wedge

A lesson runner. The facilitator opens the week, presses start, and reads the scripted opening aloud. Participants then self-drive through the course and workbook while the adult circulates with the “what to look for” prompts. Zero prep, and no AI knowledge. In a school this saves a teacher an evening; here it is the difference between running the program and not running it.

One room, a mixed group

Three lanes — Ramp, Core and Ladder — run at the same time. Everyone does the same project each week; the lane changes only how much support and how much stretch. People move between lanes freely, and someone can be on the Ramp one week and the Ladder the next. It is a teaching judgement about how a person is going that week. It is not a test score, not a stream, and not a clinical placement, and nobody is labelled by it.

What arrives

Thirty-three resources sharing one design: scope and sequence, lesson plans, build step sheets, a facilitator guide, printed and digital workbooks, a self-paced course, a competence tracker, exemplar and inspiration galleries, curriculum mapping with tasks and marking guides, and the certification pack. Seven of them are interactive web tools that run offline on locked-down machines, which matters if your devices are old and your internet is not.

Why it is not another worksheet

It runs on the manual-arts model — hands-on, functional, with a clear instruction manual — and on four teaching methods with a real evidence base: project-based learning, Universal Design for Learning, formative assessment with exemplars, and authentic assessment. The effect sizes and their citations are set out in full in the Research Rationale that comes with the pack, and the Universal Design for Learning findings are the strongest of them among learners who have disengaged from education before.

Those are findings about those methods. They are not claims about what ParkSyde has measured, because ParkSyde has not measured this yet and says so on its evidence page. What a first cohort gives you is your own data, on your own participants, and you keep it.

What it costs

Two different things get bought here, and they are priced differently because they are not the same purchase.

Seats, if you want to send people

Individual places in a ParkSyde-run program, per session or for the whole ten weeks, with a lower community rate for concession holders and community groups. Those are published on the AI courses page, which owns those figures.

A licence, if you want to run it yourself

Your organisation delivers the program with your own staff, as many times as you like. This is what most organisations reading this page actually want, and it is the one we ask you to ring about — a cohort here is usually six to fifteen people rather than a class of thirty, so the schools figure is the wrong shape and we would rather quote you honestly than publish a number built for somebody else’s room.

Prices are shown ex GST where they are shown; add GST as applicable to the purchasing entity.

Which budget line it sits on

Structured group activity for employment services. Capacity-building and skill-development supports for disability providers. Digital inclusion, community development and youth program funding for everyone else. It acquits cleanly on any of them, because it produces things you can point at: a finished product per participant, competency records at three evidence levels against the ACSF and the DLSF, an attendance and engagement record, and a showcase the community and the funder can come to.

What you can write on the acquittal is roughly this: a ten-week AI capability program, one cohort, competencies mapped to the ACSF and the DLSF, this many participants completed a finished product, outcomes reported at three evidence levels, showcase held on that date. Program managers write those sentences for a living and this one is defensible.

On NDIS plans specifically: providers fund this in different ways and that call is yours and your participants’, not ours. We will not advise you on claiming.

The credential, precisely

Participants who finish earn the ParkSyde Certificate of Competence — earned against criteria, not issued for attendance. It is not an accredited VET qualification, and it must never be described as one.

Both halves of that are load-bearing. The certificate is issued only to participants who reach the competencies and present a finished piece of work — there is a bar, and a person can miss it. The eight competencies behind it are mapped to the Australian Core Skills Framework and the Digital Literacy Skills Framework, the same national frameworks accredited training maps to, with evidence recorded at three levels. What the credential lacks is registration, not substance: only a Registered Training Organisation can issue nationally recognised qualifications, units of competency or statements of attainment, and ParkSyde is not one.

There are two routes and we would rather sequence them honestly than blur them. License now — available immediately, ParkSyde’s own credential, best for running something this quarter. Accreditation later — over time, through ASQA registration, for a nationally recognised qualification. Run the first to generate outcomes and evidence, and use that evidence to pursue the second. We will not market an accredited qualification before the registration exists. If you already hold a registration, that is a shorter conversation than it is for us, and worth having.

What it asks of you

Four things, said now rather than in week three.

An adult in the room, every session

Self-driving means learner-led, not unstaffed. This is not a staffing saving and we will not sell it as one. What it removes is the preparation and the expertise you would otherwise have to buy.

Devices, and mostly a connection

Our own tools run offline and save on the device. The AI tools participants build with generally do not. If you have a handful of laptops and patchy internet, tell us on the first call — sometimes the honest answer is that this is not the right program for your people yet.

Reading at about ACSF Level 3

The written materials sit there. Below it a participant needs a support person alongside them. A good deal of the evidence is spoken or observed rather than written — explaining to a peer, demonstrating, the live presentation — and the digital workbook reads aloud, but the program does not pretend to solve literacy.

Ten weeks of a group’s attention

If your cohort churns, say so. The weeks are modular rather than cumulative, someone who misses week four is not lost, and completion is recorded at three levels rather than pass or fail — so six weeks still produces real evidence. We will not promise you attendance figures we have not measured.

How to start

Run one cohort. Ten weeks, one group, and an outcomes report you own.

We help you set the group up, walk your facilitator through the lesson runner and the tracker, and hand you the report at the end. The pedagogy has an evidence base already; what a pilot proves is the fit in your setting, with your participants and your staff. The risk is one cohort.

Or ring 0467 937 659. A real person answers and can send you the full proposal, the research rationale, the competency mapping and the data-privacy and safe-AI-use policy.