 There's change in the air for learning technology, and it's absolutely palpable. I know many of you have felt its effect during and since the pandemic. Learning technology has taken center stage in the upskilling and reskilling of the workforce. Addressing the skills gap is now essential to equip students and workers for the teacher of work. Hi, I'm Maherine Ferdess, Project and Partnership Manager at U of 5 Oc Tech Trust with my colleague Patrick Dunn and experienced learning designer and Project and Partnership Manager at U of 5. We will share with you how U of 5 funded projects have used technology to help students and workers to learn faster and better at different stages of their working lives. Before we get onto that, a short video about U of 5. That video should have given you a good snapshot of U of 5. We're a funder, we focus on tech, enables learning and training to help people get the skills for work. We know that innovation in learning technology can be difficult to apply in real life settings and we're comfortable with risk. This allows us to fund projects that may otherwise not get funded. And we're a charity, so we focus on learners who are poorly served by traditional or mainstream provision. Our impact has been over a million learners with 240 organisations that have been supported, 23 million has been given in grants and 2.5 million has been invested in promising early stage companies. Now, going back to the focus of this session, learning and how we can equip learners and workers for the future of work. This year at Davos, where one leaders meet, one key focus was the need to accelerate the re-skilling revolution. Learning technology can be the linchpin for this. So what are the challenges? Firstly, the speed of change needed to meet the changing reality to the workplace. The changing nature of work means that the need to develop a culture of continuous upskilling and re-skilling is essential. Adult participation in lifelong learning is persistently low. For example, if you take the logistic sector, 54% of logistic companies are expecting skill shortages to increase in the next five years. In the UK, that's not the only sector that's affected with skill shortages. You will hear the story again and again repeated in other sectors in the UK, like construction, rail, IT and many more. But it's not just about filling a gap right now and fixing a current or short-term problem. It's about shifting the culture of learning. The RSA Cities of Learning programme has shown the importance of connecting learning and employment to the opportunities in the local area. And RSA, due to publish a report in October that shares the findings of their quantitative studies in UK regions, focus groups with learners and practical experience of running programmes in over seven cities across the UK. So look out for that and I'll put a link in the chat. Thinking of learning and upskilling and reskilling as a subset of the industrial strategy has led to a crude understanding of what learning is for and how it works. What would it be like if we considered the needs of learners as an economic needs of the industry? Could it result in greater flexibility, motivation, better learning outcomes? My colleague Patrick will now take over and take you through two keys to solving this puzzle. Okay, so just before I go through what we think are the two key jigsaw pieces of this complex puzzle, I just want to build on what Marion has been saying. How do we build a love of learning for the future of work without really knowing what the future of work will be in this very unpredictable world? Just taking one obvious extreme example, work patterns have changed fundamentally because of COVID. So how will work change as a result of automation in sectors ranging from large scale manufacturer to your local co-op? Climate change, aging population, pervasive artificial intelligence, and so on. We can do our best to predict and of course technology will help us in our predictions, but we must be aware of and open to changing circumstances at the same time and build on what we ourselves have learned. So our experience suggests two things. Firstly, learning solutions must maintain relevance as the nature of work changes. I know this is really over simplistic, but I'm going to talk about an old model and a new model. So let's just say the old model of learning is about big chunks, things called training courses or degrees that last months or years. So when they're complete, you expect your learner to apply this learning somewhere could be anywhere. But what we're observing at UFI is that learning in this very rapidly changing world is often very different. It's about small chunks of learning, learning bytes, learning objects and so on that last minutes or hours, not weeks and months. And typically you're able to apply these in a flexible way in a specific area, often a specific geographical area. We're hearing a lot about place-based learning which is often what this is about. And the idea here is that you apply what you've learned immediately. It's immediately relevant. And by applying what you've learned, you learn more of course and better still because you're learning in small chunks, you're far more able to respond to changing circumstances, demands and your own preferences, desires and goals. And this gives you the flexibility that's essential. Now secondly, the second point is about engagement. We have to know more about how we engage with learners. We need to get to understand how to engage with learners of all types. And it requires perhaps more thought and investigation, examination of motivations and so on and how they change over time than it may sometimes appear. This is not a one-dimensional issue and clearly learners being people very widely in what they need. So let's look more closely at this issue. So something that's occurred to me after many years of designing learning for very different audiences is that a key starting point, this may appear obvious, a key starting point is to find out how you engage your learners. Now what's gonna interest them? What's gonna drive them? Not just to learn, but to change themselves because that's what learning is, that's what it's about. And so what I found helpful is to look at two dimensions and that's degree of motivation and complexity of learning. Of course, both dimensions are complex and I know that I'm oversimplifying but this is very much an approach developed through practice and application. It shows what's worked for me and others. So about each dimension, motivation is all about how committed people are and the clarity with which they can see that there are benefits to learning and so on. Complexity is all about the cognitive and practical challenges presented by the learning. So our learners starting from a low baseline is there a lot of new content of their new experiences that people have to tackle? Is there a lot of experimentation, challenge, success, failure and so on. So what we then have with our two dimensions, if you map against them each other, you have four different learning strategies. And of course, this is only a starting point, it's a simple way of understanding engagement. So I'm gonna start with the top right. So people who are highly motivated and who are tackling a tricky learning problem, a complex learning problem, they'll just get on with it. So what you need to do is give them the right tools and approaches and just let them continue and they'll need a structure and probably a variety of approaches, kind of rich blend, but you won't need to drive them on. They are highly engaged by nature. Of course, the bottom right is very different. So you could have a highly complex learning challenge but people are not motivated by it. They don't find it particularly interesting. Now that's a really tough one. You really have to draw them in. You need to keep them at it. You need to immerse them in their learning. You need to keep reinforcing their motivation so they don't have much. So otherwise they could well get overwhelmed because they won't drive themselves on, particularly when they experience failure, which they will. So just moving to the top left again, it's very different. You have a simple learning challenge for highly motivated people. And this requires far less in terms of effort, in fact, less design effort in general. They'll get on with it and it won't be a challenge. So just give them what they need when they need it. And often this consists of learning in small chunks on demand, easy to apply. Now the bottom left is really interesting. And I've left this until last because it's the one where I think most errors are made. I've sometimes seen learning solutions that apply this approach inappropriately because people are fundamentally not interested and they're not interested in the learning task and it's not particularly challenging. So in this case, we're talking about entertaining them, we're trying to keep them going when they may not even see the point. So entertainment for people who are not motivated and where the challenge is fairly simple is the critical strategy. So what I'm getting at here is like I said before, engagement is not one-dimensional. You have to look at it very carefully. So I'm gonna hand back to Maureen who's gonna now talk about UFI examples of each of these strategies. Maureen. Yeah. So now I'll actually draw upon the experiences that we have had with over 200 organizations. And actually what we've learned and seen about engaging adults in vocational learning. So going to the top right learning strategy which is around learners who are highly motivated and they're dealing with highly complex learning in itself and the key that we've said is trust. So some of the examples that we've seen is for example, one of our projects, they created a VR environment for new care. And here the learning was part of a much more structured program but part of the learning was in a VR environment and they could practice on new care reactors without needing to get exposed to radiation. Wild skills, for example, created a blended approach to nature conservation skills and the learners can practice and demonstrate this new skills remotely in the wilderness with an expert supporting them online. At Senpai, they work with managers who are working in lean manufacturing giving them adaptive content accessible on the shop floor through an app or tablet. In these cases, the technology was part of a much more nuanced and complex learning process and environment. There were cohorts of learners in some cases and then there was a structure program there was a face-to-face element there was an online element to all of this. And in many cases, there was mentoring as well and a direct access to teachers, lecturers, trainers is much more orchestrated and much more controlled environment but learning was still done using the technology to support it. Looking at our next learning strategy some examples for the next learning strategy which is for a more complex learning but also where the motivation is low the whole trick was in amassing them. So for stream marine, they allowed mariners to refresh their fire safety training using VR so they could recognize the hazard be timed accurately in their VR environment and still go through their training program. For GTA, engineers made they used augmented reality and VR to add useful machinery details and they allowed them to show maneuvers. They were supported in the learning in the workshop for the apprentices who were working and actually dealing directly with the machines in the workshop. For body swaps, they created a soft skills training simulation. They combined embodied VR with conversational AI to create an interactive and realistic scenario in which the learner is immersed and they can practice soft skills without the embarrassment of having to go through failure in front of other people. So we've seen with all these projects where there's complex learning it can be supported through the immersion and make it directly relevant to what is going on for their working lives. It increases the motivation in these low motivation situations and it means that the new delivery method can allow for either partial or total immersion to engage the learners and help them focus and entice them into the learning. For the next learning strategy we're going to look at some examples of more highly motivated learners but in a low complexity learning problem and here the goal is really just to inform the learner and here what we've seen work really well is actually mobile apps that are using short form content, short text or video. So for example, how do I, they made learning that is just in time with short videos that could be triggered on location with a tap of near field contact cards which is like your contact with cards. And what they did is applied it to housing associations where maintenance workers needed to fix the problem on site where it came up. Habaker created an app for micro learning modules that care workers could learn during their tea break. At learning labs, they developed a mobile app for language learning and they specialized in putting in vocabulary for construction workers that was needed in the construction sites. At autonomy they used an app again and they used it to deliver videos to help workers with learning difficulties and it allowed them to actually do the tasks independently which meant they didn't need as much supervision from their manager and they actually increased the engagement of the learners 30% actually compared to similar programs that they've had. So in these cases, it's the right thing at the right time and but as a learning desire you'd have absolutely no control over your learning environment. So you need to build things that work very well as a standalone, by size, making it easy to digest in that right space and time. So the final one that we're gonna look at is the learning strategy for low motivation learners with low complexity learning and this is where Patrick talked about being entertaining and we've seen that for some of our projects where Chomp, for example, created a multi-level game for teeth and their location to teach dental reception as the nurses so they could have more food for conversations with their clients and colleagues and Spotless created a game that tested and reminded care workers about hygiene requirements and its consequences. So for example, in the game, as you go through it, you know, if you don't do everything appropriately everybody in your care situation gets killed or something like this, you know? So it really kept them engaged and enthused about something that actually is part of their day to day and in these cases, a lot of the times it's often the employers that want to make sure that their employees know something. It can be often quite dry and not particularly engaging but it's still essential and it still needs to be done. So the key there is to make it fun, to make it simple and easy and that's the way forward with these. So we've seen projects use games in this particular way but we're not suggesting necessarily that that's the only way that games can be used. You can have much more complex games as well. The other one is to bear in mind is that something that Skills for Logistics did and again, it's not necessarily about simply entertaining. Sometimes it's about simplicity and the ease of use. So for Skills for Logistics, they simply used e-learning modules and created a passport for drivers for their refresher courses. And it just, what was good about it is that it was simple and it made sure that they could keep things updated easily for their qualifications without needing lots of bells and whistles for that. So that's the fourth set of projects that I wanted to bring up with these examples. And then finally, I guess, Patrick, we come to what is needed for the success for this lifelong learning piece. Okay, I'm going to talk about three things. Actually, Mari, you chipped in as well as we're going through this. So something that we're very, very keen on with our projects is use-centered design. It may seem incredibly obvious, but the sense that you have to always start with your users, it's just a critical thing. We have to make sure that whatever the project is, they talk to their users, not only at the beginning to really find out where they're starting from, but throughout. What do you think, Mari, is that reflecting our projects? Yeah, and it's interesting when you talk about the use-centered design and going through all of it, through the testing process, through the different stages of development. It's also about actually seeing them so that you're not getting all your feedback from your technology. It's difficult to get that piece where someone doesn't quite understand exactly what's going on with what you've designed or how it works. It's only when you see them that you see, actually, they're typing at 20 times and that you never would have caught it otherwise. Yeah, the second point is about the right mix. Now, as a long-term learning designer, 10, 15, 20 years ago, we didn't have much choice, did we? There was a relatively constrained set of options, but now we have this vast sort of panorama of different options. So once we know our users, once we've engaged in our initial user research, we have to, designers, we have to make absolutely sure that we get the mix right. In a way, it's a wonderful thing because, of course, we have so many more options, but it's also more of a challenge because we have to match our learning strategy, which is what we've been talking about earlier on, with the set of options that we've got. That's right, isn't it? Yeah, and Patrick, what you're saying about the right mix, and I think I've tried to maybe shoehorn some of these projects into the specific learning strategies, and in some ways, they cover different ones. And it's just, in a sense, to show, actually, in many cases, you might be somewhere in between these. Oh, of course. Yeah, and you might be using quite a few of these different pieces to put together the fix that you need for your learners. Yes, absolutely. Something that, again, as a learning design process is always start with a strategy, always start with an overview, and that's what the four sectors, the four strategies are about. Something that I've kind of tripped over a number of times is thinking too low to start with, thinking kind of tactically instead of strategically. So by having those two dimensions, having those broad strategies, Marine, it's exactly what you're saying, make absolutely sure where you are against each dimension. The third point is almost painfully simple. Do the simple things well, keep it simple. Essentially what we're doing, particularly because we're interested in innovation with technology, it can be really quite complex, and it can be a task, a bit of a challenge to say, amongst this complex challenge, and be very clear where you're going with it. Keep your approach simple. Marine? Yeah, and I think it's a good note to end on really, isn't it, to actually do the simple things well, because actually, Patrick just picking up when you said, there is a kind of tendency, especially in innovation, to try and figure out that bit, and it ties in with the earlier point you made about the right mix. If you get the right mix and then do it really well, that's the trick. Yeah, okay, let's just go on. And so the final thing really is, there's also obviously lots of different projects that we've been working with over the years. So you can, all of the projects that we've mentioned today, they are in the directory that you can check out. And of course, it's just a brief note to say that there's also your five entries, you can check them out as well. And if there's something interesting that you're working on, feel free to reach out to them as well. And just finally to say thank you for your time. And ready for any questions? I think you get a chance to have some questions.