 and just give a very quick introduction to our speaker here before we get underway. So as I was saying, my name is Marindy. Well, I'm the CEO of Alt and I'm really delighted to welcome many of you here today for this webinar. And I'm thrilled to have Patrick done with us from the UFI Trust. And I wanted to just give a big shout out really to the partnership work that Alt and UFI have undertaken in the last few years. Since 2020, we've worked closely together to set up the Amplify V network, which now I think since I last made the slides, the numbers have gone up. I think we now connect over 2000 professionals in further education and vocational education. And it's been a fantastic journey for Alt to work with UFI. And for us, I think it's really important to shout proudly about the work that we do, but also to share the lessons learned. And one of the really big benefits for us in this partnership is that we are able to work closely with colleagues like Patrick, who have so much insight into what is happening across the sector and what works and what doesn't. So Patrick, without further ado, I don't want to take up too much of your presentation time, but if you're ready now to share your slides and switch on your mic, I'm gonna ask everybody to put their hands together to please give a very warm welcome to our presenter today, Patrick Dunn. Welcome, Patrick. Hello, everyone. I'm assuming you can see my full screen slides now. Yes, slides have come back and everybody is applauding in the chat. So I think we're ready to go. Isn't online applause allowed? Anyway, but thank you for the applause. Right, okay. So I'm gonna talk to you about developing and delivering vocational psychology. Very practical, very practical insights from, well, it's a lot more than 100 plus UFI funded projects. I'm the project manager. I've been doing this a long time. My primary focus is about learning strategy and learning design. I'm gonna talk much more broadly about lots of issues than that this morning, this afternoon. So I'll try and get through this information about UFI as quickly as I can. Our beliefs are around, our activities around providing equitable access to skills enabled by technology. We focus particularly on those who are not or who have not been, particularly those served by traditional or mainstream provision. And a core belief really is that technology enables learning and training can help more people gain the knowledge and skills required. This term VokTech is not particularly widely known, but what it means is we actually have a formal dictionary definition, which is good progress now. Digital tools that help people gain and maintain the skills that they need for work. VokTech, vocational technology. So what do we do? We, I'm just gonna go forward actually. Just wondering what you're seeing. Oh yeah, there we go. Right, so what we do, we do three broad areas. We provide grant funding, which has been for a long part of our history that the core of what we do, although we've expanded considerably over the last couple of years. We invest in ventures, VokTech ventures. And we engage in advocacy. And we do a lot of this via strategic partners like Alt. So I'm gonna talk about what we've been doing over the last year or two in terms of evaluating what we have been up to. And some of the figures are, frankly, pretty extraordinary. We've provided 14 million pounds value of grants. We've supported 105 organizations to do 117 projects. And this is the extraordinary thing. We've affected or we've had contact with through our projects, 2.6 million learners. And I always think it's amusing when you spell the most important word on a document wrongly. And it says leaners, it's not, they're learners. So what are we trying to do in this session? Well, we're trying to reflect on key lessons from the evaluation. And where we can, where I can, we will provide, I will provide advice. Now, UFI is in a really very fortunate position in that, if you think about it for a second, because we provide grants and we do that generally on an open basis. Organizations of all sorts come to us and they tell us what they need. So over the years, we get a map of what's required, if you see what I mean. Because organizations of all sorts will say, this is what we're finding out in the world and this is what we believe you can help us with. And then the other thing is, as projects develop and are delivered, not only do the projects themselves learn what works, not only do the learners learn what works, but we do too, okay? So the value of what we do and the lessons that we learn, it comes out of some all sorts of all directions. So we've carried out this evaluation, well, it was an organization called York Consulting, carried out an evaluation of all our projects from 2015 to 2019. And I've just popped up those figures again. And we've learned a lot. It's really interesting how some of these things we would have predicted and others we wouldn't have done. Some of them are almost painfully obvious and others of them are like bold moments. So we talk about project design. These are the four categories that I'm going to talk about, project design. Engaging with stakeholder and user groups, project delivery, and the end product that is delivered. So I'm going to go through each of those areas and reflect on what the evaluation told us. Let's start with project design. But this one is very, very dear to me. The idea that in designing a project start with the problem, not the solution. And again, that's one of them. That's one of the ones you would have thought, well, gosh, that's painfully obvious. But what we've learned, and this is a particular focus of mine, is that defining a problem is a skill. It's a skill on behalf of the designer and of the project. And not everyone can do it. So we try and help projects do that. And what I mean by the problem, this is quite a common term in software development. What's the pain point? What's broken? What doesn't work? That's the problem. Because if you articulate, if you define your problem really carefully, that gives you a much clearer view of your goal. And as a subset of your goal, your objectives, okay? So what's the desire change? What's the outcome? What's the impact? But above all, start from the point of pain, start with what's broken. Now projects have used various terms to describe what they've done. We've heard terms like theory of change. What's your theory of change? In other words, what's the thing that you're gonna... Sorry, what's the concept? What's the hypothesis you're testing that you're going to run your project around in order to bring the results you require? Some people use the term logic model, especially for the larger scale projects. The next point. Again, you would have thought this would be something really quite obvious. I just wanna reflect on the term market. Market can mean your environment around you, your ecosystem as it were. We're not always talking about commercial situations here. So what we're saying is what our projects told us was that if you can be very clear about your market, your environments, behaviors, your attitudes of the people within that, that the products developed, the solutions developed, should be done so with a full understanding of how they're gonna be used in daily life, daily life and work. It's much more likely if you develop that understanding that you're going to secure the engagement not only of your learners, but in terms of the various stakeholders around them. So directly consulting with your target audiences. And again, some of this is sort of slightly marketing speech. You could say your intended learners. A priority defining a project or defining project objectives. Incredibly important and not always as obvious as one may assume. Throughout this presentation, this webinar, I'll be referring from various angles at the referring to the needs to consult users at various points. The next one, internal and senior buy-in. And this is something which personally I've witnessed not to be your fine projects I've been responsible for, but really throughout my career history in terms of making projects work. And it's something you do have to consider at the design stage. So make sure that at every level buy-in, you ensure buy-in, particularly at a senior level. Senior individual, senior stakeholders can frankly present barriers or facilitate to a degree that sometimes is rather surprised to me. It's worth taking time to form strong relationships with senior teams. And forming those relationships, this is something that projects sometimes mess. Forming those relationships should be in your project plan. Don't assume they're a kind of nice to have. Many of the most successful projects I have seen have had the management buy-in component as a work stream that's actually planned into the whole project and system. Quite closely related, but not entirely the same thing is a really interesting one that we heard from, gosh, I'd almost say all the projects, maybe not all of them, but the vast majority. Know who your partners are. And partners can play various roles. So for example, the one that I've observed more than anything is partners required for scaling and deployment, for spreading out what you've done. You, the team, the people around you may be really good at developing, understand your audience, they might have great designers, content developers, and so on. But the most common thing that I've seen adding to the success of deployment and scaling is knowing who your partners are that can help you with that. Of course, you might have the more, they give the term obvious partners, like you may not have a developer, so partner with a developer and so on. But I do think the scaling issue, how'd you get out to your market to your environment? It's really handy to have partners set up right from the beginning. This one is particularly dear to me. It is quite a common error in projects who assume you've got the right people involved, right from the start, and you might not have. And it can often be useful to consult with others, consult with us, consult with whoever's helping you, to check on your assumptions about who you need. And you may find that the people in your team, the people around you, they may need further development themselves to ensure that they are capable of helping you design and then deploying the project product as it evolves. It's really, really worth thinking about the skills required and the training of the team members. And sometimes it's worth thinking about the really soft skills, how good are people working in teams? How good are people working under pressure to deliver the kind of specific project you're dealing with? So that's all about project to design. And I love this quote from the research, from the Evaluation Report. Don't think this is a good idea. Why does nobody understand it? It's your job to be able to sell and explain your ideas so that people understand its uses and its benefits. And those people, who are those people? They are your learners, your users. They are your stakeholders. They are the folks within your organization. And this sort of cry from projects, we say, oh, no, why does no one understand it? So if this is a bit brutal, but that's your fault, all right? Sort it out. Right at the beginning, it's your job to make sure you sell and explain what you're doing to the various people that are involved in all the stakeholders. So I'm gonna move on to engaging with stakeholder and user groups. Now, I've already touched on a couple of these and I've already said that really engagement is important. The key thing here is to identify who your stakeholders are. I mentioned senior stakeholders. They're probably, it's probably fairly obvious who they are, but you may also be involved with around you, the kind of network around you, you may involve many stakeholders. And the sort of, the more thorough projects are very good at mapping those out, thinking, who are we gonna bump into? Who can help? Who's gonna not help us? Who are those who may be involved in this project that we are aware of and those that might surprise us? And engaging early with them, forming relationships with them with relevant groups and ensuring engagement throughout the project can make all the difference. So getting clients or the stakeholders fully engaged right at the start, particularly to ensure commitment. And again, what I'd say is that this is part of your project plan. So don't just assume it'll look after itself because in many cases it won't. It needs to be planned in and it needs to be planned in early. I'm gonna talk about users and learners a couple of times more, but they're obviously key stakeholders. I really like this one. And this was a surprise to me. So I've lived and worked in a digital world for kind of all my life really. And I like a lot of people with my kind of history. We assume that you just make stuff online and you buy it out there and people like it. Something that we've come across a lot at UFI is it helps so much when you've, when you're prototyping something, when you've developed something, when you're trying to deploy it, take it to people and show it. Explain what you've done in the context of work. And of course, that's incredibly important in vocational context, yeah? Demonstrate what you're doing to your stakeholders, to those involved, to your users, physically in the context in which it's gonna be used. And it's just something that we know works. And it helps develop enthusiasm and commitment. And at the early stages, and this is all about iterative prototyping, getting prototyping and demonstrations in early, in the early stages, it will encourage not only your users, but it will encourage you, yeah, that's important. The next one, user testing, here we are. It's the first reference to this, probably. So user testing, can't emphasize it enough, right from the beginning. The key to many of our project success was iterative, repetitive, and very extensive user testing, with all the stakeholders. Because if you've identified the appropriate people who will be involved, you can identify who the key users are. And it's quite interesting how in some of the more complex and successful projects, they were able to, they had the kind of courage, the security, to be surprised by what users told them, and then flex and then shift their priorities as a result. One of the things that I endlessly gone about with projects is to be clear what your assumptions are. So if your assumptions are challenged, you know what kind of within you and within the project teams needs to change. There's a, you might almost say this is contradictory. I often emphasize the rigor and the structure of a really good project plan. But at the same time, you need the sort of personal and collaborative flexibility to shift that project plan as required, particularly if your users tell you to. And you've got to be sensitive to how they're telling you. They may not tell you directly, so your user testing design can be quite subtle. This next one's really interesting. You're not just testing with users, you're supporting them. And this tends to come up towards the end of a project. And I was surprised in the evaluation quite how assertive some of our projects were in saying, you know, that it took them by surprise as much as it took me by surprise. The amount of resource, the amount of effort you have to put into helping your users, helping your learners, figure out what to do, understand their own motivations and benefits, simply get through using the technology. I think, you know, those of us in the technology business can kind of assume sometimes everyone finds it easy. And not everyone does, which is why early user testing is us. A number of the projects emphasize the importance of what you might call over-communicating, making a lot of noise, particularly about the benefits to learners. One of the things that I've always found in effective learning design is convincingly and authentically communicating what's in it for the learners. You know, why should they bother? And that's particularly the case in what you might call challenging environments, sectors where things have been done in a, you know, kind of, what's the word, ossified a sort of static way for a long time when you're challenging particularly cultural beliefs. Communicate what's in it for the learner very, very powerfully. Let's move on. So, project delivery. This is a kind of, this is moving on from the, in a sense, the previous point about the amount of effort required. You've got to be, I know this seems painfully obvious, but you need to be realistic about planning time, cost resources and so on, the technicalities of designing digital solutions and so on. I could make a really obvious comment like preparation is key, but I'm perhaps overstating my case here. I almost think pessimism is key, realism is key. The number of projects that come along and say, yep, I can do this within six months, nine months, whatever. And here are the milestones. And I say, no, you can't, you can't do that. And the amount of time that we go to and throw in terms of establishing realistic milestones and deliverables, it's a lot of work. And I think I've got a quote at the end of this section where somebody says, do you know what, that initial phase, the preparation, the planning, it can be intense and actually not much fun. The fun bit is when you're in kind of the development bit, the delivery, when you're seeing users and their smiling faces and when you're seeing the thing actually working. But at the start you're thinking, I didn't realize it was going to be this much effort. Particularly if you're doing something really new. If you're doing something with, I hate using the phrase cutting edge technology, but if you're doing something with something really new, then it's going to take a lot of effort. And even if you're doing something with existing technology, but you're doing something new with it, which is a kind of innovation that's very dear to me, actually. Even if you're doing that, it can still take a lot of time and effort and more than you were expecting. Let me go on. I'm so sorry. I didn't actually advance my slide then. It should have looked like that. So pause for thought, be prepared, it can be intense. So what I was waffling on about then was that. So I'm going to go on to the next bit. Apologies for that. I'm going to go on to the next bit about flexibility. We talk a lot these days about agile approaches to software development, to project development. It's really key. Although you need to establish rigorously considered project objectives, and they generally remain unchanged. I'm going to come back to that in a second. A lot of the feedback that we got was that, although objectives generally stay the same, in more than you would have expected, in more projects than you would have expected, the need to flex, to change direction, your users tell you to do that. If you're effectively using user learner feedback, it's not unusual for your project team to have to sit down and say, gosh, this isn't where we thought it was going. I'll just give you a really simple example. I was involved in a VR project over the last virtual reality project over the last six months. The original plan was to use 360-degree live video. They constructed a little prototype. They put it on the headsets and the users kept falling over because the 360 video was physically disorientating and it was a surprise. But they had to reconsider really from the ground up the nature of the project, because what they then went to was 3D-modeled virtual reality, one of the software-generated buildings and violence and so on. The users loved it because they could navigate without falling over because the environment had been modelled to be more secure or more less physically disorientating. Of course, in that case, it required a completely different development approach, a different developer, a different graphics person, and so on and so on. The learning strategy stayed broadly the same, but that had to shift a little. Now, I mentioned changing objectives. It doesn't happen that often, but sometimes your users, your stakeholders will say, okay, the goal remains broadly the same, but the outcomes, what you're attempting to achieve in terms of objectives may have to shift, okay? And that's a tough one. I was involved in a project in the prison sector, which was obviously very seriously affected by COVID, and it took so long. The world changed so much, but actually we sat down after, I don't know, a year and a half, nearly two years, and said, you know what, the broad goal remains the same, but you wouldn't have to be really flexible here, because I actually don't think all the objectives are relevant. And you know, the world changes so quickly at the moment that I reckon more projects are going to be like that. Just finish this section with a quote. I really like this one. At the start, it's quite a lot of work, but you think it's great and focused on how you're going to explain it. And he says, it might not be the most fun. People have a great idea and want to get cracking, but I suppose it's very valuable. I think projects that go most wayward are the ones where whoever the main owner is, whoever the sort of centre of the team is, and it might be more than one person, they have their baby in their hands, and they just want to keep hold of it, and they want to make that, and they want to grow it, and they're not going to let it go. And, yeah, projects need to understand that, that however closely they might grab hold of their initial idea, it may need to flex. The final bit is about the end product. And once again, I'm going to talk about user experience testing with users. It's really, I don't want to say it's the most important thing, but it's extraordinarily important in getting to a good project. Now, something that occurred to me was that we, developers of learning technology, designers of learning technology, products and solutions, in a way, of course, we're much more fortunate than we were some time ago because we have much better tools. The basic concept of technology-enabled learning is broadly accepted to different degrees, but the huge challenge we face is that the expectations of users have gone through the roof. If you look at most, I don't know, most phone interfaces, most websites, the kind of things that we all use every day, the quality is superb compared to what it used to be 20 years ago. Most bits of software that were used were, frankly, pretty ropey, and they're not anymore. Of course, that's really unfair because the kind of budgets that we have as training and learning people, they're not, you know, Google's got a bit more money than we have. So we have to do the best we can. And again, you have to go to your users and figure out what it is they will accept as quality. What does quality mean to them? And so designing the basic user interfaces become more and more important. And I would almost say, I think this is what the project was saying to us, putting less effort into technical complexity, if that's what you can do, and putting more effort into user experience could well bring you benefits. And I can think of a couple of projects where they scale down their technical complexity in order to make the user experience more, not just more comfortable, but simply more appropriate for the learners. This is another one that's very good to me because I have been a, yeah, a boardier content designer. I don't like the term content. I think we design experiences, but that's another issue. The thing here is don't underestimate two things. Firstly, the sheer quantity of content that your learning challenge may require you to present to learners. Not just the sheer quantity, but the need to customize, to adapt, to respond to changing learning needs, respond to what learners tell you. And increasingly, this is a huge thing for the moment, not just because of AI, the need for customization. So, for example, if you have a learner body, a cohort that is made up of individuals that need very different things, and there's certain skills like, for example, basic maths and basic literacy, where that's just the standard, individuals need very different things. You're going to have to produce potentially different things for everyone, and then rely on the system to get those different things to the required people. So that's an interesting, that's a tricky one. And of course, developing engaging content takes time, and this comes back to the whole user experience issue. Again, so I'm going to repeat myself about keeping stuff up today, keeping contents up today. And I think there was a couple of surprises for us in, I think it was three or four projects came back and said, do you know what, after a while, we brought the whole content development, and authoring it is in-house, because it could enhance the product's longevity. This was an intriguing one, because a lot of our projects use external developers, and I was intrigued how, as I say, some of them said, well, that was great to start with, but we need this solution to be sustainable, and we need to be responsive. And so developing an internal team and bringing expertise in-house was a great way to make sure that worked, being self-reliant. And then more about partners, and this is a slightly different angle from my previous two comments about partnerships. You may work in a particular sector, other partners within that sector may be useful to you in terms of understanding the initial design, deployment, and scaling, as I mentioned before. It's interesting how many projects in our evaluation said that their initial perceptions, their initial views as to how they would get a route to market, again, a route out to their users and potential organizations that might use their product and service, how they had misunderstood, or that's not quite true, how they'd underestimated the need to partner with others who did things that were broadly similar to themselves. In other words, they were within the same sector, but had a different angle, a different market, a different college, a different area, and that by forming partnerships, by forming alliances with these, they were more able to understand how they could develop their end product. Now, that is broadly what I've talked about. The four findings, project design, engaging with stakeholder and user groups, project delivery, and the end product. We have the full evaluation report at that top link there on the left. It's very thorough. It's definitely worth a read. But the bottom left link, I think, is, sorry if I'm kind of waving a flag here, but that is the best handout ever, and I'm allowed to say that because I didn't design it. The reason I say that is because basically it's a superb summary of the full evaluation report, and it closely mirrors, it expands on what I've just been saying. It's short, it's very, very clear, and I really couldn't recommend it enough. Now, I hope I've given you enough detail there, and not too much detail. So I'm very happy to move on to questions and dig into anything that I've mentioned that you need to know more about. Thank you so much, Patrick. That was really interesting. And we do have a couple of questions coming in in the chat, and we have also enabled your mics as participants. So what we might do is we'll give people the opportunity to either use their mic or to post questions in the chat. And I might just start with the first question here in the chat from Timo. The first question for Patrick is, what type of projects are you mostly involved in when it comes to B2C or B2B? Are the majority of products marketed directly to learners, or are they marketed to institutions? Mainly the latter. It depends. Forgive me if this is a slightly compromised answer. I suspect if you did a quantitative analysis, you'd find the latter. Of course, it depends what you mean by end users. So I'm thinking of one project I've got in Bristol that's kind of doing both. I think the emphasis is probably on, I think it's on deploying to organisations. I think so, yeah. Okay, thank you very much. Lynn has put a comment in the chat as well. So Lynn, I don't know if your mic is working, or if you would like to post a question in the chat. But if you do have a working mic, you're welcome to come in. Hi, Maren. I'm not sure if it is. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you loud and clear. Hi, that's brilliant. Yeah, I mean, it was more a comment that, you know, it's absolutely fascinating research, and it sort of intersects with our amplifiophy insights research as well. I just wondered if you thought that learners were particularly keen collaborators and what we can do. You know, I found sometimes that they can be a bit reticent and sort of say, well, why would you be interested in my opinion? How do we get them contributing more cleanly? Oh, blimey. You would ask a typical question, wouldn't you? A difficult question. That's such a brilliant one. Of course it's on a spectrum, isn't it, in that sometimes it's all about learners realising what their needs are, isn't it? In that if you realise that you have a problem and you have aspirations to solve it, then the engagement is easy, isn't it? And they will contribute their views and they will be helpful in responding to your needs as a developer designer, so on. Of course there is the other end of the spectrum, so I guess, and then do come back to me if I'm not specifically answering your question, but for me it's always about helping the learners, this may not be the way to put it, understand what's missing, helping the learners understand what's missing, right? And sometimes providing a kind of vision of the future, you know, what would life look like if this thing that we've helped you understand you need, what would life look like after that? And of course the different environments in which we do that are extraordinarily different. Again, I'm just fishing for examples here. I can't really give too much details about this one because it's confidential, but there is a project I'm doing with blind users and it is completely transformational of their lives. We are going to open up careers for them that they couldn't have imagined a year or so ago. They don't need motivation, they'll tell us anything that we need to know and they will engage, they will collaborate. That's a kind of extreme one. And as I say, there's a spectrum down which eventually you might have to make a vast effort to engage learners and users in conversation. In terms of the methods by which you do that, again, there's a kind of scale of spectrum to think about. Those that are most familiar with this notion of community or community practice or even a chat group simply trying to gain their trust and show that you're listening and that you're interested in their world and their problems. That can cultivate a collaborative culture which will certainly help you understand what they need and what you need. We also do workshops and focus groups in a good old fashioned face-to-face focus groups. So it's a whole spectrum of things. Lynn, does that in any way answer your question or have I just gone off the line? It does. No, no, I think that's great. And I just love the way that you're actually encouraging learners to develop wider critical skill sets that are going to help beyond your project and the rest of life. What's missing in it? I know I love that. Yeah, that's very dear to me because what this is about is changing people. It irritates me enormously when we define what learning is wrongly. I have this quote in my head and I don't know where I got it from. And I hope I get this the right way around. It says you can change without learning but you can't learn without changing. And if we can encourage people to understand that learning is about change and therefore they need to identify what change they need to make in order to make their lives better, they will be with us, won't they? Thank you, Patrick. Thank you so much. I think we've had quite a few people in the chat today who said they might reach out afterwards to you. So maybe just to round up our webinar, I'm aware that it's nearly quarter to two now. So if people would like to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that? And yeah, how can they find out more? Okay, well, good old fashioned email is best just for now. So shall I just put my email in the chat? Yeah, absolutely, please do. And we'll also buy a way of follow up, share this recording from today's session and further information with everybody who's come to the session today via email. But for now, could you please just put your hands together one more time, give a big thank you to Patrick for a really interesting session today. I've really enjoyed it and I'm definitely going to follow up to learn more about partnership working as you talked about just at the end there, thinking about working more closely with more projects. Again, from everybody here at Elk, thank you to everyone who's attended and a big thank you to Patrick, really looking forward to seeing where that goes next.