 I think it's about time to get started. Thanks for being with us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for networked information. And you've joined us for one of the project briefing sessions on the third day of week two of our CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting. And just as a reminder, the themes of week two are around the transformation of organizations and professions, which of course gets deeply into topics also of teaching and learning. This is very much in keeping with all of those themes, a few mechanical things. We are recording the session the recording will be available later. There is closed captioning available, if you'd like to turn that on. There is a chat box feel free to use that for comments or to introduce yourself during the session. And at the end of our presentations Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate a question and answer session. There's a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen and you can use that to answer to enter questions at any time. We will collect those up and try and respond to them during the question and answer session. And with that, I want to just introduce this presentation and our two speakers. I am happy that Aaron Tripp, the director of research and innovation at lyricist is with us and she is going to be working with Tony Zanders. He is an old friend of the coalitions. Many of you will remember him from previous years when he attended, for example, representing ex Libras in 2018. He set out on his own to found a company of which he is CEO called skill type, which he will tell us a bit about. And really what the session is about is taking a look at how to do professional development in scholarly settings more effectively, more agilely and more responsively and with that, I will pass it over to Aaron to begin the presentation. And let me just thank both of our presenters for joining us and doing this over to you Aaron. Yes. And welcome everyone. This session is titled modernizing scholarly professional development with ally and AI. We're so happy that you can be here. My name is Aaron Tripp. Thank you Cliff for the introduction. I'm the director of research and innovation at lyricist. And I'm joining from Moncton New Brunswick in Canada. I'd also like to introduce a colleague who isn't here today but her name is Annie Peterson and she helped a lot with this presentation. And she's located in Durham, North Carolina. Tony, do you want to introduce yourself. Of course, hey everyone I'm Tony Zanders. I'm the founder and CEO skill type. And I'm beaming in from Baton Rouge Louisiana. Good to see everyone. Great. And if anyone wants to share where they're joining from in the chat, we'd be delighted to see where you're joining from or beaming in from today. So, just a note on conduct in this virtual space will strive to engage in respectful discussion ask questions and see clarification and be receptive to feedback. We also want to follow the CNI code of conduct which I'm going to drop into the chat right now. And thanks Clem and Carl for for letting us know where you're joining from Honolulu and Albuquerque. Great to see you here. Great. Some context for today's talk has to do with how we have conducted professional development in the scholarly field to date. These are the highlights of things that we're all aware of. Just again to give you context we're, we're now aware of the limitations of traveling the conferences, even before COVID when we were able to. It was expensive and not always possible. And only a select group of us had the fortune and benefit to be able to fly to events to receive these quality training opportunities. And it's hiring freezes austerity measures are going to continue. And it really adds more of a limitation on these traditional opportunities to grow and advance our careers. The last bullet here dealing with training focused on individuals instead of all employees. Something that we've been aware of, but I haven't seen much of a dialogue on the root cause this plays when it comes to diversity equity and inclusion issues there's a there's a dialogue between the model the traditional model for professional development, and whether or not that exacerbates some of the DEI related issues that we're seeking to solve. In the next slide I'll show you an illustration of sort of what this looks like and so one of the problems that we identified early in our days doing research for skill type is that professional development is by and large and independent activity. The current infrastructure requires librarians and our colleagues to navigate this career pathway process in this professional development alone. And so what you're looking at here is a diagram of a couple different options that we've all benefited from. Maybe you have a really good manager. And that manager is facilitating your professional development there's a pretty active dialogue they have with you in your growth in the organization, but not everyone. Maybe you have peers, you are a member of a cohort of peer colleagues who can recommend what trainings and what steps you should take to advance your career. But again, everyone doesn't have that peer set if you were not, you know, membership and say an ARL fellows program or some other type of fellowship, maybe you don't have that peer network. In the best case if you have a really good manager, and you have the peer set as well. You're still left to navigate a very large amount of opportunities that are coming from myriad sources thousands around the world to understand what is the needle in the haystack. You're left pretty much on your own devices to figure that out, and to carve out the proper steps to grow and advance your career. So this is what we've observed in terms of professional development traditionally being structured more like an independent study. And so, since March 2020, we've witnessed some really tangible and encouraging moves towards professional development becoming more inclusive. And traditional barriers in our way, more people can participate. It's as simple as that and I feel like we could call this a silver lining of the pandemic. The question is, and do we feel like these reduction or this reduction of barriers will lead to career advancement opportunities for more people. This is a situation where a more diverse and inclusive atmosphere will lead to tenure and promotion requirements being met for more people. We think that it will. And that's not to say that we don't have more to do to make professional development more inclusive. It's a start. We want to make and using assistive technologies for accessibility and virtual professional development and other steps as well. And so in this presentation we want to walk you some through some of the process that we're going through to create a more inclusive experience in professional development, specifically on the two projects that we're working on. To get into it, we want to ask you a question. So I have a quick poll, and I'll put a link in the chat. But how has your professional development changed since March 2020. Has it increased did the same decreased anecdotally I'm hearing from a lot of folks that it's increased dramatically, but that may not be the same across and we'll actually revisit the results at the end of the presentation. I want to talk a little bit about lyricist learning it's a program that I'm involved in. So training programs are very common and very popular in our field. They're often grant funded. And so lyricist had a very long history of delivering training in the field. In 2018, the training programs were reviewed with a fine tooth cone, let's say, and it revealed that the training programs were on a really unsustainable path. And I think a lot of grant funded training is on the same level expenditures often in are often higher than what's coming in to support the program long term. So this review, it found that revenue had been down for three years or more. That training really was focused on individuals and Tony talked about some of the problems with that so we weren't really talking about training teams or organizations. And it was really difficult to track and promote training as a whole so if we were talking about transforming an organization or transforming a team. What we were delivering really wasn't landing it wasn't resulting in what people or members needed it to result in. And so the review led to this brainstorming process and business planning process and eventually a pilot. And so in March 2018, we piloted this new service new program called lyricist learning. One of it was that we wanted to offer a subscription model which was not the norm and still is not the norm. But it's intended to level the playing field so that you can offer all training on any topic to any staff member, so that there isn't one or two people allowed to attend a class for 150 bucks a pop or $75 a pop that you would budget annually for training for all of your staff on all of the topics that they might need to transform their team transform their position or respond to a new need or requirement. And it's really evolved since that pilot launched a little under three years ago. We now roughly deliver 75 live classes a year around 1500 participants, and we've built, we've built a learning library with around 300 recording recorded classes in it. The content is growing. The, the subject matter is becoming more wide. And we're really just starting to hit our stride now with leveling the pro the playing field in delivering professional development to members around the same time the folks at lyricist must have been drinking the same water that we were. And we were thinking along the same terms, but coming at the same problem from two completely different angles. And so I want to walk you through a timeline of the skill type project, which October 2018 we came up with a name for this for this project, and had relationships that we call development partnerships with about nine academic libraries. Who were funding the research and development for a software platform that could solve a lot of the issues that we were facing. Essentially we built a talent marketplace for library professionals and their teams to analyze the expertise that they had in house. And once they analyze that expertise, they could then have data to support where their professional development investments could go. And so that cycle of analysis and then developing expertise was sort of the approach we settled on. Fast forward a couple years of doing that work together. And we had a partnership with lyricists that came out of a couple conversations. Some folks who are very sort of household names and the CNI community actually introduced us to Robert Miller at lyricist. This was Rob Cartolano at Columbia was one, Tim McGarry at Duke had both said that we should probably consider looking into lyricists talking with them they have a lot of similar philosophies to how you're approaching learning and development. And those conversations matured over the summer in 2020, leading up to a formal partnership for lyricists to become our fiscal agent and distribute our software to the library community. But also to integrate with the lyricist learning platform that Aaron described earlier. And so today we find ourselves in November, starting to focus on the body of content and training that's available inside of the platform to complement the set of tools we've built to analyze expertise inside of your organization. And so now organizations can develop a sense of what skills they have in the team, what everyone is interested in learning. And we're coupling those insights with an aggregation of trainings and content starting with the lyricist learning platform. So a few key themes on the approach that we're taking on the first challenge that we're solving through this approach is discoverability. There's no shortage of training and professional development globally. In fact, more is being created now than ever. The challenge becomes putting this all into one place. The irony of us having this conversation is that we've solved this issue. We've solved it. Some would debate that for patrons and researchers seeking to get access to scholarly resources through discovery solutions we've been working on these as an industry for over 10 years, maybe 12 years now. But the irony is that we haven't tackled this for ourselves as professionals seeking to grow our skills. And so that's the irony of the discoverability conversation. The second challenge that we hope to tackle as Aaron alluded to is affordability. Most professional development is only available to paying customers or registrants. And this we believe is exacerbating diversity, equity and inclusion issues. When out of the other side of our organization we are launching strategic initiatives and investments to solve DEI related issues. So do you think that there's some opportunity for us to grow here. And I'll note to on discoverability. It's interesting because I actually heard from Annie Peterson earlier today that she got lyricist learning content in skill type today. And so that was, that was wonderful because you really, there is a struggle getting the right training in front of the right people to let them know that it exists to create an awareness of it and get to get the right people in the seats of that class or get the right people with eyes on that module. And so the distribution and discoverability benefits of a platform are really tangible. In terms of affordability and accessibility, I'm actually going to couple these themes in my comments because, you know, we want, we want training to be affordable. We also want it to be accessible. And in order to be accessible, we incur expenses that we need to cover through some method. And so we've been working really hard on making our content more accessible and exploring services that will make content accessible on a go forward basis but also looking back at all of the content in our learning library. So 300 recordings, all of the slides and handouts that go along with those classes. How do we make those. How do we accurately caption those and I'm going to say accurately and underline that, but also make all of those materials. Readable to buy a screen reader, for example. And so we've been looking into services that could help us make these steps in our service and meet the goals that we feel really strongly about in terms of accessibility. And our research came up with an estimate an estimated cost of around $200,000 to accurately caption audio presentations and make slides and handouts accessible to screen readers. And so it was a big realization moment for us. We knew that we needed to do a tiered implementation of our accessibility measures that we really want to implement. And we also knew that we needed to focus on awareness and education for anyone who is creating content. So we all create content that we present online, like the presentation that we're giving right now it's not just informal presentations or former formal professional development or pedagogy. But we decided that we would focus on accessibility standards for instructors so when you're creating a slide deck you have to do these things to ensure that they are compliant with certain with certain standards. And that we would actually have planned budgeting or planned spending to address the content that we already have in the learning library so that we will gradually make that content more accessible, starting with the most popular content. Now the program leader for lyricist learning her name is Annie Peterson I mentioned her off the top. She drafted a three year plan and the wonderful thing about it is that she has been leading this initiative and now it is being used by other programs in our nonprofit around lyricists. So for example, an instructor guide that she's created for instructors of lyricist learning classes is now being used when we invite people to speak at a forum or a summit. And so we're seeing a trickle effect where the accessibility work that we're doing in lyricist learning is impacting other programs and other services in the organization. I have one more. I have one more comment on accessibility to Aaron, because the University of Cincinnati who was one of our development partners, provided a big service to us and I would say the larger community by using their accessibility lab they have a world class lab, not inside of at the university level. And as we were forming a partnership with them. One of the requirements was for us to develop a VPAT, which measures it's a voluntary document you create to measure your compliance with WCAG. And this was an exciting initiative for us to comply with WCAG single a for now. Because in our aggregation of trainings from around the web. We're often working with Drupal websites or WordPress websites, oftentimes that aren't accessible. And as we're bringing this material into into skill type. These conversations that Erin and Annie and her team at lyricists are having are being coupled with the conversations that are also being had inside of academic libraries. But we're focused on this this on professional development. And so it's sort of an exciting intersection from different groups in our community. And so just to put a fine point on what skill type has become today because it has evolved in response to COVID. And in response to feedback we receive from our community. As I mentioned, it's a software platform. So we're not a content provider we're not producing training, but the software is a three sided marketplace. Particularly for us as information professionals and our organizations and the functions inside of the marketplace are analyzing expertise. So what is it that we know how to do or want to learn how to do. And the developing expertise growing that and then sharing it with organizations that matter. The first column you'll see here is skill type for professionals which is a free application available for anyone to become lifelong learners skill type for teams is how we earn revenue which is a talent management offering for organizations who wish to manage that with expertise data across the organization. And lastly skill type for training providers which is for conference organizers, professional associations, commercial vendors or nonprofit vendors who are producing training. Where's this headed into the future as we wrap up. We're developing as a community new infrastructure for professional development and training this is responding to the move that experts are suggesting is the greatest reskilling initiative that the world has ever seen. We're investing billions of dollars in other industries into reskilling initiatives, but as the library and information science community. We haven't yet developed a cohesive response. We're hoping that this new set of tools are able to help all of our organizations have a modern dialogue around this. And so I want to walk through the diagram in the final seconds here to show if we have a new model for considering a learner, and all of the different inputs that are coming for a professional to guide their development. So software can help facilitate this. And the diagram you see here we have training providers that are pushing recommended content to me, based on what I'm interested in learning from lyricist learning. I also get feedback from my managers from my supervisor from my employer, who have the context of my nine to five job of the skills I need to do that job. And then thirdly there is community input, because there are peers that are from other organizations who are in my line of work, and they too are walking through the same process and can provide recommendations. So we need a more multifaceted approach to facilitate what what modern professional development can look like. And we'd like to thank you for your, your attention today and hope we can start a dialogue around these these topics. Thanks, Tony. And I mean, this, this week's theme of the CNI presentation presentations rather it's about transforming organizations and so the main question that we want to ask is, you know, what we're talking about do you actually feel like it has the potential to transform an organization. Do you feel like it has the potential to transform your team or the work your team is doing. So that's, that's the question I threw out to all of you who are in attendance. So drop in the chat if if you have any comments about what you think the potential is of professional development moving online, and some of the things that we're talking about. In the interim, I just wanted to take a quick look at the results of the poll. So 44% of respondents said that their professional development has increased since the pandemic, since things closed down in March 2020. And 23% say that it's decreased and 22% says, say that it stayed the same. And the decrease makes sense. Just because of the time we're in budgets are being cut. And we do hear that a good, good bit. And so two, if that was just time, I'm hearing a lot from people that the volume of work has increased so much that there's less time also. So we have a question from Andrew Tony and it's I'm not entirely clear on what the business model is, can you explain. Yeah, thanks for that just to clarify. So lyricist learning has its own business model skill type has its own I could kind of walk you through both. So skill types of software platform and while it's free to any individual to use organizations pay an annual subscription to a software as a service experience. So providers who are producing training can load their content into skill type and get access to tools to manage that content. That is a paid service for training providers as well to distribute their trainings to measure the performance of those trainings to get analytics on who's using the training so on so forth. So learning is a subscription offering that Aaron could speak more about but that basically a member of lyricist can pay to access that that database of content from from lyricist directly. And so we have mutual customers that subscribe to our software but also subscribing to that that content offering inside of this software. So we have, I mean the subscription model is the unique thing that. So, some of our members subscribe to lyricist learning for training annual training across the board to anyone of any topic for any individual in their institution, but people also pay per class to. So, we do have different models. I think that there's a really powerful connection between lyricist learning and skill type for subscribers of both services, where you're really. I think that there's something really special. I know that that's what Rob Kernelano was talking about he was like if you could connect these two services I think I feel like it could have a tremendous impact on the people who are trying to access relevant timely professional development for our field. Yeah, and it opened our eyes to a new opportunity as an industry, because again getting back to the equity issue. And the business model for professional development only allows one or a few people to receive that training inside of the whole organization. We're inadvertently increasing the problem around around equity and diversity and inclusion in the organization. And lyricist's approach to a subscription model for the professional development opened our eyes to us. When we're talking to a training provider, we're encouraging them to rethink their business model from charging for one person to get access to to everyone. But in the short term, you may experience a loss and revenue from that particular institution because you're giving access to more people for less money. But by creating a global set of infrastructure, you're going to get more learners from around the world. We already have people subscribing and learning on skill type from places like Singapore, Australia, the UK, Germany. We're now in a relationship with the library Association of Singapore, we're working on something with if law that's going to be announced soon. And so by by sort of making the world a bit smaller. We're hoping we can increase revenues for mom and pop training providers. Because we understand these are not large businesses that are that are doing this great work. And so that's that's sort of the approach we're taking. I want to read out a couple of comments in the chat. Clem said, I think time is one issue so I think we're talking about the poll here and how some people reported a decrease in professional development so I think time is one issue but funding is definitely an issue I won't know what my current year budget is until January hard to plan on what if anything you can spend. I know that the budgeting process has been harrowing, I think is is the right word to use. So thanks, Clem for sharing that. Another comment from Cliff. I'll note that many of our members are reporting a huge increase in demand for research and technology upskilling by faculty and students since the pandemic started. Yeah, we're hearing that. This maps to the usage data we've seen as well. We take a look at what are sort of the most popular interests. And that dictates the training and professional development we go out to get research data management's right at the top. Now have about 800 videos and articles on that topic alone. And so that we've we've seen response to that as well. I'm thinking about Clem's comment about the unpredictability of the budgets. I think this is one of the strengths of subscriptions in general is the predictability of them, as opposed to the sort of up and down nature of one off, you know, registration costs or, you know, figuring out what bundling model the conference will launch this time. You know, Charleston just bundled some things together to allow a group of people to save money. So, but those are a bit less predictable. And so we think sort of all end subscriptions do have a benefit of that that sort of predictability. Yeah, it's interesting to we were talking I was talking with some colleagues this morning about the threshold for when subscription is saving you money and I think it's first because we have different tiers for the different institutions like for different membership tiers. And so I think for at least one tier. If you were taking if if anyone in your institution was taking three or more classes. So three or more classes per institution or organization, the subscription would actually save you money. And so, this is an interesting aha moment. I think for us. I want to read out another comment Cecilia is saying I think librarians have kept up or increase their professional development and those who are not in professional positions are somewhat reluctantly upskilling, because they don't have enough work to keep them occupied. I think that for professional development is just different between the two groups in at my institution anyway. So I think a culture shift will have to happen as well. Thank you Cecilia for sharing that. Indeed. And with those words. That's a great place I think for us to bring this session to a close and which I'm very sorry to do because I think it's been just really interesting. Thank you for your thought and such a wonderful conversation. I want to thank Aaron and Tony so much for bringing this issue to CNI and to our wonderful attendees for all their thoughtful comments and questions. And Aaron just wants everyone to know that the slides are up on sked I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording because I'm very mindful of the time and thanks to everyone who's hung in there, but do stick around if you have more questions or questions, Tony, please stick around. Raise your hand I'll be happy to unmute you and with you with that I will just wish everyone a good rest of their day. Be safe and be well. Bye bye.