 Mae'r reliant dda, mae'r twel, a wrth gwrs gweithio pwysgwyr, oherwydd mae'n kyfil yn bryd ystod yn gyfyrdd, ac mae'r chyfnod, hwnnw, o wjangall pan â gefnogaeth hwnnw wedi'i bwysig o'r twel, byddai'n ffordd ychydig ar y cyfry o gyflym, wrth gwrs gawr o bwrth gwrs gwrsglunodd a'r egwycoff iawn, mae'n bwysig o'r twel, ac mae wir yn ei mwy yw cerddion mewn. Mae'r twel eich gweithio, mae'n bwysig o'r twel i'r twel. But it's unlikely. My name is Caroline. It's possible, but I'm actually Patrick Dunn. Caroline, unfortunately, is ill, so I've stepped in at the last moment to take a presentation. I know the presentation quite well. I've gone through it. And interestingly, I wonder if Caroline, I wonder if she's watching now, I actually disagree with one small part of it. So, you know, a lot of learning is about disagreement and contradiction. So that's probably a good thing. So just about me, I've been doing learning technology projects for about 40 years, actually, as of next month. I did my first one in 1983, and I do a lot of academic work as well. I've got three master's degrees as well. So this is what we're talking about. Just briefly about UFI. We support the development of digital technologies that help us obtain vocational skills. We're about vocational skills. OK, and as a charity, we have a particular focus on this kind of learner, those who haven't done particularly well or been served particularly well by mainstream education. Now, of course, defining mainstream education is a pretty important thing here. And I kind of struggled with it this morning. So I just came up with this phrase, didn't do particularly well at school. That kind of thing or didn't go to school. And if you look at the stats, they're pretty shocking, actually. I was looking at the literacy stats this morning. There's about seven million people in the UK classed as, I think, it's illiterate or pure or with difficulty with literacy age. I think eight or nine reading age, something like that. So you think about wandering around your average shopping centre, the number of people that walk in pasture that can't actually read the signs on the shops or the packaging, there's a lot, actually. So they're the folks that have not been particularly served well by the traditional mainstream. OK, so the next bit is a bit of audience interaction. Let me just see if I've got it right. Yeah. And as we go, we've got a select audience here today, ladies and gentlemen. And so what I was going to ask was, do you or do any of you have a sense that that there was a particular aspect of the mainstream education system that didn't serve you well? Do you know anyone? I need just to give you an example. My my partner, do you know what I promised? I wouldn't mention her specifically if I did. I'm going to go somewhere else. OK, now I'm going to go somewhere else completely as well. A friend of my son's has got a real hang up about maths. He'll never get maths GCSE. It's it. He just he just can't do it. And he has a sense, his parents keep telling him that it's going to be a hindrance in his life. And I think this is the wrong, you know, it's a wrong bit of parenting. But also it's one of these things that you do come across. And a number of adults have a hang up about a particular subject. It's often maths. And it can be all sorts of things. You know, the I'm just going to get out the way briefly so that we can all see. So, you know, it can just be the sense that you're a square peg in a round hole or you just lack motivation or for goodness sake, the pandemic, you know, your diversity lack of support learning. You might just not fit and there's a hell of a lot of people that don't fit. I was very lucky. Didn't come from a privileged background, but I was fine all the way through. But I know loads of people who just got one of those, you know. And if you know someone, just reflect on it, if folks online the same. And there can be all sorts of reasons for those categories. I've got here are situational, institutional or dispositional. I really like those. So it could be something to do with the situation you're in. It could be simply who you are, your disposition, or it could be the institutional situation that you're in. OK, so there's all sorts of reasons. But give me, I do have to go through these notes because this is a great presentation, but Caroline wrote the script. So let's have a look at the human element, because what we're saying here and essentially what we're talking about here is design, designing for those. Whom the educational, the mainstream education system has not done a fantastic job and how we can design for learning technologies to help them out. And I really like this diagram as a a series of zones, a series of concentric circles that puts the learner right at the centre. Now, the point here is because of course you always supposed to put the learner at the centre, aren't you? That's what you're supposed to do when you're designing learning experiences. You're supposed to say we put the learner at the centre. But when you have learners, students who are from for whatever reason, not fitting in, not well served, there are some special conditions here. So, for example, the learner may be particularly they may not be very good at expressing their needs, articulating what they need and what they want and so on, their direction and where they want to go. It's a different perspective that's required. Now, all these other folks, due to support peers, experts, and they'll be much more articulate, much more articulate and much more able to to manage the situation. But putting the learner at the core here can be tough, right? And so it requires a particularly astute and occasionally forensic approach to design, which I'll talk about to make sure that they are well served. So having had a look at who the sort of the human, the human bit, now let's look at the design process. It's worth saying that my my sort of passion in life is is designed. So I'm really pleased that Caroline wrote this bit in. I worked in a couple of design agencies. I was so obsessed by it. And what we've got here is a fairly well known cartoon that says and this isn't particularly about learning design. This is about design in general. It says, OK, let's say we're designing something from a customer for a customer. The customer wanted a tyre on the piece of rope hanging on the tree. Now, the client didn't describe that right. So they sort of got the hanging bit and the rope bit right. But actually, from their point of view, it looked like a swing. The engineer thought, ah, I'm going to have two bits of rope on a vertical part of the trunk. And then the manufacturer did what the engineer said. And so you got this chain of misunderstanding and a chain of misunderstanding is extremely dangerous and damaging where you've got a learner who hasn't been served well anyway because their experience is not going to be great. So this is what it kind of looks like. The learner says, how do I know what I need? You know, I know what I don't like. I don't like what I've usually been told and how I've usually been educated. The well-meaning professional wanders around shows and conferences like this and says, do you know what? I heard this cool thing, the sales guy said, but why don't you use Blidyblad technology or design solution? The project manager says, OK, great, we'll do that. I've joined up a budget and the IT person says, do you know what? VR is great. No one told me not to use VR. I'm doing a session partly based around VR this afternoon. So we have a chain of problems here. Now, the key thing here is we must talk about impact. And this is something that we at UFI are very driven by. And I quite like this phrase. It says, until your learners learn something, I don't like the spelling I've learnt, though. You have no evidence that your design and technology are effective or have impact, OK? Until your learner has changed. Again, I talk a lot about that this afternoon. Until your learner has changed, you haven't got any evidence that you've had any impact. All right, so that's what we have to talk about. Our problem at the moment is that technology is advancing so rapidly and so unpredictably that it's hard to track where we are. And we also, we live in an unstable society, politically, economically. And I have a slight hang up with the word transition. We're not in transition because we're changing forever now, right? We're not going from one state to another. We're changing forever. And in a situation like this, technology is a subset of the second point, isn't it? The unstable society, the cultural change is a function of technology, but it's also a subset. OK, so how do we? Actually, this is the bit I slightly disagree with. Caroline's got this thing here that says, right. Her perspective is that humans don't like constant change, right? So our problem is that if we're designing for people who are badly served, what we'd like to do is to say, this is what we're familiar with. This is how we plan for the future. And here's the structure whereby we can design for them. OK, now I actually think human beings on a spectrum here of change. I think we've got another audience person coming in. Do you come in? Hi there. Yeah, no worries at all. I'll just do a quick recap. I will do a mega quick recap. So what we're talking about is that we're talking about those with. It wouldn't be particularly well served by the mainstream, putting them at the centre of the design process. We talked about a rather flawed design process in which assumptions drive poor design and the fact that those badly served by the mainstream education system need a particularly astute and almost forensic approach design. And now I've just been talking about an unstable world in which everything changes. And what I was just saying was that actually, I think in terms of human response to change, you've got a spectrum. And at one end, you've got folks that absolutely dread it. And at the other, you've got people like me who love it. Right. And so we have to. And the thing about innovation and change is you need a mix of people, right? If you've got loads of people like me, we mess things up. If you've got loads of people who only like stable states, you don't innovate. So you need a mix of people to design a process. OK. So we go on to design thinking. Now you may or may not be familiar with these. There's the left hand one is called the double diamond. Interestingly, it's got its 20th birthday this year. It was developed 20 years ago by the design council. It's a very simple process. I think, to be honest, it's a process from a slightly different time, but as a way of thinking, it's useful. And what it says is there was an academic in the 90s, and I've completely forgotten his name, who who came up with this concept that design is about the journey out in the journey in the journey out in the journey in. So what you do is you diverge, you diverge from the point of a challenge. And then you and then you examine the nature of that challenge and then you converge towards an understanding of what you're dealing with. OK. You then say, right, what are we going to deliver? And so you go out and in again. And I think this is this is great as a principle. I think it's it's it's symptomatic of a time where things would be more stable. You had to see what I mean because you diverge from a point by the time you got to the convergence again, everything's changed, right, which is why I like the cyclical one. Yeah. So the idea is you whiz round the circle, you go, right, what do we understand? I empathise with my problem, I define it, I iterate. I'm deliberately speaking very quickly because often this cycle is very quick. I ideate, I prototype, I test, I implement, all right. And then you spin round again and you spin round again. Yeah, until you get to the point where you've tested, you prototype, you've messed about, frankly, this can be very messy, which is why you need people who are not entirely stable state people until you got to a point where your understanding is developed and you've experimented and at that point you can implement. OK. So the key thing, though, is design thinking. You've got to be aware of how you're thinking about design, particularly, and forgive me if I'm repeating myself, particularly where you're dealing with people who have not been well served and for whom the design process has to be astute, almost to the point of being forensic. So approaches, you start by identifying the problem you're trying to fix. And I want to come back to that in a second, particularly for the context of this conference. How do you involve the learner in the design process and then how do you remain flexible and responsive? And I've got a sort of question 3A that popped into my head this morning, which is how do you keep an open mind? Yeah, it's not just about being flexible and responsive because you can be respectful, flexible and responsive, but not have a particularly open mind. But that's a little bit contradictory. But anyway, I want to go back to the first one, though. What's the problem you're trying to fix? So. Who in this room would describe themselves as involved in H.E.? Ah, that's interesting. So do you differ all three? OK, brilliant. So hands up online audience. How many of you are involved in H.E.? Oh, OK. So the point here is, do you identify within higher education the concept of a problem? Do you see what I mean? So you're in front of a bunch of students and you're looking at them and saying, are you a problem? Well, of course, students are often a problem, but not in the way we're talking about, OK? So in the vocational sphere where we work, we often start with a very, you know, a profound problem. Don't we? You know, we have people. No, I'm going to disappear into detail. I'll come back to that later. In H.E., you don't tend to identify, don't to start with a problem, OK? So we may have to have another bit of a vocabulary, another term for that, which is potentially a starting state. It's not a problem, but it's a starting point, isn't it? So if you're trying to and I'm deliberately start I'm deliberately going to use a subject which is not vocational and I hope I'm not stumbling or offending anyone here philosophy. Yeah, do you start a course on philosophy by thinking, oh, my goodness, me, we got a problem here? No, you don't. You say, here's a starting point. I have a bunch of folks that are just starting a qualification and at the end they will be different. So in this case, it's not problem solution. It's start point, end point. I just thought I'd just sort of talk a little bit about that. So what's the problem you're trying to fix? Or what's your starting point? So the thing here is that the point at which you start. Has to be defined by a number of stakeholders. We've got the same map again there. You must make sure that your understanding of and you're listening to the voice of the learner is responsive to the various stakeholders. And it can be quite tricky to get to the voice of the learner. There's no point in building solution if you're trying to fix the wrong thing, if you're not actually listening to the learner astutually enough. You will often find that some of the other stakeholders have very different agendas. So, for example, they might start by saying, well, this is all interesting, but it's too expensive. Right, that's a very important thing to include in the in the in the debate, in the investigation. But the comparison of viewpoints, the second bullet down is extremely important. The checking of assumptions is extremely important. The reaching of consensus can be profoundly difficult given the diversity of viewpoints. And so to involve the learner in the design process and remain flexible. You have I really like this diagram. I wish I'd come up with it. You have this concept of this mindset and a toolkit. And I think they're both really important. The mindset involves things like checking assumptions. I talk about that a lot. I think again, I'm going to put my foot in it here. I think those of us who've done who are inverted commas educated, I think we make a lot of assumptions about things, don't we? You know, it's much easier to be fixed in your assumptions if you've studied a lot. You really thought about things. I have put my foot in it, haven't I? Anyway, mindset, building trust, empathising. Find the motivation. Find the motivation of the learner. What do they need? OK, so there's various aspects of mindset. And again, I really like the tools on the right. Personas, we're sure personas are the characterisations of people. Categorisations. We did a really interesting piece of research with the RSA in which we looked at why adults don't kind of fill their lives full of learning. Why don't adults keep learning? OK, and we identified. I think it was six or was it five personas Myron, I can't remember. I think it's six personas and we looked at the characteristic of each of these types of individual and what stops them from learning. And they range from, you know, frankly, your Amazon driver who doesn't have time and doesn't believe they have the slightest chance of learning anything. And I think we I think we call that the functional learner. And then there was the sort of I'm not going to recall this very well, but there are learners around who simply they would like to, but they don't believe that they're a learning type, you know, they don't believe that the kind of person and then the whole bunch of things. So personas is a great tool. Learner journey mapping, I like that one. Using agile approaches familiar with those. Again, it's very similar to the design cycle, the design thinking cycle that we had a couple of slides ago. And so iterative agile processes excuse me. So just a few examples of our work. The the key the key thing here is that each of these. Deal with I'm trying to avoid the word underprivileged with with these learners who haven't done well in inverted commas, right? And they take really very different approaches. The one I know best is First Step Trust. It's a remarkable organisation that takes individuals who have the most appalling lives and it just gives them a chance, you know, it gives them a chance to learn really basic things like how to fit a tyre on a car. And the reason it does that is because the people they deal with with their really dreadful starting points totally believe they can't learn. They can't learn anything, right? And it gives them a process whereby they develop self-esteem and they say to themselves, do you know what? If I can learn to stick a tyre on a car, actually, that's quite complicated and it's a bit risky and it's effortful. Maybe I can learn something else, right? So it's a it's partly a virtual reality project. But one of my real sort of height, one of my one of my insights, one of the light bulbs switched on for me, was in a way it's not just about the virtual reality. It's about that point where someone who not long ago I'm not going to go into details with, you know, was living a very dangerous and impoverished life. Someone puts a headset on them and the world they're seeing is damn slightly better than the one they live in, right? And they can do something in it. They have a functional activity they can actually achieve. And they go through a process and they think, let me look if I can do this and someone cares for me enough to do this, then I can learn other stuff as well, right? And that is profoundly putting the learner at the centre of the design process, thinking about what their needs are. They did a huge amount of research and conversation with these people. They got to know them really well and it and it works, you know? Now, the other projects I know less well. I think that the neuro care one is interesting. The whole development process was it's for it's for care workers. The whole development process was built around conversations, focus groups, discussions with with the care workers and the solution they came up with was very human centred videos, just examples of how you should do the job. So it's not the most high-tech of solutions, but it's very much focused and designed around what they discovered about the learners who had not been at all well treated. Maureen, by the way, if you do want to chip in and, you know, just sort of build on my understanding of of these projects, that's that that'd be a good idea. We have maths kitchen. Talked about maths at the start with, and I didn't mention my partner. So. Teachers make a lot of assumptions about levels of numeracy and. There's a kind of, I don't know, there's sometimes a tacit assumption an inner voice with a number of people that just said, I don't like maths. I hate maths. And so what the what the designers here did was they kind of unpicked this whole this whole assumption, this self-perception that maths wasn't wasn't for them and developed some kind of assessment, adaptive assessment, which allowed people to succeed little by little to the point where the person taking the assessment thought, you know what, I can do some of this. And as they were doing this assessment, it actually measured where they were so that when they started the sort of the learning bit, they knew where to start and they were confident they could start. So that is. The end of the main bit of the presentation. And I've been slightly surprised by an extra slide there. Do excuse me. Ah, here we go. So. Learning technologies can help. And they've got more chance of creating impact when the design process is problem and learner focus. I kept saying that. I really like the mindset and toolbox slide. I will obsess endlessly about agility and iteration. You know, when I talk about people that need a stable state, I frankly don't think they're very good at being agile and iterative. All right. This is why you need a mix in a design team. You need a mix of stable state and agitators to start to you really do. And I really like the honesty, open and collaborative approach. You remember that the circle diagram with the heart in the middle. There are lots of stakeholders you've got to be honest. You've got to be open. You've got to be clear about what your position is and you've got to collaborate. Any questions or comments or thoughts. And thank you again for Caroline, who I hope is watching for a fantastic presentation. And it's been a real privilege to be her deputy, as it were. One thing I was thinking about, I love that. Can we go back to that diagram? You know the one I mean. It's that perfect, that's the one. Can it such a teeny word, but it can be so key to the process? Would you like to talk about trust and gaining learner's trust to actually take part in that process? Cos it's not an easy thing. Is it getting honest feedback from learners about what they want? When sometimes they can't visualise it, or in my experience, they're just like, oh heavens, why are they asking me? On the back foot, how do we go about building that trusting relationship? What do you think? OK, so the question was, how do we gain trust? How do we build trust with these people? I think often you've got, the teacher is a great gatekeeper. So if you've got to teach and moderate that, you know, we see lots of stories about, you know, I'm going to say it often coming in, the teacher leaves and often start firing questions at students and then you've got this person has to sue them to report. And then you immediately clam up or give the answers that they think person wants to hear. So I think you've actually maybe got student counsellors, yeah, yeah, certainly having a familiar person, but maybe even smaller focus groups. I don't know, but it certainly can be difficult. Because I've certainly got a bit of a pushback. Why are they asking me and teacher as expert? And does this mean you don't know what you're doing if you're asking me what you should do instead? Do you know it's interesting when you said a trusted person, what occurred to me? Because of course, the reason I batted it back to you was because I needed time to think. So my experience with First Step Trust is a remarkable organisation. What they have done to gain trust is they found one or two people who represent them. So you find one person who's had a dreadful life and you gain their trust. You just find one and you work with them and it doesn't matter how long you take, you work with them. That person can then gain the trust of everyone else. Do you see what I mean? You don't want somebody like me to go in and say, hey, man, what's your problem, right? What you want, cheers, thanks for coming. What you want is to cultivate an ambassador, don't you? And that works. That works, yeah. And something that Ronnie Wilson remarked about. Ronnie Wilson at MBE, First Step Trust, amazing bloke. Something he's done is he has worked with particular individuals sometimes, I think it might be years to gain their trust and you get this thing, people like me, all of a sudden, and they advocate and he's done that brilliantly. So I think that's one way of doing it. I do like the idea of focus groups, but I wouldn't even call them focus groups. I just say group chats, as in face-to-face group chats. That works. Otherwise, any other thoughts on gaining trust? One of these that we mentioned, all of these things take time and I think people don't allocate that time that they're going to be able to move and shut down. Yeah, Linja said parachute in. You don't want to parachute in. That's for sure. That's for sure. I said burgers, possibly in poppy. Burgers in poppy. Yeah. Is it again? Pizza parties. Pizza parties, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. Yeah. If you're a student at any level, you're already going to have a... If you feel that you've been failed and you're struggling with learning, you're already going to have a bit of a distrust like this might not be for me. This isn't, you know, and people don't care. So it does require like educators, teachers, whoever is involved in that process to be willing to dedicate the time and showcase no, I'm here to help. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think that's a very big one. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, thank you. Yeah, and I'll just chuck this in. Dr. Seena Donovan is now at Edgewood University. Her doctoral thesis and her continuing work is on the bond of trust between the educators and students. Oh, it's interesting. She's a fantastic person to read on now. OK. I trust that we'll be able to assess it. Now, I'm just going to... Thank you so much. There's a new one person plus us here to the board. Thank you, thank you very much. And I'm also, we are also promoting the... What's this called, Maureen? It's... I know it's... Oh, it's the Voktec Future Skills Award 2023, the Voktec Future Skills Award 2023. If you could make one change to the skill system to get more adults learning, what would it be? What would it be? There is 5,000 quid in it for you, yeah? It's worth thinking about, isn't it? And it's a good question, a great question. Yeah, what would you do to get more adults learning? Yeah. And what I like about it, it's a very open question, isn't it? Learning what? Learning when? Learning how? How are we going to get more people involved? So, thank you very much. Thank you very much, folks online. I think that is probably it. You can get a copy of these slides. Do sign up to our newsletter. And I think that's it. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for viewing. Thank you. Tricol, you're dashing off. No, shall we do a compressed version? If you could just start from the beginning, just do that. I thought so. Each session has a little half hour of work, but then this one is on its own on a half hour. So it was a little bit confusing. Yes, it needed work. You're not first people to say this, so when you do it, what will feed it back to the creative input? I'm going to do a five-minute version, because you could do the first five or 10 minutes, couldn't you? OK, here we go again. This is mainstream education version 2.0. So, I'm not going to do the who we are with the UFI Object Trust. OK, I'll say a little bit. We do three things. We issue grants. We advocate through partnerships. We're a partner of Alt. We invest money in ventures. What I talked about originally, first time through, was what do we mean by having not done very well through mainstream education? If you just want a sort of paraphrase, you didn't do very well at school. The mainstream didn't serve you very well. It could be for many, many reasons. It could be any of these. So, in terms of putting the human at the heart, what do we mean? Well, it's all very well saying, look, we're going to put the human at the heart. At UFI, we talk endlessly about user-focused thinking, about user-focused design. The problem, the challenge with those who've not been served well, is that they're probably not able to articulate what they want or need. They're probably really bad at that. So you have to have a particularly astute, insightful, sensitive, almost forensic approach to putting them there at the centre. And not just listening to tutor support experts, peers and so on, but trying to get to them and gain their trust, which is why Lin, I think, introduced that. We talked about the design process and this kind of funny, but rather sad, bitterly sad representation of poor design. What the customer wants. I want one of them. The client describes it wrongly. So the engineer designs it, you know, misinterpets what they say and they design that. And then, of course, the manufacturer makes that, right? So the gap between what the, in this case, the learner, the student wants and what's delivered, the gap can be enormous. Over coffee or whatever, I can tell you some. I worked in the design business for quite a while. Some absolutely hilarious multi-million pound failures because we did that. I was involved in the 15 million pound failure. And this is what, you know, the learner wasn't me, by the way. The learner says, how do I know what I need? The professional says, well, I saw this at a trade fair. The project manager says, fantastic. I'm glad you saw that trade fair. I've got a budget and a plan. And the IT person says, oh, I love VR. Nobody told me that I shouldn't do VR. We talked about the sort of chaotic advance of life generally and technology as both as a subset and a subset of that. We then talked about design thinking principles. And we talked about the very well established design council model called the double diamond, which is basically based on an approach called journey at journey in. In other words, you diverge from a challenge or a problem. You converge to an understanding of it and then you make something. This one is a more iterative, more cyclical view of design thinking. Of course, the reason I'm talking about design thinking is because the approach to design thinking, when you're dealing with people who have been badly served, has to be particularly sensitive. So we talked about this kind of iteration model, understanding exploration, materialized understanding and the fact that it is very iterative and you might have to go around a few times. Design thinking approaches, you need to identify the problem you're trying to fix. How do you involve the learner? And how do you remain flexible and responsive? Best slide of the day in any of the presentations in this conference. I didn't do this. I didn't construct this, by the way. I'm sorry for that. I'm actually standing in for someone else. So I can say this is brilliant without being arrogant. So we talked about mindset and these kind of things in the mindset that are very important. I'm particularly a light on building trust, thank you, Lyn. And not making assumptions. And then we talked a bit about personas, impact measures, agile approaches. So the idea of tools and ways of thinking. And then I gave some examples and I endlessly talked about the wonderful first step trust who deal with very disadvantaged, deprived individuals and given them the chance to start. That's it. They know their people and they give them a very first simple experience to get them started and encourage them how to learn. And that's it.