 I'm happy to, yes. OK, let's go ahead and get started then. So hi everyone, my name is Chris Hodgson and I'm the owner and director of Discovery Learning Limited based in South Tyneside, which is just a short drive away from Middlesbrough College and my business predominantly focuses on three main services, which are digital learning multimedia developments, the development of bespoke digital learning platforms and supporting our clients who typically are estimies and small independent training providers through the process of implementing effective strategies for online learning. So in late 2020, I was brought on board by Gordon Duffy McGee, the director of teaching and learning at Middlesbrough College as a project lead for their college collaboration fund project. And I apologize, as I very much hope that Gordon could actually be with us today for today's session to talk about the impact and legacy of CCF at Middlesbrough, but unfortunately he can be with us, so I'm going to do my best to cover the next few slides. So CCF round one brought together five colleges from across the northeast that each delivered their own projects relating to the impact of digital technology on the student experience. And quite importantly, the ability to make students feel more connected to their learning journey moving from education to employment. Right from the very start of the project, I felt it was important that our project team, which was comprised of teaching staff, heads of department and digital coaches, to go through a human centred design process or student centred design process you may prefer to say, which encouraged us to speak to and understand the needs of our target audience through interviews and classroom sessions. And by doing so, we were able to identify student engagements with digital learning technology as one of the key challenges where we set out to make a difference. And you'll also notice there that importance of employability skills was also identified very early on in the process as well. And so by working through this, what we ended up doing towards the end of the ideation process is something like a self analysis process within our own team to critically decide upon what was within our available skill set timeline, staff availability, and also our budget that we could actually design for in order to achieve the types of change that we wanted to make happen for the enrichment of our students college experience. And the main tangible outcomes within Middlesbrough were the development of a new digital badge framework, the development of resources to help students feel more confident in showcasing their skills through digital media and the hiring of free full time digital coaches who continue to play an active role at the college today in supporting students face to face, such as through STEM workshops. From my own perspective and vested interest in the project as a digital learning solutions developer, another key product that we pitched and delivered through the CTF project was a student centered web platform that we called the construct, which as well as being a home to access the many resources that were developed from this particular project also included a student profile builder interface to allow students to build a professional profile of themselves and their key skills. And following that student centered design methodology, we paid careful attention to the floor of the student induction process onto the construct to ensure that it was as intuitive as possible, especially for mobile devices, which were very much the web enable device of choice for any construction students versus a desktop or laptop computer, for example. And we aim to support each student to realise and make their best skills known as part of a professional profile through this construct platform interface. So just in case anyone is not familiar with the staging process of the human centered design project, I just wanted to include this slide to show you the types of activities that we undertook through our own CCF project, leading to that initial pilot rollout with our student group towards the end of the project there. So now we move into the 21-22 academic year and the new skillspace platform developed during the most recent college collaboration fund round two, which is the next iteration of this idea of an ever evolving student professional profile builder. The biggest ambition that Gordon and Middlesbrough had right from the start of this project was to take the lessons that we learned and work today from CCF one and look to incorporate these into a brand new platform that could support T level students and those mainly following vocational based studies. And through the work that Gordon had done, engaging and exploring ideas with a local employer stakeholder group, we were able to identify, we were able to discover what are the most crucial employability skills currently sought after within each industry, i. What is it that makes an ideal candidate, especially a young candidate perhaps entering the world of work for the first time? What is required from them to evidence in order for their employment skills to come across to ensure that essentially through skillspace we are doing the best to showcase and highlight those key employability and core skills to prospective employers, for example. So, what we're going to do now is take a look at a brief kind of experience, user experience demonstration for the key areas of what our skillspace pilot that we ran within Middlesbrough College with a student, a number of student groups, how that essentially looks. So what you're seeing here is as soon as the student has verified and created their accounts on the skillspace platform, the very first thing that they are presented with is their induction system. Lasting approximately five minutes, which we build to be as engaging as possible through the use of presenter led videos and some game based elements as well. The activity itself is almost like a more like a casual conversation with some theoretical questions thrown at the students in order to draw out where their key skills lay the most within those core employment employability skill areas. The initial research that I mentioned, Gordon, had done with employer groups, for example, designing our questions to wrap around those key skills. Once the student has then completed their induction, they then get set loose on the profile builder interface. And here there are various building options that the student has to make their profile their own by including a professional photograph, adding a video CV like a video introduction, writing their personal statements and including their references, and also including photographic of video evidence of their skills, much like the feature set of any portfolio system, for example. And on the right hand side of the profile interface, the video probably catch up in a second, is the skill wheels area, which displays the students skills scores based on the outcome of their induction survey. So this in effect is a life score which can be influenced by the student taking part in activities both at the college and within skill space itself. So it's a never evolving view point of the student's journey, as it were, within each of those core skill areas. And then when the student is comfortable with the design and content of their portfolio, they can then choose to make their personal profile page accessible via a web link. And a critical policy of skill space that we implemented right from the start is privacy by default, meaning that the students themselves are the ones who decide when and what is publicly through skill space via their shareable private link. And when it comes to what an employer sees from the front end profile, we carefully considered the use of free adjectives, a skill space is essentially not intended to be a critical of the student's current status, for example. So where the student may be working towards further development in a particular area, the employer gets that valuable insight into the commitment that the student has done to further develop any particular skill, as the students themselves can write into each of those skills, almost like a diary to say, you know, what they have been doing, what they've been focused on in order to improve any particular employability skill. And then lastly, because skill space is a bespoke platform built on WordPress architecture, we had the opportunity to again incorporate further opportunities for students to learn and expand their knowledge on employability skills within a specific steam topic focus. So the My Action Plan, for example, provides a weekly recommendation to students based on their scores for immediate fund activities that they can open up within skill space. Including the ability to sign up to workshop events being ran at the college within the new steam lab. There are also digital badges that the student can unlock and add to their profile at any time. And the Learning and Enrichment tab that we're just seeing here contains various learning activities that were developed as part of the College Collaboration Fund Round Two project. So in many ways it's almost like a micro learning management system incorporated into that front end student profile builder interface as well. But in order to pilot the use of skill space within the college for us to report back to the CCF and Department for Education on its effectiveness and potential. We ran a number of student workshops within Middlesbrough's new steam lab area with a small number of students that were undertaking T level qualifications. We placed the focus of these events on effective storytelling and communication and how this all feeds back into employability skills before the students then got hands on with the creation process of using the skills based profile builder. So starting things off with a task involving the Lego for Education kits. We got the students thinking about how they can deliver a message in a visual way and also to consider how they would communicate with their target audience in line with their own expectations like what an employer might be desperately looking to find out from a new prospective employee. And this then leads very nicely into what was the remainder of the workshop, which was utilising multimedia enhanced professional profiles to demonstrate the students' values and skills, what they picked up at college, what they picked up at their time on placements, whilst they're on their T level course. Building that into their skills based profile in order for their voice to stand out from the crowd in the often competitive world of job seeking. So what comes next and what are we hoping to achieve going forward? In the spirit of the collaboration fund initiative, my key ambition of having gone through this project with Middlesbrough to get to the point where we are now is to make skillspace a platform that is an open resource that we can make available for the entire sector to take advantage of. And the roadmap, which I hope to achieve in order to reach that goal, is that within the next three months we'd like to invite more education providers to join an invited beta trial for skillspace. And this gives us an opportunity to take on board as much user feedback as we can to then make skillspace available as a public offering within the next academic year. And in terms of the business model that we will be adopting moving forward, a good example of this is Moodle, which many of you will likely have heard of, which is an open source LMS platform, which anybody can download and freely use. But at that point, you would become solely responsible for the management and upkeep of your own platform. But on the other hand, Moodle does have partners which offer fully hosted and maintained plans. And this is where I think discovery learning, my company, can add the most value for our own customers and where I want to position ourselves taking skillspace forward. And therefore, any business that we would generate from doing this would allow us to continuously improve on the feature set of skillspace. And over time, I feel we would also be in a strong position to attract external investment, perhaps from bodies such as UFI, when we are able to clearly demonstrate our ability to scale. So, please, if you work for an education provider potentially interested in piloting skillspace with a small number of your own students, or perhaps know somebody within your own network who you think should be told about this, then head on over to skill-space.uk, where we have a form to register your interest in our invited beta trial, as well as an interactive brochure that we've produced with lots more details on what the skillspace platform has to offer. And I'd also like to take this opportunity to signpost you towards our CCF2, our college collaboration fund round two resource site, which is accessible via the web at teesvalleyenrichment.uk. And there you will find a wealth of free resources made available from all of our college regional partners. And that includes a myriad of learning tutorials and resources around the use of LEGO, the use of Minecraft for Education. And there's a lot of well-being resources in there as well. One of the key areas that Middlesbrough and working with myself during this period as well, we focus quite a lot of time researching the impact of virtual reality and the use of the Oculus Quest 2 headset with students and some freely and also commercially available mindfulness experiences that are available through the Oculus Store, for example. We wanted to get the students direct feedback on what they saw as the potential and the value, and if they would use these within the Steam lab space at Middlesbrough, for example. And it's been, it was extremely well received. The digital coaches team now run at least, I won't be able to say exactly without, I'm kind of just quoting off the top of my head here. But I know that they do run workshops or have run workshops when the college was fully open on a weekly basis, covering things like use of virtual reality, using the LEGO for Education kits. They also have Arduino kits and there's been some coding activity going on. So there's a whole real wealth of things that have been happening at the college and continued to do so. And I would certainly say that if you're interested in kind of hearing what the college has been doing in this area to email, it's Reboot. So R-E-B-W-T at mbrough mbrough.ac.uk. And that would get you through to the digital coaches team who I think would be more than happy to kind of blow their own trumpet really and tell you about everything that they've been doing within their Steam lab over at the college. OK, so this brings me to the end of my presentation today. So I'd like to thank you very much for attending and thank you very much to AmplifyFE for inviting me to come along to give this presentation. And I very much hope to continue being a part of the community. I think it's a wonderful and great initiative for FFE, more communication and more sharing and working together to highlight and build these initiatives. I think it's a wonderful thing. It's like I said, one of the key things about skill space is that I just don't want it to end up on the shelf as sometimes these things do. You know, you kind of go through these funded periods of project work and then really the wind gets taken out of the sails in order to move on to the next thing. But thankfully, as I'm almost a third party to the college, I'm available to kind of help keep this moving as I know Gordon and the rest of the team at Middlesbrough College are very keen to do as well. So within that kind of trial period that I was talking about, our involvement with our beta users, our invited guests who will be trialling skill space for us. You would certainly be engaging with both myself from the side of discovery learning and also the team at Middlesbrough College so that we can ultimately make this thing something that is really useful for the wider industry, the wider sector for further education and vocational education. Okay, so that's it. Thank you so much. I'll hand over to Christina now. Thanks, Chris. That was really interesting. If anybody's got any questions, feel free to put them in the chat or even turn your microphone on and ask them. Emma's just said she really appreciates you coming along and speaking today. It's been very insightful. Well, I just really appreciate the advice. Thank you so much for having me. If nobody's got any questions, I'm going to end the recording now if you're happy for me too, Chris. Yeah, sure. That's fine.