A Fundamental Disconnect | 2021 VocTech Challenge
In March, Ufi will be publishing its Green Paper which sets out the findings from Ufi’s VocTech Challenge ‘discovery phase’ to explore the question:
How can VocTech improve vocational outcomes for people most impacted by the digital divide and at greatest risk from the long-term impact of the pandemic on access to training and jobs?
How do we then link those vocational skills to real employment opportunities?
This is the third in a series of blog posts that share Ufi’s reflections on using ‘design thinking’ principles to shape its work programme.
Collective wisdom and potential for innovation.
Blog Post by Daniel Whiston, Ufi Consultant and Learning Designer
I’ve been part of the team at Ufi who have recently been engaging in a ‘discovery journey’, to harvest insights from a range of stakeholders and practitioners involved in online learning in the UK. The broad intention here is to gain insights into what Ufi should be doing as a VocTech funder and advocate, and how it should be doing it in order to tackle the 2021 VocTech Challenge:
How can VocTech improve vocational outcomes for people most impacted by the digital divide and at greatest risk from the long-term impact of the pandemic on access to training and jobs?
How do we then link those vocational skills to real employment opportunities?
My role was to help bring together a group of Learning Designers and Learning Technologists, for an open discussion. The session generated a range of useful insights – but that isn’t what I’m going to focus on here.
Rather, the preparation for the event clarified (to me) a fundamental cultural disconnect between the vast majority of Learning Designers and Learning Technologists in the commercial UK online learning sector, and the aspirations and values of Ufi and organisations like it.
Which, perhaps, is ‘part of the problem’. Having worked for dozens of e-learning agencies over the past 22 years, my personal experience has been that if you asked a ‘typical’ LD/LT working in the e-learning sector a question like ‘if you could do anything with online learning, what would it be?’, or ‘what kinds of learning tools would really transform people's lives?’, the initial (honest) reaction from many of them would be mild confusion. If pressed, you’d ultimately get an answer like ‘Er, why are you asking me? Shouldn’t you be talking to a teacher or a politician or something?’
Most hands-on practitioners who produce online learning and training content work in the commercial sector, and their professional identity often has nothing to do with ‘generating public benefits’.
Which is, again, ‘part of the problem’. A huge amount of expertise and experience is arguably held by a practitioner community who would often be surprised to find themselves asked a question like ‘how can we really change people's lives through online learning?’
To the extent that’s true, it limits the voices engaged in answering such questions, and overlooks a lot of collective wisdom and potential for innovation.
In the end, we did manage to access a representative sample of LD/LT people, and generate the kind of productive, surprising and informative discovery-phase conversation that we needed to have. But a broad range of perspectives is always best, and it seems to me that one of the fundamental challenges our community faces is that many practitioners wouldn’t imagine they had anything to add to such a conversation – when very many of them do.
Read the next blog post in this series: Creating a Culture of Innovation.
