Intro to Beacon and ARLLS Beacon Changemakers has been helping talented young East Africans into places at top African International Schools and UK Universities for over 15 years. More than just a scholarship programme, the Beacon team delivers a leadership programme to their scholars, in the hope that they will eventually lead ethical and positive…
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Founder Sally Burns has been running a content creation business for some years, helping female founders and experts to create beautifully crafted content for their own audiences via the LearnWorlds platform. Sally’s vision to scale this up required a learning platform that emphasises collaboration and connection over completion and content monetisation (which excludes most of…
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Numerous research studies show that effective learning in organisations comes from three areas: experiential learning (real-world tasks) making up the bulk; social learning (interactions with others) following in second place; and structured, formal education in last place and making up just a small percentage of how we learn. This is why LMS products, traditionally focussed…
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My piece for Thrive’s AI newsletter about setting up a new AI team for the business and some of the innovations they’ll be working on through 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-made-me-do-our-journey-searching-ai-team-thrivelearning-k0bpe
The final project at my last role involved extracting seven years of learner data for 80,000 learners from an LMS that was being decommissioned. The shock of our vendor’s £150,000 quote to both extract and host 3TB of learner data led me to explore a robotic process automation (RPA) solution using a low cost browser…
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This article was originally posted to LinkedIn during April 2023. About five years ago at Brightwave, we worked on a chatbot prototype for The Samaritans. The chatbot was a learning simulation tool, with the chatbot acting out the part of Bella, a bullied teenager. The training was for listening volunteers who were increasingly supporting people…
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People have been trying to find educational uses for blockchain for many years now. I try to carve out a little time every year to see if any research projects have matured into industry products but it’s never a productive search. There are always dedicated practitioners (mostly academics) running proof of concepts, and many more…
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I recently completed the Designing a Feminist Chatbot course on FutureLearn. As a starter course it has a lot going for it, covering areas such as different chatbot uses, how chatbots can become biased, user centred design (UCD) principles, persona creation, conversation design, storyboarding and prototyping. Having studied UCD at degree level and worked on…
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Towards the end of 2020 our Head of Learning Design asked me to do a short presentation to her design team about where I thought the main disruptions to the Learning & Development technology market would come from in the year ahead. Usually we would look at startups, niche suppliers or parallel industries to identify…
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Adaptive learning uses competence, behavioural and demographic data to tailor a digital learning experience around each learners unique needs. There’s a lot of hype around this area which might have you thinking its all about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but that’s not the case and there are two types of adaptive learning approaches: AI-based and Rule-based.…
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