Category: learning technology

Case Study: Rogue Robot immersive learning pilot

Rogue Robot is an immersive educational escape room that uses AI to promote and strengthen teamwork and critical thinking skills. A year-long project to develop a pilot learning experience was put through its paces by 50 students at Lewes College in Summer 2026.

Case Study: ARLLS youth leadership startup

The All Round Leadership Learning System (ARLLS) is a collaborative leadership development programme tailored to the needs of young people, that has been productised and launched to market to help generate revenue for the Beacon Changemakers scholarship charity.

Case Study: The Portal – reimagining learning

Supporting a founder to bring their product vision to life, incorporating product definition, solution analysis, and selecting a development agency.

How community engagement platforms are moving in on the workplace learning market

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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Our journey searching for the AI Team

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

Breaking free: how a £100 RPA tool saved £150K in vendor fees

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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Using ChatGPT as a learning simulation tool

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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Should Edtech care about blockchain?

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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Designing an inclusive chatbot

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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Look out, here comes Microsoft!

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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