How might we share responsible tech learning for the greatest impact? — Part 3/3

Hi there! We’re back to share the outcomes of our Shared Learning project for the Responsible Tech Collective (RTC). In part 3 of our series on this project we’ll be sharing a little about the prototypes we’ve developed and are testing in response to our insights.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

If you’re in need of a bit of context, please take a look at part 1 and part 2 articles. In these articles you can read about our process and the core insights that informed our prototypes.

What have we been up to?

We’ve been running design sprints around the following question since January and have moved through discovery, design and delivery:

How might we share individual learning and enable collective progress?

After the initial research we ran workshops with a mix of RTC members:

• Insights Synthesis workshop [internal] — in which the Noisy Cricket team reviewed the data collected through the research and defined the insights and opportunity areas
• Insight Refinement workshop [external] — in which the Noisy Cricket team facilitated a group of RTC members to review and sense-check the insights, and together prioritised the opportunity areas
• Ideation and Prioritisation workshops [external] — in which the Noisy Cricket team facilitated a group of RTC members to develop ideas for the service, based on opportunity areas and prioritise where to spend our energy in the design and build stage

The glorious mess of the design process

So what was the outcome?

From these workshops we were able to produce a service blueprint of what a Shared Learning service could look like. This was informed by the concept developed and prioritised by RTC members:

Member Co-Created Shared Learning Sessions.

Our service blueprint

Our ambition for the Member Co-created Learning sessions is to better enable members and the Collective as a whole to share their learning and enable progress.

Co-creation is essential to this process, to enable members to come together, bring their diverse perspectives and share learning across a whole range of topics to disseminate good practice and begin to shift ways of working in the Greater Manchester tech industry.

We at Noisy Cricket will play a support role for this service, enabling members to team up with one another to develop and deliver learning sessions. These sessions can be based on projects, client work or new or evolving practices in design, data, technology.

We will support members through the five key stages of the service:

Our user journey map

For each service touchpoint, there are artefacts and processes to support members to consider how best to share their learning and support audiences to consider how it might apply to their own practices.

These artefacts include a user playbook, which details the guidance and tools designed to support members to co-create learning sessions and deliver them to the rest of the RTC, as well as how to set up and deliver their learning session such that they enable audiences to assimilate the learning and shift their practices. We’ve also created a user guidance document comprising session content and structure guidance.

At the core of all of this are our insights about what makes a good, shared learning experience, gathered with the RTC member through our co-design process. To support members delivering learning sessions to shape what learning they might share and how, we’ve shared content principles of good learning sessions and a content checklist including prompts to help the start thinking about their own session:

Our principles and provocations for sharing learning reciprocally

Take a look at the links above to review more of the content we’ve co-designed for this service. We’d love your thoughts, reflects and feedback!

What have we learned from testing?

We’ve now run the first ‘member-co-created learning session’, testing all artefacts and service touch-points in a live service test.

This first session was run by the wonderful Danielle Stone of Nexer Digital. She led the most incredible learning session on Speculative Design for RTC members, co-created with other Nexer colleagues and with input from the Department of Education.

I loved learning about a new technique to add to my toolbox — Audience member feedback

I learn(ed) how to do speculative design and I can truly see how this is beneficial, especially for innovation and to help validate ideas — Audience member feedback

We received some super useful feedback in the final ‘Reflect’ stage of the service journey, both from Danielle regarding the service journey and artefacts, and from audience members sharing what they learned, loved and lacked from the session:

• We learned that the materials we provided to support members to design and set up their sessions were very helpful, offering insight about how to structure effective and productive learning workshops, “loved that you had put together guidance…(the materials) completely changed my mind about those sessions. Realised I was very over-ambitious about what you can do by the time people have got their heads around it.”
• The fact that we handled attendee and meeting admin was very helpful for members running sessions, “really great to get the update about the attendees. Really good to know and motivating.”
• We also learned that the language and the amount of guidance we provided was quite overwhelming, “At times I found that there was quite a lot in there, quite a lot of complex language in the different values, which are really embedded in the work you’re doing but new to me. Quite intimidating…(I worried) am I going to hit all of these things?”
• It was also unclear where to go for different advice and guidance, as there were two documents, “I think we also discussed the ‘Playbook’ and ‘Guidance’ naming as I couldn’t remember which one was which when I wanted to reference something.”
• In guidance we’re missing some basic practical information, such as session length and accessibility needs, “how long should the session be, how much of that should be me talking, accessibility side for anything interactive”, “The time to set and run the exercises was much longer than I expected, luckily I had left half an hour for discussion which we used entirely to finish nearly all the exercises and sum up.”
• We were missing some specific information on how to make the session as accessible as possible, “It would be nice to have capability for captions but not a massive issue”
• Finally, zoom is new to some facilitators and we may need to include more ‘how to’ information about how to manage it, “I’m not familiar with zoom as we use Teams all the time, so didn’t really know how to use the breakout rooms. I only realised quite late on how to join the rooms.”

Next steps

We’re now testing and tweaking these prototypes, a stage that will continue until all needs are met and all our assumptions are tested!

A key question we’d love to explore is:

• How might we make these online workshops more accessible when it’s a group we don’t know (therefore we may not know what specific accessibility needs we need to meet)?

If you have any thoughts, reflections or feedback on this question or any of our content about how to create space for shared learning, please do reach out at: hello@noisycricket.org.uk.