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Thank you Tony, to repeat as Alan said, I'm standing between you and
lunch; I'll get through it as quickly as I can.
I want to talk to you this afternoon, we are in the afternoon, just about
this E-learning module that the NDA produced and launched last year and
really give a flavour for how you could use it within your organisation.
Just for those of you who haven't had much exposure to E-learning before,
before we talk about our own particular module, there are an awful
lot of benefits available through using E-learning as a training
methodology, it's not a panacea, and it doesn't fix everything,
but it certainly has some very specific benefits.
There is obvious cost savings, you are not booking rooms and arranging
trainers and paying travel expenses.
There is good research showing more retention through E-learning, because
of the interaction and engagement that are inherent in the process.
We have done a lot of work on our module and it certainly is possible
to make E-learning accessible to everybody; I'll talk more about that later on.
And again there is good research out showing learning compression and this
is really about people learning at their own speed, which often is
faster than they would learn in a classroom with a number of other
people, where really they are learning at the speed of the slowest
person in the classroom.
So through E-learning they can really take things at their own pace
and that will often be faster than a classroom base.
It offers a lot more opportunities around managing the learning,
tracking people through assessments and how they are getting on through
the learning and using that data.
So our NDA E-learning module, we produced the module, it's --
most users take between 75 and 90 minutes to get through the learning
process, that's a little bit more than we expected.
It's designed or aimed at -- the target audience is anyone working in
Irish public bodies, so that's roughly 300,000 people working in the
public sector in Ireland.
We spent a lot of time and put a lot of work into keeping the language
clear, plain, simple and short in editing it and cutting, we spent a
lot of time cutting stuff out as well and we have got pretty good feedback
from end users I will come back to later on, saying that I think that worked.
So it consists of, I'll give you a couple of examples of it in a second,
but it consists of the main theme running through it is a video case
study of a young man with an intellectual disability going through
the passport application process, so the kind of customer service process
that you could relate to most of your organisations in terms of how
you deal with customers or citizens.
People can pause and restart at will, so people can chop that training
duration into a number of different sessions if they want, split it up
into three or four or however many sessions they choose.
And we can deliver it in a number of ways, it's available online and
anyone can get at it today if they choose.
We can also deliver it on CD or indeed it could be made available on
a memory stick or if you have a learning management system, certainly
a lot of third level institutions and some other larger public bodies have
their own in-house learning management system and we can deliver
it on that as well.
Just to let you see a sample page.
This is what it looks like.
So you can see we have the text on the left-hand side and a photograph
on the right-hand side.
And we have done that intentionally, we have a lot of imagery in the
process, really just to lighten it and make it more engaging and more attractive.
This is actually the legislation page and the photograph on the right is of
the Custom House at night, very attractive photograph there.
So you can see just the amount of text is fairly small, if we look at
the Disability Act, which we're spending all day talking about,
there is about 25 words on that, which isn't a lot on any one
particular piece of legislation, but it's what your average frontline
staff member will need.
They don't need all the detail, they really just need to know this
Act exists and is there.
That's the kind of thing people will see as they go through the training.
We have assessment questions built into the training, so we've ten
questions really spread throughout the course.
They are multiple-choice questions so the person sees a number of options
and is able to get in and give their response.
In some cases they are multiple answer questions, so it's not just
pick B, it's pick B and D for example being the correct options.
And I have to say that's something that -- it's a learning for us,
I probably wouldn't do that again and we are looking at changing it,
we have confused some people around that, but again when you're
rolling it out to your organisations it's fairly easy just to prepare
people for that experience.
So users get five attempts to answer each question, if they get it wrong
they get fairly immediate feedback as to why it's wrong and we have set a
pass rate of 80%, so somebody needs to answer eight out of ten correctly
to get the certificate, which they can print for themselves at the end of the course.
And again just to give you a quick example of how that looks, just going
to - you can see I'm using the navigation here, just using the next
button to skip through a small number of pages, we'll come to page 14,
has a question here.
It's a fairly straightforward question, I'll just read it out for
the benefit of those who can't see the screen; Assessment question 2.
Erin needs to change her appointment for a medical test.
She has serious hearing loss and can't use the phone.
How should the appointment be changed?
And we have a number of options.
So the first option is Erin's mother should call to change the appointment.
Second answer that hospital staff shouldn't get involved in minor issues like this.
Third answer that the hospital should find a way for Erin to change her
appointment by post or by e-mail or by text message.
And the fourth answer that hospital should arrange to install Minicom
text phones on every desk.
Any takers?
Option A, a show of hands, Erin's mother should change the appointment?
Any takers? No.
We're doing ask the audience here!
Option B, hospital staff shouldn't get involved in minor issues like
this, I'm sure they are all very busy, any takers?
Third option the hospital should find a way for her to change her
appointment by post, e-mail or text message?
Any takers? One or two, okay.
Most people in the room.
And the fourth option, hospital should arrange to install Minicom
text phones on every desk, no takers, not too practical an option.
So you can see the questions just involve people thinking about what
they have learned and how they can apply it.
One public body told me, the access officer told me they overheard two
people talking in the canteen about the question and the answer and
that's great, that's embedding this issue really into the organisation.
So certainly it's become a point of conversation and gets people engaged in the process.
So accessibility of the tool, we were kind of keen that we walk the talk on
accessibility and we don't just preach to you guys a lot that we
actually do it ourselves as well.
So the tool was designed from the outset to be inclusive to a large
range of users, and we went through a really useful process of testing by
users, users with a range of disabilities and non-disabled users
as well, and we did that in the test lab in NCBI, so there is people
testing in one room and we are looking at the video of them using
the tool and how it's working and we are sitting beside, behind the screen
shouting at them going press it, it's there, you can see it, you can see it!
And when the fourth person hasn't seen it, you go yeah now I know why
they didn't see that, and the design was bad and you learn through that process.
You can see the videos, I'm going to show you one or two of them now,
they are all subtitled, also have transcripts available for anyone with
hearing loss and all the images have a descriptive text as well with the
image, just to -- so people with sight loss can be fully engaged.
So I'll just show you one of the videos, this is titled "Jim's Story"
and I'm just using the navigation bar here on the left.
So we're up here, just to jump forward in the learning.
So see what you think of Jimmy's story.
(Video playing)
>> Okay there is a good example of universal design there, we subtitled,
as I mentioned, all the videos for people with hearing loss, but you can
see the extra impact there, so in this case where we're dealing with a
person with a significant speech impediment, the subtitles have
another impact and allow people to use it for that as well.
As I mentioned, all the videos you saw the subtitles, there is also a
transcript available there, so the full text from the video is there if
somebody wants to go back and refer to it, or maybe play it through their
own screen reader or something like that.
And we've also just to maximise the audience again, we've given the
option to download the video, so if people want to play it, if they have
their own video player installed on the laptop, they can play the file
using their video player rather than the embedded video player,
which might be more suitable for some people.
You saw Jimmy's story, we have a number of similar stories as we go
through it, with people with different types of disabilities,
talking about what works for them in customer service situations and what doesn't work.
And certainly my feel, just from watching the room while the video was
playing is that that really engages people, it's quite impactfull where
they hear a direct personal story like that.
So now that you've seen it and now that I've forgotten, I should have
said at the start that it's available for free, which is an important
point, certainly to public bodies in Ireland. The question is why not,
why should we not go ahead and roll it out tomorrow?
I just wanted to mention some of the issues that have come up in other
public bodies, really to give you a chance to get around these and
prepare for these.
So certainly it needs a PC with audio, as you have seen, video and
those with the audio track on those videos would be a fair fundamental
part of the process and not every PC in the public sector, as we're
learning fast, comes equipped with that.
Different ways of addressing that, one public body bought in bulk small
sets of earphones, it costs them three or four euro per unit to
provide an hour and a half of training to somebody is a tiny, tiny
cost, but that's what one organisation did.
Other organisations have set up PCs in training rooms with speakers and
things like that.
So different ways of addressing that issue.
We also had an IR issue, industrial relations issue of some staff having
concerns about an assessment outcome and in the case that we dealt with,
was staff who probably wouldn't have gone through this kind of training
before, these were in fact porters in a particular organisation and
probably wouldn't have gone through this classroom training before and
were wondering what's going on, if I don't pass the assessment what does
it mean for me or my job?
So that's really a communications thing, that's just about making sure
people understand what the process is and how it's going to be used.
We had some data privacy concerns, so again people asking questions about
so you're tracking, you know what people have passed and what people
haven't and what's going to happen to that information.
So we have a very clear privacy policy set out on our website for the
information that we host, so it's really clear how we use that
information and again it's a communications issue, making sure
people understand and get that as you roll it out to them.
We have from time to time had certainly some issues, technical
issues around using particularly video and using audio.
They are largely addressable and I suppose the one point I want to make
is that people will probably have to go through maybe an internal
negotiation process around rolling this out.
But the solutions that you find to rolling out this tool, it's not about
providing one and a half hours of disability equality training,
it's really about opening up a whole world of E-learning and other online
services that are there.
So if people have to invest on whether it's bandwidth or different
screen types or speakers or whatever, that investment isn't really about
tying it to one E-learning tool, certainly it's a much bigger issue than that.
So where do you go now?
If you're thinking about using it within your organisation it would be
good to think about a target audience, finding a group,
a division, a team or a geographical area, whatever that might be, who you
think would take to it nicely and where you would probably get a bit of
senior management support and trying to get, define the target audience.
Test it out on your network and see how it works, you can do that when
you go back tomorrow, it's open and available to the public.
And just work out; have a think about what suits within your organisation,
what previous training initiatives have been successful and how have
they been successful and what you need to do in terms of communicating
this and rolling it out to make it successful?
Decide, have a think in advance about how you are going to measure
progress, and how you are going to react, what are you going to do if
after three weeks into your six weeks term only 10% of the target audience
have taken it up?
Just have a bit of a plan in place for how you are going to communicate
or chase or use line managers to roll it out and get people engaged.
And then it's really a case of just giving people a bit of time and space
to do their learning and letting them get on with it.
So your mission today, should you choose to accept it, is when you get
back to your office to go to elearning.nda.ie, a fairly short and
simple web address, just try it out for yourselves, preferably in the
work environment, it would be available from home as well, but try
it out in the work environment just to see how does it work in terms of
audio and within your network and your browsers.
And then have a think about how you would like to use it in the
organisation and come and talk to us.
We can do a small amount of customising, so what we can do is
have a landing page or the first page that users will hit with your logo on
it and with a little bit of descriptive text saying who is the
access officer in your organisation or who is the senior manager who
is committing to this initiative, so we can just put a little bit of that
kind of text together at the front-end, so come and talk to us
about how we can set that up and then we'll take it from there and happy learning.
Thank you.