Learning Management System/Experience Platform Alpha: Sprint 2

The second sprint is almost over – where has the last fortnight gone?!! We’ve just completed our second show and tell session to keep everyone up to date with our work, so here’s your summary blog on the goings on in this sprint…

Behind the scenes

This sprint we’ve had our funding documentation signed off and sent this back to the Welsh Gov Digital Transformation Fund, so the project finance is now confirmed and will be made available at the end of the work. A big thank you for the Fund for agreeing to fund us and helping us with the process! Along these lines, we’ve also hied the last member of the core team who is Suchet Budon, our content designer for the corporate content. Welcome Suchet! If you didn’t manage to make it to the latest show and tell, don’t worry – you’ll see him at the next one talking about the progress on the corporate content work.

Steering Group

One thing we didn’t get chance to cover off, as the event hadn’t yet happened, was the first meeting of the project’s Steering Group. It happened in the afternoon after the show and tell, and we had a great turn out given it was the last week of the summer term and prime holiday season. We talked about a lot of different topics and have asked the reps for help around things like sharing the requirements around the authorities to let us know if there’s anything missing, to help with content audit work so Suchet can map what content authorities have, and to let us know of other platforms we should investigate. The reps will also be the nominated communications lead for the work within their LAs so please do ask them if you have questions, or if you’d like to volunteer to take part in any user testing opportunities.  I’ve included a list of them below for you to see who your rep is. I wanted to say a big thank you to all who managed to attend – especially as it was the day Sky’s internet ability fell over!

Learning@Wales Demo

We’ve had a demo with Learning@Wales and the video of this was shared with those who joined the show and tell. If you’d like the link and password to view it, please email me and I’ll send them over to you. The demo was based around showing how the platform had potential to meet our user requirements and after the session we then asked our demo viewers for their feedback. This is the same group that saw the original Thinqi demo so we’re ensuring we’re maintaining parity of feedback across the demos. A big thank you to Julie and Donna for doing the demo for us – much appreciated!

Democratic Services Content Design

Rachel, our content designer, gave us an update on the Democratic Services content development. She’s been hard at work running 3 content creation workshops with subject matter experts with another 3 scheduled in. Tom, our user researcher, is working to set up user testing sessions with councillors to ensure that all of the courses created meet their user needs.

Thank you to everyone who has taken part as the content design process only works well when people are involved.

Update on the user experience work

In terms of the user experience work, Mike showed us the work he’s been doing developing wireframes for the content to be tested on. It’s important that we test the content somewhere neutral so that the system doesn’t influence the testers opinion – after all, it’s the content we’re testing and not the functionality and design around the outside. Mike has created the first course for testing using Figma and the GDS Design Patterns to produce a low fidelity prototype that allows testers to try the new content and provide feedback, as well as for us to make tweaks and changes quickly before retesting.

Corporate Content Design

The corporate content work is starting up and this work is split into three strands. These are:

1. The playbook
   This is a playbook for those creating online courses to cover off best practice for different content types, accessibility and what good online courses look like. It needs to be easy to read and include all the things content creators need to consider and understand before they start designing courses.
2. Audit
   This is an audit of the existing content belonging to each LA. From this we can understand the landscape of training content across LAs in Wales, how many different courses there are on the same topic and where they’re hosted.
3. Courses
   This is a test to see if we can create content that can be shared across LAs. Currently each of the LAs have their own versions of content on the same topic – can we bring that together and make the best possible and most engaging course that works for users? We’re looking for 3-5 courses created from all the good stuff that’s already out there from LAs. We’ll be user testing this with willing volunteers as well once it’s created.

Our work for the next sprint will be deciding how we’re going to evaluate all of the information we’ll be getting to make our final decision around solutions and content, meeting with Learning Pool for a demo of the platform, working to develop test areas on the sites for user testing and beginning the corporate content work in earnest.

If you’d like more information on any of this work, please email me and I’d be happy to help.