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Sometimes the best projects flourish out of an idea that’s difficult to articulate at the beginning. Helping you build and shape your idea is our speciality!
Digital spaces provide exciting opportunities for learning and communication but it can be difficult to know where to start.
That’s where we can help! We love to make things straightforward.
Ideas, no matter how well developed, are the most important first step.
We are a friendly team of digital experts who love a challenge and to offer a fresh perspective on how things are typically done.
Our services include:
We’ve supported a pretty diverse portfolio over the years, from large organisations getting started with a new digital strategy through to supporting small, local NGOs to create internal training offerings.
Click on a thumbnail image to learn more about how we’ve supported previous projects
Many new courses start with a similar design challenge - to communicate a lot of complex information to an audience of mixed abilities and experiences, with an aspiration to raise attainment for all whilst keeping retention high. Seem familiar?
The NHS Digital Academy project not just wanted to do this - it needed to achieve it and fast.
Through innovate use of mixed media and redesign of an existing platform (Blackboard) we were able to create a learning experience that got people talking, especially on the forums, and instantly hooked into the subject matter without time-consuming induction plans. Animation helped set the scene and standardised templates, mindful of limited user engagement time, helped inspire learners without overburdening them (or the tutors!)
Designing for impact is all about knowing your audience. What do they need? What do they respond best to? Where do they look to find it?
Policy makers need to find up-to-date, high-impact information in often constantly evolving subject areas. For them, the greatest challenge is to surface the core information quickly, then drill into further detail where they require, rather than where a resource wants them to focus.
For the Grantham Institute’s ‘Clean Power Program’, we supported the design and delivery of a tier-based learning program which enabled users to obtain distilled points of each subject and decide for themselves if more information on a given topic was of interest. Each topic was designed to stand alone and was paired with interactive activities and interviews from international stars in the field. Program-level content for increased outreach and marketing was curated from existing course materials to emphasise traceability back to a core research-led evidence base.
Innovation starts at home.. or at least, that’s what we think!
We constantly look for new ways to communicate concepts and approach digital spaces. It’s important for us to experiment to ensure new projects are the best they can be.
For example, we created the first lightboard in Scotland, used in many online learning courses from the NHS to Business Schools and Engineering, perfect for bringing complex concepts to life and walking through them with an expert on screen.
Every organisation knows the importance of market development insight. Education providers can help with this, and in turn align their offerings to meet market demand. Teacher education institutions are the step even before this; they need to develop educators with the confidence to not only develop future education, but also equip them with a flexible mindset to respond to unknown future requirements.
As an organisation that has supported a wide range of ‘support for educators’, we know the importance of approaching each project with an open mind and listening to their needs at the time. Just because we’ve done something similar, doesn’t mean it’s now an ‘off the shelf’ job! Every sector, level, application and topic focus brings with it a need to evolve our thinking of what it needed to support these learners online, to support their future.
That being said, we also like to challenge. Especially when supporting online education for educators! We feel it is fundamental to get ‘online’ on the radar of educators as more than just a content delivery channel. To refresh their (digital) thinking when we get the chance, as it were!
When it comes to thinking about the future and the best digital solution to take you there, describing future requirements can sometimes feel impossible.
We pride ourselves in helping organisations visualise the future digital experiences they want and translating that into technical requirements for ITT development and outsourcing builds.
By putting people at the centre of the project, rather than focusing on a final pre-packaged solution, meant that for both the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Edinburgh Business School (EBS) they were able to provide bidding suppliers with a clear vision of where they wanted to go, rather than be led by the preferences of the supplier, and create a lasting supplier relationship without unexpected compromises along the way.
Making the community stronger and sharing our experiences is an important part of organisation development for us. We know that if others in the field can build confidence to challenge and push platforms further, the world of online learning will be a far more exciting place!
One of our projects includes development of a new course aimed at learning designers using the edX platform - ‘Studio Advanced’ is a resource open to all, especially those keen to share their own experiences of how they’ve ‘creatively used’ (i.e. hacked) the edX platform to do exciting things.
All our projects start with a conversation - an opportunity to better get to know each other and the project you have in mind. We want the best possible outcome for every project we put our name to, and we can only do this through working together.