Abri case study: Embedding accessible learning and communication across teams

Michelle: On Learning Now TV today, in the Charity Learning Consortium sponsored segment, we are going to be talking to Alan Jerram, and he’s from ABRI Housing Association. And he’s gonna be telling us a story about vulnerability, I guess, overall, but it is about accessibility. But it’s a really interesting journey to say how we can do some good work in learning and development, but we can always do better work.

Alan, welcome. It’s lovely to be able to speak to you today. Do you want to tell us a little bit about who you are, what job you do?

Alan: Sure, certainly, Michelle. Thank you very much for inviting me on. So I’m a Learning Development Manager at ABRI.

I’ve been with the business for around about six years. However, I’ve kind of worked in various industries across the south of the UK. Retail, travel, finance, et cetera, and now with the Housing Association.

I’ve kind of worked across as an L&D specialist and, in the last few years, moved up to L&D manager. Small team of 3 or 4 people, and we kind of design, develop, deliver our own kind of initiatives. But are also responsibility for working with our SMEs to design the e-learning, mandatory and other, that we send out to our colleagues across the South Coast.

Michelle: So somebody with all of that experience, and still there’s more to learn, hey? So there’s no excuse for any of us. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve been doing when it comes to the e-learning, particularly.

Alan: Yeah, so, so when I, when I joined ABRI, we had probably around 30-odd e-learning modules, all bought off the shelf. So 45 minutes, there or thereabouts, for each one. So it started to add up, particularly for, we have tradespersons out in the, in the field, and housing officers.

And for them to take time out away from our customers was kind of quite considerable. So we were looking at it and working with our SMEs to bring them down to a smaller number that we could then deliver. But we also wanted to own them.

We wanted to be in charge of what messages we were giving across based on ABRI’s needs and policies and procedures, etc. So, we started to work on bringing them in-house, and working with both SMEs. And we actually brought in a learning designer from a local college over kind of summer holidays to help us design.

She worked in design, which was fabulous. She had loads of great ideas and kind of brought some new stuff like 3D walk around the office and something that we’d never even thought about and considered. So we managed to bring the e-learning down to around 16 modules overall, which is great, around about 30 minutes for each one.

So, we cut a lot of time out for, particularly those out in the field. And just recently, in the last kind of year or so, we’ve been working on vulnerabilities with understanding vulnerabilities for our customers, and designing training to go out to colleagues. And we started to think, well, actually, if we’re doing that, why aren’t we thinking about accessibility for our own colleagues, particularly around the learning and development initiatives that we give out, but also our e-learning?

So we started to kind of look at our modules. We inherited, one of our colleagues came across from our IT department as an IT trainer, and she went on an accessibility course, worked with Susi Miller. And it was, I think it was October or November last year, she sat us down and said, right, what we need to do is we need to start looking at our accessibility.

And to a T, she went through pretty much every single one of our modules and say, this isn’t right, this isn’t accessible, this doesn’t meet the standards. So it’s like, okay. But we thought we were kind of being really creative and innovative in what we were doing, and it was, yes, we were, at that time.

However, making it accessible for our colleagues just didn’t work. Contrast, colors, images, you name it. We sat down and did the ELA assessment that Susi Miller created.

And the, it was a December meeting that we had together, where we went through it, and we marked ourselves. So it is a self-assessment, but we were pretty harsh on ourselves, and came out at 16% accessible across most of our modules. So that was a bit of a wake up call for us.

Michelle: Yeah, it sounds like it was. But you’ve done good, great work. You’ve gone down from 35 down to 16.

And I love the fact that you got a student in and paid her to work for you because I think that’s really the future. Certainly graduates are struggling at the moment with the ability to compete with the AI option. So that was a beautiful thing to hear, although I appreciate it was a few years ago.

But yet there’s still more to learn. And that’s what I love about this story. The fact that you were really open to marking yourself harshly and saying that we’ve got to do better.

We can always do better. So that was December. It’s a few months further on now.

What have you done in order to do better, Alan?

Alan: Yeah, certainly we’ve started. We’re on the journey, let’s just say that. We haven’t finished.

We’re working through kind of our back catalogue, particularly our mandated compliance training that we’ve brought in-house. That’s what we’re working on at the moment. The one I mentioned around the 360 was around fire safety.

And more often than not, we would get tickets in from colleagues across the business, going, it’s just not working for me. I can’t use it on my tablet. I can’t use it on my mobile.

So actually, we start to think, well, yeah, we probably, we designed it on a laptop, so we probably designed it for laptops. And yeah, I think the camera seemed to, when it opened up on a mobile, it was pointing at the ceiling. And it just, nobody knew what to do, and there was no way of kind of wandering around.

So it was just little things like that, that we wanted to, we wanted to make it innovative, creative. Fun to do. We’re talking e-learning here, so, you know, how much fun can you have with mandatory compliance e-learning to get the message across?

So we want to kind of do that, but we said, well, you know, what we want to do is kind of move back to the, kind of really go to the basics. We want our colleagues to have that knowledge and understanding of the compliance training when they’re out there in the field. So, you know, we could do Storyline and all manner of stories, etc, but ultimately they just need that knowledge.

So we’re working through, we’ve done probably about half a dozen now. Literally to the WCAG standards as they are at the present moment in time. We’re being very critical of what we did, and bringing it back in.

And Sam, our IT developer, she is our guru and go-to. So once we’ve kind of worked on a module, we’ll go back to her and go, does it? Have we met it?

So yeah, she’ll be super critical. And our learning systems manager as well, she’s got the bug as well, I think now. So she’s starting to be super critical of stuff that we put through, wordings, etc.

We are using AI from time to time, absolutely, and getting to kind of, kind of join that journey. But we’re certainly, we’re moving towards, let’s say, I think we’ve still got probably about 10 or so to work our way through. But a lot of things that we’ve done is we’ve switched, we’re switching away from kind of the end assessment as well, because we don’t feel that that’s fair.

So, we’re almost doing kind of pre-assessments. So, if you get the knowledge, if you know what you need to know, then the SME should be happy with that, and you don’t need to actually carry out the module. So, you know, if you know everything, it’ll take you 5 minutes, probably, to get through a module, rather than kind of 15 to 20 minutes, which is where we’re aiming for for most of our modules.

Michelle: Brilliant. It’s a really great story of how we just need to stay on top of it, don’t we? We just need to make sure that we are constantly, as practitioners, learning what are the best standards out there at the moment.

So lovely shout out there to Susi Miller and her Designing Accessible Learning Content book. There’s no real excuse. You don’t have to go on the course that your colleague went on.

You know, this stuff is already out there, and this is a shining example of it. So, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story. I appreciate it.

Alan: Absolute pleasure, Michelle.