Talis Insight Workshops 2022 – A Reflection on The Future of Resources

Designing and Delivering the Workshop

Learning resources – whether they come in the form of books, articles, slides, images or video/audio content – have always played an essential role within the teaching and learning process. It is a role that is always evolving, driven by external technological, cultural, economic or societal trends.

We sought to provide through this Talis Insight 2022 workshop an environment where attendees with varied experiences, responsibilities and perspectives could have the time and space to reflect on what may happen over the next decade, including what could further change the role resources have within the learning process.

Preparing our Trends and Activities

So, how did we approach this?

The obvious challenge we recognised early on is having knowledge of what broad trends – either at a global, sector or domain level – could be reasonably expected to materialise in the next 10 years.

After a very informal literature review, we pulled together several articles to share via a reading list which attendee’s had the option to browse prior to the workshop. In order to provide prompts around these trends within the workshop, we created a rolling slide deck suggesting what some of these trends could be and why.

Watch below!

The second consideration was how to apply all these trends to such a broad topic as “resources”.

We settled on 6 broad activities that occur through a resource lifecycle in an educational setting:

• Creation
• Discovery
• Acquisition
• Access
• Consume
• Assess

We hoped this would help provide some structure for group discussion, allowing attendees to focus more easily on an aspect of resource provision and delivery, then explore different trends against this to trigger thoughts and ideas.

How the Sessions Were Run

We wrote each activity onto a plastic tablecloth, and placed these on the 6 large tables where attendees would be working. Each group was given a colour, with matching pens, and given 15 minutes to capture how they saw the activity changing or evolving in the coming decade.

With three workshops in the day and time being limited, we decided to encourage groups to choose their own activity rather than rotate. This enabled attendees to focus on areas that naturally interested them and we ended the day with 18 very full tablecloths.

What Did We Learn?

We had no expectations prior to the sessions, just a hope that the set-up would allow attendees the freedom to make suggestions. It worked – with over 350 words, phrases, sentences and (small) essays scrawled on the tablecloths for each activity:

We’re delighted to share the findings of the creation of resources activity – read them here!

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