[Charterhouse International] Using Design Thinking Projects to Enhance Student Future Ready Skills

Thank you, everyone. It's an absolute privilege and an honor to be here. As you can tell from my accent, I'm from Scotland. Anyone here from Scotland? No? No? Good. I haven't been back to Scotland since nineteen ninety, And I arrived in Manila feeling incredibly nostalgic because I got off the plane at five o'clock in the morning, and it was raining. And it was raining at six and at seven, and at eight.

And it was like being back home in Glasgow, slightly warmer, slightly warmer. I've been doing this teaching lark for thirty four years. Is there anyone, just raise a hand, is there anyone who's thirty four or younger? Because it's quite the most depressing thing when I talk to new teachers who weren't born at the start of my career. Anyway, there we go. Why did I travel? And I checked with ChatGPT.

Why did I travel nearly halfway around the world to go and teach at Charterhouse Malaysia. Well, they had Canvas, so that was a tick first. But why I went was on their website. And they had this commitment and this responsibility to future ready learning, to providing education beyond the academics. Anyone from K-twelve here? Okay.

K-twelve is dominated by certificates and qualifications, by the academics. But to have a school on its front page say, we are interested and committed to lifelong learning. And they do this through their Spectra smarts program. Well, actually, it's not a program, it's a philosophy. And the philosophy is to take seven branches of human intelligence and weave them throughout the curriculum.

And these human intelligence skills are there to support our learners when they leave beyond in this incredibly volatile, uncertain, complex, and quite scary future that no one quite knows much about. I I have to mention a bit about AI, and I'm gonna say this. I think AI is the greatest disruptor to education ever. I tried to think about whether it was the Internet or the calculator, but I think it is ever. And that is exciting, it is scary, and it is challenging.

It's hugely exciting if you work, in commercial marketing, because all you need to do is find a word that's got AI in it, and then actually make some phrase from it. What did I see the other day? Attainment for learning with AI as capitals. But for others, it is a real concern. So one of the reasons for joining Charterhouse was their commitment to this different model and philosophy. And my role as a digital learner was to support this program.

My thoughts and my ideas of digital learning are about enhancement, innovation, but most of all, transformation. And I'm incredibly privileged to work with young minds and to develop an understanding. And our role and our use of Canvas is very different for that. So, that was AI generated, by the way, that picture. A little background.

Our school is an international school, thirteen to eighteen. Like all institutions, we have subjects and classes with Canvas courses and our teachers create and share the resources. Canvas is our one stop shop for learning. I like to think of it like a supermarket. You can go into the supermarket and you have this choice there.

You don't have to buy the own brands, but actually you don't need to go anywhere else. And we focus very much on developing integrations. Our model of learning at the school is not an add on one. We are delivering content through different programs. One thing I'm hugely concerned about that maybe we haven't addressed with AI is we've got to stop students consuming content.

Yeah? What I'd love to see and what we try to do with AI, why not become content creators? Why not use AI in a way that actually we can have students leaving a legacy, developing resources, working hand in hand with us. So I'm going to talk a little bit about our design thinking work. Does anyone know what design thinking is? I'm sure that there's quite a few here. So it's kind of problem based learning, where students are given a problem and through a series of stages, they have to come up with a solution, and present that solution. Now, it's often broken up into stages.

And when I arrived at school, project based design thinking was done very much in this format and this fashion. My role as a learning technologist was to see how we could take Canvas and support this. Well, I guess the first stage is this. So taking what you saw before and actually just kind of rearranging it into boxes. And, of course, you know where we're kind of going with this because, actually, that, rather nicely, is module one of a Canvas course.

Module two, three, four, five, six, and so on. So straight away, Canvas courses can help and support a design thinking project by breaking it up, by moving away from, and I put my hands up to this, that Canvas course that's that long list of files. So moving design thinking projects onto a Canvas course is the first stage. And, of course, how does Canvas help? Well, we have prerequisites and requirements. We have features that require students to do certain tasks in students to do certain tasks in certain orders.

What's more, as I'm sure you know, you can have tasks locked so that students cannot move on to that next stage until they have met those requirements. Kind of cool. And, of course, as was mentioned by Ruth, we now have this I'm not sure if differentiable is a word. We now have this opportunity where we can have different tasks for different students within the module. We can provide different types of support to our learners that need it.

So that's absolutely great and wonderful. But how does this model look different? Where is the future readiness of all this? Well, this, of course, is a kind of learning pathway. And my interest in enthusiasm for badges, and that goes away back back from the days of Badger, was such that could we not take the credential model and apply it to this. We've got a learning pathway, but now Canvas has this model where we can take our elements, our requirements, and we can integrate this badging system within them. And what's brilliant and perfect, and hats off to the designers, is it works with what's already there.

So it works with prerequisite requirements. Students can only gain a reward, again, by completing those requirements we set. Badges can be based on all manner of different things. We have an assignment model where the badge is rewarded, and we put our badges through rubrics. We use non marking rubrics.

I don't want badges to be merit stickers. I don't want them to be those replacements. I don't want students looking at, oh, I only got ninety five percent or eight out of ten. So we use non marking rubrics so students can actually see what they have done and how that they can progress, not in terms of getting that extra mark, but that next stage. We use a kind of gold, silver, bronze.

And what's more, with the new feature within badging is that we can award a badge at any stage. So that time you know when a student comes in and produces this work that's astonishing, that's so far beyond what your requirements were, that we can give out the QR code and say, unbelievable. Here's that badge. Now, how does this work? Well, we had our design thinking projects. We had our module requirement.

Where is the future readiness? So what we then did was there are our stages for design thinking, and we badge them. So at every stage, students get a milestone badge. And that badge goes into the pathway. Students see it there in their credential, in their badge pack. And once they finished, they get the credential.

This is for a psychology project. But our design thinking and our spectra smarts and our whole model of learning is more than just this. So we do an awful work on sustainable development goals, SDGs. So we badge those because there's a requirement for staff to actually have this as part of their project work. So we identified areas, our staff identified areas where they were, and now students can get badges, milestone I've got to stop using badges, credentials, milestone badges for this.

Sustainable development goals, WEF skills, all part of the future readiness. Again, we identify where particular WES skills, and we created our own badges for them and where they would appear. So as part of that module, students have opportunities to gain these badges. And from WES skills, we have our Spectra smarts, our seven human intelligences. This is our philosophy.

And again, identifying where they are and awarding those. And you name it, digital and AI skills, badged. And this particular skill identifies kind of bronze, silver, gold. So in the course of a project, these are all the opportunities. And these opportunities are happening as the students go through.

And for those of us in K-twelve, it's not the wait to the end of the topic and the test and see how you've got on. It's happening live. Students are seeing that on their pathway. And that's wonderful. And our work in psychology, amongst other subjects, is great.

But we want to be transformational. We want this idea of going beyond the academics. So the focus for us is on the global pathway. Because when students get a badge, it goes into their learning pathway, but that badge also appears in another learning pathway. And that's the learning pathway that links all the other ones together.

So every year, our expectation is this. Yes, we'd love students to gain an understanding, a recognition of a particular badge in a subject. But actually, we want our students to leave that year knowing that they've been awarded this in science, in maths, humanities, English, or academics, arts. But then in our project based learning work, in our pastoral PSHE program, in our clubs and societies, you can gain this badge. We ask students to do passion projects.

And the model of this is this is our goal. We have to come up with something better than Uber Smart. This is our goal. The idea that students are developing this human intelligence skills across everything, not just handpicking it in those subjects that we know do. And we apply this model for Spectra smarts to the model for WAF, to SDG, for all those elements.

Incredibly exciting. So how did we go about doing it? Well, we started on paper, and we continued on paper. So, we started, by purchasing the Canvas credential package. We paid for the additional consultancy, and I worked with, Melissa Robertson. Astonishing person.

Handheld. Held my hand throughout. Brilliant ideas. And if you are going down this route, highly recommend taking that package of support out. We've put together our credential program for years nine, ten, and twelve.

So we've actually avoided the exam years. Again, just that support for staff to say, listen. Yeah. Change management. Lot on your plate.

Let's just wait a bit. Okay. We set for a number of different projects. We've also kind of made a link to Folio to say, actually, we're gonna take these badges. Yes, they look great on a pathway, but we're putting them into the students' digital portfolio so they will be there.

And I'm hugely excited by what I saw today with Journey and with developments in the digital portfolio. And then we focused on CPD for staff. So our first CPD session was we gave staff a design thinking project, the exact same one. We put our staff into mixed groups, and we got them working on. And we did it by paper.

So we designed magnetic badges with strips, with bits of paper, and we got staff to model it on whiteboards. And it was just the most joyous thing to see. I confess, I signed up to teaching probably more for this sort of work and less so for report writing. This was amazing. And I think a lot of people suddenly were thinking, yeah, I can do this.

I can share these ideas. And what we had happen was the development of some amazing projects. And it was the same project, but just with completely different plans. So that was a good session. The paperwork was the next bit, which I'll kind of skim over because, you know, it was the planning on paper.

What we did do was we scaffold it. We kind of took all those really good things we do as teachers, for students, and we applied that to teachers too. So we created templates. We had models of what design thinking plans looked like. We had sessions.

We had small group work. We had checks. Just everything to ensure people were on that right path. And then we built a design thinking badge course for staff to do as students. It's a fantastic tool, Canvas, where you can change the roles and make staff students, so you get rid of all the other bits, and you just focus on what that experience looks like.

So we designed a course. Here is our design thinking course. And we just let staff go over the course of some training sessions and beyond. And the challenge that we gave them, the project, was, how could we make a learning platform more engaging and interactive? Because we started Canvas three years three years ago. Yeah? At a time where we just got content on.

And, you know, we've got enough content. Let's just think about the pedagogy and actually how students are using it. So, this is a little video. Do I have to press if I press play, does it so here it is. Here is our course.

Now the great thing about working in K-twelve in a small school and being the admin is that we can just put things in. We can turn things on, turn things off. So this was our starter with a bit of a flip stuff. Here's our course with our features that are there and our tasks for staff to do. And there's the kind of bit that's hidden because they haven't completed that, And as they go through, all the features that are there, the different stages to design thinking.

So part of the course, we kind of, instructed staff in terms of where we're at with it. This is a feature. If you go on to the community, please use the Canvas community. It's an astonishing place to be. So much of this stuff I picked up from people who've shared openly on the community.

This is called summary HTML. Very easy to do. So we don't have CDLabs or anything, so a little bit of work on div tags and trying to make things a little less white space and a little bit more engaging. And obviously, you have the requirements, so when staff do it, it ticks it off and go on. Trying to get staff to look a little bit more at their own courses and actually be critical as to the sorts of resources that they have there.

Getting staff to look at analytics. Where is the engagement? Yeah. Somebody said earlier, if you build it, they will come. Well, they're gonna have to want to come. Yeah.

I'm not sure I'm coming for a list of files. I might come for an engaging interactive embedded multimedia quiz on a page. I created a course checker, and you're welcome, to use this in on spreadsheet. And basically, through sort of six or seven units, you click on each tab, and there's a rating. And you add in the rating, and it tells you and it gives you an overall score in terms of where your course is at with the idea that we want to get to that engagement and that interaction.

We started making use of other tools that are around there, the Lucid Chart work that we've integrated onto here, some really fantastic bits. And we just got our staff to work through that. And of course, and they'll never admit this, as adults, we love a badge. We absolutely love a badge. A reward.

Because actually, we kind of stop with rewards and acknowledgments. Yeah? So we awarded badges. And although we didn't put together the kind of learning pathway, we can attract the badges. And there'd been this triumphant cry, I've got one, from a colleague at the back. Wasn't afraid to say so.

And of course, we had them on the leader board so they could see where they were at. And I'm thinking, if this is working for staff, wow. What's it gonna look like for our students and for our students to see these opportunities for them to go beyond? So absolutely fantastic. Can I go to the next slide? So our next steps. We're ready to go second half of this term.

Everything sorted in the background, the pathways, the credentials, the rubrics, desperate to have assignments with multiple rubrics. One of the challenges that's gonna be for our staff is if we only have one assignment per particular skill, to ask them to do more than one at a time. So multiple rubrics cannot come quick enough for us. We've launched Ignite Your Learning. Look.

AI, IT. So we've launched this for our students, getting students to look at Canvas in particular ways. So you know that in, the dashboard. The dashboard, you have that feature where it's slightly grays out color overlay. So we've produced a number of little activities linked to our smarts where students can go through and check various elements to their course.

And it's bronze, silver, and gold. And the gold level is where they have to go and talk to staff and say to staff, listen. We really like that course, but do you think you could do this? Do you think you might be able? And if staff respond, then that's a higher level. We're going to take the digitals and make them wearable. Yeah? So on the lanyards, we're going to get our students with their badges.

And we're going to share it with parents. We're going to try and move away from that bit about when do we talk to parents? Parents' evenings and reports. Let's get the parents involved right away. Let's have the child student talking to the parents about what they are doing. Amazing.

Maybe I it will all work. There's no hope there. It will all work. Later, where are we going? Well, we've got this whole portfolio journey. We're excited to sign up for that.

Lightcast, I I I don't know if you know this, but the badges, when you create a badge, they're hard baked with the skills. You write the skills in to the badges that the students have earned. Lightcast is a company that works on jobs related to transferable skills. So the transferable skills that we write on the badge become hyperlinks. You click on the hyperlink.

It takes you to Lightcast's website database of jobs, And the jobs are indexed by transferable skills. They're not indexed by a level grades. They're not indexed by academics. They're about the things that employers want to see. That's a massive shift.

And finally, we hear a lot today about tertiary, and quite rightly, because tertiary, predominantly most of the audience here. But we would love to work with post eighteen providers. We'd love for universities to come and see us and say, listen, we could provide some students who want to go to university, but how about making a micro credential pre you course that we can put our students on so that when they come to you, they are prepared. Why not come in and spend? Take your learning technology and come in and spend a term with us and help design these things so that students don't see the secondary school just stopping. And then they go on to university and college, and they forget about what's there.

We need to be starting at K-twelve. Yeah. And I do believe that these credentials are one way of breaking the mold. What we cannot do with this is fit them into the existing mold. Cannot do that.

And we have a massive opportunity for that. Thank you. Sky Education for target setting, and we will use badging within that. And I think, yeah, let's get our staff involved with this process too. Let's get our staff sharing badges with students.

Let's get our students showing staff the badges they've got. Credentials. You can edit that bit, can you? Okay. Any other questions? No. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Gideon. That was fantastic. I think, yeah, really appreciate that, Gideon. I appreciate the shout out as well to the Canvas community.

For those of you who are not, participants in the Canvas community, Gideon is an active user, and he shares a lot of really great insight. And so I urge you to jump online and check out the Canvas community. And it's great to feel your passion, Gideon. It's, it's, yeah, insatiable. All right.

Well, our next speaker today is, a gold sponsor of the event today from AWS. We have Geraldine Tam. Geraldine leads, the Asia Pacific and Japan EdTech Partner Program. And she's been an incredible supporter of what we're doing at Instructure and, is also a wonderful person. Geraldine and I were joking before.

We both have a child who's similar age and they rule the house, and keep us on our toes especially when we go travelling. And Geraldine is travelling right now. She joins us today from Singapore. She's worked at the Ministry of Education in Singapore developing EdTech policies, but before that she studied in London, at King's University, and has also, done her postgraduate and research, at Columbia University in New York. So another worldly individual for you today.

It's fantastic to have you here, Geraldine, and we really appreciate the partnership from AWS. Alright. Right. Firstly, can I please start by thanking our AWS partner, Instructure, for such an amazing Canvas Con? I'm extraordinarily humbled to be here today, and thank you all for spending your day with us. And today, I just wanted to share a little bit more about what Amazon Web Services does in education, how we work with AWS partners like Instructure Canvas in education to make an impact for our staff and students.

And we know by working together, we can all unlock full potential for the generations that come after us. And I'm ex give me a second. Sorry. K. And I'm excited to share how AWS is helping to transform the state of global education.

At the heart of our approach is a deep commitment to a customer obsessed mindset with a personalized approach to innovation. And what this means is that we understand that the path to education innovation is never a one size fit all model. And I'm sure all of us here agree that within our institutions, within our colleges, we all deploy education solutions in a very different way depending on our roles, depending on the students that we teach, the profile of the students that we teach, and so many more factors. Right? Whether you are a CIO, a school principal, or the founder, or an act tech startup, AWS wants to start by aligning with your strategic objectives, and then we walk backwards from there to provide tailored solutions and guidance, and we wanna walk you through that process. We share your vision for accessibility and student success.

We invest heavily in digital equity and skill building programs to support career pathways. And we take a long term view towards this, so we wanna build partnerships that evolve with the needs of our students that come our way. We believe that data and AI are the foundation to the future of education. Across k twelve and higher education, we're helping leaders unlock insights that enhance student learning, well-being, and operational efficiency. And finally, resilience.

Resilience is key in today's landscape of growing cyber threats. As the world's most secure cloud, AWS provides reliable, compliant infrastructure that education leaders need to protect the sensitive data that your students have. And we believe education is at a pivotal moment and AWS is proud to partners with leaders like yourselves and instructor who are reimagining the landscape of teaching and learning. Humanity's most challenging problems today. Improving student experiences, spurring new innovations, and the global spending on AI is gonna reach about two hundred and four billion dollars by twenty twenty five from scaling to implementation to maturation.

And machine learning is playing a pivotal role in every part of our organizations from powering chatbots to delivering personalized recommendations. And with that growth of AI at AWS, we come comes with the recognition that we must all use it responsibly. And that's why working with our education customers, we have listened and heard how data can enable you to connect your entire learning ecosystem. We have met this up through our data education flywheel to empower institutions like you to understand how to look at data and AIML in the context of the education community outcomes in a responsible manner. Where we think about what are some of the impacts we can drive with teaching and learning.

What are some of the impact we want to think about in the student experience space and as well as institutional leadership. And we see this as an interconnected ecosystem where where we see a flywheel happening one way to the other. And working with AWS, you can not only control your data, get insights from all of your data at any time, use AI, analytics, ML models to gain insights on your student success, answer mission critical questions. And as we think about data, we mustn't forget about the way we work to support the needs of our community. And we are on a mission to accelerate digital transformation.

Sorry. Just give me a second. And we are on a mission to accelerate digital transformation in education, partnering with the full education community through our powerful cloud services. Instructure, the company behind the leading Canvas management system that has brought us all here today, shares this commitment to empowering educators and learners worldwide together with AWS. Running on the AWS cloud, Canvas brings online learnings to students of all ages in over seventy countries.

It enables students and universities to focus on student success and educational outcome, delivering online learning to millions of users globally. And the partnership between AWS and Instructure goes beyond just solving technology technology challenges. Together, we are focused on enabling the reliability, scalability, and security that's essential to protecting staff and student data. But our collaboration is more than just infrastructure. It's really about creating real impact for all of you here today.

Our shared mission is to empower the education community with tools and support that they need to drive the digital transformation that you want to see. And let me share some of the ways that we've worked with some of our customers globally to drive this better together narrative. We have built cloud content for educators and learners all hosted on the Canvas system such that we can meet as many educators as learners as possible. We have joined forces to empower universities like Penn State University to harness the power of data and technology, driving transformative change for their students and the faculty. The goal here was really to understand learning activities as they happen real time in the classrooms, in the lecture theaters that all of us use day to day.

Right? As a top ranked university with close to ninety thousand learners, Penn State University sought to use data more effectively to support its diverse student body, especially during the COVID nineteen pandemic. So by leveraging not just the Canvas LMS, but also AWS cloud services, Penn State University's data empowered learning team created innovative tools that allow them to see real time insights for their academic advisors and instructor to use as they are teaching as well. And they call it the course insights tool built on the AWS infrastructure analyzes over two TB of learning activity data daily from a variety of platforms that the school uses, which includes Canvas and a cup couple of other, point solutions. This allows instructors to visualize a rolling seven day average of student engagement, highlighting anomalies that would require immediate attention. The tools impact expands beyond individual courses because it also eventually inform strategic initiatives that the school was driving around student retention and equity.

Right here in the heart of Manila, we've also worked with Atino u Manila University. We've also worked with Atino University. Back then, at the COVID nineteen pandemic, when Athena was looking for more administrator and learner insights to evaluate student engagement and the technical support given by the Canvas team together on AWS made the difference for them as they were able to have access to a Canvas implementation specialist every step of the way and create a guided training path for their faculty to follow. Above all, upgrading to the campus LMS provide a team of a chance to design the learning experience that they want without compromising on the reliability and scalability of what they plan for their students and their courses. And as I come to the end, I just want to leave you with three points to think about.

One, how do we unlock the power of data driven insights? I encourage you to explore how you can empower your own faculty and advisors with similar tools built on AWS integrated with the Canvas learning platform. And by harnessing the power of data, you can really drive meaningful interaction interventions and improve your student outcomes. Whether is it student success, student retention, student equity. Two, how can we foster stronger collaboration across the education ecosystem? I challenge all of us to strengthen the partnerships we have across our institutions. What we are building here today with ed tech providers, with other customers, with other universities, with other thought leaders.

We can really accelerate digital transformation and deliver best in class experiences for our students. And lastly, prioritizing equity and inclusion. I urge all of you to make equity a central focus of urge all of you to make equity a central focus of your own digital initiatives. Leverage the insights surface by tools like, cause insights on canvas to understand where gaps exist, to take targeted action, to close them, and it ensures that all of our we give all of our students an equal chance to succeed. And by embracing all of these calls to action, I'm confident that we can transform the education land possibilities together.

And with that, it just leads me to thank you all for your time again, and we will be out right just right outside the door at the AWS booth if you have any further questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Geraldine. Well, thank you so much and really appreciate that Geraldine from AWS.

We are gonna have a short break now. We'll come back at two thirty, for the last two speakers of this, leadership track. But for now, you can stretch your legs, move around, get some energy, the blood flowing, and we'll see you in about fifteen minutes.