Professional Learning - ethereal materials

When it comes time to take a day out to attend a conference, it helps to travel by train on a beautiful day.

There are many problems with delivering and engaging with professional learning in a school. Common availability, catching up with absences, providing previous training to new starts, are just some of the standard personnel-focused problems; even with dedicated Professional Learning days in the annual calendar.

It’s worse though. Some of this ’learning’ is statutory or based on compliance rather than personal or professional development. Not that it’s not important, but fire regulations are just not most people’s cup of exciting tea. And it gets even worse. Mandatory training on cybersecurity, for example, is typically dull and tends to be generic - neither sector nor locale specific, let alone tailored to your own institution.

Like many/most schools, we use REDACTED¹ for some of our compliance training. It’s functional, but not especially engaging. It’s funny that we go to great lengths to avoid this situation for our students, but for staff…

Anyway, it was interesting to have demonstrated an approach taken by a school from Edinburgh. Using AI-voiced materials based on a script alongside video, slide deck, and interactive content.

A major benefit of this being that that editing the script allows the audio to be updated effectively instantaneously, without time needed to rerecord and update audio tracks. Perfect for evolving materials, or to change specific details such as key contacts for a topic. But also useful for iterative drafting/redrafting materials without having to worry about recording time and processing.

And there’s more.

Some AI voice tools can now to be trained to mimic a real person’s voice.² You can make your own materials in your own voice, created and edited in text only, and output ‘your’ voice as audio. After a few training sentences, the results are remarkably good.

All of that has the potential to make it super easy to create online training and development resources that are tailored to a school, perhaps even 90% based on something made elsewhere. Edit a script, change some pictures, Fold the materials into an Learning Management System to track completion (vital for those exciting compliance courses) and Roberto’s your Aunt Susan’s Benidorm holiday crush.

And the opportunity for easy collaboration and sharing is great.

Time to have a play.