We are delighted to announce our ninth Learning Technologies fringe event. Due to the pandemic, this year's event will be held on Zoom and in the comfort of your own home. Rather than taking place during the Learning Technologies Digital Experience we have decided to run it the week after.

We call these events barcamps because we aim to carry on the conversations from Learning Technologies in a local pub. This year that local is Zoom. Our theme for the event is how learning teams are managing through the pandemic and we have five fantastic practitioners sharing their thoughts and experiences.

The format is simple, each speaker will have between 10 and 15 minutes to host a conversation based on their areas of expertise. Once the time is up, speakers will be asked to move to the next Zoom room to talk about their topic to the next group. The event will come to an end when all groups have had a conversation with each of the speakers.

The aim of the event is to have an informal conversation, and drink, with some really interesting people.

So, to the speakers. We are delighted to have five experienced learning professionals. This is what they will be discussing:

Jilly Julian, a senior L&D Business Partner

Jilly will focus on how L&D moves from providing reactive support to new technologies and ways of working to enable and support the shift to homeworking back to being a strategic partner to the business and clients, in a world that is unlikely to be unchanged by the last 12 months.

Gaenor Aitken, Systems Training Manager, Barratt Homes

Gaenor will be sharing Barratt Homes managed the rapid move from mainly classroom-based training courses and larger programmes to a digital provision. She’ll share the challenges and successes, what she and her colleagues learned and how her internal customers responded to the change.

Richard Price, Learning Technologies Advisor, Health Education England

Richard will share an overview of the NHS educational response to the pandemic, including the creation of rapid training programmes and education for redeployment and the return of staff. He will share how the NHS is now and how things will change with education as a result of the pandemic.

Dr Celine Mullins, CEO Adaptas

Celine will explore how feelings underlie our responses to life, situations, challenges and how they impact on our life and learning and the learners we are responsible for. Certain schools of thought in psychology and more and more evidence in the crossover between neuroscience and change find that the brain does not process things logically with words and numbers. It has been argued that the language of our unconscious mind and of creating real change and learning is managing how we feel.

Gaëlle Watson, Virtual Classroom Expert & Founder, SyncSkills

Gaëlle will be exploring how to facilitate an inclusive learning experience for international audiences including how to overcome the language barrier, diverging expectations from different cultures and how to encourage collaborative thinking. Many global programmes are run in English and often facilitated by English mother tongue trainers who can be unaware of the geographical and cultural nuances of participants.