Wednesday 18 December 2024
Help us create a new problem solving skills short course for you, your organisation, and service users
What is this initiative?
Co(l)laboratory is creating a bespoke short course training series specifically for civic and community focused organisations in Nottinghamshire. The aim of this new training provision will be to help members of these organisations to develop research based problem solving skills to help them and their organisations find evidence based solutions to complex challenges faced by them and their service users – our local communities.
Why are we creating this short course?
Research approaches to problem solving, like those used by university researchers, have a broad application with potential to help community focused organisations to improve every aspect of their real world work, including;
- developing evidence based, sustainable new strategies
- making informed changes to practice and policy
- gaining useful, nuanced understandings of your communities/service users
- understanding and demonstrating the impact your work has
- developing successful funding applications
- and much more…
It is our mission to help you harness research thinking and skills to better achieve your goals.
Why do we need your help?
We need your help to help us design a course that you, your colleagues, and your organisations actually want and need.
We need you to help us understand the kinds of problems and challenges that your organisations deal with, and what skills and knowledge we could offer that might enable you to meet your needs and become next-level problem solvers.
How will it work?
We need people to take part in one of two, 2-hours focus groups, taking place on Monday 24th March (light refreshments provided), OR in an online survey.
- Focus Group Option 1: Mon 24th March, 10am-12pm
- Focus Group Option 2: Mon 24th March, 4pm-6pm
- Online Survey: If you can’t attend a focus group, we will email you the link to the online survey.
Each focus groups will include up to 12 people. We will send out some supporting material and prompts 1 week before to help you feel prepared. On the day, focus groups will be structured around interactive group discussion exercises with other participants.
Together, we will be exploring the following themes:
| Section | Questions to be explored |
|---|---|
| 1. Setting the context | What do you understand about problem solving approaches in your area of work? How can research skills and approaches help us find solutions to complex issues? |
| 2. What challenges are important to you? | What kind of challenges exist in your organisation in relation to the work you do, your services, your service users, etc.? How have solutions to challenges like these been developed before (whether successfully or unsuccessfully)? What other skills, information, and resources would be useful to enable you/your organisation to address problems like these in the future? |
| 3. What could a short course look like? | How would you want to learn about new problem solving skills? |
| 4. Reflecting on discussions | How relevant are your needs and experiences to those of other people in other organisations? How representative might your needs and experience of the wider local community and civic sector? |
Following these focus groups (and the online survey), some participants may be selected for follow-up conversations. After this, we will put your insights into action to develop a pilot course which will be delivered in June 2025 (provisionally arranged for Tuesday 10th June).
You and other colleagues, staff, and volunteers at your organisation will be involved to sign up for the pilot, separately, at a later date.
Who can take part?
We are inviting anyone who is part of a Nottinghamshire organisations whose work has a community focus and who believes research-style problem solving skills might of benefit to them and others in their organisation.
Each focus group participant will be given a £20 electronic high street shopping voucher in acknowledgement of your time and contributions to this work.
How do I register?
To take part, just register your interest through our short online form.
Should you have any queries, please contact: Patrick Keen at patrick.keen2015@my.ntu.ac.uk or Matthew Young at matthew.young@ntu.ac.uk
Please note, this project is governed by the relevant NTU research ethics procedures and the Research Ethics Committee for Art, Architecture, Design and Humanities (AADH). Participants will be asked to consent to the collection, analysis, storage and use of their data so we can co-create the short course with you and share our learning from the process. All necessary steps will be taken to ensure your privacy, including data anonymisation and secure storage. Full details will be provided to you before the focus group meetings, where you will have the opportunity to ask the project team any questions before you decide whether to take part.