Nelson Croom's Blog

A Nelson Croom Orange Part 2

by Angela Smith

In A Nelson Croom Orange Part 1 I talked about drumming information into learners and used the example of learners clicking on a telephone icon which appears repeatedly, and repeats the same warning. I came to the conclusion that drumming only gets half the job done and that the missing link when trying to change people’s behaviours is attitude.

So what about our learners clicking repeatedly on that phone? The learners know and know quickly that they are or aren’t supposed to do something. But does that mean they won’t do it, or be tempted to do it? Depending on the culture it can simply mean that they make sure they don’t get caught. We’re giving them the knowledge, but we aren’t changing any attitudes, except perhaps in the very conscientious.

From a compliance point of view some employers think that this is enough. Unfortunately for the learner, the regulatory bodies also think of it as enough and it can in fact make matters worse for them as an individual when something does go wrong - you knew you weren’t supposed to do it, you did the training, you did it anyway – you’re banged up mate. To engineer real changes in people’s behaviour it is their attitudes that we need to engage with.

What can change our received attitudes? Two things: knowledge and experience. If we think of an example we’ll see that attitudes are most likely to change through a combination of the two. Imagine I've worked at a publisher's for years and everyone leaves boxes of junk lying around the place. I come to think of this as acceptable. One day the Health and Safety guy comes along and says that if someone falls over the box and does themselves in my company and I personally could be sued. OK, that's a new piece of knowledge for me and it's pretty powerful, but then so is my complacency and the need to have my boxes of stuff around me – it's never done anyone any harm so far, so I carry on as before. One day, a few weeks later, walking round to visit a colleague at their desk, I fall over a pile of junk that they've left lying on the floor and fall on my face. Of course the minute the unsightly grazes have healed up I come back to work and clear up the area around my desk, having learned my lesson.

But how can we tap into the power of experience without going around chucking our colleagues down fire escapes and setting fire to their rubbish bins? In our programmes, compliance and otherwise, we try to make connections using the power of experience and reflection – the power of putting yourself in others' shoes, or back in an old pair of your own. We ask learners to tell us about their experiences, how they made them feel, what they would do differently given the chance. We only learn from our experiences when we reflect on them and properly process what they meant and how we acted. The tools we use online facilitate this learning process by encouraging learners to reflect on their experiences and share their answers with others. Reflective activities put you in a certain frame of mind, one in which you are more open to the thoughts and experiences offered by others, and so it is the ideal time to effect an attitude change.

Of course I’m not suggesting that Alex would have stood for going through the Nelson Croom “Manage your Ultra-violence” course. At the end of A Clockwork Orange (in the book at least) he simply grows up. Our learners, on the other hand, have already grown up and they still have lots of attitudes that need changing.

I've gone on a bit again, but I'm going to resist the temptation of a part three... If you just want people to know that what they are doing is wrong, “drumming” is fine. However, for those enlightened companies who really want to effect a change in behaviour and even culture through their compliance training, adding into a few reflective activities into the mix can give the learners the tools to change their own attitudes.

Secret squirrel

by Katy Hillary

I’m currently working on a project I cannot discuss for a client that I must not name, and it all feels rather appropriate with the new James Bond movie about to hit the cinemas! In order to protect the client’s intellectual property I am not allowed to talk about the development with other colleagues who are not on the project team.

It does remove a dynamic that we usually find very helpful on a project though, which is the ability to introduce a new eye to an issue or a piece of content. This often results in much more creative solutions, because people too close to the development often get attached to the original vision and have trouble seeing past it.

Anyway, it is making me feel a bit secret squirrel and gives the work a little extra kick! I’m rather enjoy being “hush hush” and refusing to disclose information, although, to be strictly accurate, no-one is asking for it. Still that is probably because if I told them about it, I’d have to kill them.

New Employment and Support Allowance legislation

by Victoria Clarke

Today Employment and Support Allowance replaces incapacity benefit and income support paid on incapacity grounds for new customers. It’s part of the government’s shake-up of welfare reform. So, what does this have to do with online learning? Benefits legislation is complex and constantly changing. The Institute of Revenues, Rating and Valuation (IRRV) started working with Nelson Croom back in 2003 to develop the Euclidian suite of online programmes in Council Tax, Business Rates, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit. Since then they’ve been able to update their programmes and roll out changes to users as needed (with no frustrating delays while new materials are being printed or the obvious cost associations). The introduction of the ESA was announced back in March this year. Within two months of the legislation being laid the ESA course was launched – even before official guidance was released – allowing benefits practitioners to get up to speed and ready to hit the ground running today. Since then, more than 2000 of them have taken advantage of the convenience of keeping themselves up to date in this way. The IRRV’s ESA course has also been shortlisted in the World of Learning Awards as Rapid eLearning Solution of the Year. Just getting the course put together – the IRRV used our technology to create most of the course themselves – in this short space of time is an achievement and we’re delighted that the awards judges agreed. We wish the IRRV all the best for the night!

Isolating your learners with podcasts

by Victoria Clarke

I downloaded a set of podcasts from my college website over the weekend. These are recordings of evening lectures available for all current students to download and listen to, regardless of whether you had been able to make the evening or not. An excellent idea, I thought. I may have chosen to learn by distance but there are some things that you miss out on – like the odd exam tip or hearing about others’ experiences.

I listened to two – the introductory lectures from the two modules that I’m sitting. And how different they were! Tutor 1 was lively and quirky, and when he asked the class questions he paraphrased all answers and there were no long pauses whilst discussion went on. Tutor 2 was less lively, but appeared to be more consultative, engaging the class in much discussion. The only problem was that the listener can’t hear what the class is saying, and so you’re left with lots of long pauses and what sounded like much writing on a whiteboard. This sounded like a great, interactive class. I would have liked to have been there. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. I was sitting on a train on my morning’s commute and feeling quite lonely.

And that’s the key to good distance learning – yes we need to engage learners, and yes we need to motivate them but we also need to make them feel connected, part of the larger community. Don’t give them a podcast where they learn little and spend most of the time wondering what interesting points are being written on the whiteboard!

Revisiting Due Diligence

by Rachel Bruce

At the end of 2007 we published a course in our Accounting and Finance Portfolio on Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions. The course was written by Peter Howson, a director of AMR International, a leading independent provider of commercial due diligence. Peter is currently writing a new course for the portfolio; How to Sell a Business, and we really value his contribution as an author.  Not only does he write well, he delivers when he says he will within the parameters we set out, and all this enables our development team to best convert the content into engaging online learning.

So, in preparation for the arrival of the content for the new course I thought I would revisit the course on Due Diligence, as basically what Peter Howson is to supply next is the flip side of the coin – content on selling a business as opposed to acquiring one.

As I worked through the content I was reminded what a great course this is.  Anyone who is involved in a possible merger or acquisition would find this course useful.  It is written in a methodical way with the due diligence process being defined logically and practically, along with useful advice and case studies. And refreshingly, it starts off by explaining exactly what due diligence is and how it works. This is something which many authors who are experts in their subjects fail to do. Peter Howson, however, understands his audience and starts from the beginning giving all the background detail required and then going into more depth when necessary. His tone and style is one of plain English, without jargon and without over-complication. I found myself spending longer than I had set aside in the course as I was enjoying working through it so much and easily absorbing the information. I was learning.

Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions is already proving successful with our current partners who sell courses from our Accounting and Finance Portfolio.  I now eagerly await Peter Howson’s next course, How to Sell a Business being available online as together I know both courses will provide really useful learning tools for those involved, at whatever level, in the process of buying or selling a business.

It'll all be over by Christmas: learners in charge part 3

by Alan Nelson

My last couple of blogs have focused on our belief that we should strive to find ways to put learners in charge of their learning, respecting their different interests and previous experience. One way in which we do this is to try to bring out of them things they already know and use that as a starting point for new learning. Very little of what we learn is brand new – even quite big steps of understanding often involve applying lessons already learnt elsewhere to new situations. I was reminded of this recently when an unlikely parallel struck me.

I have been reading about the origins of the First World War. I don’t remember being very interested in this at school but now I find it fascinating. What has struck me is the parallel between the escalation of events in the early 19th Century and the current world financial crisis. I’ll try to explain and keep it simple!

The war kicked off very suddenly but the foundations of the situation in which that could happen had emerged over many years. The arms race, the trading rivalries, the complex network of treaties etc meant that when some bloke named after a pop group was shot in the Balkans (always a painful place to be shot) it was almost inevitable that it would escalate into war, but that wasn’t the reason it did.

Likewise the interdependence of the credit system exaggerated by hedging activities in the derivatives markets all emerged over a long period and were the backdrop that made it possible for it all to come down like a house of cards. (I am trying hard not to use the phrase “tinder box”.) To extend the analogy, traders continue to behave as though they believe they can still turn a profit out of the situation, not realising that in fact the whole system is under threat and they are all likely to lose – “It’ll all be over by Christmas!”

Now you may think that this is a glib and tenuous piece of analysis. That doesn’t matter though. The point is that my understanding of one situation has helped me to get clarity about the other. The more we can bring learners’ experience and knowledge from outside their professional lives as well as from within, the more we can get them to help each other to grasp complex new subjects.

Of course, as history tells us, we humans haven’t always been good at learning from the lessons of the past. So there is a job for us learning designers – and in any case, I never said it would be easy!

Vive la revolution: learners in charge part 2

by Alan Nelson

I recently wrote a post which was something of a rant about facilitating learning rather than trying to teach remotely. Now I have had the time to sleep on what I said, and on reflection, far from wanting to tone it down a bit, I’d like to go a little further!

I said in my previous blog that I preferred learning experiences that allowed me to make choices about what and how I learn. What I didn’t say was how much I hate being taught in the traditional way. E-learning companies make great efforts to demonstrate that people will be happy to switch from face-to-face experiences to online, but they steer clear of pointing out that many traditional experiences are awful.

Take the idea of a lecture. Who else except a university lecturer would imagine you’d like to listen to them talk for an hour without saying anything yourself. Imagine you went to a social occasion and someone talked and talked and wasn’t interested in what you had to say. You’d think they were pretty rude. So why do we imagine that learners might like to be passive recipients of wisdom without contributing themselves?

We all have our heads full of knowledge – all the stuff we have accumulated over the years. When I listen to someone talk I am constantly comparing what they say to what I have heard before. Does this new piece of information match what I believe? Does it shed new light or offer an alternative perspective? This is of course how we make conversation. One person says something and then the other responds, asking for further information or adding something relevant of their own. If I am not allowed to say anything myself, I still make the connections (I can’t stop!). And as soon as I do I am not listening to next bit. So the only lecture I ever listen to all the way through is one where the lecturer has said nothing of any interest to me at all!

How much worse is this when the “lecture” is streamed over the internet? We publish a range of courses for accountants to complete their CPD. In that world we have come across a lot of streamed lectures. I don’t want to be rude, but these are not delivered by speakers who are that fascinating to start with – once you remove the fact that you are in the room with them live, I defy anyone to listen for any length of time.

In defence of this rant I should say that we have evangelised this gospel for the last nine years. We are not just saying it now because it chimes with the Web 2.0 philosophy of user created content. But I do sometimes feel as though we have been waiting for years for the web to move in our direction and now that it has I am going to use the new tools in as much of what we do as possible.

Death to video feeds; long live user created learning.

They don't always say what you want to hear ... but does it matter?

by Jacqui Nelson

At the recent Members 2008 exhibition, I attended a session by Jude Habib on Social Networking and Web 2.0. The discussion moved, to once you have the tools in place, how do you get your audience to engage and enter into a dialogue with you and each other? This caused one guy to ask what you do if someone says something that’s not very complementary about you or your organisation on a blog or discussion site.

As far as I’m concerned it is a risk that is well worth taking. Swearing and other rudeness aside, we have to get used, in the world of Web 2.0, to getting feedback both good and bad.

Jude’s answer was exactly as mine would have been. If people have something bad to say about you or your organisation, you can’t stop them saying it. So surely it is better to have them say it so you can hear it and deal with it, rather then saying it behind your back.

There is a relevance to what we do at Nelson Croom. In all our programmes we have what I call ‘marmite’ features. You either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. One such feature is the ‘view other learners answers’ button. It is optional so you can turn it on or off but to my mind it is a great feature. It appears on scenario based activities where there is some judgement required, and it allows learners, once they have answered a question, to see, anonymously, what their fellow learners have answered.

It has many benefits; it makes people feel less isolated, it gives them different perspectives on a topic, it gives them a reason to give an answer … I could go on.

I was with a client not too long ago who is desperate to get his learners to submit more into the course so they can gather real stories. I suggested turning on this feature to encourage a better rate of responses but the client was dead set against it because it might spread bad practice. I conceded, of course but disagree with the decision. It would be a great way of getting more responses and if people did enter best practice at least then the client could deal with that and correct it. At the moment they just don’t know what’s happening.

I make one concession to this argument. When it comes to compliance training it seems to me that it is important not to blur the issues but to make things very black and white. There is clearly a right and a wrong way to act and so perhaps finding out what your colleagues think isn’t as useful as finding out the RIGHT way.

So Farewell Orkell

by Alan Nelson

So farewell Orkell, who have this week called their customers and partners to tell them that they have ceased trading. The business was run by some very capable and professional people, so what went wrong?

It wasn’t the market. They correctly identified the growing need for accessible CPD in a range of professional disciplines. This chimes with our experience. All sorts of professionals, faced with a mandatory requirement to complete their CPD, find it hard to attend face to face events. Women and others working part, people in rural areas, and people in practice, who may find that a booked event clashes with a client request for a paid visit, all find the possibility of accessible engaging and relevant development materials online, pretty compelling.

It wasn’t the message. I was continually impressed by the way they told their story. Their promotional material was always simple and crisp, if at times a little exaggerated.

It wasn’t the way they did business. Although we did come across a number of people who had been unsettled by their approach, I am sure that isn’t the reason for their demise.

I believe they made two mistakes. Firstly they failed to acknowledge the role of the publisher. Their business model depended critically on people buying courses. They made their money from a share of the price paid. They had recognised that authors would have to be rewarded, but they hadn’t realised how difficult most people find it to self-publish. Any experienced publisher will tell you that most authors are late delivering and don’t submit quite what was agreed. They need lots of help getting it into a usable shape. Orkell’s content was very slow to emerge and when it did, it was mostly just text on the screen with some multiple choice questions.

The second mistake was one that many businesses make. They misjudged the speed of take up. The professional associations they wanted to work with are conservative organisations. They are rightly careful not to make rash decisions. The executives are cautious both with members’ funds and with the reputation of the organisation. They have committees of members that meet to discuss and agree projects. This makes decision making slow and so however straight forward and compelling you make the proposal, you can’t short circuit the time it takes to get it approved.

So Orkell may have been onto something good, but they couldn’t support it for long enough to make a success of it. The case for online CPD remains as strong as ever. The skills of professional publishers in crafting high quality engaging content will be key to answering it.

Design tip #4: HTML Snippets Series - bullets and bars

by Hamish Long

You can jazz up a plain looking html page with some coloured bullets and bars. Here's an example:

For the green bar you use:
<hr style="color: #66cc00; background-color: #66cc00; height: 10px;">
and can change the colour and size to match your needs.

For the bulleted list:
<UL style="LIST-STYLE-IMAGE: url(images/bullet.gif)">
in this example I have my bullet image in a subfolder called "images".
I find the best size bullet image is 6x6px with a 4px space above it.