Nelson Croom's Blog

A scientific approach?

by Alan Nelson

I was recently at the Institute of Association Management (IofAM) Annual Conference. We have a partnership with the IofAM to provide their members with online CPD courses and we were the main sponsors of this event. It was a great opportunity for senior association managers to meet together and discuss their issues and concerns. The meeting went well, and I was struck by one session on running successful events that was particularly participative and well received.

One presenation got me animated, although I have to say not in a good way. One of the speakers was a consultant on the black art of motivating a team. His angle was that work in this area doesn't have to be touchy feely; it is possible to analyse the behaviours and preferences of the members of a team. By scoring people in different areas he claimed to be able to apply a more robust and scientific, analytical approach. I can see why this is desirable; it must be hard in a recession to pitch to senior managers the idea that they should spend money on something cultural. However, my grasp of maths got in the way of my accepting the analysis.

We were told that Performance is the product of Skills and Motivation, and then asked to rate ourselves out of 10 for the latter two. I have been running publishing businesses for 15 years and since setting up Nelson Croom years ago we have had an excellent and stable team. So, I am quite confident that we haven't got things too badly wrong in this area. I didn't want to appear cocky though so I rated myself 8 out of 10 for each.

We were then asked to multiply the two numbers together and told the result was our percentage score for Performance. How? Why? I scored 64% - but by scoring less than 80% I had apparently revealed a problem! But you'd have to rate yourself 9 out of 10 for both to score over 80%! I amused myself by making up other entirely spurious ways of calculating a percentage. I could perhaps have scored myself 40 out of 50 for each and then added them together - it made me feel a bit better.

All of this reminded me of my reaction to elearning companies who claim to be able to calculate the return on investment on training. There are lots of useful calculations you can do to justify investment in development activities, but I'd like to offer my own invaluable equation:

Rubbish theory     x    spurious maths  ≠    anything useful

Revolutionary learning

by Victoria Clarke

Alan has been writing a new series of features for Insight Magazine, the publication from the IRRV for revenues and benefits officers. The first - Revolutionary learning - has just been published in the February edition and covers web 2.0 – can revenues and benefits officers lead the way? We’d be interested in your comments. Watch out for the further instalments in June and October this year.

Professional development with video

by Alan Nelson

I recently wrote a blog about a new course we have created for Resolution, the professional body for family lawyers. This is clearly a project that has had me thinking because there’s more to say!

As avid blog readers will know from my series of postings about keeping learners in charge, I am a fan of engaging professional learners by keeping them actively involved. Ever since Nelson Croom was launched 9 years ago we have always strived to do this and as new approaches to using the web have slowly emerged - and more recently been labelled “Web 2.0” - we have found that more and more people agree with us.

One way in which this has manifested itself for me is in my dislike of including video in professional development material. I’m probably simply betraying my own learning style preferences but I find it almost impossible to sit still and watch video on my computer for more than 15 seconds at a time. I find my mind wanders and I end up going and making another cup of coffee. I am used to being in control of my PC and so I expect to be leaning forwards with the mouse in my hand.

So when the good people at Resolution said that they had some video material that could be included to show examples of how stressful the protagonists find divorce, and therefore how sensitively their cases must be handled, it was all I could not to deliver my normal rant about the passive nature of video as a learning experience and how people learn best when they are actively engaged.

That was, until I took the time to actually look at the video. The first clip was a scene showing a father dropping his son back to his mother after having custody for the weekend. An almighty row breaks out, ostensibly about the fact that he is half an hour late and hasn’t got the kid to do his homework, but really about the fact that she still hasn’t accepted that the marriage is over. If a learner was in any doubt about how stressful the protagonists in a divorce case must find the experience, they won’t be after watching this clip.

So there we are: something I thought would never happen – a Nelson Croom course has video throughout and is all the better for it. We have of course integrated it into the active experience by using it to stimulate debate and discussion between learners, but I still have to admit that perhaps all this time I have been a bit dogmatic!

Creating a colour palette 'the natural way'

by Hamish Long

I'm always excited about a brand new project when the client gives me free reign. One of the first things I create is a colour palette for the website. "Fresh and "vibrant" are words I hear a lot and with spring just around the corner (hopefully!) let's create a palette with a seasonal twist...

I find that good quality nature photographs offer stacks of inspiration so I've carried out a search in my stock photo library, www.photos.com, and found this great image of a yellow spring tulip in bloom.

I then open the image in a graphics application, in my case, Adobe Fireworks. Next I create four squares and use the colour picker tool to find a nice selection of colours from my tulip image. You might need more colours for your project but I find four gives me enough variety without over-complicating things.

 

As this website will not have colours bleeding into each other, I add a white border to my squares and overlay them so I can see how they sit together. I have duplicated the yellow square so all colours touch each other. I have also created a 40% opacity palette.

 

I can then start mocking up website layouts and colour combinations. You may be creating a palette for a different project - a slideshow presentation or a newsletter perhaps. It can be difficult to get started when creating a palette so I hope this technique of finding an image to match the mood of the project will prove useful.

Forthcoming events

by Victoria Clarke

Well, we’ve had a busy start to this calendar year and it looks set to keep on going. In the next few months we’ll be attending the IofAM annual conference, giving two seminars at CHASE covering Flexibility in CPD and What motivates professionals to learn, presenting at the next BILD Connect Event, and holding a session at the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention ... and that's what we have booked in so far!

We love doing these events because it's great for us to have the opportunity to share our experiences with others. I’ll be posting more details of each on the blog as the time comes, and we’ll add details of the presentations up where we can too. In the meantime you can check out the events page on our website for more details.

Why do professional associations do online learning?

by Alan Nelson

A long term frustration of mine is my inability to describe succinctly the work we do with professional associations. I start off well. I explain that there are three things professional bodies are normally trying to achieve: they want to offer courses online to help members complete their CPD; they want to create online study materials for students to study remotely for their qualifications; and … and … that is where is starts to go wrong!

Many of our projects do not fall into either of the first two categories. It makes life interesting that this third, miscellaneous group is so varied but it spoils my elevator pitch!

The thing is that lots of professional bodies are seeking to fulfil an objective that they see as central to their reason for existing, but which is quite peculiar to them. For the IRRV that objective is the provision of up to date professional learning and reference materials for revenues and benefits officers in local authorities. For EphMRA, it is the provision of an induction course for new pharmaceutical market researchers.

This last month we have launched just such a project. Resolution is an organisation of 5000 family lawyers who believe in a constructive non-confrontational approach to family law matters. Quoting from their website:

"The cornerstone of membership of Resolution is adherence to the Code of Practice, which sets out the principles of a non-confrontational approach to family law matters. The principles of the code are widely recognised and have been adopted by the Law Society as recommended good practice for all family lawyers. The code requires lawyers to deal with each other in a civilised way and to encourage their clients to put their differences aside and reach fair agreements."

To support all this they require all new members to attend a half day course explaining the Code of Practice. With 70 new members a month, running the courses is quite a logistical challenge and there are inevitably some members who don’t find a course being run at the appropriate time in the right part of the country.

To add to this, Resolution is something of a victim of its own success. In the early days, no one would have joined unless they embraced the principles embodied in the Code. As they have grown, however, they have become the standard body for family lawyers to belong to, and so it is no longer a given that every new member buys into the philosophy.

So to avoid the possibility of any less enthusiastic new members using the logistics of attending a course as an excuse for not attending, they decided to create an online version that a new member anywhere could sign up for at anytime. And it’s that new course that we recently launched.

So that is the third category of online learning project. It hasn’t helped me with my elevator pitch – still way too long – but it is a great example of why you can’t put all our work into neat boxes.

Does mandatory CPD distort the natural processes of learning?

by Jacqui Nelson

Last week we also attended the CPD Forum Conference. We had supported this event financially and so I was delighted to see such a good turnout – over 80 CPD professionals from a wide range of professional bodies.

I am always struck by the collegiate atmosphere at CPD Forum events. I am envious of the way that people can share with others facing similar issues. In my world there are lots of people with the same problems but they are on the whole competitors and the last thing I am going to do ideas to share all our best ideas with them!

The highlight of the day was the afternoon debate. The motion being debated was:

“This house believes that CPD is best left to individual professionals; mandatory CPD distorts the natural desires for and processes of learning.”

The proposers and seconders did a great job both of laying out the issues and of entertaining us, but in the end the motion was defeated was a massive margin of 67 to 11. So, strong support for mandatory CPD.

This of course is good news for us. Our CPD courses are used extensively by a wide variety of professionals, but they are taken up most earnestly where there is a backdrop of mandatory CPD. While I understand that some people think that these schemes create unnecessary bureaucracy for hard pressed professionals, I for one think it is critical for the future public image of the professions that they are seen to require high standards of ongoing competence.

Watching people using our courses avidly in December as they run out of time before the year end does impress upon me the responsibility we have as a publisher to produce courses of a high standard that will really help, and not to take advantage of their slightly desperate position by selling them sub-standard content.

Thoughts from Learning Technologies

by Alan Nelson

Last week was quite an event for the e-learning industry. It was the annual conference and exhibition, Learning Technologies. We were exhibiting and as always with these events, it was exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.

Our marketing people had really outdone themselves this year and the stand looked fantastic. They had come up with the idea of giving out flowers and by mid morning on the first day the whole exhibition was full of people with sunset gerberas sticking out of their delegate goody bags. People started coming to the stand just to find out where they were coming from.

It was a great gimmick and ensured that all four people on the stand were busy talking to delegates for the entire two days. Even I find it tiring to talk for that long, although my colleagues in Vauxhall might not believe that!

I had some really interesting conversations during the two days. More and more people are coming round to the idea that they must engage with online educational provision, even those from seemingly unlikely environments. I had two in depth conversations, for example, with people charged with professional development in universities. I would hazard a guess that there aren’t many audiences more difficult to engage than academics, so next time you are frustrated at how hard it is to get people to take part, spare a thought for our new friends in higher education.

I was very encouraged by the show overall. I heave heard that exhibitions everywhere are suffering in the recession but this one was different. The number of exhibitors had increased and the show took up the whole floor at Olympia when last year it had only used a part. There were more delegates than ever before and time, and again I heard people say that they were looking seriously at online learning because they simply weren’t going to be able to afford to continue doing things face-to-face as times got hard.

I have said before that things are going exceptionally well for us at the moment and we certainly don’t see any signs of being affected by the downturn. Maybe I can now start to say it without touching every piece of wood in the room!