by Rachel Bruce
Alan and I recently returned from a trip to Dublin where we had meetings with three accounting professional bodies, with whom we partner to offer courses from our Accounting and Finance Portfolio to their members.
Much of our planned publishing programme across this year and next is focused on commissioning and developing courses for the Accounting and Finance Portfolio so that we are able to provide our partners with an even larger range of courses to promote and sell to their members.
One of the purposes of each of the three meetings was for me to gauge interest in our proposed publishing programme. Earlier this year I began putting together a publishing programme and lining up authors to write the courses and before confirming anything I wanted to test whether what we were doing met with the needs of our partners. All the meetings we had were really positive, with each of the professional bodies keen to add the proposed new courses to their portfolios, and they were particularly excited about our new series – peer-enriched learning (which Alan talked about last week).
I came away from Dublin with renewed vigour about our publishing programme and in particular about the proposed courses in our new peer-enriched learning series. The enthusiasm from the accounting bodies in Ireland meant that I have now been able to confirm our publishing schedule for the year, which includes three peer-enriched learning courses publishing in the first half of this year:
• The Budgeting Game
• Managing through a Recession
• Ethical Issues for Accountants
The great thing about our new peer-enriched learning series is that it’s creating excitement on all levels – our authors, our partners (as we saw in Dublin) and all of us at Nelson Croom who are responsible for the development of the courses. Peer-enriched learning is making use of our web 2.0 tools allowing learners to share experiences and ideas with each other, and discuss specific topics and issues while being guided through a course with content written by an expert in their field. Essentially learners are able to learn from others in their community, as well as from the author.
The “sharing each others’ answers” device means that some of the content is created by the learners themselves and therefore the courses are continually updated, remaining current and relevant. This is particularly pertinent in courses such as Managing through a Recession where learners are able to share their experiences in dealing with various situations and also share techniques and devices to get through difficult times.
So we’ve started on our peer-enriched learning journey, we are all excited about it, and now the hard work begins to deliver the courses on time to all of our accounting partners (including the three we met in Ireland) so that in addition to the existing courses in their portfolio they have something new and exciting to offer to their members.
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