by Alan Nelson
We are currently planning a new range of courses within our Accounting and Finance Portfolio that focus more on using collaborative tools to help people learn from each other. Developing a new offering of this sort is an iterative process for us. I am not sure we always do it in exactly the same way, but the process we have followed in this case is pretty typical.
The first step is normally the idea. This is often stimulated by the dialogue with clients, partners, authors and other stakeholders. Some conversation or series of conversations make us think in a new way – gives us the germ of an idea. In this case we noticed that people got excited when we showed them activities where we asked a learner a question and then shared with them the answers from other learners. Then, at the Learning Technologies show in January, one person said “This is fantastic. Why don’t you make more of this up front? I never realised you could do this.”
The next stage is to flesh it out a little internally to see whether we are all excited by it. Many ideas fall by the wayside at this stage, turning out to be simply the short term enthusiasm of one or two people (normally me, actually!). In this case we realised we had all been thinking about Web 2.0 type facilities and how we could build them into our approach without abandoning everything we had learned. We decided that we would like to create a new range of courses for our Accounting and Finance Portfolio that focused more on facilitating a group of professionals discussing and debating a subject than on an expert explaining how to do something.
Once we had convinced ourselves that we were onto something it was time to try it out on the outside world. In this case we were keen to do this as early as possible but we weren’t yet ready to consult our commercial partners with what could still have been a half baked idea we wouldn’t take any further. So we asked a couple of our existing authors what they thought, whether they would be interested in helping us to work up the idea and perhaps in producing the first couple of courses. Both authors loved the idea and wanted to be involved. One of them came up with a name for the new approach: peer-enriched learning.
We worked with the two authors to plan out the structure of the new courses and to establish some rules that we might follow to ensure that the new offering was consistent.
The next step was to talk to our commercial partners. We knew that we would have to be able to talk in a coherent and compelling way and that we would need some visual examples to illustrate what we were describing. We spoke to three commercial partners. They loved the idea and started to help us to flesh out the promotional proposition. What should the price point be for these new courses? How should we describe them? Was peer-enriched learning the right phrase? (Yes, we think so!)
Then it was back to the authors with the encouraging news about the response we had had. And that’s where we have got to.
Three courses that follow our new approach are now in development. We will pilot them with some tame learners who we can trust to give us honest feedback and then we will tweak them and launch them to the world around the middle of this year. It is exciting to be able to go from the germ of an idea to finished product within four or five months – in my old world of books publishing things took much longer.
It is already clear that by getting people involved in sharing their ideas and learning from each other we can create far more engaging and powerful professional development – a stark contrast with the passive experience of streamed lectures on offer from so many current providers.
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