by Alan Nelson
Having worked in online professional development for ten years now, I am glad to say that there are still some things that get me really excited. This is particularly true - positively and negatively - in the world of accounting CPD.
On the positive side, we publish our own list in this area, the Accounting & Finance Portfolio. Whenever I look in detail at the content of these courses, I am still excited by the quality of the material and by our ability to compete effectively with much larger organisations in this market. We have recruited some of the leading experts in the profession as authors, and have formed partnerships with many of the leading professional bodies to provide accessible and engaging service for their members. This has enabled us extend the reach of our service to many thousands of practising accountants struggling to stay up to date with ideas and regulations, and to comply with their CPD regime.
But this marketplace also gets me agitated in a more negative way. The offering from some of our competitors is truly appalling – the worst kind of streamed video with no apparent thought about what might make it an engaging experience for the user. One of the leading UK professional bodies is offering videos of some of their face to face events. Tune is to see a bunch of delegates looking bored and a lecturer wandering about and mumbling. They don’t even seem to have bothered to edit out the irrelevant bits, so the remote watcher has to wait while handouts are passed around and listen to banal descriptions of the arrangements for the teabreak that they are presumably not invited to! It seems to me that the best that this kind of resource can hope to aspire to is to be quite a bit less good than the face to face event was - and there isn’t much evidence that it was very good in the first place.
So I have always been proud of the comparison between our content rich, interactive approach and the lazy alternatives offered by competitors. But right now I feel a real sense of anticipation because we are about to raise the bar still further. Three new courses currently in development follow a new approach to online professional development which places a much greater emphasis on stimulating a dialogue between professionals interested in the same topic. We call it peer-enriched learning. Here the subject matter expert is not so much the font of all knowledge, but rather someone who has thought through the issues and come up with some interesting questions. Participants are encouraged to contribute their ideas and build a rich repository of shared experience: a community of practice.
Our two approaches are entirely complementary; each is appropriate in different situations. In some cases purchasers are driven by the need to learn from an expert. For example, the author of our course, Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions, Peter Howson, is a partner in an international mergers and acquisitions practice. Users acknowledge his expertise and want to find out what he has to say. They are happy for the experience to start with some fairly serious content. Then later they will want to contribute themselves and practise some of the techniques. This is the approach we have always taken with out technical courses and will continue to do so.
In the case of other topics though, there may not be a recognised expert. Robin Tidd, the author of our Managing Through a Recession course, does not claim to be the world’s expert, who can tell you exactly what to do if your business hits hard times, but he has spent a lot of time thinking about what questions you might need to answer in coming up with an appropriate solution. Here, the peer-enriched learning approach is more appropriate. Content is still provided but it is less of an end in itself and more of a catalyst to the debate.
There is now considerable evidence that collaborative learning is a powerful approach to embedding new ideas. This is borne out both by our experience of watching user engage with different types of learning resource and also from the feedback we get from users, who claim to have found as much value in the contributions from other participants as they have from the content, much like the participants in a good face to face session.
On a spectrum of how effective a learning resource is in engaging participants and embedding learning, we place video, and other forms of passive learning experience, at the bottom end, content rich interactive approaches in the middle, and collaborative approaches that engage the learners in solving their problems and those of their peers, at the top. Within the next three months our new courses will be live and we will have thousands of users to tell us whether we are right!
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