by Rachel Bruce
The Nelson Croom Development Team has been busy over the last couple of months creating new courses for Nelson Croom’s publishing programme. We’ve just launched our new peer-enriched learning approach with courses Managing Through a Recession and Making Budgeting Work in the Real World as well as new courses about selling a business and communicating complex ideas.
At the core of what we do at Nelson Croom is content conversion. On the bespoke side of our business clients provide us with content in varying forms and guises that we use to create engaging online learning for their target learner group. The Portfolio side of our business is different. We commission content to develop our own courses for our publishing programme, and therefore you would expect the content we receive from our authors to arrive in a pretty standard format. However, just like the bespoke courses we create, the Portfolio courses can stem from content that has landed on our Development Team’s desk in a variety of formats. What we commission is high quality content from an expert in their field. The format it is provided in is irrelevant. Whether it’s a book (where the author has the right to use the content elsewhere), presentations, activities and case studies, content written prior to being commissioned by us or content written specfically for us, we will take it and use our expertise to convert the content and create effective online learning.
One question that may spring to mind is how do we create courses of a particular level, quality and depth when faced with content coming in a variety of forms? The most important thing we can do to ensure we create a successful course is to work with a subject matter expert (who may or may not be the author) to create a syllabus around the subject we are commissioning that meets the needs of the learners we are targeting.
We have rules that we follow for each of our courses which allows us to assess and maintain the depth and level of the content once we begin conversion. So the syllabus is of course key. Then, once we have the content, it’s down to our Development Team to take the content and shape it to fit both the syllabus and the rules we have set for a course.
We are able to create courses from a variety of different forms of content. Our process gives the author freedom to write and supply the content in a format that suits them and ultimately means we get the best quality content from them. As an example, we are currently working on a course for our Accounting and Finance Portfolio, Ethical Issues for Accountants. The book is a series of case studies on ethical issues and we have taken these and designed a syllabus around the content from the book. With a syllabus structure in place and the content to hand, our Development Team have been able to convert the content from the book using our new peer-enriched learning approach and include case studies in the Resource Centre for learners to access. This content hasn’t been written specifically for us but in using our proven process of content conversion we have been able to take the content from the book, retain its identity and develop a course that fits with the rules, level and depth that we set our courses.
