by Victoria Clarke
As part of a new series in Nelson Croom News (our monthly newsletter - you can sign up here) we caught up with Stuart Warner of Financial Fluency Ltd, and author of our new peer-enriched learning course Making Budgeting Work in the Real World. If you missed it, here's the interview in full:
We've just published your course Making Budgeting Work in the Real World - will you tell us a bit about it?
In my experience you can spend years learning about budgeting in theory and it won’t to prepare you for budgeting in practice. In the real world the budgeting process is full of challenges. This course aims to help budget managers and budget holders increase their awareness of real world issues and therefore be more prepared to deal with them.
So, are budgets very different in the "real world" than in the textbooks?
The textbooks tend to concentrate on the mechanics of budgeting and how to deal with the numbers. Budgeting in the real world is about dealing with people and not necessarily numbers.
Is this the first online course that you've written?
I’ve been writing online courses since the year 1999, ranging from simple text based courses to interactive and video based courses. This is the first online course I’ve written that really embraces learning 2.0 principles (i.e. peer-enriched-learning) and I’m really excited with the results.
How different is writing for an online audience to preparing for face-to-face training?
It is more challenging writing for an online audience - in that you can’t interact with the audience as readily. However, writing a peer-enriched-learning course is much more fun than writing other online courses as it simulates a face-to-face environment to some extent.
How did you come up with the different ideas for activities?
I imagined I was in a face-to-face training session and thought of the types of questions, discussions, interactions that would naturally take place.
What did you think about the way that Nelson Croom converted the content you supplied?
I was really impressed with the Nelson Croom team. They really understood my requirements and used their creative skills to enhance the course content.
And finally, if you had to give learners just one piece of budgeting advice, what would it be?
Treat your budgets like a game of chess – always plan several moves ahead!
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