Nelson Croom's Blog

Learning in Victorian times

by Rachel Bruce

My five year old daughter is currently doing a project at school on what things were like at school in the Victorian era.  She has become fascinated by three things: firstly the use of corporal punishment (“children got hit with something called a cane just for being late, I can’t believe it!”); secondly, that girls had to play in a separate playground from the boys; and finally that asking questions in class was not tolerated; children just had to be quiet and listen.

Not being permitted to ask questions in class is something that my daughter has found astonishing.  “How would I find anything out?” she wants to know.  The project has got me thinking about the passivity of the Victorian education system, and how in “the olden days” children were just made to listen at schools rather than being encouraged to be inquisitive and actively participate. 

It has struck me that actually bad online learning could be described as Victorian in its approach.  Learners just made to sit in front of a computer and either listen to a talking head, or read through a screen before being told to click onto the next one.  With this archaic approach the learner is not in control of what and how they learn, yet sadly there is online learning out there like this.

I love being reminded through various guises (in this instance, my daughter’s history project), that what we do at Nelson Croom is good.  Online learning where the learner is in control of what they do within a course, how they navigate through it, and with the opportunity to actively participate via a range of activities. Advocates of the Victorian way of learning we are not. 

Addressing pharmaceutical wastage with online learning

by Nicola Dann

One of the things I enjoy most about managing the bespoke projects for Nelson Croom is that it gives me the opportunity to learn a little about a lot of diverse topics. As our expertise lies in the conversion of a subject to the online learning medium rather than in-depth knowledge of the subject matter, there are no topics that we can't work with. That means we have an array of courses that range from drug and alcohol counselling to financial planning, taking in relationship advice and support, competition compliance for the construction industry and dental surgery along the way!
 
Obviously none of the courses would work if we didn't have subject matter experts for all these topics, so this is where a close relationship with the client is vital as in all cases they are (or provide) the content experts. The initial phase of the relationship begins with the scoping process, where we quiz the relevant people about what the learner needs to know. We also ask a lot of dumb questions because generally at this stage we know very little. The answer can often be met with a collective Nelson Croom 'ahh, now I see' reaction. 
 
We've recently been working on a project for an organisation that provides advice and consultancy to the NHS and Pharmaceutical Industry. Among other things they also run training courses for GP practices that dispense drugs and wanted to offer this training online. One of the objectives of this project was to teach those prescribing controlled drugs how to prescribe more effectively in order to address the problem of the levels of wastage, so making the process more cost effective for the NHS. Didn't seem like to big a deal at the time. But then I saw the figures involved. Here are some of them:

• Unused prescription medicines cost the NHS over £10 million every year - just in South Yorkshire! That could pay for an extra 300 community nurses or 1,400 heart by-pass operations

• Between 2002-2007 the NHS has spent more than £1billion on buying and disposing of drugs that were never used

• 824 Tonnes of medication is destroyed unused every year – equivalent to the weight of 5 jumbo jets

Even if you never open them, once medicines have left the Pharmacy they cannot be recycled or used by anyone else, so preventing unneeded drugs leaving the dispensary at all is vital if this wastage is to be reduced. Wouldn't it be great if this course could help!

Getting to grips with content: it's child's play

by Crispin Best

I was recently one of several Nelson Croomers who took part in a meeting to discuss a new medical ethics and law course that we are just starting to develop. Stories of incompetent or downright naughty doctors still always manage to cause a stir, so I was really looking forward to learning more about what rules and strictures doctors are really encouraged to follow.

After the initial stages of the meeting, we got to the meat of the issue: the prospective content of the course.

"What do we want to cover?" we asked. And there was plenty!

Before too long, various terms were being thrown around at lightning speed:

"We have to cover non-maleficence!"

"Don't forget autonomy."

"And beneficence."

At this point, in spite of the terminology being bandied about, I think I was just about managing to keep up with proceedings. Then the Latin started,

"Well, yes, voluntus aegroti suprema lex," said one of the subject experts.

"Hear, hear!" I replied. Or I might have if I'd had any idea what he had just said, (sadly my Latin is confined mostly to football club mottos.) I rather wearily felt like medical ethics was going to be the cause of more headaches than it was going to help cure.

Medical ethics obviously is an issue that gets people going, and I was starting to understand why people are so fascinated by it. It's (literally) a life and death issue, and doing the right thing doesn’t always seem obvious. What's more, in spite of the emotions that are surely involved, if you're not careful it all has a tendency to sound so cold.

I think a few of the client contingent started to sense a certain amount of uncertainty on some of our parts. One of their party, a lady who specialises in seminars for newly qualified doctors, explained:

"Well. It's actually very simple. There's a technique that we use in our sessions to help people remember the basics. We call it 'The Kindergarten Rules'."

This got me interested. She carried on:

"For example, when talking about the dos and don'ts of confidentiality, which is one of the key principles of medical ethics, we just tell them all to remember: "Don't tell tales". That’s how to stay safe."

So maybe confidentiality is as simple as that, but surely that can't be said for all the key principles?

Well. It turns out you can do this with pretty much all of them. Patient autonomy becomes "Don't boss people around". Dignity becomes "Show respect". Justice (referring to the equal distribution of care) becomes "Always share". Non-maleficence becomes "Don't hurt people". Beneficience becomes, rather sweetly, "Try to help people".

The doctors were laughing, and so were we. It was as simple as that. Just by looking at the principles from a slightly different viewpoint, the rules immediately came to life in a way that couldn’t be failed to be understood by everyone.

And there we had it. Although there will always be situations which demand interpretation, in general the responsibility of the doctor is basically to follow a set of rules that they were all probably brought up with anyway. The whole content of this course, which minutes ago had seemed so hard to grasp, had been boiled down, brilliantly, to a list of seven-or-so key points that could have come straight from the wall of a nursery school.

Sort it out you COOKIE NOGGIN!

by Angela Smith

So I’ve been giving it some serious thought and I’ve finally decided on my favourite feature of the Imago system. You guessed it – the activation code generator!

You didn’t guess it? Oh.

Well of course it’s very good at letting people in and keeping people out of our courses as required, but let me make a real case for it as a star feature. If you don’t already know, our “classic” activation code is a randomly generated code, made up of one letter, a five letter word, four digits, a six letter word and one final digit. Often they look like this:

L-QUITE-0392-NORMAL-3

But it is surprising how often the activation code generator throws up weird and strangely pleasing combinations of words. Here are a few I selected, all from the same batch …

L-WHALE-0064-WHOOSH-7
L-VAPID-0655-GIMLET-0
L-VOLES-0405-ASPIRE-2
L-PLUMS-0645-UPHELD-6
L-FOILS-0734-NODDLE-5
L-IMAGO-0953-MONKEY-1

Sometimes there are headlines waiting to happen…

L-ASCOT-0425-UPROAR-0
L-FROGS-0253-TRIPLE-5

…the occasional careers suggestion…

L-CAKES-0987-EDITOR-6

…mmm, edit those cakes. And often brilliant insults…

L-COOKY-0393-NOGGIN-2

Sometimes they even suggest a compelling narrative, though I admit this is the first time I’ve actually strung one together…

I had just left the L-YUMMY-0817-KIOSKS-5 and was on  my way to the kitchenware stall to buy a L-GRAPE-0357- FUNNEL-4 when a L-BASIN-0812-FRENZY-8 broke out.

Those L-TIPSY-0923-MISERS-4 from the pub next door all spilled out on to the street like L-MANSE-0572-VERMIN-3  to watch our L-FORMS-0969-EMERGE-0 from the L-SPICY- 0443-CRISIS-0. The barmaid was shaking her L-SATIN- 0176-BOOTIE-9 and laughing like a L-LAGER-0374- MONKEY-2.

The whole experience left me with a L-JAZZY-0725- NODULE-1 and if I’m honest with you my L-NAVEL-0545- WEEVIL-4 has been acting up ever since.

All I’m saying is, any time you get a spreadsheet of access keys through from us, don’t forget to appreciate the wonder of random generation (and of course, check for rude-sounding codes to email round the office!)

This is L-AGENT-0212-PICKLE-4 signing off…
 

Pool-side activities anyone?

by Angela Smith

When I started at Nelson Croom, most of our building work was done on a desktop-based system called “Cobalt”. In the early days I loved Cobalt, as it was very similar in its functionality to the tools I had used in my knowledge engineer days and so had a security blanket feel to it. However, the changeover was already underway to move to the fully web-based Imago. At this point in time, Imago still had its training wheels on and pretty much all we could do in it was edit text; all structural and more “techy” bits of building had to happen in Cobalt.

Over time, our Technical Director Tony has been moving pieces of functionality from the old system to the new, improving it as he goes. I make this sound like a smooth and easy process, but in reality it has involved all sorts of complex techy Access gubbins and SQL wizardry that I couldn’t bore you with even if I wanted to. Anyway, the point is that this changeover is now very nearly complete and we are getting ready to take Cobalt down to the skip.

I’d love to get all nostalgic about Cobalt’s imminent trip to the vet’s, but (*stage whisper*) the truth is that with it out of the way, Imago will become more flexible than ever, both for us at Nelson Croom and for all you budding builders and editors who use the system “outside the building”.

One of the most recent features to move over from Cobalt to Imago has been the ability to add in text-entry boxes, radio buttons and tick-boxes to activities and quizzes. Until recently, this was only possible from a machine with Cobalt installed, which sadly limited our ability to build activities from interesting locations like our back gardens, the beach, or even by the pool.

However, with the most recent internal rollout, we can now build activities from start to finish using the glamorous new version of Imago’s WYSIWIG toolbar. Even more excitingly, if you are a subscriber to Imago Builder and Editor, we will soon be able to offer you this more sophisticated set of activity creation tools, which will enable you too to build activities from the pool-side (Wi-Fi permitting of course). Though sadly any training sessions are likely to take place in Vauxhall and work hasn’t even started on the Westminster Business Square pool…

The perils of stand-up training

by Tony Short

I love the term “stand-up training” as it betrays the fact that the focus tends to be on the trainer, rather than on the learners (the “sit-downs”, I guess?). Once the students are trapped in front of the trainer or lecturer, they have little choice but to follow the whims and vagaries of the speaker.

With a good e-learning programme, the learner can be given multiple entry-points by which to access the course material, so they can skip the content that’s not quite suited to their needs. How I wish that were the case when I have to attend day-long training seminars or best-practice workshops!

The attendees of seminars are subjected to every word the speaker utters, with only a short SCB break around lunchtime (SCB? Sandwiches, Cigarettes and Bodily functions).

Here’s a case in point, from the perspective of one of the poor schmuck’s stuck in the audience….

I tend to avoid free seminars, but this one was only a couple of miles down the road from me, and the topics to be covered looked interesting. About sixty of us were supposed to start the day with breakfast rolls at the venue near Maidenhead. The company sponsoring the event had thoughtfully laid on breakfast for about seventy people. It wasn’t their fault that the weather was awful and there had been and multi-vehicle pile-up which blocked the motorway nearby. An hour and a half after the allotted start time, only about a third of the attendees had made it through the door. Phone calls made from hard-shoulders let us know that we could expect some stragglers in about half an hour, “so could we perhaps hang on a bit before starting?”

The intrepid few who had made it on time were encouraged to have a second, and then a third, breakfast roll.

The organisers of the event decided to change around the order of the programme, and to start with some hands-on stuff. I overheard some of the attendees muttering that they had only come for the first three lectures and had hoped to slip away before the hands-on bit started. As some of them had arranged other meetings in the afternoon, this meant they actually had to miss the lectures completely, and spend time looking at things they had no interest in. They weren’t happy – and the offer of further (now very cold) breakfast rolls didn’t seem to console them.

Of course, one or two people actually turned up after lunch, because the thing they were interested in was the chance to do some hands-on stuff. These poor souls shuffled into the back of the lecture theatre, where they were later told that the hands-on bit had already finished. They found themselves effectively pinned to their seats as the arrangement of the seminar room meant the only exit point was a door right next to the lecturer – and no-one was quite brazen enough to brush past the speaker (whilst he was in mid flow) to beat a retreat. I did see a few people eyeing the emergency fire exit at the back, plainly wondering if it led to a convenient fire escape, and trying to work out if the door lock was fitted with an alarm.

The stand-up bit of the seminar covered four main topics. Whilst chatting to fellow attendees over my fifth cup of coffee in the prolonged pre-seminar breakfast, I had established that most people were interested in only  two or three of the topics, and were resigned to sitting through the other lectures (taking the opportunity for some furtive Blackberry action).

But when the talks did get underway after a late start, there was little time left to cover the ground. To make the most of his limited time, the first speaker started his talk by asking the audience a few questions to try to gauge what level to pitch things at. It immediately became apparent that some attendees barely understood what the title of the presentation meant, whilst others were (near as damn it) experts in the field. I could see the poor speaker scanning the faces in the audience, and thinking to himself “so, which elements of the audience shall I alienate?”  When he got underway, the bloke to my left was taking notes so frantically that the graphite in his pencil glowed red hot. At the same time, the bloke to my right skilfully managed to impart, by a few carefully calculated long, loud sighs, that “this tedious coverage of such basic, elementary, kindergarten stuff is an insult to my great intelligence, and a gross misuse of my (very precious) time”.

As I sat through one of the sessions irrelevant to my needs, I found my mind wandering (I don’t have a Blackberry to play with). The day had really impressed upon me the strengths of online learning, and the great advantage of being able to navigate through content quickly in a non-linear way. I worked out that my day out of the office had resulted in no more than 60 – 90 minutes of worthwhile learning (if that). And I thanked my lucky stars that at least I had only traveled about six miles that day – others had driven a couple of hundred miles, in total. Half of the audience never did arrive, but at least those who did make it could be furnished with a few breakfast rolls to eat on the long  journey home.