by Jacqui Nelson
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the MemNet Membership Development Conference. I had been asked to talk about how membership bodies can provide flexible and accessible routes to CPD for their members. My interest in this area is in the provision of effective and engaging learning. This was neatly complemented by Lee Davies of the Institute for Learning, who focused on recording and reporting CPD activity. You can read about his institute’s innovative (and successful) use of Personal Learning Spaces on his blog.
Here’s a quick hop, skip and jump through my talk. You can find the slides either here or on the MemNet Vault.
I started by posing the question, what is professional development?
Professional development, to my mind, can be broken into three main areas:
- Initial professional development – This might be a degree or vocational course, but equally, it might take place on the job. I’m a marketer by background and when I began my first job I learned what I needed, initially, from my colleagues. It was a while before I moved on to any formal professional qualification. This leads on nicely to...
- Professional qualification – Most professions will require you at some point to take a professional qualification to prove you are up to the job.
- Continuing professional development (CPD) – So now you’re qualified it is your responsibility to make sure that you continue to keep up to date, and in many cases there are consequences if you don’t.
So who does CPD? We’ve worked with a lot of professional bodies on this and it is abundantly clear that you are more likely to persuade your members to do CPD if it is regulated and mandated -they need to do it in order to maintain their license to practice. Other bodies, not governed by regulation, make CPD a compulsory part of membership and how successful they are tends to depend on their auditing process.
With many bodies now providing learning and development opportunities to their members we moved on to looking at what professional bodies should provide and how should they provide it. We talked about how most membership bodies have very diverse audiences. Members are tied together by a common profession or qualification, but they will vary in age, experience, background etc. From this we can conclude that there is no ‘One size fits all’ solution.
Your membership wants to learn what they want to learn and in a style that suits them.
This makes professional development different to many other types of learning. Think of a child’s experience in school. They arrive in a school year at roughly the same age, having learned the same syllabus for the past year. They embark on learning the syllabus as each other this year. And give or take a bit, they will reach the same standard.
For professionals it is different. Everyone arrives at learning with different knowledge, specialism, experiences, and, most importantly, requirements. At this point, getting them to click on screen 1 of 48 and then move through each screen in a linear fashion misses the point completely, and will turn professional learners off. They need a diffused approach which embraces their differences, builds it into their personal learning path and allows them to learn what they want to, not what you want to teach them.
Professionals need flexibility of delivery as well and online CPD can be an effective way of providing that. So who does CPD online? Research shows;
- Women are more likely to than men
- Young people
- Those in rural locations
- Those in practice (where their time is chargeable)
- And those who operate CPD on an Inputs basis.
The last point is not always what professional associations want to hear as so many organisations are moving to outputs based CPD, but the reality, at the moment, is that members of organisations with inputs based systems are more likely to buy CPD courses than those with outputs.
I then did a quick exercise where I asked the audience to analyse their personal learning style. Pleasingly and unsurprisingly we had a range of different learning styles; Doers, Observers, Thinkers, Experimenters.
I wanted to make the point that people learn in different ways and that is as true online as it is in the classroom.
Elearning that delivers a fact and then asks you to answer a multiple choice question about that fact is NOT good learning.
In terms of Bloom’s taxonomy, you’re not getting past first base. You may, just about, have got the learner to remember, but for learning to be effective you need to move further up the pyramid – understanding, applying analysing, evaluating…etc – and its all possible online.
So how can you achieve this deeper learning online? In our experience a learning objective boils down to one or a combination of three things. It requires a change in attitude (A) or behaviour; the acquisition of a new skill (S); or the gaining of knowledge (K). This is what we call an ASK analysis. To achieve each of these different objectives you need different types of activities and learning.
And finally, good online CPD needs to be some combination of three things; information, learning and communication/collaboration. The last one is key, as people are getting more and more used to communicating online.
I finished the presentation by working through some examples to support the argument and demonstrate what is possible. If you want any more information on these or any other elements of the presentation, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Jacqui.nelson@nelsoncroom.co.uk
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