Nelson Croom's Blog

Knowledge will always be power

by Angela Smith

Like Alan, I also read Charles Jennings' recent article Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. Sad to say, it left me a little unsatisfied, but it did set all sorts of thoughts pinging off in my mind. I thought Jennings made some good points and would like to see him take them further – apologies to Mr Jennings if he has already elaborated elsewhere – I’m sure he has!

To quote Jennings, “Is it better to get people to commit information to memory, knowing that it will be short-lived (and possibly out of date when they come to use it), or help them become skilled in the approaches and techniques to find the current, correct information quickly when they need it? Think for a few seconds and it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one. Teach people to fish rather than providing them with fish.”

I have to disagree – I’m not sure that it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one unless we are talking only about pure information, rather than knowledge in the sense of the sum of the facts, skills and awarenesses of a person or group of people. This narrow definition of “knowledge” seems to apply only to a tiny proportion of the training and learning that goes on, particularly with adults in the workplace. And if Jennings is indeed simply talking about information, try applying his fishing analogy and where it seems to leave you is not “teaching people to fish” but “teaching people to find out what the current fishing techniques are”. Only really useful, I’d argue, if you already know how to fish. Or perhaps he’s talking about teaching them how to find out how to teach themselves to fish. Anyway, the metaphor is a bit wobbly. When do I learn to fish? I’ve got to do it some time.

The core of learning is not about straight information. It is about learning the background knowledge which allows you to put that information into context, the skills you need in order for the information to be useful to you and the attitudes you need to form to make the right judgements based on the information. You don’t look up your attitude whenever you want to know how to feel about something. Similarly, a skill is something that you possess, not something you can take out of a box and wear for half an hour.

Yes there should be a focus in basic education on helping people to develop the skills to navigate the minefield of information that's out there, to assess and assimilate what they find and to make reasoned decisions based on the information they find. However this is a separate issue to how we enable people to learn specific subjects. It’s a bit like saying that all we needed to do before was teach people how to find the bookshop, pick the right book and read it.

I'd argue that what Jennings is talking about is a specific general need of society, not an approach to training. What might this mean for learners? Time spent learning how to find up to date information is just a small element. The real implication is that it means more time spent on learning the key information needed for context, shaping attitudes and engaging in practice of the skills required.

It is also true that while we won’t necessarily want or need to learn everything about a subject, that doesn’t mean we won’t need to learn what is current as a basis from which to understand all the constantly updated information that is put to us. There must be a baseline and context in which to place what we learn. We wouldn’t say that because the IT world in constantly changing, developers should only ever look up what they need – you simply can’t begin that way. To pick up on Alan’s medical analogy, a surgeon who hasn’t learned the core skills of surgery is not a surgeon – he is a butcher with a book and you should get out of there fast.

Reading back over Jennings’ article to check I wasn’t wilfully misunderstanding him (I do enjoy disagreeing with people) it occurs to me that he makes a very interesting point at the beginning of the article about the current move towards social knowledge and knowledge sharing. However, he doesn’t, in this article, then go on to look at the real implications that this has for learning and training – how can we use this trend to enrich how we facilitate learning, but that’s a whole other blog…

 

10 years on: how has our philosophy changed?

by Alan Nelson

As part of Nelson Croom's 10th anniversary celebrations we are been looking back at how things have changed.

Reaching the milestone of our 10th birthday has made me temporarily reflective. Much has changed in the last 10 years but some things have stayed the same. The philosophy that underlies what we do is a mini example of this.

When David Croom and I first established Nelson Croom, we didn’t know much about e-learning. We were educational book publishers by background and although we knew a fair amount about the web, we had no experience of creating stand alone online learning. So we decided to get some help. We turned to a man called Trevor Bentley. Trevor was an organisation development consultant with a background in screen based learning that went back to the 70s. Over the course of a number of sessions, Trevor explained to us his central theory, that when dealing with remote learners, you had to let go of ideas of trying to teach them, and instead look to facilitate their learning. At first I thought this was a purely semantic distinction, but over time I came to see how important it was.

In practice what Trevor wanted us to do was to ask people what they wanted to learn and how, and then offer them each a route through material appropriate to their preferences. At the time, this all made a lot of sense to me. I have never much liked being told what to do and the idea of following a prescribed route through material, clicking on a next button, would never have appealed to me. This was backed up by some early work with focus groups, who pushed back hard on anything within our early offerings that attempted to control their movement around a course. So I went along with it innocently, never realising that acceptance of the approach would put us fairly significantly in left field in the emerging elearning world. Some people thought we were mad and certainly there were some areas where our apparently anarchic approach was never going to play well. It was a couple of years later that Trevor admitted to me that he had been trying to persuade Xebec McGraw to adopt his approach for some months and got nowhere. Indeed he told me that he nearly fell off the chair when our initial response to his suggestions was “OK. Sounds like a good idea to us. How do we do it?”

Looking back I think there were two reasons why we were so able to accept what others couldn’t:

• Firstly, we had less baggage. We were new and so we weren’t preoccupied with how to get our CD-ROMs to work over a dial-up connection, or how to convert our John Cleese videos into online learning. I was sold on the Internet and I wanted to use the browser as the navigational tool, not some interface that was dreamt up for a different medium.

• Secondly, as book publishers, we had spent much of the latter 90s discussing what a book would look like when it was online, only to realise that it was a pointless question. It would be a website not a book and once everyone understood websites, they wouldn’t feel the need to compare them to books anymore. So I was sure that I wasn’t going to spend any time thinking “What would a one day seminar look like as a course?” The question I was interested in was “How can we get people to learn this stuff using the internet?”

 

So that was how we set off on what was a fairly distinctive course. While it no doubt ruled us out of some work, particularly in the corporate sector, it was also a real asset, even in the early days. We became expert at dealing with diverse groups of learners, all starting with different pre-knowledge and in some cases with different objectives also. Inevitably, we gravitated towards the professional bodies. They were attempting to provide services to members all over the country, with differing levels of experience and different specialisms – highly intelligent and vocal individuals, not slow to criticise anything that doesn’t work for them.

So philosophy was not just an abstract concept; it became the foundation of what we did. Out of a simple and clear set of beliefs grew expertise and competence that informed the development of the business. The focus broadened over the years to include government bodies providing a service to the public and professional services firms with diverse clients, but we have always focused primarily on enabling organisations to extend the reach of their professional development services to individuals outside of their control.

Now of course the idea seems much less radical. The whole Web 2.0 movement is based on the idea that the users are in charge. We have enthusiastically welcomed many of the new social tools that have emerged because they have enabled us to bring some of our ideas to life. The whole concept of a community of learners creating a place where they can learn is tremendously exciting. The courses we create now get better when they are used – much better.

As a result of our approach we became obsessive about learners. Thinking about everything from their point of view is something of a mantra. So when last year we won an award for Elearning Development Company of the Year, and the judges cited our record of achieving results by focusing on the needs of real learners, I was particularly proud. As someone who has been rightly criticised in the past for flitting from one idea to the next, to have stuck with the same one for ten years, and eventually to have been proved right, was quite an achievement.

The idea that we aren’t completely in control of what the learner does is really what excited me about the web in the first place. Print publishers are obsessed with the layout of the page and hate the idea that a browser might present something different dependent on the user’s setup. Personally I always found this difference exciting. After so many years of discussions about line length and orphan paragraphs, I was able to admit that I had never really cared!

So, looking back over 10 years, has our fundamental philosophy changed? No, I don’t believe it has. What has changed is that we are much more flexible. I guess this comes with confidence. We have done it so many times now that we know how to change things with out losing what matters.

Updated: Equality and Diversity course

by Rachel Bruce

We have a course in our portfolio on Equality and Diversity.  One of the key learning outcomes of the course is for learners to be aware of, and to understand, the relevant legislation around the principles of equality and diversity.  With this in mind, the course has recently been updated to reflect the new Equality Act 2010. 

This Act brings together various different strands of diversity legislation into one bill. This is done with the aim of making the law more accessible and easier to understand. The Minister for Women and Equality at the time (in April), Harriet Harmann said that the purpose of the Bill and its accompanying package of measures was to strengthen protection, advance equality and declutter the law.  Obviously we have just had a change in government, so there will be more updates required to the course regarding the provisions of the act.  In the meantime however, our Equality and Diversity course now includes what learners need to know about the Act and what effect the provisions will have going forward.
 

Developing Flexible Routes to CPD

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

10 years on: How have the people changed

by Rachel Bruce

As part of Nelson Croom's 10th anniversary celebrations we are been looking back at how things have changed.

It’s pretty easy to guess the original line up of Nelson Croom; the clue is in the name. So….

In the beginning…there was Alan and David.

During November in the first year of the business, Tony and I became the next permanent members of staff.  We both began on the same day, and were given the tricky team-building task of making our own desks (difficult for me; easy for Tony) and a free reign to order whatever stationery we liked (I think we were both pretty excited by this actually – who doesn’t like new stationery?).  The first year was challenging; a lot of learning about what we believed in, what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it. 

Things were going well, so Katy and Hamish were soon to join, both known to Nelson Croom from previous companies.  Then along came Angela to the development team as an online learning developer.

As the company grew, Nicola, Jacqui and Victoria all joined, and most latterly Crispin.  Up to this point, no-one had left.  However Victoria very recently decided to end this slightly strange reputation of “people are hired, but no-one ever leaves” by moving onto pastures new. 

And that’s the folk of Nelson Croom to date!

With Nelson Croom being a small company, I’m quite interested in the following statistics that have accumulated over the last ten years:

• 7 births (4 girls, 3 boys)
• 5 weddings
• 2 purchases of horses

However, these numbers don’t seem very meaningful (generally numbers don’t to me, who needs logic?) and instead I wanted to try and blog something more qualitative on how the people have changed over the past ten years.  I asked a few Nelson Croom folk to let me know what had changed for them and I learnt the following:

David has apparently “become more charming, youthful and even-tempered with every day.”  I never doubted this for a moment, despite ear-wigging several phone conversations which would contradict this.

Alan now “has two children, has moved three times and has lost five stone in weight.”  True to form Alan likes to be logical and stick to the numbers.   Although Alan did go on to say that he is now “more mellow and interested in other people's ideas rather than just in whether they are right or wrong.”  But that apparently they are “normally wrong”.  He’s pretty difficult to win an argument against, as many of us have found. I have had many heated discussions with Alan over the years.  And this is a small thing, but I will never forgive Alan for calling me “acquiescent”, having been forced to concede on several occasions.  I don’t like this description of myself.  Mainly because he is, of course, right. 

Angela’s hair has “changed quite dramatically in length and colour.”  I can vouch for this, and thank goodness, because it was a striking fashion statement to turn up to an interview here eight years ago with matching jumper and short bob.  Angela has also become a published poet since working at Nelson Croom, and now does a four day week so she can spend one day working on her poetry to achieve a "good work-poetry balance”.

Nicola has undoubtedly bought a sense of style into the office, with her love of fashion and clothes. Working at Nelson Croom has had a big impact on Nicola’s life as she says, “If I hadn't met David I probably wouldn't have ended up buying a horse!”

Nobody can sum things up better and more accurately than Tony, and as usual, he didn’t fail this time when he said of the last ten years “so much has changed that I don’t know where to begin”.  Being acquiescent, I couldn’t agree more. 

The last ten years have been a big journey personally and professionally for all of us.  Nelson Croom has grown as a business – we have all learnt a lot about how to get what we do right, and we’ve grown and developed a solid and highly skilled team.  Along the way, we’ve cemented warm and respectful relationships with each other that make N307 a highly desirable place to be.

Disciples of Sisyphus or 21st Century Professionals?

by Alan Nelson

I read with interest Charles Jennings’ recent article, Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. I had been alerted to this author a while back when Jacqui returned from an e-Learning Network Event enthusing about his presentation.

Jennings central theme then as now is that the way professionals operate is changing. He highlights the remarkable rate of expansion of stuff you might expect a professional to know, citing as evidence the work of Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, who in May 2009 wrote in the Harvard Business Review,

“In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.”

Getting professionally trained and then staying up to date is an increasingly Sisyphean challenge. Our expectations are changing though. Whereas it used to be the case that a professional could be expected to know most of what was needed to work in their chosen field, we now realise that in many areas that has become nigh on impossible and so a greater emphasis is being placed on having the information available: knowing where to find the answer, rather than just knowing it.

How much of this is driven by the expansion of knowledge and how much is due to the role technology has played in putting the answers within easy reach, I don’t know, but I am sure that Jennings is right to argue that it has significant implications for professional education, and of course for online learning providers.

This idea appeals to me instinctively – I’ve never much liked the anorak approach to professionalism. Most of the time we don’t need the world’s expert in any case, but we do expect a basic level of competence. And that requires more than just knowledge and information. If you put me in a doctor’s surgery and gave me access to the most extensive and user friendly reference resource imaginable, I’d still be a rubbish doctor. I’d be no better in a local authority benefits office. I agree that I wouldn’t need to know every detail of the benefits system, but I don’t know how it works at all, so I’d be no good at all.

I agree with Jennings that there must surely be a need to move the focus away from teaching facts and towards enabling people to assemble the core skills they need for their professional life. It chimes with our philosophy of putting the learner in charge. Put another way, perhaps we should see our purpose as educating people to understand how something works – the principles - and how to use them to make good judgements.

Jennings suggests some core skills that people will need – search and find skills, critical thinking etc – and these are useful. However his focus is primarily on the role of the L&D function within organisations, whereas ours is more on individual professionals – both their initial professional development and qualification, and their continuing professional development. So how does the change potentially affect the different types of learning resource that we create at Nelson Croom.

We claim four capabilities:

1. Distance Learning
2. General Professional Development
3. Formal CPD
4. Compliance

Let’s look at them in turn.

 

Distance Learning

Our distance learning projects are focused on preparing students to take their professional exams. The students do not get to decide what they would like to learn; they just want to ensure that they have reached the point where they have the requisite knowledge and skills to pass the exam.

This places an emphasis on the Examiner who sets the syllabus. They are in an invidious position. If they keep the syllabus as it is they will be accused of teaching and testing an increasingly small subset of the relevant information. On the other hand, senior professionals had to study hard to qualify and are likely to resist any initiatives to change the nature of the qualification to focus more on skills and judgement, on the grounds that it is lowering the hurdle and downgrading entry to the profession. If this conjures up stereotypical images of the oldest, most traditional professions, ask yourself why new taxi drivers still have to pass The Knowledge. I’d frankly rather they used a Sat. Nav.

So for these reasons I suspect that our distance learning resources may be slowest to change, but we will continue to push from our end.

General professional development

Our work in this area is more and more focused on professional conduct and ethics. In this area we have already taken huge steps forwards. Whereas five years ago we might have created a course to explain the ethical code in place in a particular profession and thought we had done our job, we are now focusing more on the application of the principles in practice.

Our course for Resolution, designed to encourage family lawyers to take a less combative approach to their work, encourages learners to reflect throughout on a real case they are working on. A range of case studies for STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) present complex scenarios and ask the users to make judgements based on the ethical code. The concepts are simple but in practice it isn’t as easy as you’d think. And our own Ethical Issues for Accountants is a vast array of case studies that the user can comment on and read the views of other professionals.

CPD

Our approach to CPD has always been pretty flexible and so it is easier for us to change than it may be for others. From our origins in 2000 we have always argued that we should look to facilitate learning rather than attempting to teach remotely. Professionals all come to a course with different perspectives. They operate in different specialist areas and have different levels of experience. So any course that tries to make them all learn a set bunch of facts is going to alienate most of them. The idea of taking someone through the basic principles, getting them to engage and think and offering them access to more information for reference where they are interested, has always been central to our approach, and so we have been well placed to embrace these new ideas.

Over the last eighteen months, we have taken a further step forwards with the launch of our peer enriched learning courses. These tend to deal with an issue or debate. The learning takes place in a series of three-step activities. Firstly the learner is asked a question which they consider and construct a reply to. Next, they read an expert summary of the key issues. Finally they read their peers’ contributions. While this may be an inefficient way to teach lots of facts, it is a excellent way to change attitudes and broaden horizons.

Compliance

This is the area of our work where we have the most challenging conversations with our partners. Whether we are talking to an organisation that is concerned to make sure their employees understand the ins and outs of competition law, or to an individual professional signing up for a course to make sure they understand how to avoid a malpractice case, their instinct is to focus on what they need to know.

Although this makes intuitive sense, I think it is often misleading. I’m pretty convinced that you could write down what most people need to know about competition law on two sides of A4. When we teach them more, I wonder whether they remember it for much longer than it takes to pass the assessment. What matters is not whether they become expert, but whether we really succeed in changing their behaviour. So recently we have started to work on more and more case study based approaches to compliance. This seems to me to be a massive step forward. If we can focus more on whether people understand the limits of acceptable behaviour and less on their ability to commit a series of facts to their short term memory, we will be doing a great job.

So how does this all fit together? It seems to me that it continues to be the case that professionals in any particular sector need to learn some principles and how to interpret them and put them into practice. Add to that some more generic information management and retrieval skills and we will start to turn out some real 21st Century professionals and not just an army of Sisyphean disciples.

10 years on: How things have changed

by Alan Nelson

As part of Nelson Croom’s 10th anniversary celebrations, we have been looking back at how things have changed.

The Office for National Statistics recently announced changes to the basket of consumer goods which form the basis of two main inflation trackers, the consumer prices index and the retail prices index. This isn’t in itself noteworthy: changes are made fairly regularly to reflect changing consumer habits. Over time though, the changes reflect pretty major shifts in behaviours and attitudes. Indeed, only three items have remained constant throughout the basket’s history: sliced bread, sausages and flour.

This time round I was struck by a number of changes. Hairdryers have been removed in favour of hair straighteners and tongs. I don’t have much hair any longer so I’m not ashamed to say that that one had largely passed me by. There are no more bars of soap – only liquid soap dispensers. We have both in our house but I see the point. Also deleted are disposable cameras – who needs one when they have a camera on their phone? Most worrying, just as we have caught up at home with flat screen TVs, digital radios and DVD players, is the inclusion of Blue-ray disc players – I feel myself getting poorer again!

All this got me thinking about how attitudes have changed to online learning over the ten years that we have been in business. Ten years ago the people we worked with were pioneers and were fairly thin on the ground. Nowadays almost everyone we meet understands the rationale for what we do. The debate is more around the migration path from where they are now to where they would like to be.

There seem to me to be three main aspects to the change:

• The massive increase in personal use of the internet
• The perceived value of online resources
• The internet as a social tool

 

The internet for personal use

Ten years ago, most of the professional communities we engaged with were used to working with technology. They had PCs on their desks at work and in more or less sophisticated ways, they used them. The big change has come from the growth of home PCs. Back then, few people had a PC at home and those that did accessed the Internet via a dial up connection. Now the vast majority have a PC at home and a broadband connection.

It is the arrival of a PC and bandwidth at home, and frequently its use by children for school work, that has made decision makers in the professional bodies we work with decide that they must migrate their professional development services online. From study materials for professional qualifications, through general educational services, to structured and formalised CPD, the change has been dramatic and rapid.

 

Perceived value

Although the pace of change hasn’t always seemed as fast as we would have liked, there has been a rapid growth in the use of online services, most importantly at home. Online banking, comparison services for insurance quotes, Amazon (not only for books, but now for all our Christmas shopping!), BBC iPlayer – ordinary people using the internet every day to get stuff done and enjoy themselves. About five years ago my wife took the micky out of me because I moaned that she had thrown away the Yellow Pages. Now I wonder who keeps one at home: It just gets in the way and gives you out-of-date information.

How does this affect us? I remember one early conversation with an organisation that produced distance learning materials - ring binders to support students studying for their qualification. Printing the binders was expensive enough, but storing them in a warehouse and then sending them out to people who signed up was prohibitive. It was easy to demonstrate that they could do something better online and save money. But we couldn’t get over the loss of perceived value. If you signed up and paid your fee for study materials you expected a big box to arrive with stuff in it. Spin forwards ten years and the issue is no more.

Imagine you are a 23 year graduate living in London and taking a post graduate professional qualification. All you can afford as accommodation is a room in a shared house. The last thing you want is some big fat ring binders around the place. You see far more value in a good website where you can access the materials you need, complete learning activities and assignments, ask questions of a tutor and communicate with other students.

 

The internet as a social tool

All of which brings me onto the third and perhaps most significant factor – certainly the most exciting. Ten years ago the discussion was all about how we could provide content to people. We spent much of our time trying to persuade people to stop thinking of trying to teach remotely and to think instead of facilitating their learning. This was an important distinction even back then, but there were limits to how far you could go in offering a personalised experience.

The advent of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled us to move way beyond the idea of teaching online and instead create professional development resources that facilitate the community of learners building their awareness and understanding together.

And this is going to change ever more rapidly. As the current generation of teenagers grow up into the next generation of professional students they will expect a different kind of service. This is exciting and scary in roughly equal measure but it certainly keeps me interested!