by Angela Smith
I don’t know where we’re going, but I sure know where we’ve been…
Nelson Croom’s 10th Birthday celebrations have brought up a few feelings for me. For starters, it made me think about the fact that I’ve been at the company for six of those ten years. This thought makes me a) very proud and b) much older than I like to think I am. What’s that? Your thirties aren’t part of your twenties? Rubbish.
It also set me thinking about how we have changed our approach to learning design since I’ve been here. When I started, we had a very set way of approaching learning design. It revolved around the theory that there are four basic learning styles and we had three activity types which we mapped to these learning styles. In fact, we were pretty dogmatic about this approach and if anyone suggested that their programme should follow a different structure or – god forbid – be linear, we’d quite happily say “I’m afraid we don’t do that” and show them the door.
Over the past six years, I’ve seen our thinking on learning styles develop. We are still concerned with the concept of learning styles and, where appropriate, providing learners with the ability to choose their own route through their learning materials, but we are more open to the fact that we can offer the benefits of different activity types without explicitly labelling them and attaching them to a style of learner.
So why the big change? Well, firstly, we have learned a lot from our clients and the learning experts they work with, being exposed to new learning theory along the way. We’ve also learned from the collective wisdom of the industry as it moves forward and examines itself via conferences and industry communities. And of course, we’ve received feedback from the multitudes of learners who have been through our courses over the years.
Our response to all these influences has been to become more flexible in our approach to learning design. We can now bring ourselves to admit that sometimes a linear approach is the best one, whereas sometimes our classic Nelson Croom activity streams are most appropriate – and there are all sorts of exciting possibilities in between and perhaps beyond. In addition to this, our focus on learner community has grown with our technology and what we are hearing now is that getting to see what their peers have to say is of growing importance to our learners.
Our approach has also become more flexible as we work with more and more clients who have different learner groups with different needs. Working in the area of compliance, for example, prompted us to develop Imago to allow a more robust linear approach, but a linear approach which provided the scope for interactive branching case studies where the learner chose their own path – flexibility arising from seeming inflexibility.
If I can be permitted to go a bit Grand Designs on you, while the foundations of everything we build at Nelson Croom are still firmly rooted in our origins, the buildings that rise up from these foundations are appearing in ever more exciting shapes and configurations. Above all, I think this opening out of approach points to the fact that we are more confident in our scoping and development process and our expertise in learning than ever. It will be fascinating to see where the next ten years lead us.
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