Nelson Croom's Blog

Potato Peel Pie Blog

by Rachel Bruce

I am a member of a book club. We meet monthly and each month we read a different book and then at our meeting we discuss it. It’s an evening I always really look forward to, and I have read a lot of books that I otherwise would have left on the shelf because they weren’t really my cup of tea.

At the moment I am reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  It’s is a story about life on Guernsey during and right after World War II.  It also covers life in London during this time.  One of the chapters I’ve just finished included a description of how the protagonist dealt with The Blitz.  When she had finished, I was left feeling like I wanted to find out more. I immediately turned to the Internet.

Within the space of a couple of minutes I was able to:

• Track down more information about the book I was reading, including some interesting questions to pose to reading groups which I printed off
• Find out the facts about The Blitz, including dates, along with descriptions and photographs
• Find some personal accounts of how people lived during The Blitz

Within a really short space of time I had satisfied my curiosity, learnt a lot and was able to go back to my book and continue reading.

This really reinforced to me (yet again!) about how much we all rely on the Internet as a way of adding to our knowledge and finding out new information, and how this information can come in a variety of forms.  For me, I was vaguely interested in the facts and dates, but what I really wanted to look at were the personal accounts of how people lived during that time.

Like learners are able to do with one of our courses, I was able to find out more in a way that suited me; i.e. by reading case studies.  It’s just another reminder to me of how important it is that we continue providing learners with the ability to choose their own route through the learning that we provide online, as everyone likes to find out more in a different way.   Our courses have always done this, and thank goodness.  How annoyed I would have been had I been trying to find out information on The Blitz only to be forced to read through all the facts and figures first before I could continue onto some of the more colourful and interesting case studies.

The book is great by the way.

Launch of Innovation Course

by Rachel Bruce

We have just launched a new course on Innovation, written by Anna Faherty (author of Communicating Complex Ideas and Thinking Strategically).

This new course is all about generating and implementing new ideas, breaking the mould to deliver business success. It shows learners why innovation is important, how to create and select great ideas and how to realise them in their own organisation. 

This course is available to accountants through our accounting and finance portfolio at www.accountingcpd.net and also through our professional development portfolio via the various professional associations we work with.

This is the third course Anna Faherty has written for Nelson Croom and we think she’s written a great course where learners will appreciate how creativity can grow from crisis, consider alternative business models and try out some practical tools for idea generation and risk management. Innovation will teach professional managers how to contribute effective new ideas to a range of situations within their organisation.

Internet Explorer 9 today

by Jacqui Nelson

You may already have read that today Microsoft release the BETA version of IE9. It probably won’t affect many of you for a while yet but at Nelson Croom it’s really important that we are ready when IE9 released fully.

Because our technology, Imago, is a hosted solution we’re updating it all the time, and when a new browser is released we are interested for two reasons. 1. We need to make sure that Imago, all its features (and there are 1,000s) and all the courses built upon it, work with the new software and 2. We want to explore what new possibilities the new browser presents for our learners.

IE9, we are pleased to hear, is likely to be about faster speeds, better graphics and being more social. Our online learning’s always been about learning from each other, as much as it is about learning from the experts, so ‘more social’ suits us.

We love the idea that new browsers will play video and animations without the use of flash, because we know that so many of our learners can’t see flash based content, and that’s only getting worse with the ever increasing popularity of our itoys. 

We’ll have to wait for further information about the full extent of the new functionality but the word is that IE9 is going to be major step forward for Microsoft.  We’ll be ready for it when it comes and we’ll monitor closely what proportion of our over 100,000 learners turn to it, and when...but realistically we don’t expect to see vast usage for a couple of years.

ELearning Award Nomination

by Andrew Turner

We are very proud to announce that we have once again been shortlisted at the E-Learning Awards.

This year we have been shortlisted for two categories: E-Learning Development Company of the Year, in which we received the Silver Award at last years’ ceremony; and Excellence in the production of learning content - not for profit sector category, for our work with One Plus One.

We are proud of being shortlisted in both categories and have our collective fingers crossed for the Awards Ceremony on November 11th.