Nelson Croom's Blog

SYP – An opportunity through social media

by Andrew Turner

 

A friend who I met whilst doing my Masters in Publishing at Kingston University recently contacted me about the opportunity to join the committee of the Society of Young Publishers (SYP). The SYP was established in 1949 and is open to anyone in publishing or a related trade – or who is hoping to be soon, catering especially for those with fewer than ten years experience.

The opening was to join this friend, Tina Mories, on the committee as an Events Coordinator. The SYP hold monthly events, for members and non members, which aim to focus on interesting topics from the world of publishing which can help those in, and looking to get in to, the industry.

I am extremely happy to be on the committee and with the opportunity it gives me to help those looking to get in to publishing and also expand my own network. This put me in mind of our recently launched course Social Media for Professionals which stresses the importance of social media as a way of maintaining your network as a whole. Not only is this new role a great way for me to network, I wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for the network I already had. This network is one which I maintain primarily through facebook and twitter. I did meet Tina through my Masters but we maintained our friendship online, speaking through facebook and twitter, as everyone from the course does. In fact even when we do meet for a drink and a catch up, we organise it through our facebook group.

This group does more than just enable us to organise a drunken catch up. We tell each other about job opportunities ask advice on things in our work life and discuss books, films and the publishing world in general. Not once did we sit down and plan this group, or plan to communicate so frequently through social media, rather it was just the natural way to maintain contact with a like minded group of individuals. Without it I do wonder how many of us would have stayed in contact with each other, and how I would have maintained my knowledge of the broader publishing world rather than just having a focus on my interests and my job. In fact, I wonder how these relationships were maintained before Social Media.

You may shout out - through phone calls, emails and ACTUALLY meeting people. I still do these things but, for me, they do not offer the same constant access to my network, and potential network, as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do. And it isn’t just the young workforce either; recent Nielson figures reveal that the 50+ demographic are driving the growth of Facebook and Twitter.

For me this is a realisation that whilst networking is possible without an online presence, your network isn’t complete until you have one.

Selling the Benefits of Online Content

by Alan Nelson

 

I read with interest this week that medical students at the University of Leeds are being given i-phones, providing access to medical textbooks online. The idea is that as they work away from the campus, in hospitals and GP surgeries, they will be able to access reference material online.

There has been much comment recently about professionals increasingly defining themselves by their competencies rather than their extensive knowledge, and this seems to chime with that trend. The i-phone won’t help them develop skills and judgement but it will enable them to work effectively without having yet learnt the vast array of facts that doctors end up storing in their heads.

This will be watched carefully by content providers. Textbook publishers have struggled over the last 15 years to develop significant revenue streams from their online content. Indeed Thomson sold its textbook business, Thomson Learning, because it had not been able to migrate towards the online renewable revenues that its parent company valued.

The main obstacle to this is the absence of a marketplace. Selling access to online content to students has been problematic. If a textbook is adopted as required reading on a course, a fairly high percentage of students will buy it. Ten years ago, the take up was as high as 60% for students on business, economics, science and engineering courses and just over 40% for humanities courses. These numbers have been hit as the web has provided a marketplace for students to trade their second hand books. Publishers have responded to this by jacking up their prices and that has created a vicious circle. So you can understand why the publishers are so keen to grow their online revenues.

However, with a growing belief among people of student age that content should be free, it has not proved possible to create a model where each student buys content and doesn’t immediately share it with their peers. Universities buy online research content centrally for their library, but all attempts to persuade them to foot the bill for online textbooks have been stone-walled – they see it as an attempt to transfer a student cost to them.

So this move by Leeds University may be more significant than it at first seems. Perhaps if publishers can persuade the academics of the reason why mobile content is required – students being off in GP practices and hospitals – they will have more luck.

That said, perhaps if they had spent more time thinking through their benefit statements rather than showing off about how clever their technology was, they would have got there sooner, or perhaps they just had to wait until Apple invented the i-phone!    

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.

Disruptive technology that benefits everyone

by Alan Nelson

I read with interest last week that in the US sales of ebooks on Amazon have outstripped those of hardbacks, with the online retailer now selling 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks. This scares the hell out of publishers who have never been good at reacting positively to new innovations.

What is today termed disruptive technology has echoes in the past. The reaction 75 years ago to Penguin releasing the first paperbacks was equally hostile. So it’s appropriate that the Penguin boss, John Makinson, should be one the few publishing luminaries who is reacting positively.

Ebooks have been around for a while but the success of the Kindle reader has led to take off. The new iPad, with its superior ibooks app looks set to be an even greater catalyst.

In our world of online professional development, there are parallels too. Many of our clients and partners are concerned about the impact of online courses on existing face to face provision. Will people still come? I have to admit that I am never very sympathetic for two reasons:

1. I don’t really care much - in the end people will get what they want. If they find it more convenient to study for qualifications and stay up to date once qualified, by engaging with well prepared online material then that is what should be provided.
2. It doesn’t happen – our experience is that attendance at face to face events is not affected at all by online provision. Those that enjoy physical events where they can meet and interact with their peers, continue to attend, but others, who never went in the first place, start to engage online. Overall participation goes up.

So I was interested to read the detail of the story about Amazon sales of ebooks. Have they cannibalised sales of hardbacks? Is it the end for printed novels. No - far from it. Sale of hardbacks in the US – where these statistic comes from – are up 22%.

10 years on: CPD

by Alan Nelson

The emergence of Continuing Professional Development as a serious part of professionals’ lives has been one of the key developments that have shaped the company over the last ten years.

Of course, nothing is completely new. It’s not as though professionals didn’t engage in their own development. Some of the ideas were around back in 2000, but the language was different. I remember a lot of talk of “cradle to grave lifelong learning”. If we were to prosper as a society, we were told, competing in a global market, we would all have to become knowledge workers , using our superior skills to stay ahead of competitors in lower wage developing economies.

So when did CPD start and how? The honest answer is that I don’t know. So I did what every lazy researcher does and turned to Wikipedia. I was amused to note that if you type CPD into the online encyclopedia, it comes up with a host of other expansions of the initials, nineteen of which apparently rank higher than Continuing Professional Development. So however important it may seem to me and to the people I talk to in professional bodies, we should all remember that it ranks nine lower than the Oregon based rock band, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Puts it in perspective doesn’t it? I should also say that the entry is far from comprehensive and includes this comment from the moderators:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

Now there’s a project a group of us should turn our minds to.

Good professionals have always strived to stay current and this has been explicitly stated by many. The British Psychological Society, for example, had the following principle in their Code of Conduct long before they established their formal CPD regime:

“Psychologists shall endeavour to maintain and develop their professional competence, to recognise and work within its limits, and to identify and ameliorate factors which restrict it.”

Often through a network of local branches, professional bodies have encouraged their members to engage in training and development. Many of our early projects focused on this sort of activity and were designed simply to extend the reach of the professional development services on offer to members.

Over the years CPD has become more clearly defined. The Professional Associations Research Network suggests the following:

“[CPD is defined as] 'any process or activity that provides added value to the capability of the professional through the increase in knowledge, skills and personal qualities necessary for the appropriate execution of professional and technical duties, often termed competence.”

For what it’s worth, I think I prefer there to be more of an emphasis on currency. This definition from The Health Professions Council works for me:

“A range of learning activities through which health professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practise safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice.”

Alongside this clearer definition of what is needed, there has been a move towards greater compulsion.

The move towards more tightly controlled and monitored CPD has been driven partly by the professional bodies. In health they are responding to adverse public reaction to high profile medical malpractice cases, and elsewhere the response is to other governance related cases such as Enron, which has been the catalyst for action in the accounting profession. This is reinforced by pressure from government for the professional bodies the get their house in order if they want to retain their regulatory role.

This move to the right of the scale created a demand for CPD resources of all kinds. What was exciting for me personally was that this world looked remarkably similar to others that I knew all about. I cut my teeth as a publisher producing textbooks for students. Students would buy good books in greater numbers than bad books. They found out whether a book was good either through peer recommendation or through a suggestion from their lecturer. But one thing was clear – they were mostly going to buy a book because they knew they needed it to get through their course.

The parallels with CPD were clear. I could see that if we could produce something good it would sell better than something bad. Good would have to be defined. It might mean any or all of: engaging, relevant, authoritative or fun, for example, but it was the existence of a CPD regime requiring professionals to complete and record their CPD that would ensure that they would buy something. It created a market.

It was to meet the demands of this market that we developed our publishing programme. We now offer our courses to a wide variety of professionals and are learning all the time about what they like and what they want. We also understand more about who is most likely to opt for online CPD:

• Judging by our sales, CPD activity is highest in regulated professions where CPD in mandatory and monitored. We have also been pleased to see that alongside the move to more regulated CPD, individuals are starting to migrate rapidly towards online offerings.

• In the UK and Ireland, two thirds of the courses are bought by women, who make up only one third of our audience. More women work part time and find it difficult to fit attendance at face to face events around other commitments.

• There is a bias in take up towards younger, newly qualified accountants, although this is not nearly as pronounced as expected.

• More courses are bought by those in practice, where a future course booking may conflict with a paid client work, whereas completion of CPD online can be fitted around other priorities.

• Finally, take-up is highest where CPD is monitored on an inputs basis – by hours or points – rather than on an outputs basis.

One of the things I like about publishing online is that you can see how people are using the courses. I never knew how someone used a book but I know exactly how they use our online courses. This means we can continually evolve our approach to meet their needs. So although more than 95% of users consistently rate our courses as good or excellent, and 98% say that the course has met their professional development needs, we continue to develop the offering to meet the needs of a CPD world that may well change over the next ten years as much as it has over the last.

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.

Talking about the real benefits of online learning

by Victoria Clarke

I don’t know about you, but I regularly wonder how I got by in the days before the internet became so widespread and accessible. Everything is just so quick and easy. Gone are the days of rooting around for the yellow pages to look up a phone number (though admittedly I still do that) or going to the library and leafing through some dusty encyclopedias to find information (although I still do that too!) or, shock, horror, actually physically going to the supermarket to do your weekly shop (I’m happy to avoid this one if I can!).

By and large, we’re now used to having information at our fingertips and being able to find out what we need to know, when we need to know it. We’re used to being able to be immediately in contact with colleagues, friends and family, no matter where in the world they might be, through email, skype or social media. From a marketing point of view, I’m seeing fewer articles now extolling the virtues of online media for reaching your audience, and more articles about how to use online better, faster, more effectively and efficiently.

I think it’s safe to say that online has become an integral part of professional life. But that wasn’t always the case. When I started working at Nelson Croom in 2007, our communications were more focused on explaining the benefits and advantages of online learning to the professional associations that we hoped to work with. Professional associations wanted to know why their members would want to learn online and whether online really could provide a rich professional development experience, in the way that more traditional forms of learning had done to date. We talked a lot about the flexibility of online learning, particularly for professionals working in industries where their time was chargeable, or for those who wanted to maintain a better work-life balance and still ensure their skills were up to date. We stressed the importance of being able to log on 24/7, whether you were at home or in the office, because online learning – whether for CPD or qualifications or just general training – is flexible, convenient and always accessible.

We still talk about those things, but I think they’re also things that are taken as read. We expect to be able to look things up at the click of a button or two. And we expect to have the option to do the same with our learning. Increasingly we are talking to professional associations who are implementing online learning as part of their educational provision because that’s what their members are demanding. They talk to us about providing an enhanced learning experience, and about extending the reach of their educational provision. We talk to them about how we can make the experience engaging and rewarding for learners. Gone are the days of having to sell the features of online learning, and instead more emphasis is being given to the learning experience, and that can only be a good thing.