Nelson Croom's Blog

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.
 

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.

Addressing pharmaceutical wastage with online learning

by Nicola Dann

One of the things I enjoy most about managing the bespoke projects for Nelson Croom is that it gives me the opportunity to learn a little about a lot of diverse topics. As our expertise lies in the conversion of a subject to the online learning medium rather than in-depth knowledge of the subject matter, there are no topics that we can't work with. That means we have an array of courses that range from drug and alcohol counselling to financial planning, taking in relationship advice and support, competition compliance for the construction industry and dental surgery along the way!
 
Obviously none of the courses would work if we didn't have subject matter experts for all these topics, so this is where a close relationship with the client is vital as in all cases they are (or provide) the content experts. The initial phase of the relationship begins with the scoping process, where we quiz the relevant people about what the learner needs to know. We also ask a lot of dumb questions because generally at this stage we know very little. The answer can often be met with a collective Nelson Croom 'ahh, now I see' reaction. 
 
We've recently been working on a project for an organisation that provides advice and consultancy to the NHS and Pharmaceutical Industry. Among other things they also run training courses for GP practices that dispense drugs and wanted to offer this training online. One of the objectives of this project was to teach those prescribing controlled drugs how to prescribe more effectively in order to address the problem of the levels of wastage, so making the process more cost effective for the NHS. Didn't seem like to big a deal at the time. But then I saw the figures involved. Here are some of them:

• Unused prescription medicines cost the NHS over £10 million every year - just in South Yorkshire! That could pay for an extra 300 community nurses or 1,400 heart by-pass operations

• Between 2002-2007 the NHS has spent more than £1billion on buying and disposing of drugs that were never used

• 824 Tonnes of medication is destroyed unused every year – equivalent to the weight of 5 jumbo jets

Even if you never open them, once medicines have left the Pharmacy they cannot be recycled or used by anyone else, so preventing unneeded drugs leaving the dispensary at all is vital if this wastage is to be reduced. Wouldn't it be great if this course could help!

Getting to grips with content: it's child's play

by Crispin Best

I was recently one of several Nelson Croomers who took part in a meeting to discuss a new medical ethics and law course that we are just starting to develop. Stories of incompetent or downright naughty doctors still always manage to cause a stir, so I was really looking forward to learning more about what rules and strictures doctors are really encouraged to follow.

After the initial stages of the meeting, we got to the meat of the issue: the prospective content of the course.

"What do we want to cover?" we asked. And there was plenty!

Before too long, various terms were being thrown around at lightning speed:

"We have to cover non-maleficence!"

"Don't forget autonomy."

"And beneficence."

At this point, in spite of the terminology being bandied about, I think I was just about managing to keep up with proceedings. Then the Latin started,

"Well, yes, voluntus aegroti suprema lex," said one of the subject experts.

"Hear, hear!" I replied. Or I might have if I'd had any idea what he had just said, (sadly my Latin is confined mostly to football club mottos.) I rather wearily felt like medical ethics was going to be the cause of more headaches than it was going to help cure.

Medical ethics obviously is an issue that gets people going, and I was starting to understand why people are so fascinated by it. It's (literally) a life and death issue, and doing the right thing doesn’t always seem obvious. What's more, in spite of the emotions that are surely involved, if you're not careful it all has a tendency to sound so cold.

I think a few of the client contingent started to sense a certain amount of uncertainty on some of our parts. One of their party, a lady who specialises in seminars for newly qualified doctors, explained:

"Well. It's actually very simple. There's a technique that we use in our sessions to help people remember the basics. We call it 'The Kindergarten Rules'."

This got me interested. She carried on:

"For example, when talking about the dos and don'ts of confidentiality, which is one of the key principles of medical ethics, we just tell them all to remember: "Don't tell tales". That’s how to stay safe."

So maybe confidentiality is as simple as that, but surely that can't be said for all the key principles?

Well. It turns out you can do this with pretty much all of them. Patient autonomy becomes "Don't boss people around". Dignity becomes "Show respect". Justice (referring to the equal distribution of care) becomes "Always share". Non-maleficence becomes "Don't hurt people". Beneficience becomes, rather sweetly, "Try to help people".

The doctors were laughing, and so were we. It was as simple as that. Just by looking at the principles from a slightly different viewpoint, the rules immediately came to life in a way that couldn’t be failed to be understood by everyone.

And there we had it. Although there will always be situations which demand interpretation, in general the responsibility of the doctor is basically to follow a set of rules that they were all probably brought up with anyway. The whole content of this course, which minutes ago had seemed so hard to grasp, had been boiled down, brilliantly, to a list of seven-or-so key points that could have come straight from the wall of a nursery school.

Ethical dilemmas and a new course structure

by Nicola Dann

All of us at Nelson Croom know Imago, the technical shell that all our courses are built in, really well. This means that when a client is explaining their vision for their online learning project we can quickly assess if Imago is the right tool for them to do it in. Where it isn't we are pretty straight forward about saying so, as we can't see the point of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The end result has to be satisfaction for our clients and if that means they need to go to another company to have their vision realised, then so be it.

Recently we thought we were in exactly that situation, where a client was explaining how they envisaged their online course working (a bit like one of those "turn to page 90 if you think Elgor should slay the dragon or page 131 if you think he should turn and run like a headless chicken" books) and we thought it might just be too different to what we normally do. Before saying it wasn't possible though we thought we'd put our heads together and look at the content in detail to see whether it was worth suggesting an alternative structure for the client's learning (there wasn't a large budget so they may have struggled elsewhere!). After a few 'I suppose we could try....' and 'what if we just changed.....'  questions to ourselves, we ended up with what turned out to be pretty much the client's original vision, and a new way to use Imago by creating an alternative course structure that a couple of other clients have already jumped on.

The original issue was that we were dealing with a subject matter that didn't often present a clear right and wrong, but covered many grey areas that needed to be taken into consideration. To reflect this and to present the content in the most suitable manner for the topic, a linear approach wouldn't have worked, so instead we created a variety of pathways to allow learners to choose the route they felt they would naturally follow in a specified situation. This allowed us to replicate the multiple choices often faced with ethical dilemmas in the real world. Activities were incorporated throughout a weaved structure, all based around a central case study. This encompassed a number of reflection style activities supported upfront and at the end with learning style screens to ensure no vital information was missed.

By focusing on the case study, we created a story that unfolded in response to the choices the learner made. The results and impact of the learner’s decisions were then revealed as they worked through the choices in the case study. By making the course structure highly flexible in design we have created the option for the learner to work through the case study a number of times, making different decisions each time to see how their choices play out and the impact on the outcome. At key stages of the unfolding story they are asked to think about what is happening and enter their thoughts about the situation. They are then presented with alternative pathways which force the learner to make a choice.

The result of this structure should be the learner acquiring knowledge without feeling like they are passively being told what to think, as they are actively seeking out the responses to situations themselves. By using feedback pages in the various stages of the case study we can then present them with the recommended responses in these situations and allow the learner to judge for themselves whether they were thinking along the right lines or not. Allowing them to feel in control of the decisions they make is closer to what they would have to do in the real world, where they would have to make a choice and then deal with the consequences of that choice. The course reacts to their decisions. From the feedback we have had it is a great way to hold a learner's attention, as the way the course develops in very personal. And the client was really happy to!

And the winner is ...

by Victoria Clarke

Nelson Croom! We’re delighted to have won the silver award as E-Learning Development Company of the Year in the E-Learning Awards 2009.

Last night, we dressed up in our very best and attended a glitzy ceremony at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel for the fifth annual E-Learning Awards. It was great news to have been shortlisted and we didn’t dare to hope, but …  thank you to everyone who kept their fingers crossed for us!

The E-Learning Awards celebrate excellence in the elearning industry and received a record number of entries in 2009. Here’s what the judges had to say about us:

Statistics are rarely as convincing as this: every single one of Nelson Croom’s customers would recommend the company to other businesses. With an extremely diverse client base, Nelson Croom dismisses the idea of trying to teach people online as a non-starter and looks instead to facilitate their learning. Each learner will have different things they want to learn and different preferences for how they want to learn it, and the company creates resources to suit their learning style. Nelson Croom’s strong results focus and a very high level of long-term customer retention make it an outstanding company.

If you’re a regular blog reader, or friend of Nelson Croom, you’ll know that we take our philosophy very seriously. In fact, some might say that we’re a bit evangelical about the benefits and possibilities of online learning. All of the team put learners at the heart of all of their work, and we’re very proud to have this recognised by the industry as a whole.

Believing it's interesting!

by Alan Nelson

I visited the IRRV Conference last week and was pleased to find it as lively as ever. It’s good to see first hand the positive reactions of real users of our courses, especially now that the range is so extensive.

The Euclidian range of products we have created with them is now the market leader for training and maintaining the currency of revenues and benefits officers and the new distance learning materials that support students enrolled on the Level 3 Certificate in Local Taxation and Benefits have been enthusiastically received. Indeed this year will see the expansion of their distance learning provision to support the new Diploma level qualification.

Bringing us right up to date, Institute Chief Executive, David Magor took to the main stage to announce the imminent launch of the new range of online induction and continuing education resources we are currently developing for enforcements officers (bailiffs to you and me).

Helping on the exhibition stand got me thinking about how all this started. Like so many of our clients and partners, IRRV started with something modest and expanded their offering slowly, learning as they went.

The first project was a short induction programme for benefits officers. To help us put this together, the Institute put us in touch with an author they had worked with on printed materials. Colin Holden (for it was he) and his wife Julie, are benefits royalty. At the time we first met, Colin was already well known in the profession. Julie, who was at the time a rising star, is now just coming to the end of her year as President of the Institute.

At our first meeting, we started explaining to Colin how the development process might work. In order to explain to him the sort of thing we had in mind, I showed him a course we had put together for the Pensions Management Institute. Colin seemed impressed with the approach, but less so by the subject matter. “This is pretty dry stuff” he said.

“Some people might say that about benefits administration” I replied.

Colin looked surprised. “Why would they say that?” he said.

At the time his response surprised me but now I know Colin much better and I was wrong to be surprised. Colin, along with many of his fellow IRRV members, is so knowledgeable about the world of benefits, that he does make benefits interesting. And why shouldn’t it be: it’s important, it’s complicated and it’s constantly changing.

Bringing things right up to date we are currently blessed with another enthusiastic and knowledgeable IRRV author. Bill Lovell, who is providing the content for our new enforcement officers’ course, is just as much of an enthusiast as Colin. He can describe 400 year old case law in a way that makes it fun and interesting.

In the years between meeting Colin and Bill I have come to realise how much we rely on authors who are passionate about their subject. So thank you Colin and Bill for your enthusiasm. Our job is to capture the essence of that in the finished course.

An industry divided by a common language?

by Alan Nelson

We have spent some time recently discussing our strategy for this Learning Technologies 2010. What is our objective in attending? Who do we want to talk to? What do we want to say to them?

We ended up focusing on identifying the simplest way of describing how we are different to everyone else. Now I think we are pretty clear about why we are different, and if the results of the most recent customer survey are anything to go by, our clients and partners are pretty clear too.

The problem is that lots of the other companies at the learning technologies exhibition use pretty similar terminology to describe something completely different. And they are not necessarily wrong, but as a group we end up confusing the hell of the visitors.

So here is my unofficial advice on how to sort the wheat from the chaff:

1. Remember that it’s all about people learning stuff. The technology has to be a means to an end and anyone who appears to have forgotten that is not worth spending time on

2. Decide what you want and ask about that. What advice do you need? What would you like help with? If you haven’t heard of what they do, you probably don’t need it.

3. Distrust jargon. Anyone who describes their offering as “an asynchronous distributed learning platform” deserves to be ignored.

4. Plan ahead and book appointments with a few exhibitors. They will be pleased to give you time and you’ll get much more out of a few detailed conversations than many short ones.

I hope this helps. But if you do end up as confused as ever come and see us. We’ll be offering a free translation service for gobbledegook!

Nelson Croom reaches finals for two E-Learning Awards!

by Victoria Clarke

We’re excited to announce that Nelson Croom is a finalist for two prestigious E-Learning Awards 2009! The first is for E-learning Development Company of the Year. Nelson Croom has also been shortlisted for Best Online or Distance Learning Programme with the Institute of Fundraising.

This is a great achievement and we’re very proud to have been shortlisted in two categories. This is the fifth year for the E-Learning Awards, which aim to celebrate excellence in the industry. A record number of entries were received by the judges this year so competition has been fierce.

The winners will be announced on 12th November at the E-Learning Awards Ceremony and Dinner. We hope that it will be good news but either way we’re excited to be finalists in the awards!

Questions, questions, questions

by Victoria Clarke

At our monthly management meeting yesterday, Tony, our Technical Director, was filling us in on new developments to our technology, Imago. You’ve probably heard me talk before about this continuous development process being one of the benefits of a hosted solution like ours, but don’t worry, I’m not going to start preaching about that now – what really caught my attention were further developments that have been made to our questionnaire functionality.

I’ve got a bit of a vested interest in questionnaires. I use Imago to create the online version of our annual customer survey, as well as finding new ways to facilitate feedback and do a bit of market research amongst our clients. So, unlike most monthly meetings where a lot of what Tony says goes over my head (sorry Tony!) I sat up eagerly to hear what new developments we’ll be rolling out. My sudden attention wasn’t entirely selfish … yes, the new developments will make my marketing life better but I could also immediately see the benefits for our clients.

They currently use questionnaires in a number of different ways … to capture registration information for marketing … to allocate learners to user groups … to gain agreement to terms and conditions or disclaimers … to conduct surveys on topical issues … to get feedback on a particular course … to canvas ideas for future topics and courses … to gauge opinion on further developments … I could go on and on but I think you probably get the idea.

What’s particularly good now is that the sky is the limit! Well, perhaps not quite but clients can have what seems like an almost limitless amount of different questionnaires in their courses, as well as the same questionnaire in different courses, and this functionality can be used to create online documents such as forms and records as well. For example, this new feature is being used by the ADI for their “Learning Portfolio” to create all sorts of forms and records such as Personal Development Plan, Study Days Record, Educational Sessions Attended, Reading Record and more. Learners will be able to access their records from any one of the courses that they are using in the ADI resource so they’ll be able to build up a complete picture of their learning. I think that this opens up all sorts of possibilities for enhancements to learning and I can see it sparking off some novel ideas from other clients.

We’ve also developed the technology in other ways. Administrators can now add notes to an individual learner profile – useful if you want to record alternative means of contact or an ongoing problem an individual might have – and Tutors can join in with a Tutor notes field. The Publishing Training Centre is using this to record comments on learners’ grades (e.g. Merit) which will then download onto their customised completion certificate.

And to round the new developments off nicely there are also new methods for analysis of all this lovely data that clients will be able to collect with their brand new questionnaires. Great stuff!