Nelson Croom's Blog

The end of University as we know it?

by Andrew Turner

I’ve spent 4 of the past 5 years in higher education and I’m a real advocate, so you can imagine how dismayed I was to read in The Guardian that universities are “Full” and will “turn away record number of students”.  This shortage of places is before clearing has even opened and means that many people will be disappointed and miss out on the University experience. 

However Bill Gates may have the answer. Unsurprisingly it is in technology that the Microsoft mogul see’s the saviour of higher education, but despite his bias the option does seem viable.  By moving more material online and offering it through e-learning more students can access course material and Universities can become more flexible.   He’s billing it as a way of reducing university bills – a big issue in the US also, but it could also increase the number of university places. For Bill Gates, “College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based”. This may be true but we’re really going to need to work on the parties’ angle.

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.

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

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!

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.

It's a "nelson" for us at Learning Technologies 2010

by Victoria Clarke

Did you know that the number 111 is also known as a “nelson”?

So, it’s very apt that we will be exhibiting on stand 111 at Learning Technologies 2010! Superstition has it that if you score a nelson in cricket you should hop in the air so that neither foot is touching the ground (no mean feat) and then stand on just one foot until the score has moved on. Don’t worry, we won’t be expecting any gymnastics on our stand (luckily for me!), so if you’re attending Learning Technologies on either the 27th or 28th January do pop by the stand and say hello.

Members of the Nelson Croom team will be on hand to discuss your online learning needs and plans, and to answer any questions that you may have about our services. If you’d like to make an appointment to speak to us then just get in touch.

If you haven’t registered yet, then there’s still time. Learning Technologies will be held at London’s Olympia 2, 27th-28th January. The show is now in its eleventh year and is Europe’s premier showcase of organisational and learning technologies. This year, Learning Technologies is being co-located with a brand new exhibition: Learning and Skills.

We hope that you can make it, and we look forward to meeting you!

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!