Nelson Croom's Blog

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%.

Going to Dublin

by Rachel Bruce

I was in Dublin last month to meet with two of our partners, CPA Ireland and Accounting Technicians Ireland.  As I arrived at their beautiful Georgian building, close to St Stephen’s Green, CPA Ireland was providing face-to-face training to a group of Lithuanian auditors.  I was interested to find out how this was going as it is a new initiative for CPA Ireland.  During one of the breaks, I was shown into the bright and airy training room and was introduced to John McCarthy, the presenter, who also happens to be one of our new authors that I hadn’t yet put a face to, who said that the training was going well.

I wondered how the language barrier was being overcome.  CPA Ireland showed me that each delegate has a copy of the PowerPoint slides, each copy with an English version and a Lithuanian version side by side.  In addition to this each delegate has a headset. In a separate room, while John McCarthy was presenting, two interpreters were translating the presentation which each delegate could then pick up via their headsets.  It was really interesting to see this set up, and how well it was working and being received by the delegates. 

The main reason for blogging about this though is that it reaffirmed something I have always believed throughout my working life: that even though new technologies are moving on apace, and facilitate amazing things in terms of building ‘virtual’ relationships, there is still a place for meeting people face to face.  My reason for meeting with CPA Ireland was to talk to them about the development of their online portfolio of courses from our Accounting and Finance portfolio, not to find out about their training of Lithuanian auditors.  However, in the process of meeting with them, on their turf, I found out and saw for myself one of their new initiatives in action.  This has helped to further my understanding about how our partner, CPA Ireland operates, which only serves to strengthen the bond that we have. 

Institute of Physics – record number of registrations

by Rachel Bruce

I recently met with Vishanti Fox at the Institute of Physics who has been creating and coordinating a campaign to market the online courses that we provide for them, to their members.

IOP set themselves a target of generating 400 new registrations for courses throughout the first month of the campaign. As the result of an email campaign to their members, they have had 420 new registrations in June, the most they’ve had in any one month since the launch of their portfolio at the end of 2005.

Vishanti was delighted with the result, and I asked her how she had worded the campaign.  She said that it was very straightforward and to the point:

• The online courses were chosen to meet the needs of the members
• The content was tailored for physicists
• The registration process was easy
• There were 18 new courses available

Keeping it simple clearly works.

Registration numbers are all well and good, but we also need to know that the courses are being well-received.  As part of a new initiative at the beginning of this year, the IOP courses now include a completion area with an evaluation questionnaire.  The evaluation questionnaires confirm that the IOP’s online portfolio of CPD is a success story, with plenty of positive comments and testimonials from the members.

I’m now talking to Vishanti about how we can sustain registration numbers and positive feedback on a monthly basis going forward.  So far, so good.

How we Learn

by Andrew Turner

After reading Jacqui’s thoughts on verrucas last week I begun to think about the way the general public are ‘taught’ about issues concerning things such as health through legislation.  Being a non smoker I was very interested to see how regulations to place warnings on cigarette packets would affect smokers.  Are warnings with words or images an education as to the health hazards which smoking present?  I was always doubtful, mainly as most smokers I knew were already aware of the dangers and so a warning in a large font or with a horrific picture was unlikely to discourage them.

Now I am at Nelson Croom I see that it isn’t the message that is ineffective but the way it is put across. On the side of a cigarette package surely what we’re trying to do is change people’s attitude to smoking?  And, at Nelson Croom, we’d say that you don’t change attitudes by either giving more information or by just shouting louder at people. People need to engage, experience, and consider if they are to decide to change their behaviour. Yet for some reason those charged with getting these messages across seem to ignore this. 

I saw this also in a recent article on addiction to prescription medicine.  Last month the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) called for warnings to be placed on the front of some over the counter painkillers.  This will be coupled with stronger warnings inside on the instruction leaflets. Is this likely to have an affect?  I am not saying there isn’t a problem to be addressed, rather is this the way to do it?

Personally I tend to just take two tablets of any over the counter medication believing that is the right dose, and depending on the strength of it, avoid alcohol.  This being the case I would not see the strong message inside the box at all and would view the warning on the front, as most smokers do with those on cigarette packs, with an initial shock that I slowly become accustomed too. 

How many people read the instructions for medication or similar products?  We all know Jacqui doesn’t for Bazooka and I believe it is a similar case for all.  For this reason I find it hard to believe that government bodies persist in an approach of educating people on dangers around them in this method.  I have no answers as to a better one but have a feeling one could be found that could be slightly more effective if they merely looked at how teachers, schools and learning providers across the board are shifting their views on the topic.

Running the BUPA 10k race

by Alan Nelson

As many of you will know, I recently ran in the BUPA London 10k race. From a fundraising perspective, this was a great success. I raised over £1500 for The Alzheimer's Society, which far exceeded my target, so thank you to everyone who made a donation.

I can’t say I much enjoyed the training, although there was always a strange feeling of exaltation each time it finished, but I did really enjoy the race day. There were over 13000 runners so the whole thing had the feel of a big event and it was good to be a part of it.

All in all the experience has got me thinking. When I started out to do this, I wasn’t at all convinced that I could do it. I am quite fit – play a lot of squash – but have never been very good at running long distances. I knew that if I practised a bit I could run 5000m in half an hour – I had done this before - but the idea of carrying on and doing another one straight afterwards sounded impossible. Nevertheless I set myself the challenge of doing it, and in less than an hour.

I started to do some training runs and all I found out was that anything over 5k was indeed a stretch and hurt a lot. I tried to think my way round it. Maybe it was all in the mind. I checked out running sites for tips on technique and approach. None of it seemed to help much. Then gradually I noticed that I could do 6k as easily as I had been able to do 5k before. Then I managed 8k. Finally a week or so before the race I ran 10k for the first time.

By the day of the race I was convinced I could do it. In fact it didn’t seem such a challenge as it had when I first agreed to do it.

So how did I get on? Well, the race was won by Mo Farah. He did it in 27 minutes and broke the British record. He beat me. In fact he had nearly finished by the time my group crossed the starting line! Indeed, as we started to run I realised that I had been too cautious in where I asked to start. I was running past other runners the whole way, and I ended up in the top third, finishing in 57 minutes – not staggeringly fast, but not bad for an old bloke like me.

So what did I learn? I learnt that sometimes, there is no clever way of working out how to do something better. To get better you just have to practice a lot. For a lazy and slightly cocky person like me, this is not welcome news, but in the context of Nelson Croom and our approach to getting people to learn, it is good to remember that sometimes there isn’t a shortcut: you just have to put in the hours!

The end of instruction as we know it!

by Jacqui Nelson

My daughter arrived in the kitchen last night with a pamphlet in hand and proceeded to read me the entire instructions for Bazooka cream (probably too much sharing for a corporate blog, but stick with it!).

“That’s why it’s not working Mummy. You never do steps 2 and 3 do you? Are you sure you have read these instructions?”

Now, I’m sure I did read the instructions but it was probably some time ago and I probably thought I knew enough now, just to wing it, but I guess this isn’t always sensible. This got me thinking. How much instruction is the right amount?

Unlike the vast and detailed pamphlet on how to apply Bazooka cream, in general there is a trend to reducing the amount of instruction you get when you buy something new. The trend seems to be to get people to just have a go, and learn by trial and error. This really supports our philosophy, at Nelson Croom, which is about letting learners get on with it, choosing their own path depending on what they want and how.

This is a big shift which was bought home to me recently when I was helping my mother-in-law set up her new cordless phone. The instructions were just not detailed enough to enable her to do what she wanted to do and she doesn’t use the internet so couldn’t find any help that way.  So she turned to me. I could help because I have experience of similar types of gadget and was willing to give it a go.

I had a similar problem myself when my husband and I got iphones. We spent an age trying to work out how to insert the Sim card. In the end we asked a friend who we knew had an iphone too. He explained the procedure to us but admitted that he’d had the same problem and had nearly sent his back because he thought it was faulty.

It’s just a demonstration of how the way people find out how to do things has changed. We no longer expect to be told in great detail what to do. Instead:

•    We start with a small amount of information and we give it a go.
•    If we need more to look to other sources of information for help – probably the internet
•    And we turn to others and share experiences

At Nelson Croom, these concepts are built into all our courses, but in so many learning experiences they are not. Educators, online and off, need to embrace the idea the days telling people what to do and calling it learning, are over. Today’s generation demands an altogether more rounded learning experience.

Unless of course you are applying Bazooka cream to your daughters’ foot, when you cannot have too much instruction!

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 learning design has changed

by Angela Smith

I don’t know where we’re going, but I sure know where we’ve been…

Nelson Croom’s 10th Birthday celebrations have brought up a few feelings for me. For starters, it made me think about the fact that I’ve been at the company for six of those ten years. This thought makes me a) very proud and b) much older than I like to think I am. What’s that? Your thirties aren’t part of your twenties? Rubbish.

It also set me thinking about how we have changed our approach to learning design since I’ve been here. When I started, we had a very set way of approaching learning design. It revolved around the theory that there are four basic learning styles and we had three activity types which we mapped to these learning styles. In fact, we were pretty dogmatic about this approach and if anyone suggested that their programme should follow a different structure or – god forbid – be linear, we’d quite happily say “I’m afraid we don’t do that” and show them the door.

Over the past six years, I’ve seen our thinking on learning styles develop. We are still concerned with the concept of learning styles and, where appropriate, providing learners with the ability to choose their own route through their learning materials, but we are more open to the fact that we can offer the benefits of different activity types without explicitly labelling them and attaching them to a style of learner.

So why the big change? Well, firstly, we have learned a lot from our clients and the learning experts they work with, being exposed to new learning theory along the way. We’ve also learned from the collective wisdom of the industry as it moves forward and examines itself via conferences and industry communities. And of course, we’ve received feedback from the multitudes of learners who have been through our courses over the years.

Our response to all these influences has been to become more flexible in our approach to learning design. We can now bring ourselves to admit that sometimes a linear approach is the best one, whereas sometimes our classic Nelson Croom activity streams are most appropriate – and there are all sorts of exciting possibilities in between and perhaps beyond. In addition to this, our focus on learner community has grown with our technology and what we are hearing now is that getting to see what their peers have to say is of growing importance to our learners.

Our approach has also become more flexible as we work with more and more clients who have different learner groups with different needs. Working in the area of compliance, for example, prompted us to develop Imago to allow a more robust linear approach, but a linear approach which provided the scope for interactive branching case studies where the learner chose their own path – flexibility arising from seeming inflexibility.

If I can be permitted to go a bit Grand Designs on you, while the foundations of everything we build at Nelson Croom are still firmly rooted in our origins, the buildings that rise up from these foundations are appearing in ever more exciting shapes and configurations. Above all, I think this opening out of approach points to the fact that we are more confident in our scoping and development process and our expertise in learning than ever. It will be fascinating to see where the next ten years lead us.

Formal vs informal learning: a thought from Training Zone Live

by Jacqui Nelson

I had a great day on Tuesday at Training Zone Live. I learnt a lot, particularly about social media which was my main reason for attending. I’ll write more about that later but I wanted to share (that’s what social media is all about!) a couple of stories. Here’s the first;
The last session of the day was an ‘Ask the panel’ event. The panel included Peter Honey, Jim Kirkpatrick and Charles Jennings (who has appeared often in this blog). It was good to hear the majority (if not all) of the panel talking about how we need to move from thinking about ‘training’ people to thinking about enabling people to ‘learn’.

‘Facilitating learning NOT teaching’ is a concept central to what we do at Nelson Croom, and has been for 10 years. I think, it’s particularly important with online learning because the internet should be about freedom not constraint. It is in no small part due to the popularity of the internet that people now expect to be able to learn what they want to learn in a style that suits them. People want to discover not to be told. People want to learn, not be taught.

We embrace this in our courses; but for some of the panel this is not enough. They would like to take it further. Perhaps there should be no formal learning at all, just the learning that is part of our everyday life. The information we absorb, learning on the job etc.
I can see the point, and there is no doubt that more and more ‘learning’ is outside of a formal ‘classroom’ setting but I still think there is a place for a ‘course’. Here’s why.

I’ve been learning lots about social media recently. My learning has been purely self-directed and much of it has been ‘informal’ learning. (The best advice I got was to ‘follow a teenager around for a week – that’ll teach you about social media!’) But a good part of my learning has been formal too. I’ve watched videos on you tube, attended a webinar (ok, only lasted 8minutes then did my emails and got back on google)………… and I went to Training Zone Live, didn’t !?

I’m happy with my informal learning but there is a point where I want to interact with an ‘expert’ and that’s where I will look to ‘formal’ learning.

Knowledge will always be power

by Angela Smith

Like Alan, I also read Charles Jennings' recent article Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. Sad to say, it left me a little unsatisfied, but it did set all sorts of thoughts pinging off in my mind. I thought Jennings made some good points and would like to see him take them further – apologies to Mr Jennings if he has already elaborated elsewhere – I’m sure he has!

To quote Jennings, “Is it better to get people to commit information to memory, knowing that it will be short-lived (and possibly out of date when they come to use it), or help them become skilled in the approaches and techniques to find the current, correct information quickly when they need it? Think for a few seconds and it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one. Teach people to fish rather than providing them with fish.”

I have to disagree – I’m not sure that it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one unless we are talking only about pure information, rather than knowledge in the sense of the sum of the facts, skills and awarenesses of a person or group of people. This narrow definition of “knowledge” seems to apply only to a tiny proportion of the training and learning that goes on, particularly with adults in the workplace. And if Jennings is indeed simply talking about information, try applying his fishing analogy and where it seems to leave you is not “teaching people to fish” but “teaching people to find out what the current fishing techniques are”. Only really useful, I’d argue, if you already know how to fish. Or perhaps he’s talking about teaching them how to find out how to teach themselves to fish. Anyway, the metaphor is a bit wobbly. When do I learn to fish? I’ve got to do it some time.

The core of learning is not about straight information. It is about learning the background knowledge which allows you to put that information into context, the skills you need in order for the information to be useful to you and the attitudes you need to form to make the right judgements based on the information. You don’t look up your attitude whenever you want to know how to feel about something. Similarly, a skill is something that you possess, not something you can take out of a box and wear for half an hour.

Yes there should be a focus in basic education on helping people to develop the skills to navigate the minefield of information that's out there, to assess and assimilate what they find and to make reasoned decisions based on the information they find. However this is a separate issue to how we enable people to learn specific subjects. It’s a bit like saying that all we needed to do before was teach people how to find the bookshop, pick the right book and read it.

I'd argue that what Jennings is talking about is a specific general need of society, not an approach to training. What might this mean for learners? Time spent learning how to find up to date information is just a small element. The real implication is that it means more time spent on learning the key information needed for context, shaping attitudes and engaging in practice of the skills required.

It is also true that while we won’t necessarily want or need to learn everything about a subject, that doesn’t mean we won’t need to learn what is current as a basis from which to understand all the constantly updated information that is put to us. There must be a baseline and context in which to place what we learn. We wouldn’t say that because the IT world in constantly changing, developers should only ever look up what they need – you simply can’t begin that way. To pick up on Alan’s medical analogy, a surgeon who hasn’t learned the core skills of surgery is not a surgeon – he is a butcher with a book and you should get out of there fast.

Reading back over Jennings’ article to check I wasn’t wilfully misunderstanding him (I do enjoy disagreeing with people) it occurs to me that he makes a very interesting point at the beginning of the article about the current move towards social knowledge and knowledge sharing. However, he doesn’t, in this article, then go on to look at the real implications that this has for learning and training – how can we use this trend to enrich how we facilitate learning, but that’s a whole other blog…