Nelson Croom's Blog

One plus one makes?

by Katy Hillary

 

Since Angela’s recent departure on maternity leave I have started working with One Plus One, whose existing elearning development with us has been shortlisted for the Excellence in the production of learning content - Not for Profit Sector category in the E-Learning Awards tonight. No pressure then Katy!

One Plus One is an organisation that puts research on what makes relationships work, into practice, making the findings accessible to everyone. We’re currently working on a case study based approach to a programme that helps support workers to understand how to put some of that research into practice - when couples turn to them for advice.

Our development system (Imago) works in a very specific way and though we can jump through lots of hoops for both learners and clients and can produce a very personalised learning experience, the technical development process remains very similar from our end.

I’ve had to resort to pen and paper – scribbled boxes and arrows – to make sense of what I am trying to achieve, in order to be able to work out how to best map the content in the online system. *Gasp* Yes, pen and paper… My home office is a virtually paper free environment; I even proofread online (though colleagues tell me the results are sometimes less than perfect. You know who you are!)

So what’s my point? I guess I am so used to seeing content in a Word document or an Imago screen that I’d forgotten how creative holding a blank piece of paper and a pen can make you feel! I’m going to try to remember to pick up my pen and paper before getting too far into the next new project, just to check that the way I’m developing the content is really the best approach for that material.

So really one plus one makes two, just as I suspected – I’d just forgotten how to work it out without a calculator!

Potato Peel Pie Blog

by Rachel Bruce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is great by the way.

Internet Explorer 9 today

by Jacqui Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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.

10 years on: How have the people changed

by Rachel Bruce

As part of Nelson Croom's 10th anniversary celebrations we are been looking back at how things have changed.

It’s pretty easy to guess the original line up of Nelson Croom; the clue is in the name. So….

In the beginning…there was Alan and David.

During November in the first year of the business, Tony and I became the next permanent members of staff.  We both began on the same day, and were given the tricky team-building task of making our own desks (difficult for me; easy for Tony) and a free reign to order whatever stationery we liked (I think we were both pretty excited by this actually – who doesn’t like new stationery?).  The first year was challenging; a lot of learning about what we believed in, what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it. 

Things were going well, so Katy and Hamish were soon to join, both known to Nelson Croom from previous companies.  Then along came Angela to the development team as an online learning developer.

As the company grew, Nicola, Jacqui and Victoria all joined, and most latterly Crispin.  Up to this point, no-one had left.  However Victoria very recently decided to end this slightly strange reputation of “people are hired, but no-one ever leaves” by moving onto pastures new. 

And that’s the folk of Nelson Croom to date!

With Nelson Croom being a small company, I’m quite interested in the following statistics that have accumulated over the last ten years:

• 7 births (4 girls, 3 boys)
• 5 weddings
• 2 purchases of horses

However, these numbers don’t seem very meaningful (generally numbers don’t to me, who needs logic?) and instead I wanted to try and blog something more qualitative on how the people have changed over the past ten years.  I asked a few Nelson Croom folk to let me know what had changed for them and I learnt the following:

David has apparently “become more charming, youthful and even-tempered with every day.”  I never doubted this for a moment, despite ear-wigging several phone conversations which would contradict this.

Alan now “has two children, has moved three times and has lost five stone in weight.”  True to form Alan likes to be logical and stick to the numbers.   Although Alan did go on to say that he is now “more mellow and interested in other people's ideas rather than just in whether they are right or wrong.”  But that apparently they are “normally wrong”.  He’s pretty difficult to win an argument against, as many of us have found. I have had many heated discussions with Alan over the years.  And this is a small thing, but I will never forgive Alan for calling me “acquiescent”, having been forced to concede on several occasions.  I don’t like this description of myself.  Mainly because he is, of course, right. 

Angela’s hair has “changed quite dramatically in length and colour.”  I can vouch for this, and thank goodness, because it was a striking fashion statement to turn up to an interview here eight years ago with matching jumper and short bob.  Angela has also become a published poet since working at Nelson Croom, and now does a four day week so she can spend one day working on her poetry to achieve a "good work-poetry balance”.

Nicola has undoubtedly bought a sense of style into the office, with her love of fashion and clothes. Working at Nelson Croom has had a big impact on Nicola’s life as she says, “If I hadn't met David I probably wouldn't have ended up buying a horse!”

Nobody can sum things up better and more accurately than Tony, and as usual, he didn’t fail this time when he said of the last ten years “so much has changed that I don’t know where to begin”.  Being acquiescent, I couldn’t agree more. 

The last ten years have been a big journey personally and professionally for all of us.  Nelson Croom has grown as a business – we have all learnt a lot about how to get what we do right, and we’ve grown and developed a solid and highly skilled team.  Along the way, we’ve cemented warm and respectful relationships with each other that make N307 a highly desirable place to be.

10 years on: Design

by Hamish Long

You can have any colour you like as long as it's #000000*

How has the design of our courses changed over the last 10 years? It hasn't! Well, when I say that, I mean the core elements behind the design haven't changed - they are sometimes referred to as the three pillars of good web design: HTML, javascript, and CSS (cascading style sheets). This latter pillar has become more prominent in my workflow over the last three years or so, as developments in our Imago system have enabled us to really utilise the power of CSS, providing flexible tailoring without the need to hand code.

In terms of graphics, the volume of designed objects within a course has dramatically increased over the years. Seven or eight years ago you would only see graphics in the knowledge pages. Interactive graphics might appear in every two or three knowledge pages. Today we have interactive graphics in almost every knowledge and activity page. Experience and increased efficiency are probably the two main reasons behind these improvements. But not only that, we now create customised gateways and splashpages - these splashpages are often developed further into fully functioning websites with guest areas, and members' areas providing access to the courses.

But how has the actual design of the web graphics changed? When I started in web design twelve years ago it was all about rounded corners and bevelled edges, and the general graphical look and feel tended to err on the illustrative side. Later there was say a five year period when graphics became flatter and squarer, and photographs were increasingly used. Although some of our clients have specific requirements, generally, over the past few years, we've been combining both illustrative and photographic elements along with subtely bevelled buttons and drop shadow icons.

 

I suppose that's how progress is made in many industries - you keep the best bits from the past, develop, and move forward. Take fashion for example - imagine if people today were wearing clothes that were only really acceptable in the Eighties...

* #000000 is the web (hexadecimal) colour for black.

Nelson Croom is 10 years old

by Alan Nelson

If you need us this afternoon, we’ll be in a private room at Bertorelli’s, the restaurant on Charlotte Street where David Croom and I first met to explore the mad idea of leaving the corporate whirl to set up a new online learning publishing business. The whole team is attending a celebratory lunch to mark the company’s tenth anniversary.

Nelson Croom Ltd was officially established on Valentine’s Day 2000. The event was marked by the arrival of a package from Companies House. Inside were a certificate of incorporation and a company stamp. I remember being highly amused with this anachronistic irrelevance for a company that would operate online. It’ll be no surprise if I tell you that ten years later I still have not had the need to stamp anything, although at the time I remember amusing myself for an innocent ten minutes making bumps and hollows in the shape of the company name on a variety of bits of paper.

Back then, I had little idea what the future held. If you had asked me at the time, I would not have been able to tell you what we would be doing ten years later, where we’d being doing it or how many of us there would be. I’d have been pretty pleased if you had told me that we would be awarded the Silver Award for Elearning Development Company of the Year. And I would be pretty amazed if I had been given a sneak preview of the impressive client list we have now.

But what have we really achieved in the last ten years?

On the client side, we have become the UK’s leading provider of online learning to professional and membership bodies. We are uniquely competent in helping them to meet the needs of their diverse and challenging groups of adult professional learners. This competence has been recognised by other types of organisation also wanting to extend the reach of the professional development services they offer to their clients. Major professional services firms, large health bodies, and governmental organisations such as the British Library, all choose Nelson Croom as partner and trust us to create, host and manage their offerings.

On the technology side the tenth anniversary of the company coincides with the release of Imago3, a milestone we have been working towards for several years. Imago will now be a completely online system, with all the functionality used by our development team available to clients. To my knowledge it is the only online learning environment designed to put the learner in charge of their own learning. Right from the start, we set out to create places where people could go to learn rather than trying to teach them over the web. It is the single guiding philosophy that has informed our progress throughout the ten years.

Our belief in creating communities of practice was seen as distinctly left field in 2000, but the advent of Web 2.0 social networking technologies have seen our approach move to centre stage.

Finally I am really proud of the team we have assembled. They are talented and committed but don’t take themselves too seriously. They manage to balance productivity and creativity, hitting client deadlines and delivering creative solutions.

What will the next ten years bring? In some areas the answer is clearer than others. The possibilities are if anything more exciting than ever.

Our 10th birthday has caused us to think about different aspects of what we do and we’ll all be blogging about them over the next few weeks in our series ’10 years on…’. I hope you enjoy them and we’d be interested to hear if our experiences reflect yours.

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!

Hurrah!

by Alan Nelson

This is the day of the year when we have in the past gone a bit quiet. Last night was the annual E-Learning Awards Ceremony and this is the morning after. We are proud of our record of being recognised in these awards. However, the cynical among you may have observed that we make a lot of noise about being shortlisted, but then go a bit quiet after the winners are announced. Why could this be?
 
So last night we got dressed up in our DJs and posh frocks and hopped on the tube over to Green Park. There we met up with Paul Marvell and Amanda Shepard of the Institute of Fundraising. The course we created with them, All About Fundraising, had been shortlisted in the category “Best online or distance learning project”.
 
A champagne reception was followed by a three course meal – food pretty good considering they were catering for 450 people – and then we were on to the announcement of the winners.
 
Despite the fact that it is a real honour to be shortlisted and winning in any of the categories is extremely unlikely, as the winners are announced and your category approaches, you cannot help but get a little bit hopeful. Jacqui Nelson and Paul Marvell had come back from the presentation they made to the judges saying that it had gone well. Not only that, but as a company we had also been shortlisted for “Elearning Development Company of the Year”, so we had two chances of winning.
 
The first of our categories to come up was the Best Online or Distance Learning Project.
 
And the winner is…….
 
Damn and blast! Sorry I mean of course, “Congratulations to Department of Health e-Learning for Healthcare.”
 
I really thought we had a good chance. At least I could relax now. Silly to get excited - I always tell myself not to. Then the names went up for the E-Learning Development Company of the Year. There are so many on the shortlist that they have to run it onto a second powerpoint screen. “Not a good sign.” I think.
 
“And the winner of the Silver Award for E-Learning Development Company of the Year is….. Nelson Croom!”
 
Cue everyone going potty! (Everyone on our table that is.) Up we go to accept the award and then back with grins on our faces. Happy now. More champagne and we hit the disco until the early hours. A great night!

Now in the sober light of the next day it still feels pretty good. What is particularly satisfying is the explanation the judges gave about why the chose us. I won’t repeat it here – you can read it in our press release. They describe the two reasons they gave us the award: the remarkable levels of customer satisfaction; and the emphasis we place on facilitating people’s learning rather than trying to teach them remotely. This is great because it means we have been given an award because they have recognised the very things we are most proud of.

I don’t think they are separate things either. I think the reason why we have such high customer satisfaction levels is in no small part due to the fact that we focus on pleasing the end user and not just on making sure the person who is paying us is kept sweet. In the long term that is the only way to maintain the relationship.

One final note of caution. I have worked in organisations before that have received awards, and I know from experience what a fine line there is between being proud of what you are good at, and being complacent. I know that it is important that we continue to work towards improving in every way we can, so we won’t be sitting our laurels.

Well done to the team here and thank you to all the customers and partners who make it possible by choosing to work with us. I promise we won’t become complacent but allow us just a day of being a bit smug!

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.