Nelson Croom's Blog

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.

Before you go ...

by Victoria Clarke

We believe that learners should be in charge of their own professional development, which is why the vast majority of our courses are non-linear. I think that I’m fairly safe in saying that our clients and partners who offer our non-linear courses like the fact that it means their professionals are thinking for themselves, taking charge of their development and that they don’t have to waste time on stuff that they already know! However that’s not to say that we don’t get asked “how do we know when somebody has finished the course?”  If learners are following a non-linear route through a Nelson Croom course then it’s unlikely that they will all finish on exactly the same page.

With CPD for example, professionals have a clear set of objectives and a clear outcome that they want from the online course. It doesn’t really matter whether they start at the beginning and work their way through, whether they start with the final test and then go through the course to fill in gaps in knowledge or whether they flit about from module to module. All of these learners will consider themselves to be “finished” at a different place in the course but from their point of view it’s important that they can demonstrate that they have completed the course with their CPD certificate.

So, we’ve just launched a new area in our courses – the Course Completion Area. This brings together some old and new functionality to provide a point at which learners can download their completion certificate, complete a course questionnaire and be recommended similar courses that they might enjoy. This has just gone live across our Accounting and Finance partners and will be rolled out across our Professional Development Portfolio partners soon. In time, we also plan to offer a customised version for our bespoke clients. In the meantime we’ll be watching how this area is used and we hope that our clients and their learners find it useful.

Inclusionists and deletionists

by Alan Nelson

You may have noticed that Wikipedia recently reached the milestone of 3 million articles in English. It is a remarkable phenomenon, and although I know it causes much debate in academia about its reliability, for the rest of us ordinary mortals it is an invaluable, constantly available, desktop reference.

But amidst all the hype, there is a more interesting story. The rate of increase in the number of articles is, for the first time, slowing. Some commentators attribute this to a power struggle between what they call the “inclusionists” and the “deletionists”. As their names suggest, the former are more concerned with enabling as broad a base as possible to contribute, while the latter are more concerned to safeguard quality. The move towards the latter seems regrettable to me but it is entirely understandable as the project has matured, a stable group of high level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopaedia, while casual contributors feature less and less prominently.

All of this got me thinking about the emphasis we place on quality. Coming from a book publishing background, we have always believed that we understand the processes and controls necessary to ensure our finished courses are as good as they can be. For most of our work this is entirely appropriate. But in some cases, I wonder whether the inclusionist approach is worth considering.

For some projects, perhaps timeliness is the most important thing. Professionals need to learn about some new developments immediately – a properly crafted learning experience that arrives two months late is no good to them at all. That’s not to say that standards can be dispensed with entirely – the user should still expect the content to be accurate and free from typos. We have been experimenting with resources that focus on presenting brief pieces of content and then framing the right questions. Participants add their comments and get to read each other’s contributions. It is quite clear what is officially quality checked and what is the unmoderated observation of a peer - both seem to be valuable to the community.

So sometimes perhaps the challenge should be “What is the best thing we can do by 3.00pm tomorrow?”

 

Quality of learning in CPD

by Alan Nelson

Having worked in online professional development for ten years now, I am glad to say that there are still some things that get me really excited. This is particularly true - positively and negatively - in the world of accounting CPD.

On the positive side, we publish our own list in this area, the Accounting & Finance Portfolio. Whenever I look in detail at the content of these courses, I am still excited by the quality of the material and by our ability to compete effectively with much larger organisations in this market. We have recruited some of the leading experts in the profession as authors, and have formed partnerships with many of the leading professional bodies to provide accessible and engaging service for their members. This has enabled us extend the reach of our service to many thousands of practising accountants struggling to stay up to date with ideas and regulations, and to comply with their CPD regime.

But this marketplace also gets me agitated in a more negative way. The offering from some of our competitors is truly appalling – the worst kind of streamed video with no apparent thought about what might make it an engaging experience for the user. One of the leading UK professional bodies is offering videos of some of their face to face events. Tune is to see a bunch of delegates looking bored and a lecturer wandering about and mumbling. They don’t even seem to have bothered to edit out the irrelevant bits, so the remote watcher has to wait while handouts are passed around and listen to banal descriptions of the arrangements for the teabreak that they are presumably not invited to! It seems to me that the best that this kind of resource can hope to aspire to is to be quite a bit less good than the face to face event was - and there isn’t much evidence that it was very good in the first place.

So I have always been proud of the comparison between our content rich, interactive approach and the lazy alternatives offered by competitors. But right now I feel a real sense of anticipation because we are about to raise the bar still further. Three new courses currently in development follow a new approach to online professional development which places a much greater emphasis on stimulating a dialogue between professionals interested in the same topic. We call it peer-enriched learning. Here the subject matter expert is not so much the font of all knowledge, but rather someone who has thought through the issues and come up with some interesting questions. Participants are encouraged to contribute their ideas and build a rich repository of shared experience: a community of practice.

Our two approaches are entirely complementary; each is appropriate in different situations. In some cases purchasers are driven by the need to learn from an expert. For example, the author of our course, Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions, Peter Howson, is a partner in an international mergers and acquisitions practice. Users acknowledge his expertise and want to find out what he has to say. They are happy for the experience to start with some fairly serious content. Then later they will want to contribute themselves and practise some of the techniques. This is the approach we have always taken with out technical courses and will continue to do so.

In the case of other topics though, there may not be a recognised expert. Robin Tidd, the author of our Managing Through a Recession course, does not claim to be the world’s expert, who can tell you exactly what to do if your business hits hard times, but he has spent a lot of time thinking about what questions you might need to answer in coming up with an appropriate solution. Here, the peer-enriched learning approach is more appropriate. Content is still provided but it is less of an end in itself and more of a catalyst to the debate.

There is now considerable evidence that collaborative learning is a powerful approach to embedding new ideas. This is borne out both by our experience of watching user engage with different types of learning resource and also from the feedback we get from users, who claim to have found as much value in the contributions from other participants as they have from the content, much like the participants in a good face to face session.

On a spectrum of how effective a learning resource is in engaging participants and embedding learning, we place video, and other forms of passive learning experience, at the bottom end, content rich interactive approaches in the middle, and collaborative approaches that engage the learners in solving their problems and those of their peers, at the top. Within the next three months our new courses will be live and we will have thousands of users to tell us whether we are right!