Nelson Croom's Blog

And the winner is …

by Alan Nelson

 

So the judging of the e-learning awards is finished for the year. This is the first time I have acted as a judge, so how was it? Well firstly, it’s quite a lot of work. Overall I had forty submissions to read in two categories, which took me more than a day. Some were good, some had flaws but all were interesting. There were three judges in each category and we talked through the entries to establish a shortlist. This was fairly straight forward. Basically if the project was noticeably good in some way and didn’t fall significantly short of the mark in any of the stated criteria, it tended to get onto the shortlist.

Next was judges houses. I want the groups. I want the groups. Only kidding. Next was two days of face to face presentations, one for each category. I turned up wondering what it would be like. I have been on the other side of the fence presenting submissions, but I hadn’t been in the judges’ shoes before. I had done my research though. I had practiced being Simon Cowell (“I don’t like this.....[long pause] I love it!”) and Louis Walsh (“This is just what the elearning awards are all about”). But I quickly found that such preparation was unhelpful. What we did, for those looking for tips on how to win, was to listen to the presentations and decide how we thought they stacked up against the stated criteria for that award. Nothing more mysterious than that. If you want to win outright, you need to be good on every count.

For obvious reasons I can’t go into much detail about the entrants and our decision making but I can say a couple of things:

• I was impressed by my fellow judges. They took the job seriously and thought deeply about how to arrive at the fairest outcome.
• The quality of the entrants was high. All the shortlisted projects had something about them that was admirable.
• I was impressed with the honestly and openness of the candidates. Straight questions got straight answers, even when they weren’t exactly what they would have wanted to tell us.
• It is hard for a project to be good in every way. Was the need properly researched? Did it have a strong theoretical underpinning to the learning design? Were the outcomes measured? Did the results demonstrate clearly that the objectives had been met? And once they had scored a yes in all of those, there remained the question of whether we thought it was an example of excellence in itself?

So well done to everyone. They can’t all win and while it is true that all the shortlisted candidates are winners, having been on the other side both successfully and unsuccessfully, I do understand that the former is infinitely preferable. But I will be looking forward to the awards evening in November and the chance to celebrate the quality and commitment of all those involved with the finalists.

Last Minute Learners

by Andrew Turner

 

People learn best when they are engaged, interested and having fun. This was always true for me and it is clear, when I spend time with my young niece or watch my partner, who’s a primary school teacher, planning her lessons, that it is the case for children of all ages.

And this shouldn’t stop when we leave educational institutions. There isn’t an ‘off switch’ which flips when we no longer have a teacher in front of us. Why would our learning style change once we reach a certain age? Yes our interests and approach to learning are likely to be very different, but the fundamental aspects of how we learn are a constant throughout our lives.

This is something that e-learning can capitalise on by offering a ‘student-centric’ approach to adult learning, whether it be for CPD, qualifications or personal fulfilment. For many people the thought of being taught in a classroom with a teacher taking you through a topic, is not a pleasant idea. It’s unlikely to be fun, interesting or engaging. E-learning offers a unique way for learners to remain immersed in their learning. By putting them at the centre of the experience they are able to pick the route best suited to them and which provides the best results.

Not all of our learning habits are good though. I for one was always a ‘last minute learner’ staying up late to meet a deadline, with a week to complete a 12,000 word essay! I like to think pressure helped me perform but some of my friends said I was unmotivated and ‘lucky’ to get away with it. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to work this way.

This is certainly born out each year as I watch professionals sign up to complete their CPD. No matter what good intentions we all have, in my experience, the majority of CPD is completed in the last two months of the year. That’s also where e-learning comes into play. How much CPD have you got left to do? How are you going to complete it?

With e-learning you can complete the courses when you want. You aren’t tied down to the dates when a learning provider could secure the hire of a suitable room, or when you can get time off work. All you need is a computer and internet connection and you can do the course when you want.

Of course this isn’t the way everybody learns, and e-learning isn’t just aimed at those who do this, it truly is there 24/7 365 days a year. But this is an added benefit of learning online, and another way that it caters for the learning preferences of those ‘last minute learners’, who like me, like a bit of pressure.

Contributions to enrich the learning experience

by Crispin Best

 

It's always good to talk to peers, hear their points of view and share experiences. So, we try to create courses that enable users to do just that, courses that have the flexibility to allow engagement with other learners as well as reading the thoughts and opinions of subject matter experts.

These features are one of the main facets of our courses that consistently get a great response from our learners and clients, and so that's why we've spent a good deal of time expanded and updated this technology.

We've recently been working to design, build and launch a new initiative called "Contributions". The functionality allows learners to add bits of professional experience or opinions into courses. Doing this works to build on and enrich the knowledge on each topic. Learners can read, reflect on and respond to other people's contributions, creating a learning experience that can be different and interactive in various new ways.

The functionality also allows learners to rate each other's contributions, as well as flag any that are inappropriate.

We're looking forward to seeing what this new initiative leads us towards, and will keep trying to create new ways in which our courses can engage the learner.

Assessing completion in CPD

by Alan Nelson

 

A recent BBC article about learning by rote to pass GCSE exams raises an old question:

"Why do we test people’s retention of facts that they will never need other than to pass the exam?"

This rang bells for me because it is a subject that frequently comes up with regard to our online CPD courses.

The problem for me is that people associate testing with rigour. I can to some extent understand that with qualifications but it is really counterproductive in the case of CPD. The purpose of CPD is to help professionals to maintain and develop the skills and knowledge they need to continue to practice effectively. What that constitutes will be different for each individual depending on their experience and current role. Most professional bodies we work with specify that CPD must be "relevant", but the detail of what is and is not relevant is rightly left to the individual professional to determine.

The assertion is that the completion certificate can’t be worth much if you don’t have to pass to get it. But that implicitly assumes two things:

1. That testing is appropriate for all topics; and
2. That the alternative is to hand out certificates to anyone who turns up irrespective of their level of engagement.

The futility of validating completion by assessment becomes apparent if you look at some examples of the different sorts of topic they might engage with:

1. Developing skills

Our course Networking Skills helps professionals to establish and maintain their professional networks. It is popular, despite or perhaps partly because we don’t promise to get everyone to the same specified end point. Success for the course could be defined as having enabled each user to acquire new skills and gain confidence, hardly something which can be assessed with a few multiple choice questions. What makes the process valuable for the learner is the process of digesting and reflecting on what is being learnt.

2. Keeping up with the changing world

Our new course Social Media for Professionals provides a briefing on key developments in social media and suggestions and tools for using them in your professional life. I would regard a successful outcome to be that a learner had found out some useful and relevant things about the subject that they didn't previously know and that they had come up with a plan for how that could benefit their professional activity.

3. Engaging with an issue or debate

Our most popular course for accountants is Ethical Issues for Accountants. It takes the form of a series of case studies. These present real world problems where it is genuinely difficult to decide what the right course of action is. We ask participants to suggest what they might do. In return, they get tips from the author on the key issues, and the chance to see what everyone else has said. I cannot imagine what an assessment could add to this process.

4. Technical topics

In some cases our courses focus on ensuring that users stay up to date with a technical topic. Our short briefing on Irish Capital Acquisitions Tax is a case in point, as is the course on the concept of the Going Concern principle in accounting that we put together because of its significance in the recession. These courses focus primarily on knowledge and we do tend to include assessments. However these are presented as part of the learning experience rather than as a way of qualifying for the completion certificate. Even here, I would argue that assessment does not equal rigour. Imagine you are a tax expert. It’s getting close to the end of the year and you are running out of time to complete your CPD. You decide to enrol on the basic course on capital acquisitions tax. You don’t bother with any of the course itself because you know the subject inside out. You just complete the assessment and print off the certificate. An hour’s CPD completed in ten minutes flat.

These examples should, I hope, have put to bed the idea that assessment makes CPD more rigorous, but what about the second point about the certificate being worthless without the requirement to pass a test?

We define completion with reference to what we call an ASK analysis, which analyses the learning outcomes of a course. ASK is an acronym that stands Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge. The definition of completion depends on the balance between the three. We are careful not to be specific to avoid attempts to meet our criteria cynically, but the certificate is accessed only when the learner has met criteria that will generally include the amount of time spent in the course, the proportion of the screens they have visited and the extent of their engagement with the exercises that solicit their reflection and their contributions.

In case you still aren’t convinced by my arguments I have constructed a short multiple choice exercise to test whether you have been paying attention.

1. What exams, happening at the moment, inspired the original BBC article
   1. SATS
   2. GCSE
   3. 11 plus
   4. Driving Test Theory
2. Which of the following are implicitly assumed by the assertion that completion certificates must be accessed only if you pass an assessment (tick all that apply)
   1. Testing is always appropriate
   2. Professionals aren’t to be trusted
   3. The alternative is handing out certificates to anyone who turns up
   4. The earth is flat
3. What does the acronym ASK stand for?
   1. Aristotle, Sartres and Kant
   2. Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge
   3. Aardvarks, Antelopes and Kangaroos
   4. Always Salute the Kaiser
4. Which of the following most accurately describes your thoughts on this assessment as part of the blog
   1. A useful exercise that adds rigour to the experience
   2. Ha!

OK, so I have trivialised it to make a point, but I’m not sure what questions would have been better. A much better learning experience would be for us all to conclude this piece by spending some time thinking about it and sharing our thoughts.

And since this is a blog, why not add your comments below?

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!

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…

 

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.

Face(-to-face) off

by Angela Smith

One of the most obvious benefits of going to a face-to-face session is that you get to interact with your peers. This allows you to better place yourself in the context of your contemporaries and share valuable experience.

People often cite peer contact as an area where face-to-face training can deliver and online learning cannot. Of course, these days, people are becoming more and more able to gain the same benefits online – partly due to advances in web technology and provision and partly due to their web abilities.

There are a few ways we can enable people to interact online, all quite different and suited to different personalities and learning styles. Here are a couple of examples that quite closely mirror the face-to-face experience:

• We can allow freeform discussions on a discussion forum where people can start conversations, ask questions and take things in whatever direction they want.

An added benefit here is that we can potentially preserve discussions, questions and answers for future learners to draw on. This is something face-to-face trainers can do by using what they’ve heard to inform the content of future sessions. However, being involved in an ongoing discussion or even reading a closed discussion can lead to a deeper understanding of the sorts of difficult issues that tend to prompt questions.

• We can use the numerous social networking tools available online to allow those who want to make more lasting professional connections, or have “private word in the corner” discussions to do so.

At a face-to-face session that I recently attended as an observer, although the attendees were interacting here and there over coffee and lunch, I noticed that they largely stayed in the groups they had arrived in. Of course this may have been a little different were there more individuals attending, rather than groups, but it made me consider the value of facilitated sharing. Facilitated sharing happened during the face-to-face session in the form of interaction between the speaker and the attendees and the interesting discussions which followed. This is another thing that we can facilitate online.

• We can facilitate sharing by designing activities where learners share their answers anonymously. This allows them to test out their ideas and learn from what the body of their peers are saying without exposing themselves to scrutiny.

• We can also use a moderated discussion forum in a similar way to pose relevant questions and even combine the two, getting people excited about an idea or topic through an activity and then channelling that enthusiasm to the discussion forum to encourage the discussion to grow.

So we have a few alternative ways of offering online “social” benefits that mirror those of a face-to-face session. This means that we can cater not just to the person who is holding up the coffee queue by talking to everyone, but also the timid soul who is sitting in the corner and would rather jump out of the window than engage with another human being face-to-face.