Nelson Croom's Blog

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: 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.

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.

Developing Flexible Routes to CPD

by Jacqui Nelson

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the MemNet Membership Development Conference. I had been asked to talk about how membership bodies can provide flexible and accessible routes to CPD for their members. My interest in this area is in the provision of effective and engaging learning.  This was neatly complemented by Lee Davies of the Institute for Learning, who focused on recording and reporting CPD activity. You can read about his institute’s innovative (and successful) use of Personal Learning Spaces on his blog.

Here’s a quick hop, skip and jump through my talk. You can find the slides either here or on the MemNet Vault.

I started by posing the question, what is professional development?

Professional development, to my mind, can be broken into three main areas:

• Initial professional development – This might be a degree or vocational course, but equally, it might take place on the job. I’m a marketer by background and when I began my first job I learned what I needed, initially, from my colleagues. It was a while before I moved on to any formal professional qualification. This leads on nicely to...
• Professional qualification – Most professions will require you at some point to take a professional qualification to prove you are up to the job.
• Continuing professional development (CPD) – So now you’re qualified it is your responsibility to make sure that you continue to keep up to date, and in many cases there are consequences if you don’t.

So who does CPD? We’ve worked with a lot of professional bodies on this and it is abundantly clear that you are more likely to persuade your members to do CPD if it is regulated and mandated -they need to do it in order to maintain their license to practice. Other bodies, not governed by regulation, make CPD a compulsory part of membership and how successful they are tends to depend on their auditing process.

With many bodies now providing learning and development opportunities to their members we moved on to looking at what professional bodies should provide and how should they provide it. We talked about how most membership bodies have very diverse audiences. Members are tied together by a common profession or qualification, but they will vary in age, experience, background etc. From this we can conclude that there is no ‘One size fits all’ solution.

Your membership wants to learn what they want to learn and in a style that suits them.

This makes professional development different to many other types of learning. Think of a child’s experience in school. They arrive in a school year at roughly the same age, having learned the same syllabus for the past year. They embark on learning the syllabus as each other this year. And give or take a bit, they will reach the same standard.

For professionals it is different. Everyone arrives at learning with different knowledge, specialism, experiences, and, most importantly, requirements. At this point, getting them to click on screen 1 of 48 and then move through each screen in a linear fashion misses the point completely, and will turn professional learners off. They need a diffused approach which embraces their differences, builds it into their personal learning path and allows them to learn what they want to, not what you want to teach them.

Professionals need flexibility of delivery as well and online CPD can be an effective way of providing that. So who does CPD online? Research shows;

• Women are more likely to than men
• Young people
• Those in rural locations
• Those in practice (where their time is chargeable)
• And those who operate CPD on an Inputs basis.

The last point is not always what professional associations want to hear as so many organisations are moving to outputs based CPD, but the reality, at the moment, is that members of organisations with inputs based systems are more likely to buy CPD courses than those with outputs.

I then did a quick exercise where I asked the audience to analyse their personal learning style. Pleasingly and unsurprisingly we had a range of different learning styles; Doers, Observers, Thinkers, Experimenters.

I wanted to make the point that people learn in different ways and that is as true online as it is in the classroom.

Elearning that delivers a fact and then asks you to answer a multiple choice question about that fact is NOT good learning.

In terms of Bloom’s taxonomy, you’re not getting past first base. You may, just about, have got the learner to remember, but for learning to be effective you need to move further up the pyramid – understanding, applying analysing, evaluating…etc – and its all possible online.

So how can you achieve this deeper learning online? In our experience a learning objective boils down to one or a combination of three things. It requires a change in attitude (A) or behaviour; the acquisition of a new skill (S); or the gaining of knowledge (K). This is what we call an ASK analysis. To achieve each of these different objectives you need different types of activities and learning.

And finally, good online CPD needs to be some combination of three things; information, learning and communication/collaboration. The last one is key, as people are getting more and more used to communicating online.

I finished the presentation by working through some examples to support the argument and demonstrate what is possible. If you want any more information on these or any other elements of the presentation, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Jacqui.nelson@nelsoncroom.co.uk

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.

How do you learn how to use Microsoft packages?

by Alan Nelson

The other day, Victoria sent me a link to a press release from Microsoft about a new initiative they have launched to teach people about some of the more advanced features of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It’s called Ribbon Hero and involves people competing with others by completing a range of games or challenges based on advanced features in the packages.

I am dubious about educational games. Don’t get me wrong: I have two young children and their cupboards are packed with worthy developmental games, just as our family PC is. But I always find myself asking. “Will this be fun, or will it be educational” Because I can’t believe it will be both. Even my six year old can only be persuaded to stick at BBC Bitesize KS1 (educational games for kids) for a short time before he demands to go to the ‘proper’ games on the CBBC site.

But it got me thinking about how people learn new stuff and whether an ‘edugame’ is really the right way to do it. Will the lure of competition be enough to tempt people to play/learn?

The next day I mentioned it to Victoria. It was, after all, her that introduced me to this. “I’d hate to learn that way,” she said. “If I need to learn something I want to just look it up and then practice it. Just give me some simple instructions and a couple of examples.”

Next I asked Tony how he finds out how a new piece of software works. “I just poke around. I can normally work it out and if I can’t, I find the answer on one of the IT forums. If it’s really difficult to track down, I have a subscription to a service that will answer a certain number of questions a month.”

Finally I turned to Angela. “It depends what it is I want to find out” she said. “If it’s Powerpoint I might ask you, for Word I go to Nicola and I’d ask Matthew [her husband] about Excel. One of you will normally show me the answer”

Now you don’t have to be Kolb to notice that we have a Doer (Victoria), an Experimenter (Tony) and an Observer (Angela). However, we don’t appear to have a gamer. The jury is out on Ribbon Hero at present. I’ll be interested to see the take up over the next months.

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.