Nelson Croom's Blog

Going to Dublin

by Rachel Bruce

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

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

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

Institute of Physics – record number of registrations

by Rachel Bruce

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

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

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

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

Keeping it simple clearly works.

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

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

How we Learn

by Andrew Turner

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

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

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

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

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

10 years on: CPD

by Alan Nelson

The emergence of Continuing Professional Development as a serious part of professionals’ lives has been one of the key developments that have shaped the company over the last ten years.

Of course, nothing is completely new. It’s not as though professionals didn’t engage in their own development. Some of the ideas were around back in 2000, but the language was different. I remember a lot of talk of “cradle to grave lifelong learning”. If we were to prosper as a society, we were told, competing in a global market, we would all have to become knowledge workers , using our superior skills to stay ahead of competitors in lower wage developing economies.

So when did CPD start and how? The honest answer is that I don’t know. So I did what every lazy researcher does and turned to Wikipedia. I was amused to note that if you type CPD into the online encyclopedia, it comes up with a host of other expansions of the initials, nineteen of which apparently rank higher than Continuing Professional Development. So however important it may seem to me and to the people I talk to in professional bodies, we should all remember that it ranks nine lower than the Oregon based rock band, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Puts it in perspective doesn’t it? I should also say that the entry is far from comprehensive and includes this comment from the moderators:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

Now there’s a project a group of us should turn our minds to.

Good professionals have always strived to stay current and this has been explicitly stated by many. The British Psychological Society, for example, had the following principle in their Code of Conduct long before they established their formal CPD regime:

“Psychologists shall endeavour to maintain and develop their professional competence, to recognise and work within its limits, and to identify and ameliorate factors which restrict it.”

Often through a network of local branches, professional bodies have encouraged their members to engage in training and development. Many of our early projects focused on this sort of activity and were designed simply to extend the reach of the professional development services on offer to members.

Over the years CPD has become more clearly defined. The Professional Associations Research Network suggests the following:

“[CPD is defined as] 'any process or activity that provides added value to the capability of the professional through the increase in knowledge, skills and personal qualities necessary for the appropriate execution of professional and technical duties, often termed competence.”

For what it’s worth, I think I prefer there to be more of an emphasis on currency. This definition from The Health Professions Council works for me:

“A range of learning activities through which health professionals maintain and develop throughout their career to ensure that they retain their capacity to practise safely, effectively and legally within their evolving scope of practice.”

Alongside this clearer definition of what is needed, there has been a move towards greater compulsion.

The move towards more tightly controlled and monitored CPD has been driven partly by the professional bodies. In health they are responding to adverse public reaction to high profile medical malpractice cases, and elsewhere the response is to other governance related cases such as Enron, which has been the catalyst for action in the accounting profession. This is reinforced by pressure from government for the professional bodies the get their house in order if they want to retain their regulatory role.

This move to the right of the scale created a demand for CPD resources of all kinds. What was exciting for me personally was that this world looked remarkably similar to others that I knew all about. I cut my teeth as a publisher producing textbooks for students. Students would buy good books in greater numbers than bad books. They found out whether a book was good either through peer recommendation or through a suggestion from their lecturer. But one thing was clear – they were mostly going to buy a book because they knew they needed it to get through their course.

The parallels with CPD were clear. I could see that if we could produce something good it would sell better than something bad. Good would have to be defined. It might mean any or all of: engaging, relevant, authoritative or fun, for example, but it was the existence of a CPD regime requiring professionals to complete and record their CPD that would ensure that they would buy something. It created a market.

It was to meet the demands of this market that we developed our publishing programme. We now offer our courses to a wide variety of professionals and are learning all the time about what they like and what they want. We also understand more about who is most likely to opt for online CPD:

• Judging by our sales, CPD activity is highest in regulated professions where CPD in mandatory and monitored. We have also been pleased to see that alongside the move to more regulated CPD, individuals are starting to migrate rapidly towards online offerings.

• In the UK and Ireland, two thirds of the courses are bought by women, who make up only one third of our audience. More women work part time and find it difficult to fit attendance at face to face events around other commitments.

• There is a bias in take up towards younger, newly qualified accountants, although this is not nearly as pronounced as expected.

• More courses are bought by those in practice, where a future course booking may conflict with a paid client work, whereas completion of CPD online can be fitted around other priorities.

• Finally, take-up is highest where CPD is monitored on an inputs basis – by hours or points – rather than on an outputs basis.

One of the things I like about publishing online is that you can see how people are using the courses. I never knew how someone used a book but I know exactly how they use our online courses. This means we can continually evolve our approach to meet their needs. So although more than 95% of users consistently rate our courses as good or excellent, and 98% say that the course has met their professional development needs, we continue to develop the offering to meet the needs of a CPD world that may well change over the next ten years as much as it has over the last.

10 years on: how 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.

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.

The Institute of Sport and Recreation Management

by Rachel Bruce

We have just begun to work with a new partner on their portfolio.  The Institute of Sport and Recreation Management (ISRM) will soon be providing four courses from our Professional Development Portfolio to their members: Negotiation Skills, Health and Safety, Project Management and Employment Law for Managers. The ISRM's members are involved in providing, managing, operating and developing sport and recreation services, and its CPD programme currently exists in the typical traditional formats.  This initiative is the first step for the ISRM in providing its members with online learning as a route to CPD. They have ambitious plans going forward in expanding their online learning provision and we are excited to be a part of it.

New course: Financial Management in Turbulent Times

by Victoria Clarke

The Nelson Croom Development Team and authors are now beavering away on the courses for our 2010 publishing programme. To kick start this year, we've just released a new peer-enriched learning course: Financial Management in Turbulent Times (or FMITT for short!).

The last ten years have been marked by increasing and unprecedented turbulence, yet many of the techniques that underpin financial management were developed during conditions of stability. This new course will help learners get to grips with the dynamics of financial management. As a peer-enriched learning course, FMITT is designed to stimulate debate and dialogue between learners, so that the course becomes an evolving resource of professional knowledge. Author David Allen prompts learners to think through how the volatility which characterises today's business environment has affected their particular enterprise, and how they are, or might be, responding.

We're pleased to hear from learners that they're finding current peer-enriched learning courses (Ethical Issues for Accountants, Making Budgeting Work in the Real World and Managing Through a Recession) useful, and we hope that they find this new course just as valuable.

Addressing pharmaceutical wastage with online learning

by Nicola Dann

One of the things I enjoy most about managing the bespoke projects for Nelson Croom is that it gives me the opportunity to learn a little about a lot of diverse topics. As our expertise lies in the conversion of a subject to the online learning medium rather than in-depth knowledge of the subject matter, there are no topics that we can't work with. That means we have an array of courses that range from drug and alcohol counselling to financial planning, taking in relationship advice and support, competition compliance for the construction industry and dental surgery along the way!
 
Obviously none of the courses would work if we didn't have subject matter experts for all these topics, so this is where a close relationship with the client is vital as in all cases they are (or provide) the content experts. The initial phase of the relationship begins with the scoping process, where we quiz the relevant people about what the learner needs to know. We also ask a lot of dumb questions because generally at this stage we know very little. The answer can often be met with a collective Nelson Croom 'ahh, now I see' reaction. 
 
We've recently been working on a project for an organisation that provides advice and consultancy to the NHS and Pharmaceutical Industry. Among other things they also run training courses for GP practices that dispense drugs and wanted to offer this training online. One of the objectives of this project was to teach those prescribing controlled drugs how to prescribe more effectively in order to address the problem of the levels of wastage, so making the process more cost effective for the NHS. Didn't seem like to big a deal at the time. But then I saw the figures involved. Here are some of them:

• Unused prescription medicines cost the NHS over £10 million every year - just in South Yorkshire! That could pay for an extra 300 community nurses or 1,400 heart by-pass operations

• Between 2002-2007 the NHS has spent more than £1billion on buying and disposing of drugs that were never used

• 824 Tonnes of medication is destroyed unused every year – equivalent to the weight of 5 jumbo jets

Even if you never open them, once medicines have left the Pharmacy they cannot be recycled or used by anyone else, so preventing unneeded drugs leaving the dispensary at all is vital if this wastage is to be reduced. Wouldn't it be great if this course could help!

Getting to grips with content: it's child's play

by Crispin Best

I was recently one of several Nelson Croomers who took part in a meeting to discuss a new medical ethics and law course that we are just starting to develop. Stories of incompetent or downright naughty doctors still always manage to cause a stir, so I was really looking forward to learning more about what rules and strictures doctors are really encouraged to follow.

After the initial stages of the meeting, we got to the meat of the issue: the prospective content of the course.

"What do we want to cover?" we asked. And there was plenty!

Before too long, various terms were being thrown around at lightning speed:

"We have to cover non-maleficence!"

"Don't forget autonomy."

"And beneficence."

At this point, in spite of the terminology being bandied about, I think I was just about managing to keep up with proceedings. Then the Latin started,

"Well, yes, voluntus aegroti suprema lex," said one of the subject experts.

"Hear, hear!" I replied. Or I might have if I'd had any idea what he had just said, (sadly my Latin is confined mostly to football club mottos.) I rather wearily felt like medical ethics was going to be the cause of more headaches than it was going to help cure.

Medical ethics obviously is an issue that gets people going, and I was starting to understand why people are so fascinated by it. It's (literally) a life and death issue, and doing the right thing doesn’t always seem obvious. What's more, in spite of the emotions that are surely involved, if you're not careful it all has a tendency to sound so cold.

I think a few of the client contingent started to sense a certain amount of uncertainty on some of our parts. One of their party, a lady who specialises in seminars for newly qualified doctors, explained:

"Well. It's actually very simple. There's a technique that we use in our sessions to help people remember the basics. We call it 'The Kindergarten Rules'."

This got me interested. She carried on:

"For example, when talking about the dos and don'ts of confidentiality, which is one of the key principles of medical ethics, we just tell them all to remember: "Don't tell tales". That’s how to stay safe."

So maybe confidentiality is as simple as that, but surely that can't be said for all the key principles?

Well. It turns out you can do this with pretty much all of them. Patient autonomy becomes "Don't boss people around". Dignity becomes "Show respect". Justice (referring to the equal distribution of care) becomes "Always share". Non-maleficence becomes "Don't hurt people". Beneficience becomes, rather sweetly, "Try to help people".

The doctors were laughing, and so were we. It was as simple as that. Just by looking at the principles from a slightly different viewpoint, the rules immediately came to life in a way that couldn’t be failed to be understood by everyone.

And there we had it. Although there will always be situations which demand interpretation, in general the responsibility of the doctor is basically to follow a set of rules that they were all probably brought up with anyway. The whole content of this course, which minutes ago had seemed so hard to grasp, had been boiled down, brilliantly, to a list of seven-or-so key points that could have come straight from the wall of a nursery school.