Nelson Croom's Blog

It's a "nelson" for us at Learning Technologies 2010

by Victoria Clarke

Did you know that the number 111 is also known as a “nelson”?

So, it’s very apt that we will be exhibiting on stand 111 at Learning Technologies 2010! Superstition has it that if you score a nelson in cricket you should hop in the air so that neither foot is touching the ground (no mean feat) and then stand on just one foot until the score has moved on. Don’t worry, we won’t be expecting any gymnastics on our stand (luckily for me!), so if you’re attending Learning Technologies on either the 27th or 28th January do pop by the stand and say hello.

Members of the Nelson Croom team will be on hand to discuss your online learning needs and plans, and to answer any questions that you may have about our services. If you’d like to make an appointment to speak to us then just get in touch.

If you haven’t registered yet, then there’s still time. Learning Technologies will be held at London’s Olympia 2, 27th-28th January. The show is now in its eleventh year and is Europe’s premier showcase of organisational and learning technologies. This year, Learning Technologies is being co-located with a brand new exhibition: Learning and Skills.

We hope that you can make it, and we look forward to meeting you!

An interview with Stuart Warner

by Victoria Clarke

As part of a new series in Nelson Croom News (our monthly newsletter - you can sign up here) we caught up with Stuart Warner of Financial Fluency Ltd, and author of our new peer-enriched learning course Making Budgeting Work in the Real World. If you missed it, here's the interview in full:

We've just published your course Making Budgeting Work in the Real World - will you tell us a bit about it?
In my experience you can spend years learning about budgeting in theory and it won’t to prepare you for budgeting in practice. In the real world the budgeting process is full of challenges. This course aims to help budget managers and budget holders increase their awareness of real world issues and therefore be more prepared to deal with them.

So, are budgets very different in the "real world" than in the textbooks?
The textbooks tend to concentrate on the mechanics of budgeting and how to deal with the numbers. Budgeting in the real world is about dealing with people and not necessarily numbers.

Is this the first online course that you've written?
I’ve been writing online courses since the year 1999, ranging from simple text based courses to interactive and video based courses. This is the first online course I’ve written that really embraces learning 2.0 principles (i.e. peer-enriched-learning) and I’m really excited with the results.
 
How different is writing for an online audience to preparing for face-to-face training?
It is more challenging writing for an online audience - in that you can’t interact with the audience as readily. However, writing a peer-enriched-learning course is much more fun than writing other online courses as it simulates a face-to-face environment to some extent.

How did you come up with the different ideas for activities?
I imagined I was in a face-to-face training session and thought of the types of questions, discussions, interactions that would naturally take place.

What did you think about the way that Nelson Croom converted the content you supplied?
I was really impressed with the Nelson Croom team. They really understood my requirements and used their creative skills to enhance the course content.

And finally, if you had to give learners just one piece of budgeting advice, what would it be?
Treat your budgets like a game of chess – always plan several moves ahead!

The power of web 2.0: Part 2

by Alan Nelson

I recently blogged about the impact of micro-blogging site Twitter on the box office performance of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, Bruno. It got me thinking about whether the e-learning industry is as ready for Web 2.0 as it likes to think. I wonder whether we are being complacent.

It’s pretty clear that e-learning professionals are excited about Web 2.0. Whether through press releases and white papers on their websites or presentations at conferences and seminars, everyone is keen to promote themselves as the master of new collaborative technologies and their application to learning.

But do they really know what a Pandora’s box they are opening? Certainly few seem to see the irony of using Web 1.0 one-to-many vehicles, such as articles and presentations, to talk about many-to-many Web 2.0 technologies. Aren’t these the same people who have created the mind-numbing linear learning we have had forced on us by the tyranny of SCORM?

Having spent the last ten years being cast as left field because I had the temerity to suggest that it isn’t about “teaching” people but more about facilitating their learning, I find it incredible that these organisations, who for so long have insisted on their next buttons and “screen 1 of 48” navigation, should become the apostles of anarchy.

The topic of whether Web 2.0 is just a new set of tools for us to use or a whole new world with different rules and different attitudes, has been the subject of several blogs on this site (see here and here for examples). I for one am increasingly coming to the view that we underestimate both the scale of the challenge and how exciting it is. This is a revolution. The learners are taking over and they may not want the old teachers to stay in charge!

The power of web 2.0: Part 1

by Alan Nelson

The power of Web 2.0 was brought home to me by the interesting box office performance of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest creation, Bruno. The film had received massive pre-release coverage, not least because Cohen is so good at making stories through his own personal appearances. His antics not only created column inches but, just as significantly, stimulated an unprecedented number of Tweets on the micro-blogging site, Twitter.

This was great news - until the Tweets turned sour. So just as remarkable as the first night success of the film was the comparative drop off in audience numbers for the second night. Traditionally films that receive a big pre-release hype, but turn out to be disappointing, see a drop off in audience numbers come the second weekend. This is the first time that the effect has been so immediate.

This has parallels in the world of online learning, although you will be relieved to hear that I am not intending to walk around in a brightly coloured posing pouch to promote our courses. People attending a face-to-face event tend not to leave until the first coffee break even if it is terrible! Online they will go elsewhere if they aren’t seriously engaged within the first few minutes.

Our approach to non-linear, learner centred resources has always meant that we have had to focus on how to ensure that diverse groups of people each find something useful as soon as possible after logging in. As we move towards wider acceptance of web 2.0 technologies for creating collaborative learning environments, we will have to take this a big step further. Personally I am excited by this, but we shouldn’t underestimate the challenge inherent in passing control to the users.

ps This blog was prompted by a newspaper article. I couldn't remember where I read it. I thought perhaps the Guardian. I knew it wasn't the Observer because I was on the train and it was a weekday. So I googled to see if I could find it and was presented with the sad truth that the paper I habitually read is in fact not any of these fine liberal braodsheets, but the London Paper. What have I become?

Webinars Part III: Last time, honest

by Angela Smith

Having been a bit capricious about the webinar experience, I feel the need to write a third piece on the subject to bring balance to the Universe.

The answer to the excellent question ‘isn’t this just a PowerPoint presentation delivered over the internet?’, though of course this wasn’t quite how the presenter put it, was ‘yes’. True, there were bits and bobs around the edges, but all of those bits and bobs were designed to make up for the fact that it wasn’t actually a face to face session and to bring it as close to that experience as possible.

Is there value in this? Possibly. However, to my mind, just because you deliver your learning online, that does not make it ‘online learning’. It’s not online learning in the same way that a stage play read on the radio with sound effects and applause is not a radio play. What online learning should do is focus on using the benefits and features offered by the medium to offer the learner the best possible experience. Each medium uses different devices, some of which are unique to it; each has its strengths and weaknesses and the trick is to play to its strengths. Ideal online learning would suffer if you tried to take the content and deliver it in the same format in a training room because you just wouldn’t be able to reproduce what it offers online. To make the best of the web you need to stop thinking of online learning as a compromised version of ‘the real thing’ and start seeing it as an exciting medium in its own right.

And this is something that, as suggested by its hybrid name, the webinar does not do.

If you’ve had a more positive experience with a webinar I’d be interested to know what you thought and if the providers used it to good effect.

Webinar Part II: Wait for me!

by Angela Smith

I’ve already been fair about the webinar, so now let me be harsh, as real learners often are. The webinar in question purported to be about creating effective online learning, but would more properly have been named ‘Why not use a webinar?’ which raised my hackles more than a little. However, as I said before, I went into it with open eyes, having Googled the speakers.

Here I turn away from what I did and didn’t agree with philosophically and get down to what it was actually like as an experience…

When I finally joined the webinar – to start with I couldn’t get through on the phone to listen to the speaker because ‘all the lines were busy’ – things were in full swing. Unfortunately I’d missed the explanation of how to use the tools, but on the plus side they were quite self-explanatory.

I found myself listening to two speakers in the presence of a silent administrator type and an unknown number of other attendees. On screen, slides were coming up one after another and the presenters talked us through each point, just like any other presentation. Actually, sometimes the slides and the chat were way too similar, not to mention being ugly and too texty, but I’m not here to diss the providers’ presentation skills.

The webinar provided a useful questioning tool. This allowed one of the attendees after about ten minutes to say what we were all thinking: ‘isn’t this just a PowerPoint presentation delivered over the internet?’ I did ask some Excellent Questions, of course, but I can’t claim this one for myself. I agreed though and was slightly disappointed with the whole experience for this reason: a ‘webinar’ sounds much more exciting than an ‘online presentation’.

Anyway, by way of trying to explain why this was not just an online presentation, the presenters described the technologies available for monitoring the attention level of your audience etc. However, I had a bit of a problem with these technologies: they assume that you can tell whether someone is interested in a session by their interaction with their computer and browser. Of course I may appear to be listening because I have the webinar toolbar up, but who says I’m not also staring out of the window, or looking at lolcats, or talking to someone on the phone (which I was at times)?

They also pointed to the interaction tools, which of course don’t enhance the seminar-style experience, they seek to recreate it. However, all too often, they recreate it poorly. For example, the ask a question functionality: when you stick your hand up in a seminar, the thing stops, you ask your question, everyone has the benefit of the answer and then it continues; when you want to ask a question in the webinar, you have to type it in. Now, perhaps this says something about me, but I found it almost impossible to keep track of what the presenters were saying while I was formulating the right wording for and typing in my questions, so I got left behind.

All this brings me to one of my main frustrations with the webinar: interruptions. Busy professionals who are learning in the workplace or at home can’t help being interrupted. Whether it is colleagues, family members or the cat sitting on the keyboard and refusing to move (which he was at times) there’s always something and the webinar just didn’t seem to account for that. My opinions about this were set in stone when, interrupted by a call from work, I went away from my desk for five minutes and came back to see that my Excellent Questions had been answered. They were helpfully highlighted to tell me this. Of course everyone else listening had had the benefit of the answers to my questions, but I’d missed them totally.

It might have been at this point that I gave up paying proper attention, though I couldn’t say for certain.

To be fair, this was the only webinar I have ever attended, but that was what it was like.

In summary, the webinar slide for this blog entry would say:

- Paying attention for an hour is a big ask face-to-face; it’s an even bigger ask online
- Feeling left behind is one of the worst feelings a learner can have
- You can’t have a ‘looking at funny pictures of cats’ break when you are timetabled in for an hour of listening without getting left behind

Quality of learning in CPD

by Alan Nelson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gauging interest in the publishing programme

by Rachel Bruce

Alan and I recently returned from a trip to Dublin where we had meetings with three accounting professional bodies, with whom we partner to offer courses from our Accounting and Finance Portfolio to their members.

Much of our planned publishing programme across this year and next is focused on commissioning and developing courses for the Accounting and Finance Portfolio so that we are able to provide our partners with an even larger range of courses to promote and sell to their members.

One of the purposes of each of the three meetings was for me to gauge interest in our proposed publishing programme. Earlier this year I began putting together a publishing programme and lining up authors to write the courses and before confirming anything I wanted to test whether what we were doing met with the needs of our partners.  All the meetings we had were really positive, with each of the professional bodies keen to add  the proposed new courses to their portfolios, and they were particularly excited about our new series – peer-enriched learning (which Alan talked about last week). 

I came away from Dublin with renewed vigour about our publishing programme and in particular about the proposed courses in our new peer-enriched learning series.  The enthusiasm from the accounting bodies in Ireland meant that I have now been able to confirm our publishing schedule for the year, which includes three peer-enriched learning courses publishing in the first half of this year:

• The Budgeting Game
• Managing through a Recession
• Ethical Issues for Accountants

The great thing about our new peer-enriched learning series is that it’s creating excitement on all levels – our authors, our partners (as we saw in Dublin) and all of us at Nelson Croom who are responsible for the development of the courses.  Peer-enriched learning is making use of our web 2.0 tools allowing learners to share experiences and ideas with each other, and discuss specific topics and issues while being guided through a course with content written by an expert in their field.  Essentially learners are able to learn from others in their community, as well as from the author.

The “sharing each others’ answers” device means that some of the content is created by the learners themselves and therefore the courses are continually updated, remaining current and relevant.  This is particularly pertinent in courses such as Managing through a Recession where learners are able to share their experiences in dealing with various situations and also share techniques and devices to get through difficult times.

So we’ve started on our peer-enriched learning journey, we are all excited about it, and now the hard work begins to deliver the courses on time to all of our accounting partners (including the three we met in Ireland) so that in addition to the existing courses in their portfolio they have something new and exciting to offer to their members.

Process, process, process - the development of a new range of courses

by Alan Nelson

We are currently planning a new range of courses within our Accounting and Finance Portfolio that focus more on using collaborative tools to help people learn from each other. Developing a new offering of this sort is an iterative process for us. I am not sure we always do it in exactly the same way, but the process we have followed in this case is pretty typical.

The first step is normally the idea. This is often stimulated by the dialogue with clients, partners, authors and other stakeholders. Some conversation or series of conversations make us think in a new way – gives us the germ of an idea. In this case we noticed that people got excited when we showed them activities where we asked a learner a question and then shared with them the answers from other learners. Then, at the Learning Technologies show in January, one person said “This is fantastic. Why don’t you make more of this up front? I never realised you could do this.”

The next stage is to flesh it out a little internally to see whether we are all excited by it. Many ideas fall by the wayside at this stage, turning out to be simply the short term enthusiasm of one or two people (normally me, actually!). In this case we realised we had all been thinking about Web 2.0 type facilities and how we could build them into our approach without abandoning everything we had learned. We decided that we would like to create a new range of courses for our Accounting and Finance Portfolio that focused more on facilitating a group of professionals discussing and debating a subject than on an expert explaining how to do something.

Once we had convinced ourselves that we were onto something it was time to try it out on the outside world. In this case we were keen to do this as early as possible but we weren’t yet ready to consult our commercial partners with what could still have been a half baked idea we wouldn’t take any further. So we asked a couple of our existing authors what they thought, whether they would be interested in helping us to work up the idea and perhaps in producing the first couple of courses. Both authors loved the idea and wanted to be involved. One of them came up with a name for the new approach: peer-enriched learning.

We worked with the two authors to plan out the structure of the new courses and to establish some rules that we might follow to ensure that the new offering was consistent.

The next step was to talk to our commercial partners. We knew that we would have to be able to talk in a coherent and compelling way and that we would need some visual examples to illustrate what we were describing. We spoke to three commercial partners. They loved the idea and started to help us to flesh out the promotional proposition. What should the price point be for these new courses? How should we describe them? Was peer-enriched learning the right phrase? (Yes, we think so!)

Then it was back to the authors with the encouraging news about the response we had had. And that’s where we have got to.

Three courses that follow our new approach are now in development. We will pilot them with some tame learners who we can trust to give us honest feedback and then we will tweak them and launch them to the world around the middle of this year. It is exciting to be able to go from the germ of an idea to finished product within four or five months – in my old world of books publishing things took much longer.

It is already clear that by getting people involved in sharing their ideas and learning from each other we can create far more engaging and powerful professional development – a stark contrast with the passive experience of streamed lectures on offer from so many current providers.

Engaging learners with a pinch, a touch or a sweep?

by Victoria Clarke

I was interested to read on the BBC website recently that Windows 7 (likely to release in the next 12 months) will include multi-touch technology. The piece talks about what multi-touch might mean for users and what it means for the future of technology. One day, and perhaps in the not too distant future, we may all be using touch technology in our day-to-day lives – gone will be the familiar keyboard and mouse.

Personally I dislike sweeping statements like this; what will work for one may not work for all. Just look at the debate that’s been raging in publishing for years – will the ebook mean the end of the traditional paperbound copy? Does mobile browsing mean no-one will use a desktop PC again? Now that we have sat-nav will road atlases just disappear from the shelves? (Actually, on that last point, who knows?). Multi-touch probably won’t render keyboards and mice 100% useless for quite some time to come, if ever - no more than e-learning has resulted in the extinction of face-to-face training. However, everything has a time and a place and the advent of multi-touch could create some interesting developments for learning, and one that I suspect will be taken up with much enthusiasm by the elearning industry.

Our philosophy at Nelson Croom has always been to encourage our learners to actively participate in the learning experience; our development team are constantly creating new activities that encourage learners to lean forwards and click around rather than passively watching or listening to content. The growth of social networking and other web 2.0 technologies reflects our learning philosophies and indeed one of our most popular features is our sharing answers technology. I can already see a future where Nelson Croom learners will no longer just be actively leaning forwards and clicking but perhaps actively leaning forwards and “pinching”, “touching” or “sweeping” …