Nelson Croom's Blog

Which browser do you use?

2009-11-03T15:22:44+00:00

by Tony Short

This year, especially over the last few months, things have started to get a bit complicated with web browsers. Imago, our technology, and our courses are designed to work on all browsers for all learners – regardless of their system specifications. There was a time, and not that long ago, that pretty much everybody was using Internet Explore 6. And then, the browser ratings war split most of the vote between Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Now, after a bit of a slow start, many learners are now switching to Internet Explorer 8 (used by 23% of learners) – probably because Microsoft Automatic Updates have been responsible for upgrading from version 7 to 8. At the same time, Firefox has been growing in popularity (currently used by 14% of learners).

Why is this important to us? Well, the way that our Development Team constructs pages needs to change to ensure that we are optimizing them for a wider variety of browsers (Opera, Safari and Chrome are starting to feature more heavily on our usage lists). It also means that more time is devoted to testing new features! The latest version of each browser type – whether that’s Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox – has its own idiosyncrasies that have to be catered for.

The Development Team asked me when all the different browser types might start to behave in a more predictable and standardised way – it could be a decade before things settle down completely. But the good news is that the really primitive browsers – the ones that used to constrain the use of some elegant page designs – finally seem to have disappeared from the list of browsers in use. This means that we can use less code to create better looking pages, and make the pages more flexible and sophisticated to boot.

Before you go ...

2009-11-03T12:46:39+00:00

by Victoria Clarke

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

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

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

Harry Potter and the Irish Accountants

2009-11-02T09:45:00+00:00

by Alan Nelson

Last week I was invited to attend the Annual President’s Dinner of CPA Ireland. It is always a pleasure to visit Dublin, where our partners are impeccably hospitable, but this event is a special treat.

This year’s Dinner was held in the dining hall of Trinity College. With its wood panelled walls and pictures of eminent alumni, you could be forgiven for thinking you had walked onto the set of a Harry Potter movie. Both the refreshments and the company were excellent and the evening was topped off by guest speaker, the Irish Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, who impressed a polite but initially sceptical audience of 90 or so of the country’s leading accountants.

When I say that the evening was topped off by the speech, I imply that it was anywhere near finished at the end of the formal proceedings. Being in Dublin, of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as we embarked on a voyage of discovery of Dublin’s central drinking establishments.

I can now share a key lesson I learnt from the trip, in the hope that others may learn from my pain. When at midnight you are asked the question:

“Would you like another drink?” the correct answer is not:

“Yes, I’ll have a pint of Guinness.”

What's in a name?

2009-10-26T12:08:35+00:00

by Tony Short

When we build our courses we often include examples and case studies which feature fictional characters. For example, questions in test and quizzes might include sentences like “If Janet has £30 and John has £35 …”. Our developers often find themselves burning up mental energy thinking up names to use in activities – names that avoid the old clichés of “John Doe” (or “Jane Doe”) or “John Smith”. We further agonise over being politically and socially correct, carefully ensuring that about half the characters are male and half are female (actually in our published courses we often alter this to reflect a particular industry – where there is a high number of women for example). And, of course, we try to avoid any ethnic stereotyping, by liberally scattering some non-Anglo Saxon names amongst our characters.

Just occasionally, our clients ask us to make changes to the names we pick. And now and again, the names we happen to choose even become a topic for discussion. So, I thought I’d ask Imago (our Learning Platform) to run a report to show what our real (non-fictional) learners are actually called. Below, for example, is a list of the top fifty first names our learners register under – is your name on the list?

Alison (792)
Amanda (600)
Andrew (1194)
Angela (687)
Anna (687)
Anne (566)
Carol (473)
Caroline (653)
Catherine (540)
Chris (864)
Christine (564)
Claire (1186)
Daniel (554)
David (1892)
Elizabeth (616)
Emma (1157)
Helen (1172)
Ian (685)
James (955)
Jane (872)
Jennifer (553)
Joanne (835)
John (1457)
Julie (1054)
Karen (1253)
Kate (564)
Laura (920)
Linda (591)
Lisa (893)
Louise (826)
Mark (1151)
Martin (571)
Matthew (540)
Michael (1050)
Michelle (873)
Nicola (935)
Paul (1456)
Peter (941)
Rachel (798)
Rebecca (800)
Richard (973)
Robert (670)
Samantha (551)
Sarah (2017)
Sharon (721)
Simon (710)
Stephen (701)
Sue (634)
Susan (969)
Victoria (487)

As you’ll see they’re all very run-of-the-mill, traditional British names. Not a sign of any Kylies or any of the many names that we try to use to reflect the multicultural nature of society. So now we have to decide whether the randomly picked names we choose should reflect our actual user population, or encourage diversity and try to engage minority groups. It seems that, when it comes down to it, even the apparently straightforward task of picking a few names out of a hat has philosophical and even controversial aspects to it.

Believing it's interesting!

2009-10-06T16:32:05+01:00

by Alan Nelson

I visited the IRRV Conference last week and was pleased to find it as lively as ever. It’s good to see first hand the positive reactions of real users of our courses, especially now that the range is so extensive.

The Euclidian range of products we have created with them is now the market leader for training and maintaining the currency of revenues and benefits officers and the new distance learning materials that support students enrolled on the Level 3 Certificate in Local Taxation and Benefits have been enthusiastically received. Indeed this year will see the expansion of their distance learning provision to support the new Diploma level qualification.

Bringing us right up to date, Institute Chief Executive, David Magor took to the main stage to announce the imminent launch of the new range of online induction and continuing education resources we are currently developing for enforcements officers (bailiffs to you and me).

Helping on the exhibition stand got me thinking about how all this started. Like so many of our clients and partners, IRRV started with something modest and expanded their offering slowly, learning as they went.

The first project was a short induction programme for benefits officers. To help us put this together, the Institute put us in touch with an author they had worked with on printed materials. Colin Holden (for it was he) and his wife Julie, are benefits royalty. At the time we first met, Colin was already well known in the profession. Julie, who was at the time a rising star, is now just coming to the end of her year as President of the Institute.

At our first meeting, we started explaining to Colin how the development process might work. In order to explain to him the sort of thing we had in mind, I showed him a course we had put together for the Pensions Management Institute. Colin seemed impressed with the approach, but less so by the subject matter. “This is pretty dry stuff” he said.

“Some people might say that about benefits administration” I replied.

Colin looked surprised. “Why would they say that?” he said.

At the time his response surprised me but now I know Colin much better and I was wrong to be surprised. Colin, along with many of his fellow IRRV members, is so knowledgeable about the world of benefits, that he does make benefits interesting. And why shouldn’t it be: it’s important, it’s complicated and it’s constantly changing.

Bringing things right up to date we are currently blessed with another enthusiastic and knowledgeable IRRV author. Bill Lovell, who is providing the content for our new enforcement officers’ course, is just as much of an enthusiast as Colin. He can describe 400 year old case law in a way that makes it fun and interesting.

In the years between meeting Colin and Bill I have come to realise how much we rely on authors who are passionate about their subject. So thank you Colin and Bill for your enthusiasm. Our job is to capture the essence of that in the finished course.

An industry divided by a common language?

2009-10-02T10:37:00+01:00

by Alan Nelson

We have spent some time recently discussing our strategy for this Learning Technologies 2010. What is our objective in attending? Who do we want to talk to? What do we want to say to them?

We ended up focusing on identifying the simplest way of describing how we are different to everyone else. Now I think we are pretty clear about why we are different, and if the results of the most recent customer survey are anything to go by, our clients and partners are pretty clear too.

The problem is that lots of the other companies at the learning technologies exhibition use pretty similar terminology to describe something completely different. And they are not necessarily wrong, but as a group we end up confusing the hell of the visitors.

So here is my unofficial advice on how to sort the wheat from the chaff:

Remember that it’s all about people learning stuff. The technology has to be a means to an end and anyone who appears to have forgotten that is not worth spending time on
Decide what you want and ask about that. What advice do you need? What would you like help with? If you haven’t heard of what they do, you probably don’t need it.
Distrust jargon. Anyone who describes their offering as “an asynchronous distributed learning platform” deserves to be ignored.
Plan ahead and book appointments with a few exhibitors. They will be pleased to give you time and you’ll get much more out of a few detailed conversations than many short ones.

I hope this helps. But if you do end up as confused as ever come and see us. We’ll be offering a free translation service for gobbledegook!

Indexing the indexers

2009-09-29T11:32:00+01:00

by Alan Nelson

We recently began work on a project with the Society of Indexers. Jacqui has been working with them to develop the idea and I haven’t as yet been involved in any of the discussions, but after Angela and Jacqui attended the first scoping meeting I asked them what the project is called so that I could add it to the list of scheduled work.

'I think they simply want to call it “Training for Indexers”' said Angela. I smiled as I added it to the schedule:

“Indexers, Training for…”

The Society of Indexers

2009-09-25T15:24:00+01:00

by Jacqui Nelson

We had a great scoping meeting last week with the Society of Indexers. We are working with them to migrate their qualification from its current hardcopy/cd-rom format, online.

People often ask us how much a distance learning solution might cost. It's a difficult question because it really depends on what you want to include and how much you want to spend! The Society of Indexers are typical of many of our clients as their budget is tight. What’s refreshing, is their preparedness to embrace new ideas and make the most of what Imago, our technology, does. They are not wedded to doing things like they have always been done. They are excited about new ways of creating activities and they are keen to hear new ideas and take advice ... We definitely have had instances where money has been, to our mind, wasted trying to fit square pegs into round holes, rather than allowing us to play to our strengths.

For the Society of Indexers, this approach is going to ensure that they get the best possible programme for their budget.

Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

2009-09-24T16:21:00+01:00

by Alan Nelson

I had an interesting session this week with a group of publishers at Wiley. I know a couple of them from a previous life as a book publisher and they asked me to come in and talk to them about CPD. They asked some great questions and I think everyone got a lot out of it, but perhaps it’s just as they say, that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!

What quickly became apparent was how many parallels there are between their relationships with societies – generally as publishers of their journals – and our relationships with professional bodies.

We had both noticed the way that we exist harmoniously with our partners while actually having slightly different objectives – or rather a difference of emphasis. This is most apparent on the publishing side of our business. We create short CPD courses designed to help professionals in a wide range of sectors to comply with the CPD requirements of their professional body. We then form partner relationships with professional associations, who offer branded versions of our courses to their members and share the income from those sales with us. They would describe their objectives as follows:

To engage and excite their professional community
To extend the reach of services they offer their members
To generate additional income

They would almost certainly put them in that order. Now we understand entirely that the way for us to generate income is to make our courses as engaging and exciting as possible, and that these relationships are only successful if they extend the range of services offered to members, but when it comes down to it, we are a commercial organisation, and so the generation of additional income is important to us.

Wiley have a similar transposition of objectives with their society journals. They understand that the way to grow revenues profitably is to deliver a consistently high quality research vehicle, but they would never say that up front. The society understands that if they create a really first rate journal they will make money, but they would never list that as their primary goal.

In both cases we co-exist happily, secure in the knowledge that although we use different language and come at it from opposite points of view, we end up in the same place.

Inclusionists and deletionists

2009-09-23T15:28:54+01:00

by Alan Nelson

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

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

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

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

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