On the home front

For many learners, the home is the natural place to learn, away from the pressures of work, sat quietly in the study in front of the PC with your favourite music playing and perhaps a glass of wine. Unlike at work, you have a decent, modern PC with multimedia capability and no firewall to content with. For others, home is screaming kids, endless chores to perform and the continual quest for sleep. Work is where you go to relax.

Of course, much depends on the extent to which your target population is wired. In the course of designing an e-learning component to its National Nursing Leadership Project, a programme involving some 35,000 nurses, the developers conducted a major research study. They found that 70 per cent of registered nurses have Internet access, compared with 30 per cent of adults in the general population and that, although 63 per cent of NHS clinicians had access to a computer at work, 59 per cent preferred to learn at home.

Ali Handscomb and David Dawes conducted the study for the NHS Leadership Centre. Explained Handscomb: “There’s not really a culture of learning at work in the NHS – if you’re at work, then you’re with patients. In practice, nurses found that they obtained more support in their learning from the people around them at home, than they could expect from teachers and trainers. We improved the design of the materials so that now less than 3% of learners need any technical support.”

And how successful was e-learning as a medium? Handscomb: “The profile of our audience is 87% women and an average age of 41, a profile that does not obviously suggest e-learning. What has surprised us is the level of interest in e-learning. Nurses are desperate for personal development and love the fact that they can access the materials in small chunks and return as often as they need.”