5 things I learned from writing a MOOC

Last year I authored a MOOC (massive open online course) about managing public money for the Open University. It was an interesting and enjoyable project to work on, and I learned an awful lot the production of online courses. Here are five of the lessons I learned.

1. Stay focused

I’m an expert in managing public money and can write about it at length. I know this is true because I wrote a book about it with over 120,000 words. It is tempting, therefore, to write as much as you can in each step of each lesson in order to give the learner as much value as possible (even though the course is free). It is better, though, to keep the lessons focused in order to give the learners only what they need to know. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry put it:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

2. Variety is important

The MOOC I was writing was destined for the FutureLearn platform. This platform has many different types of webpage that can be used. These include video and audio steps, quizzes and tests, and discussion pages as well as a basic template for formatted text and inline images (much the same as a standard blog template).

I know from my own teaching that learners will soon switch off if I just stand at the front a lecture for 90 minutes straight. Classes need changes to happen every ten minutes or so. The same is true for a MOOC. Each step in the lesson needs to be kept short enough to be completed in under 10 minutes and there should be a variety of steps making up the lesson. This means mixing up text with other media and incorporating activities and discussions along the way. If you don’t do that you are basically writing a book and one of the attractions of an online course is that it is more alive than a book.

3. Stick to the budget

When I first fleshed out my plan for all the steps in each of the four weekly lessons I went crazy with all the options for different kinds of steps. I thought I’d put together a really interesting, exciting lesson for each week. In fact, I had done exactly that. The problem came when it was presented to the producer of the MOOC and she had to tell me that the budget for the course meant I could have no more than two video steps in a lesson and depending on the fees paid for videos from third parties, I would have to limit the amount of images, etc.

I’m an accountant and I know that the budget rules. It was frustrating though. It was also frustrating to discover that the fee for authoring the MOOC was about 5% of the budget. I’d like to think that creating the content is valued more highly than that given that there would be no course without it. I should not have been surprised, really, since it’s much the same with books in terms of author royalties. 

4. Clearance takes a long time

The overall production process was about 20 weeks but only 8 weeks was planned for the writing and editing of the content. The rest of the time was needed for all the other activities like uploading the content to the draft site, building and checking hyperlinks, etc. One thing I had not expected was how long it takes to get permission from third parties to use their material. I had not referenced very many things like this but it still took weeks to get permission. 

I had also specified what I wanted as images to illustrate various steps and there was a fairly long process of findings suitable images, sending them to me to select my favourite, and then acquiring the rights to use the selected images.

There are two particular things I learned. One was that permission is not needed if you are simply putting a hyperlink into your course. This is a useful workaround if you cannot wait any longer for a response to your request for permission (as we did for one step of my course) but the downside is that it takes the learner off to a different website and we all know that runs the risk that they will be distracted by something and not come back to the course immediately.

The second aspect of this is that you can avoid the need to seek permission if you create the content yourself. This can be practical for things like diagrams and even some video material but it also brings back lesson 3 and the budget for the course. For some of the content you can’t create yourself, such as stock photos and videos, you can still look for royalty-free versions. There are lots of sites for these. For photos, I like Unsplash.

5. Leave room for the learners’ voices

It's easy to focus on delivering content to the learners but if you do that the course will be didactic. In a classroom it's always possible to stop talking if you sense someone has a question to ask. A MOOC can't be interactive in that way but it is possible to include a comments feature at the bottom of any of the steps where learners can ask questions, of the author or other learners, as well as make comments. As the author you can go a bit further and include requests in the text for learners to make comments, perhaps sharing their own experience. It is also possible to think of activities that learners can do which require them to report their answers/findings in the comments section. All of these things bring the learners' voices into the MOOC and make it a richer experience for everyone.

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I’ve learned these lessons, and more, and I am using them to create  courses at my own online school. I have lots of ideas for courses and some of them are in various stages of production. I have finished one course: 5 questions to ask about your budget. It’s a short course (less than an hour to complete) and it’s completely free. Not only is it free, you also get a copy of my glossary of financial terms as a bonus. You can find the course here.

Writing about public financial management

For the last six months I’ve been writing a book about managing public money. The title won’t be confirmed until the manuscript is accepted by the publishers but for now it is International Public Financial Management: the Essentials. I’m writing it for CIPFA, based on their international public financial management qualifications. There are four different levels of qualification depending on which of the twelve modules are passed. Here’s a snapshot of the topics covered in the syllabus and if you want to know more about the qualifications just click on the image..

The experience of writing this book is different from writing my first book, Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector. In the first book I was free to deviate from my initial outline of the book. I could decide to write more about one topic and less about another if I felt that would be best for the book. Even when it came to the second edition I felt able to go further than a simple updating of the tables and references and could rearrange the chapters or sections within chapters. As a result I think the second edition flows better than the first.
With this new book I am constrained. The modules determine what the chapters are about and the content I am writing has to fit with the syllabus. Having said that, each chapter still has to be a manageable size (8,000 to 10,000 words) so a lot of time is spent deciding what to include and what to leave out. 
I’ve enjoyed the challenge of writing this book. I’m close to the finishing the manuscript. After submitting it there will still be work to do regarding the editing process and checking the proofs but I hope this book will be on the shelves by the autumn. I’ll write some more about the process over the summer.

Who's job is it to end poverty?

More or Less is a BBC radio programme (on Radio 4 and the BBC World Service) that "tries to make sense of the statistics around us." I subscribe to its podcast feed (subscribing to BBC radio programmes means you don't miss them wherever you are and whatever you're doing). This week there was a short edition of the show focusing on the drive by China to eradicate completely (rural) poverty in the whole country by 2020. This sounds like an impossible thing to achieve but apparently in the last 25 years or so they have reduced extreme poverty in rural areas from 90% to 5%. That will be hundreds of millions of people helped.

The programme is even-handed (it is the BBC, after all) and points out some of the issues in the Chinese approach, such as the fact that there is no definition of poverty in urban areas, and therefore no counting of how many people in the urban areas are extremely poor. And, the poverty threshold being used by the government is income of just over $2 a day per person. Someone receiving $3 a day is still poor, but not defined as being in poverty.

What I was most struck by was the policy of assigning every poor family in the rural areas to a named official. It is the official's job to get their assigned families out of poverty by 2020. I can see that if an official is under pressure to meet the target they might be tempted to adjust the figures or whatever but if I look at this in a positive way, it is a significant statement by the government that it would assign resources to a family in this way. It is also an acknowledgement that families will not become richer without some assistance: there is not just a belief that the free market will somehow result in the trickle down of money that will eventually reach the poorest of the poor.

If you have ten minutes it's worth having a listen to the programme. Maybe you will want to subscribe to it as well.

Budget time: here's 5 questions to ask about yours

A few years ago I was asked to give a presentation to some councillors to help them in their work of scrutinising their council's budget proposals. What I came up with were five questions that the councillors could ask in their scrutiny meetings. Whilst these questions were conceived in the context of a scrutiny role it strikes me that they could apply to any budget, whether in the public or private sector or for operating or capital spending.

The five questions I suggested were:

How was the budget made?

There are different methods that can be used to produce a budget. The most common is incremental budgeting, where the new budget is based on the existing budget. This has the advantage of being easier to do but is not quick to respond to policy changes. Zero-based and priority-based budgeting address this weakness but have weaknesses of their own, namely they are time-consuming and complex.

What outputs will the budget deliver?

The thing about budgets is that they express plans in terms of money and that means that they focus on inputs: how many people, buildings, computers, vehicles, etc will we employ next year. However, the whole point of this plan is to achieve the organisation’s goals so it is important when looking at budgets to make the connections between the plans and the objectives.

Who has been consulted?

It is perfectly possible for a budget to be constructed by a team of finance staff without involving anybody else but the chances are that, however good the budget is, no-one will take ownership of it. That means that managers should be consulted on their own budget. In the public sector consultation has to go further, involving relevant stakeholders, even the general public, in the budget making process. There is a growing call for participatory budgeting.

What assumptions is the budget based on?

Budgets are forecasts and there are many assumptions and estimates that underpin the numbers. It is important to understand what assumptions have been made especially the major ones about pay and price rises, interest rates, staffing levels, demand for goods and services and income.

How robust is the budget?

Just because a budget is the result of an orderly, controlled process does not mean that it is any good. It might be that the managers and accountants have been unduly optimistic in their forecasts or there may be some significant risks that need to be understood. It is is fair to challenge the finance director and senior management about how they have assured themselves that the budget is robust.

I think all of the questions are good questions for any budget holder to ask about their proposed budgets but question 4 is especially important for them. If they do not understand and agree with the assumptions on which their budget is based then they are could have serious problems managing within it and yet still be held accountable. Complaining that the budget was wrong when you're already three quarters of the way through the year is not going to sound like you're a manager to be trusted.

You can download a PDF of the handout from my presentation here.

What would you like to learn about managing public money?

I've written previously about creating a MOOC (massive open online course) about managing public money for the Open University. That's not my only experience of creating online training. In 2016 I put together a 5-module course about commissioning and procurement for a council to use on its internal training system.

I enjoyed the creative aspect of both of those. They both include text so it is a bit like writing a book; but the technology allows you to do more. It's possible to incorporate audio and video clips, have downloadable documents and discussion forums.

One of my plans for 2018 is to create my own online training courses. I have lots of ideas ranging from producing guides to public finance aimed separately at teachers, medical professionals, councillors through to video course on creating better spreadsheets. Obviously, I can't do all of them at once so I need to prioritise. I could choose to do the one that is most interesting to me first, or the one I think is easiest, or the one I think would be most popular. I'd like to go down the last of those routes and you could help me by letting me know what subject areas you would like to see as the subject of an online training course.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section and sign up to me mailing list to be kept informed about the launch of online courses.

12 golden rules for outsourcing

Back in 2012 I attended a national conference entitled Strategic Partnering in Policing. It was an interesting day where 35 of England's 43 police forces were represented and there were  presentations from four different police forces, mainly from Lincolnshire Police, who had recently commenced a 10-year partnership with G4S. One of the speakers was Lincolnshire's then Chief Constable, Neil Rhodes, who had been the Deputy Chief Constable throughout the procurement process and was, therefore, very closely involved in the procurement. In his presentation he explained the twelve golden rules that he would have liked someone to share with him when Lincolnshire began the procurement process.

I wrote about these principles at the time. I share them again now because of the attention on public sector outsourcing caused by the collapse of Carillion. I know there are voices calling for outsourcing to be abolished but that is simply not feasible even if it was politically attractive. Public bodies are not going to set up internal building units when it is easier, cheaper and less managerial hassle to hire expert builders when you need them. And do we really want to see the senior managers in hospitals spend any time setting up cleaning, catering and payroll teams when they have a crisis on their hands in terms of emergency medical care?

My personal rule of thumb for outsourcing is never to outsource something which is strategically or operationally critical to your mission. I think this is what businesses do, too. Apple is happy to outsource assembly of its devices but it does not outsource design or retail (I know there are some authorised resellers but massive volumes go through Apple Stores where Apple controls all the details). This rule of thumb means that every public sector organisation would come up with a different answer about what they could outsource and what they would never outsource. On this basis, if a hospital has a good contract in place for its back office services and its hospital services then it would be best served by sticking with them.

Anyway, back to the chief constable's 12 golden rules. They were:

1. Have realistic expectations about what the private sector can deliver for you given your starting position.
2. Get the metrics sorted out early so you know where you are and how you will measure success in the future.
3. Don't be seduced by promises of "jam tomorrow" by always asking yourself, "can we uplift this promise into the contract?"
4. Make sure you choose the right route to contract.
5. Plan the work, then work to the plan.
6. Chief officers get involved in the process early and stay in it to the end i.e. closely involve senior managers throughout the procurement process.
7. Bake the partnership's guiding principles into the contract.
8. Be balanced in your requirements because risk aversion is very expensive.
9. Set the structure for future projects so that you know in principle how the partnership will adapt to changes in requirements over time.
10. Don't focus your evaluation scheme too heavily on price because you don't want to sign a deal with a partner who will give you "a mess for less".
11. If something is not binding contractually it gains little credit in the evaluation.
12. Maintain the competitive tension between the bidders until the very end.