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BPP manuals a victim of the digital age

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16th Oct 2015
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ATT students who have poor broadband were thought to be at a disadvantage since BPP’s manuals are no longer available, but Ross Burgess, BPP’s head of programmes for tax courses, assured students that the face-to-face and online course will be just as cost effective.

The cost of enrolling in the face-to-face or online course would be more expensive than just buying the manual, but Burgess explained that in the long run opting for the courses will be more cost effective for the students. “It is more expensive than studying on their own with a book, but it’s much more cost effective because you’re much more likely to pass because you’re doing an OCR live and you can interact with your tutor and ask questions, and so have a bigger chance of passing.”

All of the content which BPP manuals provided are now available as part of a course or an online course. As well as being a victim of the digital age, the emphasis on online courses stems from the ability to offer comprehensive teaching to students who live in an area where there isn’t a strong demand to study for the ATT qualification.

“One of the problems outside of the major centres, you might two or three people that want to do an ATT qualification in a geographical area. It’s not cost effective to run a face-to-face course for two or three students. So part of what we had to do is work out how we can deliver courses in a cost effective way,” Burgess said.

The online course comes with all of the recordings, and uses adobe connect to offer the lecture as an immersive online experience. Students living in areas where broadband is poor shouldn’t be too affected; Burgess tells AccountingWEB that the required broadband is only 500MB.

The decision to head down this route was a balancing act between retaining quality with the cost of production. Burgess said that a consequence of this change was that students now have more practice material than they did before. “More practice, the better off they are,” Burgess said. 

Removing the manual has allowed BPP to re-evaluate its study text, and they have been able to make the notes more focused on the explanatory aspect for the students.

“We had a separate set of course notes and study text and it would have been the study text that was very dense that was very detailed that non-classroom students would have bought through book shops or websites.

Now what we have is a combined single piece of material, which still contains all of the necessary content but in a more personable way as opposed to a detailed driven study text, which is designed to appeal as a reference material and also for students,” Burgess said.

ATT students are able to learn through printed material provided by the other major tuition providers along with a number of smaller providers across the market.

An ATT spokesperson said: “There has been no change in the number of enquiries from prospective students or a fall in the number of actual students since BPP informed us that it would no longer publish ATT manuals earlier this year. We would not have anticipated any change in numbers because printed materials are still available in the market for people.”

"We do take an interest in how our students get the knowledge they need to pass our exams and we would encourage any students who would like to study ATT to contact us on 020 7340 0551."

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By carnmores
18th Oct 2015 18:09

whatever happened to
Financial Trading?

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