Overview

Correctional agencies are increasingly confronted with critical workforce issues (e.g.,staff and fiscal resource limitations) that make it difficult to provide adequate professional development opportunities for staff. Advances in information technologies present significant opportunities for all trainers and training units to use exciting, innovative approaches to achieve strategic outcomes.

The course reviews the basic principles of e-Learning, describes the strengths and weaknesses of this instructional delivery strategy, outlines the processes by which an e-Learning course is designed and developed, and provides important information to consider when deciding whether to develop e-Learning in-house or to outsource part or all of the services. An e-Learning readiness checklist helps assess agencies’ readiness to undertake an e-Learning strategy.

An important feature of this course is the availability of an electronic bulletin board that allows participants to communicate with a subject matter expert at any time while taking the course. The expert will respond to individual questions in a timely fashion.

Objectives

At the conclusion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Differentiate between the advantages and disadvantages of WBT for both learners and instructional designers (training personnel in general).
• Identify effective ways to mitigate the disadvantages of WBT]*
  
• Understand current issues in the area of WBT design, development, and delivery.
• Examine several types of content and determine which are most appropriate for WBT delivery.
• Identify the basic instructional design principles for WBT course development.
• Analyze a situation and identify which instructional design principles have been violated.
• Understand the steps that an instructional designer follows in creating a WBT course from scratch and in migrating instructor-led training content to WBT delivery
• Explore the use of job aids and learning aids in an e-learning environment.
• Discuss the factors needed to build a strong blended solution in training.
• Analyze the factors involved in determining whether to build e-Learning in-house or contract out the services to third-party providers and/or subcontracted developers.

Audience

Training administrators, coordinators,and trainers from all types of correctional agencies who are responsible for managing the development and delivery of their agencies’ training.