Training

In the corporate training world, competency-based instruction and assessment is a dominant paradigm. Unfortunately, there is a distinct tendency for this kind of instructional design to drift towards content-centrism, rather than student-centrism.  If you have a list of technical competencies that learners are supposed to master by the end of the course, it becomes easy just to teach those competencies as they are laid out in the source material.  The hard work of thinking through the material from the student's perspective, what they want to learn when and why, never gets done.  This produces less-effective learning materials.

Specifying learning objectives may not rectify this matter.  It becomes easy just to re-dress competencies in learning-objective lingo.  The instructional sequence can still be quite program-centric, and the rationale given to the learners for that sequence may still be framed in terms of the structure of the material, rather than according to their needs and desires to learn.

The Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division worked with subject matter experts from government, the private sector, and academia to develop an umbrella framework that establishes a national baseline representing the essential knowledge and skills IT security practitioners must have to perform their jobs. The IT Security EBK builds directly on established work and is not intended to represent a standard, directive, or policy by DHS. Instead, it further clarifies key IT security terms and concepts for well-defined competencies, identifies notional security roles, and defines primary functional perspectives to help advance the IT security training and certification landscape as we strive to ensure that we have the most qualified and appropriately trained IT security workforce possible.

A Federal Register Notice has been published for the Department of Homeland Security's "Information Technology (IT) Security Essential Body of Knowledge (EBK): A Competency and Functional Framework for IT Security Workforce Development." The deadline for comments is December 7, 2007.

According to the Notice:

More information, including a downloadable version of the IT Security EBK, is available at http://www.us-cert.gov/ITSecurityEBK/

Use of digital video is exploding in UK higher education, both as a tool for teaching but also as a topic for research -- and in the arts and humanities, as well as the sciences. New meta-search tools like PureVideo are making video content newly accessible to researchers and institutions. Organisations like JISC, AHDS and the British Universities' Film and Video Council are helping to set up open-access video archives for education. There's a whole constellation of factors at work (technological developments, affordability, licensing agreements, etc.), jointly conspiring to make digital video an emergent key research tool.

What particularly interests me in all this is that film and video, as research tools but also as research subjects in their own right, have broken free of the boundaries of disciplines like Media Studies, Design, and Journalism. In the humanities, digital video is now of significant interest to historians, political scientists, performing arts specialists, literary scholars, architects--in fact, the whole scholarly battalion. In Cambridge, high demand has led to establishment of a new graduate degree programme in Screen Media, and a cluster of associated research seminars. At a graduate training seminar I gave recently, I couldn't keep up with the video-related questions fired at me by the students.

Implementing a HIPAA Security Rule Training Program for System Administrators at East Carolina University.    Carol Davis, DRP Coordinator, East Carolina University

 

This session walked us through the planning and implementation process that created a training program for systems administrators at ECU for the HIPAA Security Rule.  The program was added to a privacy program that already existed but was in need of revision.  A key resource was the SANS Press HIPAA Security Implementation book.

 

Key questions for the planning process were

• What is the training?
• Who needs the training?
• What are the overall project alternatives?
• How will it be delivered?
• What will the cost be?
• What is the “completion” point?
• How will effectiveness be measured?
• How often must the training be taken?
• Who will do the Public Relations on the project and what will be included?
• Who will continue to update the training content and monitor?

The project was developed over three months using their HIPAA Committee as the key advisory group.  This committee developed the policies for the project.   Time was spent on fully understanding the rule sets: the privacy rule, the transaction and code set rule, and the security rule.  Technical safeguards and related policies were to be included in the training.  Initial options considered included purchasing a full set of modules or customizing the training using Blackboard which was already an established resource. 

 

Awareness training was to be included for all members of their health care workforce including management.  Visitors and students complete an abbreviated version of the training and students take a web-based quiz and take the results to their faculty.

 

The course objectives were:

• Familiarity with HIPAA and the security rule
• Understanding rule sets
• Understanding why both Privacy and Security rules are needed
• Understanding how the rule applies to the trainee.
• Understanding safeguards
• Review of security policies
• Understanding technical security awareness
• Understanding individual responsibility for protecting health information

 

The content was created in five sections:

• Overview and structure
• Security rule principles
• ITCS safeguards
• Security awareness
• Security incident notifications

 

A Blackboard course was populated & information on the program was distributed

Training guidelines were provided electronically and course deadlines were included

Management helped to ensure course completion.

 

Current knowledge was sampled by having administrators complete the quiz before the online training and again afterwards.  The specific training assessment is a quiz of 10 questions based on HIPAA privacy but concentrating on security specifics.  Instant feedback is provided for both correct and incorrect answers.  The training and quiz can be retaken to improve learning.  Certificates are awarded for 80% or better scores.  The certificates are popular and being hung on office walls and added to resumes.

 

Each person taking the training is asked to complete an evaluation survey that includes the question of the application of the training to their position and a blank field for additional comments. 

 

The latest phase is to more fully utilize Blackboard with one training package that includes two modules and to incorporate student training into the system as well as reviewing role-based training opportunities.  HR is assisting in identifying new departments or individual positions that require compliancy or other special training.  And, of course, the training content is continually reviewed and revised when appropriate.

 

HIPAA Security Rule Training – presentation slides

 

HIPAA System Admin Training Guidelines – 4 page document – instructions for training program.

This 50 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled 64 Campuses, One Central Organization for Training and Professional Development.

This 51 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Learning Mania: A How-To Guide to Revitalize and Transform Online Staff Training and Development.

One part of my job as Instructional Program Manager is to help faculty members develop pedagogical strategies that work effectively in an online environment. There are a number of challenges to this, and the primary one is probably the looming presence of the technology itself: that is, the complex and powerful online course management system is there in front of the instructors -- they can almost stub their toe on it -- and so when they start to think about incorporating an online component into one of their face-to-face courses, the first thing that comes into their mind is "how do I use the technology" rather than "what do I do with the technology." In other words, they are well aware that they need guidance and probably even training with regard to the nuts and bolts aspects of logging on, making online quizzes, using the online gradebook, and so on. But this focus on the technology AS technology causes them to overlook less tangible things, such as the need to develop new pedagogical approaches, and the need (and opportunity) to make online learning as active and student-centred as possible. On a day to day basis, this problem is manifested in the fact that many of our faculty mistakenly think that our unit -- The Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology (LT3)-- is a kind of "technology help desk," the place that they phone when they are having a problem with a computer or with software. In short, it's lamentable that LT3 sometimes gets confused with IST (Information and Systems Technology); and sometimes we are also confused with other quite distinct units, such as Distance Education.