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CBT/EPSS - Formación asistida por computadora/Ayudas electrónicas

Web-Based Training and Education Resources
by Eric E. Smith, Ph. D
New Mexico Chapter

In this, the final installment in the series on resources of value to the training designer and developer charged with developing and implementing. Web-based training, I thought I would focus on sites related directly to training and education. In the previous columns, we have examined resources for research, computer-mediated communication, and intranets. All of these are critical to the succes of any Web-based training or instructional endeavor. But, what about information about training and learning itself? As it turns out, our problem isn't how to find such information, but how to decide which of the thousands of sites available will be of greatest value to us.

One approach is to follow some of professional associations that are involved in the field. For example, the Ispi Web site is www.ispi.org and the ASTD Web site is www.astd.org. Both are excellent resources for what is happening in the training and management fields. And many of us belong to both. But these are not the only professional associations worth checking out.

You may find the Association for the Advacement of Computing in Education (aace.virgina.edu/aace/home.htm) and the American Management Asociation www.amanet.org to be excellent resources for educational uses and research (AACE) and management concerns for communication and training (AMA). EDUCAUSE (formerly Educom and CAUSE) at www.educase.edu is also and excellent resource, particularly for people in higher education. Indeed, there are far too many professional associations to list in this column. Whatever your discipline, you will find it helpful to follow your associations and even to share what you learn with them.

If we look beyond the associations, we will find a number of sites that are specific to training and education. Some are commercial sites, so we must be careful of bias, while others are presented as a service to the field or because they are funded as research / resource laboratories. I will mention just a few of those that I have found quite useful over the last year or two.

One of the first place I look, not necessarily for information, but for connections is the WBC Information Center www.filename.com/wbt/index.html. While I might argue with some of the theory, the connections and discussions are quite valuable. The Training SuperSite www.trainingsupersite.com is another excellent resource for links of value to the training designer and developer or even manager.

For an academic perspective, the Learning Research and Development Center http://alan.lrdc.pitt.edu/lrdc at the University of Pittsburg and The American Center for the Study of Distance Education www.cde.psu.edu/acsde/default.html at the Pennsylvaania State Universityare great places to start. You may also find some of the regional educaion laboratories, like Midcontinent Regional Educational Educational Laboratory www.mcrel.org to be of value. They are funded by the US government and charged with researching, among other things, how to effectively use technology in the educational process. While they focus on education, principally public, they do provide information of value to the trianing field.

As you can see from this list, there are many resources directly related to what we do in the perfomance field. In this case, I focused on resources of value in training and education. But, a similar list could be developed for any part of the human performance disciplines.

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