So last week I made a snarky picture post about this brochure that offered "Free Terrorism Web-Based Courses".
This week I signed up for the courses offered in the brochure and it all amounts to a pretty complete system for mass training of people so that they know what the hell to do in the event of an emergency. Note that I said "system"– I haven’t taken a course yet, so I don’t know about the content.
Here’s what they have to say about it:
Welcome to the American Red Cross and Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Grants and
Training Pilot for staff and volunteers of non-governmental organizations. The
online course that you are about to take is the first of a six course pilot
program on providing response and relief services when a Weapons of Mass
Destruction and Terrorism incident occurs. We encourage you to take all six
courses in the pilot program.
I haven’t started the first course yet, but I can comment on the way they’ve put them together as a general platform for training on Open Source Emergency Response:
- They say that you have to be a member of a non-governmental entity to sign up, but they don’t check that you are
- They use the Plateau Learning Management System, which seems reasonably full-featured in that they allow you to self-register, "purchase" courses and add them to your "Development Plan". It also tracks prerequisites for courses and the progress you’ve made in each individual course
- They use Zoomerang for an initial survey of how much experience you have with the subject matter
- The course content itself is created by an outfit called Pearson Performance Solutions. An initial take on it looks like it has good production values, with voiceover,good design, authored in Flash, etc. Here’s a look at a screen from that:
Here’s my Development Plan:
Red Cross Terrorism Preparedness Courses, originally uploaded by juggernautco. More info as I run through it…