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My reservations reiterate largely Ian's comments – we have done numerous training programs over the past 5 years. Our training material has evolved significantly to reflect the changes in tooling and development of templates, querying, CKM etc to support the practical use and implementation. While this is still in a state of significant flux, and it is likely to be so for some years still, the training will be harder to standardise, but will become gradually easier. In addition, each of our training courses has been configured to reflect the needs/desires of the attendees and this creates an additional overhead that needs consideration.
[Thomas Beale] As someone who does training from time to time, it seems to me that the only way to certify anything is to design course modules with standardised known outcomes (by the end of this module you will have learned X, Y and Z) rather than trying to standardise what is in the material itself. Personally I find it really hard to standardise anything in this area, because how people learn a given fact depends a lot on their background, current challenges, how they arrived at their current role in an organisation and so on - how you talk to one group e.g. heavily hospital oriented, can be quite different from another, say, mobile nurses, let alone academic researchers, analytics people etc.
Anyway, as Heather says, I have also reduced the 'slides' part of course material a lot and added much more ad lib content based on tools. Also - it's amazing how some of the most important moments in a training course occur on the whiteboard - just to get a key idea across really clearly.
I think the future is some combination of self-learning modules of video material + class-room / webinar time. Each module (maybe 15 minutes, occasionally 30 mins) teaches just one or two key things. This kind of thing is obviously a big area today in e-learning, and I would think we need to rely on professional educators like Evelyn to provide advice on how we should devise training material for the future.
Evaluation criteria
TODO: for student certification
Governance, policy and funding
[Ian McNicoll] I think we could probably agree the core training requirements quite quickly but the real problem is how any certification process could be policed and funded.
Who trains the trainers, who checks that they are delivering the core content?
In Ocean we certainly have a set of core training materials but these are adapted and amended for every specific customer - the requirements for a clinical audience is somewhat different from a technical audience or mixed audience and time avaialble differs half-day, one day, three day?? ... and again for a vendor client vs. a national organisation. If we have 'certified training', to what extent does that prevent us from adapting content for specific clients and circumstances - I know this is the case for some UK training certification processes. it is one thing to specify the core requirements but quite another to ensure that these are being properly adhered to.
[Pablo Pazos] I think we could break down the problem into certification for students (what they have learned) and certification for trainers (who is validated by the foundation to give quality courses). E.g. a not certificated trainer could make a course for students to study for the certification evaluation, and if they pass, they receive a certification (as students). What is certified here is the evaluation process, not the course itself. The course and the evaluation could be different things, like in english courses (here we pay for a course, and if we want the certificate, we pay for the exam).
Obviously, a course given by a certified trainer could be more costly than a course given by a not-certified trainer, but students from both courses could be certified because de evaluation process is the same, and is supported by openEHR.org. I totally agree that certification processes should have a fee for the foundation, but I think the current funding model should change in order to do that (I participated in a discussion not so long ago where we discuss about funding and governance http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/Community+Governance).
[Carola Hullin] The feedback I got for my part of the world, The americas........the copy and paste approach does not work effectivelly and it got the potential to miss the opportunity to engage the right people for a sustanaible approach. Also, if they are a fee for these courses, I believe the openehr community as foundation should have a part of the profits that colleagues use this material.
Certification in the developing countries is not value as a quality asset , quite the opposite since they do not have much experience with this approach, they use as a commerical propaganda in order to see themselves as a global players.
It is the time to formalise the training approach from the foundation and ensure the rewards to all the hardwork is paid for. This manner the value of openehr is explicit and treat it the way it should be.