Staff Perspective: Live Online PE Training, Part 2
Last Thursday and Friday, the Center for Deployment Psychology held an online training in Prolonged Exposure Therapy via Second Life. The CDP’s virtual education center played host to a group of providers from around the country as they were instructed in the methods of PE through slides, videos and interactive role-playing elements with their fellow workshop participants. CDP trainers, Dr. Kevin Holloway and Dr. Kelly Chrestman, led the training event in the virtual world.
If you’ve been following our blog updates, you’ll know this has been a goal for a while now. We’ve been working towards this point for several months. We began piloting online training workshops in evidence-based therapies back at the beginning of the year. Last month, we held our first online training in PE for continuing education credits. We used Adobe Connect teleconferencing software to facilitate that session. This time we raised the bar even higher, using Second Life to deliver a virtual conference.
It was, and still is, quite a challenge to transition from our traditional face-to-face training style to presenting to an audience that’s thousands of miles away! It’s a big adjustment in a variety of ways, ranging from how our presenters interact with the audience to how the audience interacts with each other, to the distribution of handouts and media.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the high-quality training and information that is delivered to participants. That’s one element we wanted to keep the exact same as our in-person training. Judging from the feedback we’ve received from the participants in our recent online training endeavors, we’ve succeeded! This is so vitally important because we realized that in an era of shrinking budgets and increasing travel restrictions, it’s often difficult for providers to travel to attend a training. To accommodate this, the CDP is doing everything we can to use technology to increase the accessibility of our training for providers everywhere.
Our participants weren’t the only one who were educated over the two days at the workshop. We here at the CDP also learned quite a bit! We’re planning on using this new knowledge to improve future workshop and make them even better for everyone involved. We’ll be expanding our topic offerings and increasing the size of the workshops to allow even more providers to attend these sessions. As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas about specific training types or topics that you’d like to see the CDP offer, please feel free to drop us a line via the “Contact Us” link at the top of the screen or send an email to General@deploymentpsych.org. Keep an eye on our training calendar for the latest news on upcoming online events. We hope to “see” you soon in one!
Mr. Chris Adams is the CDP’s Project Manager for Online Services.
Last Thursday and Friday, the Center for Deployment Psychology held an online training in Prolonged Exposure Therapy via Second Life. The CDP’s virtual education center played host to a group of providers from around the country as they were instructed in the methods of PE through slides, videos and interactive role-playing elements with their fellow workshop participants. CDP trainers, Dr. Kevin Holloway and Dr. Kelly Chrestman, led the training event in the virtual world.
If you’ve been following our blog updates, you’ll know this has been a goal for a while now. We’ve been working towards this point for several months. We began piloting online training workshops in evidence-based therapies back at the beginning of the year. Last month, we held our first online training in PE for continuing education credits. We used Adobe Connect teleconferencing software to facilitate that session. This time we raised the bar even higher, using Second Life to deliver a virtual conference.
It was, and still is, quite a challenge to transition from our traditional face-to-face training style to presenting to an audience that’s thousands of miles away! It’s a big adjustment in a variety of ways, ranging from how our presenters interact with the audience to how the audience interacts with each other, to the distribution of handouts and media.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the high-quality training and information that is delivered to participants. That’s one element we wanted to keep the exact same as our in-person training. Judging from the feedback we’ve received from the participants in our recent online training endeavors, we’ve succeeded! This is so vitally important because we realized that in an era of shrinking budgets and increasing travel restrictions, it’s often difficult for providers to travel to attend a training. To accommodate this, the CDP is doing everything we can to use technology to increase the accessibility of our training for providers everywhere.
Our participants weren’t the only one who were educated over the two days at the workshop. We here at the CDP also learned quite a bit! We’re planning on using this new knowledge to improve future workshop and make them even better for everyone involved. We’ll be expanding our topic offerings and increasing the size of the workshops to allow even more providers to attend these sessions. As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas about specific training types or topics that you’d like to see the CDP offer, please feel free to drop us a line via the “Contact Us” link at the top of the screen or send an email to General@deploymentpsych.org. Keep an eye on our training calendar for the latest news on upcoming online events. We hope to “see” you soon in one!
Mr. Chris Adams is the CDP’s Project Manager for Online Services.