Online Training Creates Opportunities, Obstacles in Delivery
More than 10,600 Kentucky law enforcement and dispatch clients depend on the Department of Criminal Justice Training (DOCJT) to deliver the knowledge and skills needed to do their jobs safely and effectively.
It’s a tall order for law enforcement recruits to learn the skill, for example, of properly operating a handgun while simultaneously navigating the legal system’s requirements for how to deploy it. For our clients to perform definitively, DOCJT must ensure that the provided instruction is comprehensive, concrete, and credible.
“It needs to be purposeful,” said DOCJT Staff Assistant Patrick Miller, who has been a part of designing and creating both online and classroom training at DOCJT for more than two decades. “It needs to be what’s best for the student learning experience, not what is the easiest.”
The first Distance Learning courses went live at DOCJT in 2005, but online training delivery has evolved significantly in 16 years. DOCJT training staff actively pursue new ways to offer courses online, even taking the initiative to educate themselves about effective online teaching. But training interruptions created by Covid-19 fast-tracked the process.
More than 7,000 DOCJT students completed their annual training online in 2020 when Covid-19 risks shut down in-person training and limited the department’s options for providing statutorily mandated annual in-service training. DOCJT staff developed an 8-hour course entitled Ethical Policing in Contemporary Times to ensure every certified officer in the state met their training mandates.
“We are listening to our clients, who are telling us they want more online training,” said DOCJT Commissioner Nicolai Jilek. “We are fully committed to providing this option and taking the time to make sure we do it well, and we do it right.”
In October 2020, DOCJT invested $750,000 into a learning-management system called Blackboard, a company well known in the tech industry for being the backbone of online educational content. The originally planned implementation date for this system was July 2021. Still, DOCJT saw a need in providing immediate training to clients who were unable to complete annual statutory requirements and were in jeopardy of losing their police powers at the end of the year.
DOCJT staff developed a virtually streamed course by November 2020 to ensure this didn’t happen.
“We took our courses, Blackboard presentations, guest speakers, and we copied everything into the Blackboard format,” said DOCJT Instructor Jim Root, who attended faculty development classes at Eastern Kentucky University to bring those online-training skills over to DOCJT. “It’s like walking into a classroom, but it’s virtual. They can see us, we can see them, and they can verbally chat with us or do it through a text box.”
DOCJT is offering and developing online courses to be available in three ways:
Synchronously: learning that takes place in real-time with an instructor, allowing learners to engage with one another.
Asynchronously: takes place in settings that do not require participants or instructors to be engaged simultaneously.
Blended: a portion of the class is offered synchronously, but participants have requirements, such as pre-course assignments or homework, that can be completed on their own time.
“It’s certainly more conducive for people from remote areas to get training,” Root said. “They don’t have to travel. There’s less cost to the sheriff’s office or chiefs, and they’re not paying per diem or all these other things. So, the students really liked it.”
Thirteen courses, ranging from law enforcement recruitment and retention to child abuse investigations, have been or will be taught synchronously online in 2021. Seats for these classes range from 75 to 100 students per class. While DOCJT has seen great successes thus far in developing these options, there are three significant obstacles in the progression of online training:
More DOCJT training staff must be hired and trained to create and provide effective online courses.
Clients must have technology and permissions in place to succeed.
Not all training should be online.
Staff training and availability
DOCJT employs 70 training instructors who each must be trained in the Blackboard system and the appropriate creation and instruction of online content. To assist with this process, DOCJT revived the Instructional Design Section to ensure the highest quality of training and instructional staff at DOCJT. They will provide support to the Training Operations Division in the following ways:
Analysis: Identify specific course training needs to ensure all training will be valuable and necessary for DOCJT’s clients. Additionally, it includes information about the course that will help clients increase their safety, learn techniques to perform their duties better and obtain the necessary skills and knowledge to serve the state’s diverse communities.
Design: assist instructors in curriculum creation and course planning that better meets identified training needs.
Development: assist in the creation of quality lessons, assessments and training materials. This could include the creation and use of PowerPoint presentations, videos, handouts, etc.
Implementation: monitor courses taught and provide feedback for improvement regularly.
Evaluation: assist instructors in creating quality assessments and evaluating student feedback to measure student learning and improve the quality of future training.
DOCJT is working toward hiring staff to fill the new Instructional Design Section. Additionally, online courses create more staffing demands. While one instructor may be assigned to teach an in-person class, online synchronous classes require a team of at least three staff members – one to instruct, one to facilitate and one IT person to navigate technology issues – per every 30 students. More facilitators are required the larger the class size. This increased staffing demand when DOCJT is already managing an instructor shortage has accentuated this obstacle.
“Everyone says, ‘Just put it online,’ and you can’t,” Miller said. “There are tech issues, staff issues, learning issues, and student issues. So, we need to be purposeful about what, how and when we evolve into distance learning. Unlike in the past, I don’t think anybody is doubting we are moving in this direction. But not everything needs to be online.”
Root noted that the synchronous courses he has taught thus far had experienced roughly the same student participation. However, much of that must be drawn out through facilitators engaging students and checking in with them throughout the course to make sure they’re present and participating and grasping the presented concepts.
Client needs
DOCJT provides training to all 120 counties in the Commonwealth, and our clients range from one-officer police departments to 1,200-officer agencies. Law enforcement and dispatchers serve in areas from the most rural and mountainous corners of the state to bustling urban metropolises. Online training must be accessible to all.
Better internet is part of Gov. Andy Beshear’s Better Kentucky plan, prioritizing bringing high-speed internet to areas without current access to broadband or those providing 10 Mbps or less download speeds. However, not all our communities have yet reached these goals.
“We have to give our clients time to make sure they have proper internet and connectivity,” said Frank Kubala, DOCJT Training Operations Director. “Internet speeds, buffering speeds and downloads are all issues. Agency computer settings and restrictions also are an issue.”
The learning process for deploying online training has revealed that some clients log in for online training and cannot access the materials because their computers won’t accept certain types of files or they don’t have administrative permissions to change computer settings that allow them access.
“Then we have students who are signed up for a class they can’t get into,” said Mike Keyser, DOCJT Systems Consultant. “It happens a lot with larger agencies that have bigger networks.”
Education vs. training
DOCJT provides adult education, much of which is well-suited for the online format. However, it also provides extensive skills training which must be performed and tested to ensure student safety and effectiveness in their communities.
“Everybody keeps saying you can get a Ph.D. online through universities, and you can,” Kubala said. “That is education. We are training. Education deals with cognitive learning. So, do we, but we also deal with performance. Anything that is going to have a performance-related aspect to it will have to be taught in person, at least in some way. Firearms, driving and tactical skills, even crime-scene related skills, all require a practical application.”
As a training institution, Miller agreed that DOCJT cannot afford to only offer knowledge-based training to law enforcement officers.
“Knowledge without understanding is worthless,” Miller said. “Take legal, for example. We can teach you the KRS statute and case law, but can you apply it? To do this job, we have to put them out in a scenario and teach them how to apply the knowledge in a real-life situation.”