Training principles

To introduce the discussion of online training, we offer here the five key principles that emerge from our on-going study of the online training program that we developed for Smarthinking, Inc., an online learning center. Specifically, we will discuss the benefits of grounding a training and professional development program in commonly-held educational principles and practical activities that online training necessitates: investigation, immersion, individualization, association, and reflection into the online training processes and experiences. Our discussion of principle-centered training for online writing instruction (OWI) is adapted from Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes (2004).

One of our goals in offering this synopsis is to underscore the theories and concepts that ground our training program. However, our purpose is not to hold it up as a definitive model for other programs, although we hope that other educators from different institutional settings will find it helpful. Instead, we want to use the underpinnings of our program to demonstrate how important it is for educators and program administrators to examine their own programmatic underpinnings and/or to consider how they want to ground the programs they are developing.

This synopsis of our training program explicitly examines and values the principles and processes that other training programs may, in fact, engage. We think that an explicit demonstration of these principles and processes may help readers to investigate, reflect upon, and improve or build upon the principles and processes that implicitly ground both their online training programs and their thinking about such programs overall.

In separate nodes, we present each of the five principles. Then, we offer a scenario of a hypothetical online instructor, instructor-trainer, or administrator who would benefit from engaging that particular principle. We invite readers to consider these scenarios as an invitation and opening to writing about and sharing their own online training program's principles and processes.