Social Workers and Distance Learning: How We Put the Social Back Into Distance

This is a story of how distance learning technology and a little good old-fashioned instructional design brought personalized training to Child Protective Services' caseworkers across Texas while saving the state hundreds of thousands of dollars. Child protective services (CPS) is the type of profession that draws from people who want to make a change in the world. Caseworkers are willing to go out every day, often putting themselves in dangerous situations, in order to provide for the safety of other people's families. In Texas, a state with some of the largest expanses of rural areas as well as some of the largest urban areas in the nation, caseworkers spend much of their day traveling from one location to another. In the training department we are tasked with finding ways to provide caseworkers with the training they need to be successful on the jobs, without requiring undue amounts of additional travel or overburdening their already hectic daily schedules. At the same time, we in the training department have a responsibility to design training experiences that adhere to the current research in learning acquisition and transfer.