POST Logs More Than 13,000 Peace Officer Users
<p><strong>Salt Lake City — Oct. 31</strong><br />Finding time to train is difficult, especially when you are a peace officer in a remote area, but that is changing with the introduction of a learning portal and online training from Allen. In fact, since the portal began operation two years ago, almost 13,500 users have taken the training in the Allen portal.<br /><br />Before the portal was introduced in 2005, only a few thousand CD-ROM training courses had been completed in the seven years since its unveiling. This was largely due to trouble ordering the CD-ROMs, equipment malfunctions, or the misplacement or damage of existing disks. POST came to Allen to discover a better way to provide quality training to its large widely dispersed peace officers.<br /><br />Through a thorough needs analysis of POST’s challenges, Allen created a learning portal that could manage the 90,000-plus possible users by tracking courses taken and learning assessments. Then Allen converted three CD-ROM of POST’s highest-demand training courses — Communications, First-Aid, and Terrorism — to Web-based versions, enabling learners to take the courses on their own, whenever and wherever they have access to the Internet. <br /><br />“Agencies find the portal and online training courses convenient. The most popular reason users like online training is the ability to return and finish it later without losing their place,” states Richard Dunn, senior instructional systems engineer of POST in California. “It is hard for peace officers to take several hours out of their schedule for training, and this approach lets them do it when they have down time.” <br /><br />Based on the success of this portal and the popularity of taking courses online, Allen and POST are in the process of creating a Search Warrant training prototype. This prototype could help POST receive much needed government grant money to develop an online course helping officers generate effective search warrants in less time.<br /><br />“The use of technology for the deployment of more effective training is a must,” states Ron Zamir, CEO of Allen. “Allen specializes in providing custom solutions that go beyond the product-based course management solutions.” </p>
