Online Training for Fire and EMS

Who is it Appropriate for…and Why?

By Don Chambers

Background:

Anyone actively involved in the Fire Service and EMS today knows how much the job has changed in the past 20 years or so. The tasks of fire suppression, basic rescue and emergency medical care have evolved into increasingly sophisticated actions requiring skills and training virtually unknown just a few years ago. 

In addition to “the basics,” we now have HAZMAT, technical rescue, ALS, special ops, new and challenging extrication procedures as vehicles become more complex, exposure to bloodborne pathogens, etc., as well as the continuing challenge of responding to hotter and more dangerous fires with fewer people. And with increasingly complex incidents come new dangers to be faced by responders and new standards of training and compliance.

The Role of the Training Officer:

“Whatever happened to On-the-Job Training?” we ask ourselves. The good news is that it is alive and well in today’s emergency services, as it should be. The bad news is that it is simply no longer enough to stand alone as it did in years gone by. As the changing nature of the Fire Service and EMS plays out for command staff at a fire, MVA or some other incident, the responsibility to prepare responders for whatever they may encounter at the scene falls squarely on the shoulders of the training officer.

The greatest challenge training officers face today is how to not only have the time to develop and deliver the required courses and training evolutions, but then track and record the assessment process to maintain an accurate record of who is and who is not up-to-date and compliant with the established standards.

Time…time…time:

It seems like there’s never enough! Indeed, there’s nothing new about the challenges of time management in an educational setting. Teachers never have enough time to get done all that they would like accomplish. Years ago, while working on a MAT degree in night school, I was by day a special education teacher with a self-contained classroom for emotionally disturbed adolescents. Yup…I know what you’re thinking, ‘cause I’ve lost count of how often I’ve heard it before: that job was the perfect preparation for teaching and training in the Fire Service!

Anyway, because some of the funding for our program was from a federal grant with performance expectations and renewal contingencies, there was a lot of documentation of individual education plans (think strategies), specific educational objectives (think tactics), materials chosen and rationale, assessment procedures, progress made vs. goals, and so on. These are the very same challenges faced by today’s training officers in the Fire Service and EMS, and this is precisely where online training can be incredibly helpful.

The Dreaded C-word…again:

If you read my article last year about too little water and not enough people on the fireground, you already know what that word is: CHANGE. My experience in the Fire Service leads me to observe that while most of us want the latest and greatest gizmos that will make our jobs easier, and perhaps even make us safer, we are reluctant to embrace change if it means doing things differently. And I’ve never been able to reconcile the disparity of those two attitudes. And speaking of attitudes, you may know this guy (By the way, I use “guy” without regard to actual gender because it’s part of our vernacular and convenient for me):

“Hey, listen to me…this is a hands-on job!...it always has been…always will be…computers and the Internet have their place, I’ll give ya that…but they won’t teach ya how to muscle a 2½-inch line up a stairwell or pop a lock with a K-tool.”

Now then, before you start looking for the door so you can escort this guy back to the Neanderthal Period, consider this: he’s right! And he’s ignorant. Not stupid, mind you…but completely uninformed. He’s right because the truth is, the Job is largely hands-on. It requires physical strength, physical stamina, emotional stability, immense courage, the ability to think fast and act fast…hey, you know what I mean. But he’s ignorant because he’s refusing to acknowledge the degree to which the job has changed since he came on board 30 years ago! And he’s not considering how much he’s learned…run after run…day after day…year after year. Noticing those changes requires skills of observation and perspective, and some folks just don’t have ‘em. That’s just the way it is, as the song goes.

Online Training for Fire and EMS:

So just what do we mean by online training? Well, before we consider that question, let’s agree on what we mean by training itself. Grab your dictionary if you must, but may I offer my definition? I define training as the interaction between a student and instructor to develop a demonstrable understanding of a body of information and/or competency on a piece of equipment, including tools, appliances, apparatus and so forth. Does that work for you?

The key word is interaction. It implies a dialog between the student and the instructor or device, whether in a classroom or a hands-on situation. It implies a change in one’s understanding or behavior: simply put, you know something or know how to do something at the end of the training that you did not know before. Does that make sense? 

The other key word is demonstrable. It implies that you must demonstrate with some form of test or evaluation that you really have learned what you were supposed to learn. That’s what separates learning from training. Learning is an internal/cognitive event or an external/kinesthetic act that can occur in isolation, outside a training environment.

So if you go to the library and read a book, is that training? No. You may be entertained or informed or even inspired and enlightened, but there’s no interaction as described above. If you sit alone in the day room or classroom in your firehouse and read a manual about pump operations, are you being trained? No. Again, there’s no dialog or interaction and no assessment going on. 

But…if you use that same manual in a classroom or drill yard with an instructor who is asking you questions and answering your questions and then tests you at the end of the day to see what you have learned, is that training? You bet it is!

Now let’s consider online training. If I go on the internet and look at a fire-related video, is that online training? No…there’s no instruction or evaluation going on. If I download an article or other material from a website, print it out and distribute it to my people in class and then give them a simple test, would that be online training? No…because even though you’ve added instruction and evaluation to the scenario, it’s not happening online. Obtaining courses and activities—what I call content— from the Internet is not the same as real online training.

Genuine online training provides the individual with practical content from an established and recognized organization or agency, delivers that course or activity over the internet with real-time assessment embedded in the material—including the opportunity to ask questions and get  answers—and a required evaluation of the individual’s knowledge and understanding at the end of the course. And all of that happens online.

But there’s more to online training than delivering educational material. Genuine online training provides the training officer with management tools that record the progress of every individual he/she is responsible for: who has taken assigned courses, who has not; who has passed the tests, who has not; who is up-to-date with assignments, who is not. In other words, all the information that is filed in your training office and accessed manually from a drawer in a filing cabinet is available online from a platform over which you have complete control. 

As important as record keeping is, the less time you have to spend pushing pieces of paper into file folders in a drawer, the more time you will have to do what you really became a training officer for: develop and deliver the best training material and activities you can for your people.

The truth is there are no panaceas or shortcuts in this business. But online training can save the Training Officer valuable time. It can actually save the organization money as it reduces travel time, fuel cost, overtime and callbacks, etc. And as we make the management of courses and accountability more efficient, we make our people safer on the job. Think about that: that really is the bottom line, after all—safety.

In the stairwell of the training academy of a major metropolitan fire department hangs a stately wooden plaque with this message:

Let no man’s ghost come back to say “My training let me down!” – Kassimoff

And isn’t that, after all, why we are fire instructors? Stay safe, brothers and sisters.

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