E-crisis management training
Within the rapidly changing technological environment, training and education of personnel is one of the major priorities for corporations and organizations. Especially for organizations that manage crisis situations like fire brigade and police, continuous training plays an even more crucial and dynamic role. At the same time new technologies can reduce the overall educational costs by minimizing or almost eliminating the expenses for transportation and accommodation, as well as for development, maintenance and regular updates of educational material. Focusing on crisis management education and training, the GATE project, developed a software tool that provides tutors with a user-friendly and easy to use educational presentation building program, and the tutees with a remotely access interactive learning facility. The Multimedia e-Training software enables domain experts without programming skills to develop their own educational multimedia courses. The courses can be structured in a way that apart from the core educational part, promote simulations of realistic scenarios allowing the students to manage realistic emergency situations and to act as crisis managers. The developed courses are stored in a central server and can be accessed through intranet or Internet with common navigation programs such as Internet Explorer©. The program also keeps track of the students' activities in a log file. The collected data could be used for self-assessment, tutor-assessment and certification as well as for feedback for the scenarios' improvements. The software has already been used for firemen training with excellent educational results. Compared to the conventional face to face courses, the program has two major advantages: the trainees can have access to the educational material any time they want and that the training costs are significantly reduced.
