[LINK] From real emergency services training to 'virtual'

[Tom Worthington]

On 19/05/14 09:22, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> ... based online course instead of a hands on disaster management
> training centre. Someone's lost the plot. ...

Mt Macedon is officially called the Australian Emergency Management 
Institute (AEMI) and is a Registered Training Organisation: 
http://www.em.gov.au/Education/Courses/Nationallyrecognisedtraining/Pages/

Keep in mind this is management training. It is not about how to hold a 
fire hose, it is about how to conduct operations. They even have a 
course to "Develop and use political nous": http://www.em.gov.au/Education/

The AEMI has a campus with accommodation for 50 people, which must be 
very expensive to maintain. Most of the face-to-face classes, should be 
able to be replaced with e-learning, using software such as Moodle.

Some training may be by role playing a scenario. I have been a student 
of such an exercise at the Defence Staff College in Canberra. On a large 
screen we had maps of a fictional country and each played roles as 
senior military and government officials. We were handed "signals" and 
had to decided what to do.

An obvious way to do this part of disaster management training is to 
have the students in their own offices around Australia and use the same 
telecommunications as for a real emergency, to link then to the Canberra 
training centre. Trainees would then play roles for the scenario. But 
such exercises only form a small part of training and most will be just 
normal classes, delivered online, as is routinely done in Higher Education.

AETI charges $13,500 for a Diploma, or $1,500 per course. It will be 
interesting to see if these increase with the deregulation of Higher 
Education fees.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
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