Technology: Moving Our Mission Forward  

HHD’s mission is to promote healthy human development. An important aspect of this work is to provide policy makers, health practitioners, and other professionals with up-to-date, research-based information about health promotion and disease prevention, and also create opportunities to build their skills around “best practices”.

Conveying pertinent information and finding ways to build the skills of professionals spread out across the globe is quite a challenge. Fortunately, information and communications technology offers us new avenues to meet these goals.

As the quality and cost-effectiveness of distance learning increases, acceptance and interest in this type of training is growing among both practitioners and funders. Several HHD projects currently deliver online courses.  One of them, CSAP’s Northeast Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies (NECAPT) which works with state- and local-level substance abuse prevention practitioners, has developed a menu of online courses focusing on different aspects of substance abuse prevention. In just four years, almost 1,300 practitioners in the northeast region have participated in NECAPT’s online courses. For those who live in remote areas or operate on small budgets, Web-based courses provide a low cost and convenient way to access important information as well as connect with colleagues doing similar work. 

Valerie Herres, a Program Director in rural northern New Hampshire, has found the online courses very useful. “One of the wonderful things about these trainings is that I always learn something new: a strategy, attitude, or experience from others.”

According to Peter Bergh, HHD’s Director of Technology, “Advances in technology are also providing us with new options to bring key learning principles to life to make our trainings, courses, presentations, and web sites more engaging and interactive. This stimulates learning and skill-building.”

Whether the health issue is substance abuse, suicide, or bullying, HHD is meeting the expressed need for skills-based training and resources that are participatory, flexible, and easy to access. For instance, using a program called Captivate, powerpoint presentations can now come to life through the use of animation, audio voice-overs, and quizzes that require responses from viewers. Additionally, Captivate does not rely on programmers and can easily be used by staff who create the content for trainings, courses, and presentations. The result is more rapid and higher quality training and course development at a lower cost. A number of HHD’s projects are effectively using this technology, capturing our collective knowledge and making key information accessible to many people simultaneously with good results.
 
“We are seeing positive learning outcomes with those who are using our technology-based resources,” Bergh confirms. “They like it, they are gaining new knowledge and skills, and they are using what they’ve learned.” HHD will continue to explore new ways to use technology to further the work that we do.

July 7, 2008