Foundational Training in Family Literacy The Centre for Family Literacy in Alberta, in collaboration with a pan-Canadian advisory group, developed national Foundational Training in Family Literacy. The goals of this training are to provide a common base of knowledge to family literacy practitioners across Canada and to give professional credibility to the field. This nationally recognized training is now being offered all across this country by various organizations. In 2002/2003, Community Literacy of Ontario received funding from MTCU and NLS to offer national Foundational Training in Family Literacy to 21 community-based literacy practitioners across Ontario. Evaluations and feedback from those course participants were extremely positive. A detailed evaluation summary report is available on CLO’s website. Based on this feedback and the number of ongoing inquiries that CLO received about the course, CLO received funding from the National Literacy Secretariat to re-deliver the training in 2003/2004. From January to June 2004, the Foundational Training in Family Literacy was delivered online to 23 participants working in literacy agencies and Early Years Centres across Ontario. CLO’s intensive online training took place once per month from January to June 2004. Each module was four hours in length. Our dedicated participants further augmented this rigorous online training with self-study of the course manual, homework assignments, supplementary readings and an online discussion group on AlphaCom. CLO’s online training was based upon the 10-chapter, 370-page Foundational Training in Family Literacy course manual. An anonymous, online evaluation was included at the end of each of the six workshops. The response rates were quite high with over 90% of participants completing the evaluations each month (the one exception being Module 4 where a technical glitch made it impossible for some people to access the online evaluation). Workshop content and facilitation were evaluated at the end of each of the six workshops, but other questions were asked at different points in time to evaluate various workshop components. The sixth module also included the opportunity for participants to take a more global look at the course as a whole rather than just at the specific module. Throughout the course, modifications were made based on the feedback received from the evaluations. |