ATSSA Signal March/April 2019

American Traffic Safety Services Association 30 Training News ATSSA Training Transformation in ATSSA training ATSSA’s high quality training has prepared workers in the roadway safe- ty infrastructure industry for nearly 50 years—and, in the near future, mem- bers can expect innovations that will transform ATSSA’s training across the country. ATSSA’s Director of Training Jessica Scheyder shared that the association will be working on refreshing online course material, enhancing the content, and making it more responsive for all learners. “We look forward to sharing several new and exciting training opportunities over the next few years,” said Scheyder. Scheyder said that ATSSA will be work- ing to convert classroom courses so that they can be taken online, giving students more options. “Our goal is to make our training more accessible for learners across the country. Right now, we have several training courses people would like, but they can’t necessarily take them because the specific courses aren’t sched- uled in their area, so this is going to help us reach them.” The rollout of a new database system is also improving ATSSA’s response time to students, and making sure grades are updated immediately. “Previously, when someone took a course, the grade came through to us in a report and we had to manually type it in to ev- eryone’s profile. Now with that automat- ed, it will significantly speed up our pro- cessing timeand response times ingeneral, and course participants will be getting their certification cardsmuch faster,” said Scheyder. To help facilitate the online expansion, ATSSA has brought on Training Devel- opment Manager Karen Jones. “ATSSA training is the best in the indus- try and having someone with over 20 years of experience in instructional de- sign take a microscope to our courses is a big benefit for ATSSAmembers. This will result in more training options for attendees, especially as we’re growing our online platform. And we’re not go- ing to forget about our in-person cours- es in the interim,” said Scheyder. By making more online courses avail- able to students, it gives them different options to learn and provides 24/7 ac- cess to course material. The goal is to have the first of many new online cours- es rolled out in early summer 2019. ...the associationwill beworking on refreshing online coursematerial, enhancing the content, andmaking it more responsive for all learners.