Part of Brian Jacobsen's job as emergency medical services (EMS) coordinator for the Davenport, Iowa, Fire Department, is training the department's 140 firefighters, from the seven stations over 65 square miles. And presenting the same information to multiple classes has proven difficult.
From an instructor’s perspective, presenting the same content nine times can be pretty tedious, Jacobsen said. The result is that the content of each of those sessions is not consistent. “By class nine, an hour and half class got down to about 35 minutes. And so, we found that the same information wasn’t delivered on all [nine] times,” he said.
Jacobsen knew the training could be better and went looking for a solution.
Constantly Training
The training includes current EMS techniques, but the department also is constantly training in other subjects: fire science, hazardous materials response, required Occupational Safety and Health Administration training as well as city administrative policies and firefighters’ standard operating procedures. Additionally the department is in the process of ramping up a technical rescue team.
All that training poses quite a challenge considering the instructors and students also must respond to calls for service from a community of 100,000 residents, potentially leaving a class without an instructor or students who don’t get all the information. The department responded to 10,000 EMS calls in 2009.
“In order to do one hour of content, whether it’s an EMS class or a hands-on class, we end up doing it nine times over three days in order to catch the majority — and notice I said majority — of our personnel,” Jacobsen said. “So a typical day here would have you doing training at 9 o’clock, at 1 o’clock and again at 3:30 in the afternoon. The same content, three times over nine days — or over nine times.”
This also severely limited opportunities to bring outside experts in to conduct classes, who would also have to present the same content nine times over three days.
The Solution
With that in mind, in March 2009, Jacobsen went looking for an electronic learning solution that would help him get all the required content out to all 140 firefighters in an efficient manner.
Jacobsen settled on an e-learning management system from Adobe Systems called Connect Pro that includes video-conferencing capability and a learning management system that lets him see what each of his firefighters have studied and how well they did on their exams.
This solution allows him to give the class live once to all seven firehouses with interactive feedback, and then record it for playback by firefighters as part of a self-paced course. The video, along with any accompanying slides, can then be packaged with an exam to form a full course.
Jacobsen credits city leaders with signing off on the purchase of the solution that could provide training and facilitate collaboration across Davenport, including safety training for the Public Works Department personnel, coordination between the fire department and the 911 dispatch center, as well as improved coordination between a firehouse and an incident commander during a fire.
“We could have a dash cam in our district chief’s car. He could actually share what it is that he’s seeing on the emergency scene,” he said. “Someone in one of the unaffected stations could actually go in and pull up an aerial view of the incident. Plus if we have somebody there that can be snapping pictures, we can go ahead and load those in, with the goal of sharing that information with the personnel that may be coming in in a relief role.”
The fire department hasn’t implemented the system for that use yet. “But the more we use Connect the more ideas that we have to use it in a noneducation manner,” Jacobsen said.
