The pandemic is still a threat and all the precautions are just as necessary today as they were a couple of months back. Congregating in a packed room still carries a risk of transmitting the novel coronavirus. This is why training and learning is getting particularly difficult to manage. Especially law enforcement training.
Crime never takes a break and, therefore, neither can training police officers. But you also want to minimize the chances of police officers transmitting COVID-19. That’s why, to ensure prevention of COVID-19 among police officers, law enforcement academies should shift their focus to online law enforcement training.
In fact, if we step back and take a look, the pandemic is essentially reshaping the entire training and learning landscape, among the many other aspects of life.
Online training and learning had been making headway even before the coronavirus outbreak forced us apart. The value in remote learning has been recognized by many organizations the world over. It’s cheaper, easier and quicker than traditional, in-person learning. That’s because you don’t have to devote as much space, personnel and time to the online training process. You can have pre-recorded learning content that the learners can access at their convenience. Plus, learners can pace themselves according to their capacity and make the entire training and learning process more effective. Some may argue that remote learning lacks the human touch or real-time discussions between the instructor and the learners but that can be remedied by simply incorporating an occasional live stream or video conference.
The COVID-19 pandemic has further catalyzed the adoption of remote training. During this pandemic, you get the added benefit of everyone still having access to training content despite self-isolating and social distancing. In fact, you encourage people to maintain social distance by avoiding in-person training and adopting remote training instead. In other words, by adopting remote learning, you make sure that the world doesn’t stop even when the world does indeed stop
Let’s talk about online law enforcement training. By training police officers remotely, you ensure that they don’t mingle in a compact place, like classrooms, and, therefore, reduce the chances of transmission. If even one officer is infected in training, it could lead to the entire batch of new officers getting infected. Police officers are on the front lines through this difficult time. The sheer public exposure they deal with everyday puts them right there in the coronavirus’ path.
If a police officer is infected with COVID-19, they have the potential of infecting every single person they come in contact with, as well as their colleagues that they meet and talk to in the briefing room, in the precinct or even in the squad car, which can go on to infect every person they come in contact with, and so on. Therefore, it is immensely important to make sure that the police officers are not infected. One way to do that at an early stage is through online law enforcement training.
Apart from the COVID-19 angle, this is the perfect opportunity to standardize law enforcement training. With remote learning and training, you don’t need different academies to have different training courses. You can have a single set of recorded training material and distribute it to law enforcement academies across the country. This will eliminate the variable of different instructors having different takes on law enforcement training and the entire police force will have much more predictable and objectively measurable protocols to guide them through everything. It will give every new police officer joining the force equal footing.
The current landscape of nationwide law enforcement training lacks uniformity. “What these look like on a local level are like apples to oranges,” Dr. Rashawn Ray said about uniformity in training programs. “They are so different from one another. Honestly, it’s not even like apples to oranges – it’s more like fruits to vegetable. That’s how different they are. That is something that definitely needs to change.”
Considering the current climate and the unrest regarding law enforcement, uniform training across the country could do a lot of good in combating implicit biases. Bottom line is that we can either take this pandemic as a tragedy and mourn, or we can take it as an opportunity to fix everything we’ve been doing wrong. Law enforcement training is just one of those things.
As you would expect, there are some challenges to online law enforcement training. The biggest is that law enforcement training is more than just lectures in classrooms. There are plenty of physical, scenario-based training programs that truly prepare officers to enforce laws, that can’t be taken online.
This basically means that while there are parts of law enforcement training that you can take online, there are also parts that you can’t. But there is still value in online law enforcement training, regardless of the non-online parts. You can still avoid packing officers in classrooms. Officers are at a much higher risk of COVID-19 transmission in a classroom than during physical training. That’s because a lot of physical training is either done outdoors or in large gymnasiums where people are farther apart. Programs like firearm training involve very little human interaction, apart from the instructor.
However, most of the training hours typically go into training for operations. Courses like that, as well as report writing, self-improvement and legal education, among other things, mean that the officers spend a giant chunk of their training time packed in classrooms. Therefore, by taking classroom training online, you are avoiding the most likely source of COVID-19 transmission in law enforcement training.
Furthermore, the coronavirus pandemic is a temporary blip in history, just like the many pandemics before it. But adopting online law enforcement training now will fundamentally revolutionize policing and we will all reap the benefits as a nation.
Videos have proven time and again to be effective tools for remote communication. Online law enforcement training can make good use of videos and deliver effective and engaging training. VIDIZMO comes with a comprehensive list of training and learning functionalities out of the box. With VIDIZMO Virtual Academy, you can stream live and on-demand training videos and manage your digital training content on a secure, CJIS compliant platform.
I’m sure you understand the role live streams play in remote learning. VIDIZMO has you covered on that end as well. With VIDIZMO, you can have a low-latency and scalable training session. You can also make your live streams available for viewing on demand, for those who miss it or simply want to watch it over. Officers can interact with each other during a live training session through live chat and submit their questions and receive responses from the instructor in a Q&A section. You can control and monitor who is attending the session, as well as integrate your Twitter and Yammer feed into the live training session. VIDIZMO also gives you the option to create an FAQ ahead of starting the session where learners can view frequently asked questions and answers.
You can make your online learning sessions more engaging with VIDIZMO by inserting quizzes and surveys into a live or on-demand training video and get feedback on how effective your training is. In fact, you can also augment the learning content with related presentations, workbooks and handouts for employees to download and view offline. This way, you can easily enhance the police officers’ learning experience and test them on what they’ve learned so far.
You can also attach annotations or ‘notes’ to on-demand training videos to divert attention to or highlight a specific point in the video. And with media analytics, you can see how employees engaged with each video to measure the effectiveness of your remote training methods and get actionable insights.
You can create playlists and collections of your videos and other digital media to make organized training programs and learning plans and segregate your training programs through multiple portals. Each portal has its own settings for privacy, and VIDIZMO provides extensive security controls to make sure only the right people can access your content while keeping unauthorized individuals from viewing your training videos and content. This is extremely important in law enforcement training because the training material may contain sensitive information.
VIDIZMO seamlessly integrates with any CMS, LMS, or Video Conferencing Platforms so you can easily integrate the solution with your existing technology infrastructure, leverage your existing content, and easily share and transfer your content.
Finally, you can issue certificates upon completion of courses and programs directly from VIDIZMO Virtual Academy.
To find out more about VIDIZMO’s capabilities and offerings,