courses Archives - Page 4 of 4

One of the things that DeeAnna and I joke about being at the top of our technology development wish list is a USB adapter for our brains. When we plan a course – from one of our smaller special interest modules right up to our 60-hour Specialist Certificates – one of us generally has the entire basic structure and content in our head right from the start.

Of course, then we have to extract that course from our brains and into our training platform, JigsawBox, before we can offer it to our students! And one of the beauties of the platform is that we can edit the course once finished, meaning that the moment a new resource or updated information about any aspect of the content turns up, we can add it or amend the course within seconds – ensuring that our students only get the most up-to-date information available. Any course that involves the use of technology needs to have that functionality – the days of emailing out handouts and lessons are long gone.

I’ve just completed the overhaul of our Online Supervision Specialist Certificate: checking links; replacing out of date articles; adding new videos; designing new written assignments… the list of blended technologies we employ in our courses reflect the Online Therapy Institute ethos of blending technologies to better meet the needs of the clients we serve. Along the way, I’ve restructured the 30 hours to flow better from the introductory definitions, through the ethical considerations, on to the clinical aspects of supervising online, and ending at advanced readings encompassing private practice, internships, one-off supervision models and using avatars in virtual worlds as part of a supervision service.

Sometimes when finishing up a course, I wonder how it got from the inside of my head to the training platform. And then I realise I am generally staring at one sheet of A4 that shows me. Look!

What a mess, huh? And yet every scribble on that one piece of paper (and I only EVER need one piece of paper) links to everything else in my head around that specific topic, from random thoughts to newspaper articles to online jokes to the academic papers that Google Scholar throws at me every morning.

Sometimes the human brain just stuns me. As Einstein said, “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” Of course, he also said that technology has exceeded our humanity, but that’s a point I disagree with anyway 😉

I love technology. That’s not a secret. I also love my profession. Slamming those two things together in a coherent and ethically delivered way – not only educating others to advance confidently into the CyberCulture we now live and work in but also mentoring the innovators of the future to ensure the helping professions remain current and relevant in society – is my life’s work.

And if all you need is a pen and a sheet of paper like I often do, with no plug socket or wire in sight, remember that you are still using technology. Douglas Adams taught me to think that way about chairs back in 1999. And in my world, you don’t get a better teacher than him.

🙂

At the Online Therapy Institute, our mission is to get as many trained online practitioners out there as possible, to protect the practitioner, the profession, and of course the potentially vulnerable client at the other end of the process. This is in common with my fellow trainers here in the UK and internationally – we don’t mind which training you choose, as long as you seek training in being an online practitioner!

The classic phrase we all hear from our trainees is “I just didn’t know how much I didn’t know!”

But we also hear how practitioners – who let’s face it have already invested probably a lot of money in their core training – also feel that Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a never-ending sink hole of expenditure. We empathise with that entirely – as practitioners ourselves, we know that our learning doesn’t end when we graduate with our counselling qualification.

Transferring your offline skills to an online environment isn’t just about knowing how to use electronic forms of communication. For most of us, that is second nature now – and for the future therapists and clients it’s pretty much going to be in their blood from birth, metaphorically speaking. I recently wrote an article on this, outlining how that tipping point hasn’t quite happened yet, but isn’t all that far off.

The point is, whether you want to practice online or not, your clients live in a digital world and deserve to have a therapist that is immersed in that world – understanding Cyberculture is the new first step to being an empathic practitioner (click here for an empathy-based in-joke).

But post-graduate training and CPD costs time and money 🙁

If you are thinking about investing in your ongoing development as a practitioner, and want to be an effective therapist in a fast-changing technology driven client world, you have probably seen our full BACP Endorsed trainings as a Certified Cyber Faci OTI_CertifiedCyberTherapist_Cover_v1 (1)_001 litator (CCF) at the Institute. But what if you are just not sure if the financial outlay is going to give you what you need?

DeeAnna and I have thought about this long and hard, and as a result have introduced a new introductory course called our Certified Cyber Therapist (CCT) course. This cut-down version of our full training still gives you the one-to-one mentoring at every step that we are known for, but at a quarter of the both the cost and time needed. If you are in the United States, you will have come to know the Distance Credentialed Counselor (DCC) certification as the ‘gold standard’- and OTI has been proud to have written the DCC curriculum, training thousands of practitioners. Now we bring you the absolute latest information through our own credential with our CCT course.

What’s more – if you take the introductory 15 hour CCT course – we’ll discount the money from the full CCF or PGCert training when you are ready for it! It’s a win-win! Many of our students pick up additional courses from us as and when time and money allow – and in between they get all the benefits of ongoing resources from us, as well as free subscription to TILT Magazine and now free access to the video library of our awesome colleagues at OnlinEvents!

Read more about the CCT here, and we look forward to mentoring you on your journey to being an effective and ethical online practitioner at whatever training cost suits you!

🙂

CyberSupervision – Updates and Revamps (or what the inside of my head looks like!)

Certified Cyber Therapist – new approach, new course!