courses – Page 3

Ordering Training À La Carte

December 15, 2014 by Kate Anthony

I’ve been having a think about how clients need varying levels of support in their lives at different times, and how online services can meet those needs. Sometimes a forum with no interaction by the client is enough – they can learn from previous posts about how others coped in challenging times. Sometimes, the need steps up to receive communication from another human being about an issue, and this can be done through anonymous support forums or chat rooms. Perhaps an ongoing relationship would be helpful, and a less anonymous contract for therapeutic help would be useful from a trained counsellor or psychotherapist. Perhaps that contract can in turn be stepped up to include face-to-face sessions in-room as part of a blended care package.

In short – the levels of support and contact a person needs is a fluid thing! So why not also apply this to training?

At the Online Therapy Institute, we pride ourselves on our attitude to training being a personal thing. Each of our students gets one-to-one mentoring from myself or DeeAnna, depending on what the student wants or needs to learn about (and our training catalogue is extensive and diverse!). We build a personal relationship with each student to ensure their training needs are fully met, and we have found this to be the most enjoyable process in continuing professional development for both parties. Our training model lies in the training relationship being as central to the process as the therapeutic relationship will be to their future client base. The key to learning is in the writing, and the essence of the learning being valuable comes from the personal mentoring that reflects and builds that learning into a living breathing part of a person’s professional identity.

Our Certified Cyber Facilitator and PGCert trainings are the gold standard of what we do, where students build relationships with us as expert trainers to meet professional needs on their journey to being an online practitioner. A more cost-considerate route is our streamlined versions of this, for example our Certified Cyber Therapist credential where you still get the mentoring relationship with me but at a faster pace! And to make sure that our students feel happy with the chosen route, costs of any introductory courses are fully met if the student chooses to go on to the gold standard route.

But you know what? Just as sometimes a potential client will only need to surf anonymous forums or blogs for help with their mental health, sometimes a potential trainee just needs some building blocks to discover how much training they need or can afford. This is why in 2015 I shall be offering my trainings à la carte! This means you can receive the valuable teaching tools and resources we have developed over the years, but without the one-to-one mentoring. You can always come back for more at no additional cost, and still get a certificate for CPD validation! It’s a win-win!

DeeAnna already offers this training model for our Certified Intuitive Practitioner course over at the Online AromaTherapy Institute if you want to see it in action – or drop me a comment below for updates in 2015!

🙂

[Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]

Fostering the Spark – How Our Students Become Pioneers

October 9, 2014 by Kate Anthony

One of the most enjoyable aspects of tutoring our courses are the live “vivas” – a chance for DeeAnna and I to talk individually to each of our students. These talks, held over the telephone, through a videolink, or in a chat room, take place twice during our larger trainings – once at the end of the Foundational Course in CyberCulture and then again on completion of the written work in the Specialist Certificate portion.

We used to call them “oral examinations”, but that seemed very formal for what is essentially a check-in to ensure the learning is being taken on board, to clear up any misunderstandings about the work, and to clarify any parts that may be unclear or need further unpicking. It is also a chance for us to exemplify our message that communication is at the heart of all we do – whether in a learning environment or working with the clients we serve. To truly model our belief that communication is communication whatever technology we use (including those chairs Douglas Adams talked about), moving away from the written feedback we give at the end of every lesson towards the live conversation and back again allows the concept of the importance of blending technologies to emerge.

But what I really love about these conversations is hearing how the learning is being applied to each student’s work environment – whether a therapist, coach, support worker or other human wellbeing professional. This gives us a chance to drill down into how the student can take the learning forward, not only for their own ongoing development but for the good of the clients and the wider profession. I can get flavours of this through our ongoing written dialogue throughout the course, where the ideas the student has take hold and start blossoming – but it is the live conversation that allows not just the brainstorming part between two people, but also the infectious enthusiasm we both get as those ideas start to be fleshed out. There is nothing more satisfying than to hear the course content come to life when the student finds their niche – recent examples have been around how to reach and serve the suicidal client better, the use of blogging for co-education for senior Supervisors, the creation of a virtual gallery for those interested in showcasing art therapy techniques, and how best to de-stigmatise mental health services for children and young people.

The students on our courses are the pioneers of the profession. Sure, we give them the tools to work effectively and ethically online, and I honestly applaud any practitioner who seeks the training so necessary to do so (whether they are trained with us and the Online Therapy Institute or not).

But it is hearing the spark igniting the fuse towards meaningful ground breaking online work as each student applies the technology that makes my day during these vivas. Fostering that spark and helping to turn it into a realistically better way to be present for our colleagues and clients in any therapeutic field is intensely satisfying for us as tutors and mentors. It’s simply a privilege to see how our courses can startle a new thought into action for each and every student who joins us.

🙂

Being Virtually Homeless

September 24, 2014 by Kate Anthony

Avatars and virtual environments have been on my mind a lot lately: we recently relaunched our Avatar Identity Specialist Certificate; I finally got around to finishing the book Infinite Reality; and a recent question to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy on the topic from a colleague led to the organisation making it their research enquiry of the month. This allowed me to revisit my own writings on the subject, and reflect on past experiences that feed into my thirst for understanding how different technologies fit into the lives of others.

On Sunday of this week, it was my absolute pleasure to join DeeAnna in a shop in Second Life (SL) to choose our new virtual office furniture. Since our previous SL landlady moved on to other projects and closed her beautiful island, we have been virtually homeless for around six months, both of us feeling out-of-sorts and ungrounded within an important part of our work – the virtual world. If you have ever been homeless, as I have, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you haven’t, I promise you it’s not exactly a bundle of fun emotionally (quite apart from practically, of course).

To borrow the name of one of my favourite bands, it makes one feel “uncluded”. I’m not going to exaggerate my experience – it was temporary, during the summer, and mercifully only for a matter of a few weeks – but it certainly gave me an outlook on life that enabled me to understand why people seek communities and environments created by those on the outside of mainstream society. And what technology has enabled us to do, at least in the developed world, is to seek those out and be part of them virtually.

In our search for a new island in Second Life, I looked at spaces next to graffiti-covered biker bars, got thrown out and banned from a house of a, ummm, shall we say a “private” nature, and gatecrashed a virtual wedding. I fell into virtual fountain and virtually almost drowned. I met an aardvark who then googled my avatar name and emailed me for therapy. I went to virtual Paris and bought a virtual croissant from a virtual vendor who bizarrely only spoke Spanish. These were interesting experiences, but none of them made me feel included.

So we turned to our dear colleague Gentle Heron, who runs Virtual Ability Island and who had available land for rent – you may remember her from the documentary film Login 2 Life and the feature she wrote for us for TILT Magazine. We now have space in SL which could have been made for us – a therapeutic community, with a conference centre and cafe for our students to hang out in (office-warming party coming soon!), and a beautiful building with roof garden, library, therapy room, Reiki centre, and TILT’s headquarters . It’s a work in progress as DeeAnna and I find time to shop together inworld from our offline offices either side of the Atlantic – but it gets more like our virtual home every day.

I am very used to the odd looks I get when trying to describe the virtual living so many people partake in – it’s why we ask the majority of our students to experience it for themselves as part of their Foundational Course in Cyberculture. We don’t need to have the same experiences as clients to empathise with them, but we do need to understand how they live. If the community of the virtual world is where they feel included – rather than uncluded – then who are we to dismiss that as being unreal?

🙂

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

September 17, 2014 by Kate Anthony

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.

🙂

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