Our instructors strive to stay in the forefront of their fields: they continually update their material and present new, relevant information in each course that they lead. That’s one of the things that makes NWETC a leader in the industry.

But what about overall trends – not just in Environmental Training, but in Adult Learning and Professional Training in general? Is NWETC keeping up with advances in the field? This is a question that we ask ourselves regularly, and the answer sometimes causes us to revise our techniques.

For the last several years, we’ve been following the growth of both on-demand and live online training. In fact, I wrote a post about why we don’t offer any online training options just about a year ago. At that time, I defended our decision to only offer live courses, saying “…some of the best feedback we get from attendees is that they really appreciate the active and interactive elements of our courses.”

While that remains true, we are currently reevaluating our position regarding online learning. In fact, I’m excited to announce that we are actively producing several customized workshops for Alaska Airlines that will be housed on their internal network and delivered to hundreds of employees all over the US in an interactive e-learning format. In addition, we are working with the Sustainable City Network to develop and present one of our top courses in a live webinar format in the first quarter of 2014. Are we abandoning the “active and interactive elements” that received such positive feedback? Definitely not! Our research shows that there are ways to integrate interactivity that serves the material into e-learning, and we are being quite careful about which courses will be considered for an online offering.

It is possible, and indeed probable that within the year we’ll have a few options for those who want to access their environmental training from the comfort of their home or office. But be assured that we will make sure that any online option will contain up-to-date, relevant, engaging material and presentation, just as our live courses do.

But before we go much further, we’d like to get your feedback. After all, we’re only here because of you. It’s important to us to find out what YOU like and don’t like about online learning, and what format would be most interesting to you. We’ve developed a short survey to get your thoughts and would greatly appreciate it if you’d take a moment to answer the questions here. As a special thanks, everyone who completes the survey will receive a coupon code good for $25 off of any NWETC course (live or online, when we have those!), and be entered in a drawing to win either a free course or a free iPad (winner’s choice).

So we hope that you’ll let us know what you think, we value your input as we plan how best to grow in our ability to serve you in the coming months and years. Thank you!