An open course, "Supervised Fieldwork Learning Management System (LMS)," for managing the fieldwork supervision via 2-week curriculum. Free & open source software. Creative Commons-BY-SA-NC content.
BT wanted to write a welcome letter but it kept growing. Text pasted below. Need to get this under control to include it.
TrainABA courses are part of the TrainABA Supervision Curriculum Series.
The material was built via private collaboration in version zero, released December 31, 2015. Future distributions aim for open source community contribution. The books are used by professionals at organizations and also at universities for course curriculum, making a public wiki unsuitable (not stable enough). However, print media is inflexible and does not encourage collaboration. TrainABA is looking for a happy medium for the next version.
Here is a note from the project maintainer, Benjamin J. Theisen:
TrainABA is a free and open source software (FOSS) framework. Wait, so is all of it free? No, paperbacks are not free, as somebody has to print, warehouse, and ship them. Servers are not free either. In fact, cloud computing is expensive and a budget-friendly widely-available website costs $500/month at minimum. FOSS is not about price. It is about ethics in giving people the freedom to use, share, modify, and distribute materials in a way they see fit. This matches the values of science, seeking exploration of generalized knowledge. The license also protects the material from being locked into a proprietary contract, where a company keeps certain code and practices proprietary, including through copyright restrictions.
Freedom from copyrights is necessary for ABA in practice, where companies are growing rapidly and training materials need to be customized to meet local needs. If training materials are copyrighted and proprietary, trainers cannot modify the content accordingly in a time-efficient way (if at all). Trainees lose the opportunity to learn the most specific knowledge. Trainers do not practice creating/refining/assessing their own training materials for clients on the caseload. The results of using one-size-fits-all training approaches is a team (and company, and region, and ultimately a whole industry) that punches below its weight.
Good, tech-savvy training is worthwhile if proper structure is utilized. Everyone can understand the utility of a framework like TrainABA, which provides a starting point for training procedures in many competencies. Not everyone understands that making elearning videos, audio programs, LMS goals, and other content is only time consuming with consumer/amateur equipment and workflows. If your tools and structure are professional, the results are professional. It's not worth the effort of doing it wrong because doing training the right way is actually faster and more reliable.
Clients benefit from a better team. Reading these words, one may argue there is little harm in having general procedures in video form, modeling procedures to use with clients via cloud-based web applications. I disagree entirely. Somebody needs to "go first" by making general procedures publicly available under Creative Commons licenses, but the point is that trainers should make their own training content. It should be something trainers do all the time as a core skill in a given week. It is not quick and easy to make quality training content. It is worth the effort.
In my view, the general training procedures found in this course should be regarded as a starting point and not an end game. The short videos are publicly available to promote embedding them in various places that benefit trainers. The notion of short, organized video in a framework is that trainers can repurpose existing content to meet a particular need. How many vanilla videos explaining reinforcement does the world really need? One or two should suffice. A trainer can pick and choose some basic content from the TrainABA framework to get started, add a video or two with a little write-up and some learning objectives, maybe a PowerPoint here and there... within an afternoon, the trainer has crafted a whole training event. The training includes goals. It is organized by competencies. Content contains peer-reviewed references. It can be elearning based, on ground, or a blend. Performance measures are included. It is, for all intents and purposes, unique to the trainer despite having some foundational pieces borrowed legally from TrainABA framework. The trainer has the legal right to share these with others, who can build on the materials and still give credit to the persons who have worked on the material. A trainer community can grow around this technology and workflow.
Supervisors should be able to modify these trainings to specific client needs. These should be kept on the private company server because they are too specific for general audiences. Trainers should incorporate the videos of general procedures into their own workflows, in my view. The results are positive, though it costs some time from the supervisor. With a solid workflow and well-organized general training procedures, a supervisor can make and publish a video in a few minutes. It does not need to take a lot of time, but if a supervisor started from scratch it would be too time consuming to do.
There is a big benefit to organization when supervisors make their own trainings. Technicians demonstrate higher skill acquisition rates, but that is obvious and nobody really cares about that because scientific demonstrations strike practitioners as glorified common sense. The subtle benefit is in turnover and team dynamics. The top two reasons technicians quit their ABA jobs include the relationship with the supervisor and lack of professional development opportunities. When the supervisor copies, uses, modifies, and shares training made solely for a client, these two objections are minimized. The technician gets a direct line to the supervisor's thinking on how to use the procedures with the client. The technician also experiences a customized opportunity to advance their professional skills and apply them to the client's program at ongoing sessions. Stronger relationships between supervisors and technicians make for lower turnover, better services, and trickle down to better client outcomes. These benefits may also help the long-term health of the organization, as funding sources can refer clients with less concern about turnover or suboptimal results.
The above benefits require a supervisor to go through three learning curves. First, they learn the TrainABA framework so as to locate whatever skill a staff member is to be taught within a larger, stable system. Second, they learn to use the technology that will achieve a fast, prosumer workflow with software and hardware (often just a phone). Third, they learn to communicate with the rest of the service delivery team about the training (local privacy laws, uploading to secure servers, how to use at the company, whether this is company property or specific to a certain client, etc.).
The same problems come up for everybody and can be overcome with some persistence. Once the technician locates a target skill within a TrainABA segment, and establishes a workflow, the obvious problem is how to have good on-camera content without being a professional actor. With a little practice, maybe a budget teleprompter (<$150), and the examples from others in the TrainABA open source community, quality results are reachable for almost anybody.
The third item, communicating with the company, is what holds many people back from pursuing individualized training content creation. Some companies want to control everything by shooting videos and then claiming them company-wide to someday be able to sell to the public. I think this is silly and I do not know why companies would care about that. The industry is doing well but autism services are still waitlisted in the global picture, so why hold onto valuable information that could help people in need when you are already making money in a service industry? What difference does it really make? It's not as though something specific to your idiosyncratic client and service team in city A is worth $99/month to a supervisor with a different team and clients in city B. Who cares, I say. Not worth pursuing.
The licenses that will protect content creators in TrainABA start from TrainABA core materials. These are discussed in other writings and will be mentioned only briefly here. The GNU Free Documentation License covers stable, core material written in solid versions of the TrainABA framework. The Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution and ShareAlike licenses are used for material that can be adapted for other training purposes. Some materials, such as the text you are reading now, reflects a person's individual views and should not be modified. Changes to the content would also change relevant context. Such materials are licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 - Attribution - No Derivatives. Most software used by TrainABA is open source under GPL v2.0 or GPL v3, if not MIT license or some other free and open source license. Many of these open source licenses are inherited from whatever the people developing that project chose. The licenses allow us to make changes so long as we pass the same freedoms onto others.
Many people in ABA are not yet familiar with what open source technology could do for the ABA industry in terms of training. In the coming years I will do my best to communicate that message. Open source projects afford sponsored by TheisenIO, run by the series editor of the books. Building and maintaining this project is an expensive, time-consuming, perplexing, and thankless endeavor. It is also intrinsically rewarding and important for the sake of having an open source alternative for individuals in the field of ABA.
As maintainer of this project, I took 2016 and 2017 to work on a PhD in organizational psychology while learning systems administration and computer programming. Although I did not have much to show for those years of toil, it is my hope to accumulate enough knowledge and skills over time to effectively bring TrainABA into a format any practitioners, professors, admins, and students can use in a flexible way. I want people who use the framework to treat it as a starting point, not an end-game.
It is my view that people in ABA are fortunate to be paid to indulge in the science of behavior analysis, however they choose. It is great fun to experiment with programming, training, and assessment, to build an ABA company. I hope the framework is useful in helping others know if they take the risk of creating their own materials for training, the TrainABA framework will keep it organized in a useful way so that supervisees or students can access it at the right time and place to advance their learning.
Those who know me know I am two things at once: aloof and obsessive. I love training in any form, whether that be creating, delivering, analyzing, or experiencing it. This passion drives me to stay awake until sunrise many nights just looking at possible ways to organize TrainABA using open source technology.
It is true that a person with more social skills and outwardly likeable qualities would push the project forward in a more public way. At the least, someone who emails the project manager expects and deserves an email back. I don't reply to most emails, as I view it as a distraction from precious time that could be better spent building the TrainABA framework for others to use (when it is released for production eventually). This is an annoying quality for those who have tried to communicate with me, but there is only so much time I can work and it takes a lot of focus to build this kind of work behind the scenes. I appreciate those times when you can find the patience and compassion to accept me for how I am, embracing diversity for its beneficial and annoying qualities.
This is a draft document written first on October 9, 2017 and may or may not be finished. It is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 - Attribution - No Derivatives. You can include it in commercial use, such as a program you create and sell, if desired. You would be required to credit me for creating this material and preserving it as-is, including any mistakes I made. The license needs to be mentioned if you share this material. Thank you very much for reading however much you read. I appreciate what you do in ABA and value you highly as a member of my favorite community, that of behavior analysis practitioners who train.
BT wanted to write a welcome letter but it kept growing. Text pasted below. Need to get this under control to include it.
TrainABA courses are part of the TrainABA Supervision Curriculum Series.
The material was built via private collaboration in version zero, released December 31, 2015. Future distributions aim for open source community contribution. The books are used by professionals at organizations and also at universities for course curriculum, making a public wiki unsuitable (not stable enough). However, print media is inflexible and does not encourage collaboration. TrainABA is looking for a happy medium for the next version.
Here is a note from the project maintainer, Benjamin J. Theisen:
TrainABA is a free and open source software (FOSS) framework. Wait, so is all of it free? No, paperbacks are not free, as somebody has to print, warehouse, and ship them. Servers are not free either. In fact, cloud computing is expensive and a budget-friendly widely-available website costs $500/month at minimum. FOSS is not about price. It is about ethics in giving people the freedom to use, share, modify, and distribute materials in a way they see fit. This matches the values of science, seeking exploration of generalized knowledge. The license also protects the material from being locked into a proprietary contract, where a company keeps certain code and practices proprietary, including through copyright restrictions.
Freedom from copyrights is necessary for ABA in practice, where companies are growing rapidly and training materials need to be customized to meet local needs. If training materials are copyrighted and proprietary, trainers cannot modify the content accordingly in a time-efficient way (if at all). Trainees lose the opportunity to learn the most specific knowledge. Trainers do not practice creating/refining/assessing their own training materials for clients on the caseload. The results of using one-size-fits-all training approaches is a team (and company, and region, and ultimately a whole industry) that punches below its weight.
Good, tech-savvy training is worthwhile if proper structure is utilized. Everyone can understand the utility of a framework like TrainABA, which provides a starting point for training procedures in many competencies. Not everyone understands that making elearning videos, audio programs, LMS goals, and other content is only time consuming with consumer/amateur equipment and workflows. If your tools and structure are professional, the results are professional. It's not worth the effort of doing it wrong because doing training the right way is actually faster and more reliable.
Clients benefit from a better team. Reading these words, one may argue there is little harm in having general procedures in video form, modeling procedures to use with clients via cloud-based web applications. I disagree entirely. Somebody needs to "go first" by making general procedures publicly available under Creative Commons licenses, but the point is that trainers should make their own training content. It should be something trainers do all the time as a core skill in a given week. It is not quick and easy to make quality training content. It is worth the effort.
In my view, the general training procedures found in this course should be regarded as a starting point and not an end game. The short videos are publicly available to promote embedding them in various places that benefit trainers. The notion of short, organized video in a framework is that trainers can repurpose existing content to meet a particular need. How many vanilla videos explaining reinforcement does the world really need? One or two should suffice. A trainer can pick and choose some basic content from the TrainABA framework to get started, add a video or two with a little write-up and some learning objectives, maybe a PowerPoint here and there... within an afternoon, the trainer has crafted a whole training event. The training includes goals. It is organized by competencies. Content contains peer-reviewed references. It can be elearning based, on ground, or a blend. Performance measures are included. It is, for all intents and purposes, unique to the trainer despite having some foundational pieces borrowed legally from TrainABA framework. The trainer has the legal right to share these with others, who can build on the materials and still give credit to the persons who have worked on the material. A trainer community can grow around this technology and workflow.
Supervisors should be able to modify these trainings to specific client needs. These should be kept on the private company server because they are too specific for general audiences. Trainers should incorporate the videos of general procedures into their own workflows, in my view. The results are positive, though it costs some time from the supervisor. With a solid workflow and well-organized general training procedures, a supervisor can make and publish a video in a few minutes. It does not need to take a lot of time, but if a supervisor started from scratch it would be too time consuming to do.
There is a big benefit to organization when supervisors make their own trainings. Technicians demonstrate higher skill acquisition rates, but that is obvious and nobody really cares about that because scientific demonstrations strike practitioners as glorified common sense. The subtle benefit is in turnover and team dynamics. The top two reasons technicians quit their ABA jobs include the relationship with the supervisor and lack of professional development opportunities. When the supervisor copies, uses, modifies, and shares training made solely for a client, these two objections are minimized. The technician gets a direct line to the supervisor's thinking on how to use the procedures with the client. The technician also experiences a customized opportunity to advance their professional skills and apply them to the client's program at ongoing sessions. Stronger relationships between supervisors and technicians make for lower turnover, better services, and trickle down to better client outcomes. These benefits may also help the long-term health of the organization, as funding sources can refer clients with less concern about turnover or suboptimal results.
The above benefits require a supervisor to go through three learning curves. First, they learn the TrainABA framework so as to locate whatever skill a staff member is to be taught within a larger, stable system. Second, they learn to use the technology that will achieve a fast, prosumer workflow with software and hardware (often just a phone). Third, they learn to communicate with the rest of the service delivery team about the training (local privacy laws, uploading to secure servers, how to use at the company, whether this is company property or specific to a certain client, etc.).
The same problems come up for everybody and can be overcome with some persistence. Once the technician locates a target skill within a TrainABA segment, and establishes a workflow, the obvious problem is how to have good on-camera content without being a professional actor. With a little practice, maybe a budget teleprompter (<$150), and the examples from others in the TrainABA open source community, quality results are reachable for almost anybody.
The third item, communicating with the company, is what holds many people back from pursuing individualized training content creation. Some companies want to control everything by shooting videos and then claiming them company-wide to someday be able to sell to the public. I think this is silly and I do not know why companies would care about that. The industry is doing well but autism services are still waitlisted in the global picture, so why hold onto valuable information that could help people in need when you are already making money in a service industry? What difference does it really make? It's not as though something specific to your idiosyncratic client and service team in city A is worth $99/month to a supervisor with a different team and clients in city B. Who cares, I say. Not worth pursuing.
The licenses that will protect content creators in TrainABA start from TrainABA core materials. These are discussed in other writings and will be mentioned only briefly here. The GNU Free Documentation License covers stable, core material written in solid versions of the TrainABA framework. The Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution and ShareAlike licenses are used for material that can be adapted for other training purposes. Some materials, such as the text you are reading now, reflects a person's individual views and should not be modified. Changes to the content would also change relevant context. Such materials are licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 - Attribution - No Derivatives. Most software used by TrainABA is open source under GPL v2.0 or GPL v3, if not MIT license or some other free and open source license. Many of these open source licenses are inherited from whatever the people developing that project chose. The licenses allow us to make changes so long as we pass the same freedoms onto others.
Many people in ABA are not yet familiar with what open source technology could do for the ABA industry in terms of training. In the coming years I will do my best to communicate that message. Open source projects afford sponsored by TheisenIO, run by the series editor of the books. Building and maintaining this project is an expensive, time-consuming, perplexing, and thankless endeavor. It is also intrinsically rewarding and important for the sake of having an open source alternative for individuals in the field of ABA.
As maintainer of this project, I took 2016 and 2017 to work on a PhD in organizational psychology while learning systems administration and computer programming. Although I did not have much to show for those years of toil, it is my hope to accumulate enough knowledge and skills over time to effectively bring TrainABA into a format any practitioners, professors, admins, and students can use in a flexible way. I want people who use the framework to treat it as a starting point, not an end-game.
It is my view that people in ABA are fortunate to be paid to indulge in the science of behavior analysis, however they choose. It is great fun to experiment with programming, training, and assessment, to build an ABA company. I hope the framework is useful in helping others know if they take the risk of creating their own materials for training, the TrainABA framework will keep it organized in a useful way so that supervisees or students can access it at the right time and place to advance their learning.
Those who know me know I am two things at once: aloof and obsessive. I love training in any form, whether that be creating, delivering, analyzing, or experiencing it. This passion drives me to stay awake until sunrise many nights just looking at possible ways to organize TrainABA using open source technology.
It is true that a person with more social skills and outwardly likeable qualities would push the project forward in a more public way. At the least, someone who emails the project manager expects and deserves an email back. I don't reply to most emails, as I view it as a distraction from precious time that could be better spent building the TrainABA framework for others to use (when it is released for production eventually). This is an annoying quality for those who have tried to communicate with me, but there is only so much time I can work and it takes a lot of focus to build this kind of work behind the scenes. I appreciate those times when you can find the patience and compassion to accept me for how I am, embracing diversity for its beneficial and annoying qualities.
This is a draft document written first on October 9, 2017 and may or may not be finished. It is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 - Attribution - No Derivatives. You can include it in commercial use, such as a program you create and sell, if desired. You would be required to credit me for creating this material and preserving it as-is, including any mistakes I made. The license needs to be mentioned if you share this material. Thank you very much for reading however much you read. I appreciate what you do in ABA and value you highly as a member of my favorite community, that of behavior analysis practitioners who train.
Sincerely,
Benjamin J. Theisen