Healthy Families Georgia (HFG) is a home visitation and support program for first-time mothers and their families intended to promote positive growth and development for all of Georgia's children. Since 1993, the program is funded through a collaborative effort between the Georgia's Children's Trust Fund Commission, Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, and communities throughout Georgia (Brown, Luo, Hickey and Tollett, 2005).
Collaboration between practitioners and researchers has become critical as HFG seeks to meet goals and improve the effectiveness of the program through the use of evaluation findings. The Children's Trust Fund Commission contracted the Center for Family Research (CFR) at the University of Georgia (UGA) to conduct the evaluation of HFG. The CFR then custom developed a web-based database, the Healthy Families Georgia Information System (HFGIS) and it was released in August of 2003 (Brown, Luo, Hickey and Tollett, 2005). There are nearly 200 active HFG staff members and associated staff at any given time who interact with HFGIS on a daily basis.
Since the initial training provided by CFR in the spring of 2003 prior to the HFGIS launch, there has not been standardized instructional plans or instructional materials to support HFG sites to train any additional staff on how to utilize HFGIS, or any existing and more experienced staff members on how to adjust to any changes or additions to HFGIS in timely manner.
In an effort to ameliorate the challenge of training staff members in consistent manner at HFG local sites throughout Georgia, we have come to design an instructional plan and created an instructional material using computer-based interactive technology. According to the results of the formative evaluation, HFG staff members appear to be more open and receptive to new changes, technologies and alternative ways of instruction than we had initially predicted. We have found the lessons effective and the learners expressed their satisfaction on the user-interface and information given in the lessons through the formative evaluation.
With a few more revisions to the lessons, we think that this instructional design can be used as a module or a template to develop courses for all three main sections - the program manager (PM) section, the family assessment worker (FAW) section, and the family support worker (FSW) section - of HFGIS. HFG sites will be provided with a standardized instructional plan with the guidelines for instructors or facilitators as well as the computer-based interactive tutorials. The tutorials will be maintained on-line, and proper updates will be made to the tutorials as changes are made to HFGIS or HFG polices and procedures in timely manner. |
