In the last installment of Learning About Learning, we talked about the trends in corporate L&D and how I-Os can help investigate whether or not these trends live up to their hype. Now, we’re looking at the other side of the coin: the trends in I-O concerning training. As we’ve stated before, sometimes the “hottest new thing” in L&D is an approach to learning that I-Os have been researching for a decade or more. Other times, the latest and greatest fashions in L&D don’t even make a blip on the I-O radar. So, let’s explore what training has looked like recently from the I-O side of the fence.

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees concluded negotiations on an omnibus appropriations bill (H.R. 244) to fund federal government agencies for the remaining 5 months of fiscal year (FY) 2017.  President Trump signed the bill into law on Friday, May 5.  Despite the cuts proposed by the Trump Administration, the final bill provides increases to federal investments in many of the research, education, and healthcare programs important to research universities and nonprofit research institutions. 

Welcome readers! A little more than a year ago I wrote a column on preparing to teach an online class. At that time I was about to teach a fully online section of psychology research methods for the first time. That class has come and gone, and I’ve also just finished teaching a hybrid format statistics class, also for the first time. I’d like to share with you some of my experiences as a new online/hybrid instructor as a follow up to the column from last year. My goal is to provide some further food for thought for those of you considering teaching fully online or hybrid format classes.

Though there are myriad wonderful resources (see the end of this column for a partial list) available through SIOP and through other sources that offer advice to graduate students on everything from how to seek out graduate programs to how to make the most of attending SIOP’s annual conference to, indeed, how to enact money-saving tips specific to graduate study, I can’t locate any1 that accomplish the modest objective that I have for this issue of the I-Opener: to identify specific, temporally-constrained categories of expenses that graduate students face in our field.2 Here’s why I’m doing this:

This issue, we’ll be taking a step back to explore something you probably don’t think about a whole lot: How does the Internet work?  In my experience, I-Os tend to treat the Internet a lot like they treat their car: a tool to get from A to B.  When something goes wrong, and it always eventually will, you don’t usually bother figure out why, you just call your tow truck to drag it over to someone who will do that for you.  In the case of the Internet, you might call your IT person or your Internet service provider if your access becomes slower than you expect it to be or goes out, but otherwise, you tend to ignore little problems.  When’s the last time you called someone because you couldn’t use a webpage the way you thought you should be able to?  Never, that’s when.