SRN readers are likely to be savvy users of the most fundamental resources for CPSTs—all the more reason to read this article carefully for important updates.
Readers may have noticed a couple of new resources mentioned a lot lately: Child Passenger Safety Learning Portal and the National CPS Board YouTube page. Both have popped up quite a bit in recent social media posts and articles directed at CPSTs, and some readers may have already bookmarked these links. But these particular resources warrant a closer look, as they are not simply handy new websites to keep in our back pocket (though they are indeed handy). In fact, they represent important revisions to how key CPS information is offered—and will be offered going forward. As such, all CPSTs should be aware of these resources and incorporate them into their CPS practice.
Some background information will help clarify why SRN is calling out these resources with front-page attention. As SRN has reported in past issues, in 2020 the National Safety Council, which manages the National CPS Board and other projects for NHTSA, created a dedicated CPS curriculum position, which has been filled by CPST-I Tammy Franks. This was quietly groundbreaking for the CPS field, as it has provided a professional focus on creating quality curricula for not only the certification course but also a variety of specialized CPS topics (see page 8 for some recent announcements). NHTSA’s goal is to ensure these curricula are provided in ways that will reach more people than in the past, resulting in a burst of offerings available in e-learning, modular, and hybrid formats.
Over just the past few years, the output of new, modern CPS educational content is impressive. However, the final step of delivering the content to educators and learners has been a hurdle. Anyone who tried to access early versions of the Car Seat Basics or Kids in Hot Cars trainings can attest to some initial ease-of-access challenges.
Find trainings at carseateducation.org
The solution to this final hurdle is the Child Passenger Safety Learning Portal. (Let’s pause for a moment of gratitude that the NSC was able to secure such an apt and simple URL!) The CPS Learning Portal organizes, tracks, and manages all trainings from one site. From the portal’s homepage, click View All Courses to see an array of tiles that advertise the various trainings available, all of which are free. In addition to e-learnings like Car Seat Basics, there are also numerous CPST CEU courses, which are the recorded versions of live webinar presentations from the National CPS Board over the past couple of years.
In other words, the Child Passenger Safety Learning Portal, is now the centralized site for important training materials for the CPS field. The site is even the delivery mechanism for the hybrid certification curriculum for those teaching or taking that training.
Users (students and instructors) must create an account on the site, which provides them with a dashboard for accessing selected trainings, reviewing progress, and viewing certificates. (Instructors can use a button at the top of the screen to toggle between viewing their own dashboard as a student or as an instructor.) Users can put a desired course into a “cart” and “purchase” it (for $0). The training is automatically loaded onto their dashboard, where they can access it to begin the training. It’s easy to stop/start/resume and even rewatch any training on one’s dashboard. To help users learn this new system, job aids for creating an account and earning CEUs on the Child Passenger Safety Learning Portal are posted here.
Find videos on youtube.com/CPSBoard
Another site that is important for CPSTs to use and reference is www.youtube.com/CPSBoard, which now offers a trove of useful CPS videos. In fact, one could spend hours (maybe days) reviewing all the videos now offered on this site, so one tip for getting a handle on all the site has to offer is to click on Playlists from the homepage. This links to a page where the site’s videos are organized into 14 categories (playlists). Each playlist has the option to click View Full Playlist to see the category’s set of video titles.
Notable among these playlists is one that includes all 54 videos from the National CPST Hybrid Certification Training. As readers will remember, the pandemic inspired the creation of a slew of videos filmed by the CPS community in support of that curriculum. The NSC and professional curriculum designers combined and refined these raw videos into dozens of quality learning segments. Since these videos stand alone as helpful training for any learner, not just those taking a hybrid-format course, they’re now available for public viewing. Instructors will want to let students know about this resource when teaching either form of the certification curriculum. While students taking the hybrid format can view/review the e-learning content (including these videos) during (and for a period after) the course, they’ll appreciate knowing they will have ongoing access to the videos. For in-person courses, instructors can call out the videos as a way for students to review and reinforce classroom teaching, if desired.
There is also a playlist of the 23 videos from the CPS on School Buses National Training curriculum (see page 8). This is especially helpful to note for attendees of in-person classes who will watch the videos in the classroom and may want to refer to them again later. Because they are publicly available, this playlist can help teach any student transporter, as well.
Other playlists include:
- 2020 National CPST Certification Curriculum videos (and a handful from the 2014 curriculum).
- Recordings of the monthly CPS Coordinators’ Forum series.
- How-to videos for the National Digital Car Seat Check Form.
- Videos for special topic areas, like heatstroke and vehicle recalls.
- The National CPS Board’s CEU and community education webinars. (However, if the intention is to earn a CEU, be sure to view these videos from the Child Passenger Safety Learning Portal instead in order to take the accompanying quiz needed to earn a CEU. Watching the community education sessions on the CPS Learning Portal ensures that those completions will also be recorded on the CPST’s dashboard.)
These are just the videos available today. Plan to visit both of these sites regularly, as more content is sure to be added over time.