Meeting the need: Delivering quality child‐care education on the web

Abstract

This investigation describes the initial attempts to deliver a self‐paced online program to prepare child‐care providers to receive Child Development Associate (CDA) certificates through the Child Care Learning (CCL) organization program. The program made use of several strategies attempting to promote a sense of community of the students, while allowing all students to progress at their own pace through the five‐course program. This paper discusses the experiences for the students in the program, identifying the efficacy of an established mentoring process within this online learning framework. Finally, several suggestions for providing effective high‐quality training to child‐care providers through Internet learning are offered, and a basic model for delivering quality child‐care training is proposed.