The Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI) has launched an exciting new platform for accessing trainings and educational modules geared towards learners interested in clinical and translational research and translational science. The Learning Network contains a wide range of courses that address learning needs for principal investigators and co-investigators, research professionals, students, and community members. Importantly, learners are able to search for courses based on their role or their type of research (i.e. clinical, healthcare delivery science, and community based). Additionally, courses are aligned with competencies put forth by the Joint Task Force, which outline eight competency domains for clinical research professionals. These include competencies like communications and teamwork, ethical and participant safety considerations, and data management and informatics. Finally, the content is also searchable alignment with principles of Translational Science, as defined by the National Center for Advancing Translational Science. There are seven principles; examples include efficiency and speed, creativity and innovation, and cross-disciplinary team science. Grouping educational content based on competencies and principles allows learners to search based on an area of interest.

Example courses cover topics such as clinical and translational research study design, quality improvement, clinical trial monitoring, dissemination and implementation, and more. Training topics are relevant to the skills, knowledge and activities of investigators and clinical research professionals from all areas.

SC CTSI was searching for an updated solution for displaying all of the educational offerings in one, easy-to-use place that would best serve learners. To accomplish this, the group within SC CTSI responsible for education and workforce development facilitated the migration of the educational offerings to Brightspace, a learning management system used by USC for all of their course offerings. This move to Brightspace allows SC CTSI to centralize offerings and more easily collect user data and metrics for reporting purposes, and to make continuous improvements to the content based on the needs of our learners.

“We are thrilled to share our new learning platform with the research communities at University of Southern California and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles,” said Tamara Simon, MD, MPH, CHLA Site Investigator and Director of Workforce Development at SC CTSI. “We believe SC CTSI Learning Network will jumpstart our capacity to provide clinical research training to a broad variety of users, ranging from faculty and staff to community members both in Southern California and beyond.”

Future plans include migrating some of the existing content on what is currently the SC CTSI Online Educational Library to the Learning Network, as well as expanding the content as more educational material becomes available.

“We are excited to use our community’s input and metrics from the existing courses to grow our offerings over the next year, so please visit early and often,” she added.

New courses will be added on a continuous basis, so learners are encouraged to bookmark the page and check back often. To access the Learning Network, click here.