TRAINING COURSES

Generally

AVUK runs a variety of different training courses for professionals, from short 90-minute online webinars to inset training and longer, distance-learning programmes.  We maintain an electronic record of participants who have enrolled on our training courses (their name, contact phone/email address, geographic location) and a register of attendees for individual courses in order process their enrolments and deliver their training.  The minimum length of time that we retain these records is three years; for courses that carry CPD we may retain these records for longer.  Any financial information we collect as part of providing our training, for example fees charged, payment history, bursary applications and awards, are kept separately on our accounts systems and are retained in accordance with financial regulations.

AVUK’s Foundation & Advanced training courses

We keep an electronic register of all enquiries specifically relating to our foundation and advanced training courses (name, contact phone/email address, geographic location).  Entries on this training register will be anonymised after 7 years.  We will continue to use anonymised data for statistical purposes, for example how the professional heard about us, geographic spread, conversion of enquiries to enrolments, etc.

For our Foundation and Advanced courses, where participants are routinely required to submit both written and video assignments for assessment, we will use AVUK’s training site in SharePoint to create an individual folder for each course participant.  Access to each of these secure electronic folders will be password protected and restricted to the course participant and AVUK's training team (course tutors and specific members of staff responsible for IT/Operational support).  These folders will be used for the transfer of assignments, video clips and marked assessments back and forth between the course participant and their course tutor except where a participant’s employer has its own system for secure data transfer that it requires us to use.

As part of their training, course participants are required to submit a variety of short 5-minute clips for discussion with their cohort during webinars, and longer full-session videos of them delivering therapy for formal assessment.  The purpose of this is to enable course tutors to provide feedback and help participants reflect on their practice and embed their training into their therapy.  Alongside each video, the course participant may need to share limited personal information, eg first names of child and adults participating in the session, age of child, hearing history of child (eg level of hearing loss, type of hearing technology etc) and any other medical conditions that may have an effect on the child’s learning and/or behaviour, eg SI indicators, Oro-Motor difficulties, etc.  Foundation and Advanced course participants are notified of these requirements prior to being enrolled on their course and are responsible for obtaining the necessary consents from their employer and service users.

Ahead of each webinar a member of AVUK's training team uploads the video clips from that cohort's individual SharePoint folders into a PowerPoint presentation so that they can be played to the group during the webinar.  The webinars take place using Skype for Business, Teams or Zoom.  Access to the webinars is via a secure link, by invitation only and is restricted to that cohort's participants, the course tutor and, if required, a member of the IT/Operational support.  Participants are held in a virtual lobby prior to the webinar starting and are required to be “on camera” during all webinars so we can see as well as hear everyone.  The webinars are not recorded.  At the end of each webinar the PowerPoint presentation, including the participants' video clips, is deleted and participants are advised to delete their clips from their SharePoint folder. 

The full session videos that course participants are required to submit for formal assessment are not played in webinars.  Once they have been downloaded from SharePoint to AVUK’s server they are watched by the course tutor and moderator in order to complete the assessment and are then deleted.  Once marked, the assessment is returned to the participant via SharePoint and the participant is advised to remove the video from their SharePoint folder.

We do not keep any participants' videos on our own servers or for longer than necessary.

Copies of the marked assessment forms will be retained in secure folders on AVUK’s server and will be destroyed no later than 5 years after the training course has been completed.  An electronic log of course participants and results is maintained.  Our course accreditation requires us to share this information with the AG Bell Academy.  In order to manage participants’ training and keep them informed of appropriate training in the future, information on this log will be updated but will not be deleted unless we receive a request for erasure.