Support more fulfilling, more rewarding lives in the community.

You and your staff broaden the world of possibilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, ensuring each person lives their best life possible. The College of Direct Support has the training your organization needs to help your support staff make life in the community a priority for the people they support.

The College of Direct Support is designed to help.

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In collaboration with:
For agency administrators
For managed care organizations
For state officials

Beyond compliance to competency.

College of Direct Support content delivers competency-based training designed to prepare your direct support staff to go above and beyond compliance. In fact, our training is fully accredited by the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals (NADSP). To take support even further, College of Direct Support training can help your organization achieve the Council on Quality and Leadership Accreditation – and ensure that you’re ready to meet other national competency-based credentials.

Train efficiently.

Our learning management system, Elsevier Performance Manager, allows you to track every staff member’s status as they navigate through each objective-focused lesson and achieve skills within each competency area. Tools embedded in the content delivery assist learners in bringing trusted knowledge to the workplace through discussions, on the job training checklists and reflection exercises. Alongside education, you can also document the results of any assessments, certifications, checklists, discussions, acknowledgements or surveys.

Reduce costs.

Unlike traditional training and learning systems, DirectCourse saves your organization the costs for travel, location and time spent in the classroom. To ensure you get the most out of your training programing – customize our content to fit your agency’s specific needs. See your potential savings here.

Standardize support.

The direct support workforce faces high turnover rates and inadequate training throughout the industry. With DirectCourse College of Direct Support, you can build a standard of skills and competencies in your provider network – much like the certifications and competencies for healthcare professionals.

Reduce costs.

By combining training that supports best practices, and powerful tools to track, manage and assign lessons, you can be sure that every direct support professional your providers employ is trained to deliver the best support. With a workforce trained in nationally validated standards, you can reduce the costs associated with errors and inadequate support.

Ensure compliance.

The moment you put DirectCourse to work, you begin to build a permanent, verifiable record of training for every member of your state’s direct support workforce. With courses filled with evidence based content and skill-building content, you can ensure that everyone is properly trained and ready to deliver the best quality support to meet and exceed state compliance, ensuring less incidents to report.

Be ahead of the curve.

Our content partners at the University of Minnesota are leading the change for home- and community-based services. By bringing training built on their latest research to your direct support workforce, you can ensure that your state is ahead of what’s next in the industry.

Why DirectCourse?

The best content.

DirectCourse College of Direct Support (CDS) content is developed by the Research and Training Center on Community Living at the University of Minnesota, leading experts in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities. The College of Direct Support Editorial Board is comprised of subject matter experts who review and contribute to the development of courses to ensure that every course for direct support professionals offers leading insight and nationally recognized best practices. With CDS, you can trust that you’re providing your staff with the most recent, most trusted information available.

A trusted platform.

We deliver our content through Elsevier Performance Manager, a premier learning management tool. The platform enables learners to access courses online at any time, and it allows training supervisors to add customized content so you can integrate training into everyone’s current workflow. Elsevier Performance Manager enables learners to meet training objectives at their own pace, empowering team leaders to mitigate risk, demonstrate compliance and improve the learning process of every staff member.

Improvement for all.

By combining the latest research, competency-based training and an advanced learning management tool, we’ve built an outstanding interactive training solution. Instead of being a burden, training your direct support staff can be a natural part of your current workflow.

Educate. Enrich. Inspire.

That’s our mission. We want to give you everything your organization needs so you can educate your staff, enrich their knowledge and help them inspire everyone they work with on a daily basis.

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