Open Fire Academy, International

While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.

“There are many people who would love to augment their education by having access to M.I.T. content, people who are very capable to earn a certificate from M.I.T.,” said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, in a conference call with reporters Friday.

M.I.T. led the way to an era of online learning 10 years ago by posting course materials from almost all its classes. Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions.

Mr. Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would start this spring — perhaps with just one course — but would expand to include many more courses, as OpenCourseWare has done.

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The question I have always wondered is, "Why can't training and courses be delivered on Facebook?" It seems logical that it could be done. This is what we have now. We have integrated our courses with Facebook to provide you greater opportunities to share and get the training you need. Click the link below to see the current courses we offer in the mixed platform. We will continue to add coures and expand our integration with FB.

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150546794873134

Certification and promotional testing is one of the most critical components to any training institution or fire department. Ensuring you are working with validated material and content is of the utmost importance. The Open Fire Academy, International offers the most comprehensive assessment service available. We provide the following:

• Extensive testbanks for written tests. All testbanks are written to the applicable NFPA standard and tailored to the textbook your organization uses. All questions are validated back to the text and the standard.
• Skills packets for practical skills examinations. Skills sheets written to the NFPA standard and validated back to the standard. Available in "paper copy" version or utilizing our web technology to go paperless and track validity of your skills sheets.
• We provide validated promotional testing to the NFPA standard, and assessment center services.

The Open Fire Academy, International and Institute of Terrorism Research and Response offer HLS recognized certificates.  Getting these certificates requires five years of job experience 8 hours mandatory core content, 4 hours flexible core content and passing of an exam, but will lead to more job opportunities and higher pay, since the organization is nationally recognized. This course examines various catastrophic emergencies and response plans in the event of a terrorist attack and/or natural disaster. The course will provide collaborative approaches designed to help the HLS professional in the public sector, emergency management, business, and public service. 

The program is very competitive and takes limited enrollment due to the nature of the coursework. For questions, information, and application, please email admin@openfireacademy.org.

To view the program and specific courses, please visit the link below.

http://www.openfireacademy.org/course/category.php?id=7 

We want to get the word out about what we are doing to help better promote training to the fire service. If you are a website or blog publisher, we will pay you to promote the Open Fire Academy, International. Promoting our mission and efforts to the fire service is our goal. We want you to be a part of it. 

To learn more, go to:

http://www.openfireacademy.org/mod/page/view.php?id=787