LEESBURG, Va., March 31, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Major companies and organizations involved in career and technical education (CTE) recently joined forces to create the CTE Coalition, a group designed to keep students learning during the COVID-19 crisis. Originally consisting of camInstructor, Haas Automation, Lincoln Electric, NC3, SkillsUSA and Tooling U-SME, the coalition has now added five new allies to the group: The American Welding Society, Autodesk, Caterpillar Inc., NCCER and Sandvik.
All participants are contributing resources to the coalition's Keep CTE Moving website, a central portal where instructors and students can access online classes, videos and instructional materials in machining, welding, mechatronics, industry 4.0, and programming. All of these resources — available for free or at a low cost — are produced by the now 11 coalition partners. The goal is to help CTE faculty continue their teaching in a new virtual environment.
"Our CTE Coalition will help thousands of CTE students quickly transition online and continue their studies," said SkillsUSA executive director Chelle Travis. "This is our effort to support our students and teachers who need guidance and resources right now. These are unprecedented times when many school systems are closed. By working together, we can support education and training for America's future workforce with the least amount of disruption to learning."
Many CTE courses — like welding, CNC, automotive, manufacturing and construction — are hands-on, and instructors may not have access to readily available online training content. That's why the non-competitive group of industry-leading companies that make up the CTE Coalition agreed to share their robust e-learning resources.
With this opportunity, tens of thousands of CTE students can keep learning, even though they can't gather as a group in a classroom or technical lab. Keep CTE Moving highlights best practices in e-learning and provides resources to help CTE instructors and their students quickly transition to a virtual environment. With a skilled labor shortage already affecting companies nationwide, the continuing COVID-19 crisis presents an additional challenge for educational institutions as face-to-face learning is disrupted for weeks — and possibly the rest of this school year.
CTE instructors are urged to visit the Keep CTE Moving website regularly for new learning resources and guidance that will evolve over time. The coalition will continue to monitor the situation and work together to respond to the needs of CTE educators and their students.
For more information on the Keep CTE Moving site and CTE Coalition efforts, visit http://www.ctecoalition.com.
About SkillsUSA
SkillsUSA is a nonprofit partnership of education and industry founded in 1965 to strengthen our nation's skilled workforce. Driven by employer demand, SkillsUSA helps students develop necessary personal and workplace skills along with technical skills grounded in academics. This SkillsUSA Framework empowers every student to succeed at work and in life, while helping to close the skills gap in which millions of positions go unfilled. Through SkillsUSA's championships program and curricula, employers have long ensured schools are teaching relevant technical skills, and with SkillsUSA's new credentialing process, they can now assess how ready potential employees are for the job. SkillsUSA has more than 366,000 annual paid members nationwide in high schools, colleges and middle schools, covering over 130 trade, technical and skilled service occupations, and is recognized by the U.S. departments of Education and Labor as integral to career and technical education. With the addition of our alumni, membership last year was 427,432. We have served nearly 14 million members since 1965. For more information: http://www.skillsusa.org
SOURCE SkillsUSA
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