Information Technology

IT Training Services changes name to IT Learning and Development

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In early July, IT Training Services changed its name to IT Learning and Development (ITLD) and relaunched its website as itld.psu.edu.

Since beginning in 1998, ITLD has continuously grown to better serve the evolving technology needs of the Penn State community with performance support and resources.

Beyond live, face-to-face and online training workshops, the group provides a wide variety of other performance support resources to help students, faculty, and staff members get the most out of University technologies.

According to Chris Lucas, director of ITLD, the new name better reflects the group’s focus on professional development and supporting IT learning across the organization.

“Over the last several years, we’ve made a strategic shift to providing more support on enterprise-wide IT services that support the teaching, research and administrative needs of the University,” Lucas said. “For example, we’ve used lynda.com as a replacement for many non-Penn State specific topics, which created capacity to focus on such initiatives as Canvas, iTwo, and IT Service Management. We felt that given these strategic changes in how we support the learning needs of students, faculty and staff, our old name was no longer accurately representing the way we support the goals of the University.”  

In addition to the new name, ITLD has launched a new and improved website, which makes searching, browsing and requesting learning resources much easier. The site also allows users to explore the newest training offering: Learning Paths, which curate the best learning resources on a given topic to help users build skills and knowledge from start to finish.

“We’ve started aggregating content from various resources into Learning Paths that provide a sequenced, structured route to give learners control of the learning experience,” Lucas said. “These combine courses, web-based modules, job aids, knowledge articles and more, and the content is usually a combination of vendor-provided resources and those we develop internally for Penn State-specific-use cases.”

To explore Learning Paths and find more information on ITLD services, visit the new website. For updates on upcoming training offerings and news, visit the ITLD blog

Last Updated September 13, 2017