INTRODUCTION
For many years, administrative theories have evolved and have been concerned with training of organization collaborators, seeking to use activities which minimize operational flaws in the current administration of knowledge as a tool for sustaining competitive advantages. Training and development activities (T & D) of company employees are characterized as strategic issues. Program methods of T & D have started to receive new focus. Distance education has been an emerging solution for training.
THEORETICAL REFERENTIAL
Training and Development Perspectives
The management of human resources in the last 10 years has had a larger involvement in the executive decision processes aiming for results through the alignment of human potential with the strategic focus of the organization. To Bohlander, Snell and Sherman (2003), the term “training” is frequently used in a casual way to describe the efforts of a company to stimulate its members to learn.
Structure and Evaluation of Virtual Training
The structure of a training program can be defined through four basic stages (Bohlander, Snell and Sherman 2003): evaluation of needs, the project, implementation, and evaluation of training. In the last one, the four levels proposed by Kirkpatrick (1998) are reaction, learning, behaviour and results. To Hack (2000) they can also be adopted to training via the Litemet:
DESCRIPTIONS AND ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
After bibliographical research into the definition of criteria and indicators and analysis of interviews with the distance education speciahsts, it was verified that: distance education specialists place greater emphasis on evaluation of leaming, while the managers of Training and Development defined a larger range of criteria and indicators, especially evaluation of the results.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
The presented model has expressed the effort of listing maximum possible relevant criteria and indicators for evaluation of virtual training in the organizations. It was also established specific indicators related to each criterion, being that some are repeated for different criteria. However, the study has pointed out that the definition of indicators is still inexact for four criteria, as the evaluation of each is more directly hnked to the particularities of organizational reality