The US Department of Energy developed the National Training and Education Resource (NTER) as an open source platform to foster a new ecosystem for training and education.  NTER was originally developed to improve the quality and rate of delivery for training of those involved in energy efficiency retrofitting of residential buildings.

Since the 1990s people have been creating digital content, such as training courses, en masse. However, we still aren’t very good at finding high quality online materials, sharing them, or repurposing them for new projects. Part of the reason for this is technical limitations (for example, tools are needed for search and customization) and part is due to policy. To address these issues, the National Training & Education Resource (NTER) was designed as an open source platform to foster a new ecosystem in the training and education space.

By taking advantage of information technology and the latest learning science, the NTER platform offers a new suite of tools to create and access traditional, multimedia and 3D-enabled courses. In addition, NTER acts as a distributed system of courses and content, with nodes (servers) in federal agencies, universities, colleges and commercial organizations. Courses can be created and maintained by local instructors but shared and accessed across all NTER nodes.

NTER provides all the standard tools needed for developing and deploying online learning including a Learning and Content Management System (LCMS), e-commerce support allowing commercial entities to sell training and educational material, single sign-on, a sharable content object reference model (SCORM) editor and support for a wide variety of social media tools. Together, these tools enable instructors to share, reuse and remix existing works so that students can benefit from rich and immersive educational experiences.

NTER has already begun to transform online training.  Organizations, schools and industries are using it to teach and train about topics much broader than energy.  The United States welcomes those countries who would like to use NTER to offer training that is useful for their own purposes.  Current courses include:  Blower Door Basics; Process Heating; Building Sciences; Attic Air Sealing, and others.