Yesterday morning, I looked at some of the general issues in the adoptive parent training required by the Hague Convention. Now, I'd like to tell you about a nifty online training class I've just completed.

This summer, the National Council For Adoption, an adoption advocacy group based in Alexandria, Va., released "The Intercountry Adoption Journey", a seven-part tool that allows you to get eight of the 10 hours of Hague-mandated training right over the Internet, whenever and wherever you want. That alone held enormous appeal for me: When Russia, which has not yet formally implemented Hague, began mumbling about parent training during my second adoption in 2005, I had to hire a babysitter and hightail it up to my home study agency to sit in on a parenting class. Informative, but not convenient. With the NCFA course, I began training when it was convenient for me, and I spread it out over more than 10 days. It's Web-based, and though you have to Adobe's Flash 8 Player to view it, it runs well, even on my creaky, six-year-old Dell.

The NCFA has broken the key issues that need to be covered in Hague training into (mostly) manageable chunks. It has brought in a wide range of experts--adoption professionals, doctors, lawyers, government officials--as well as adoptive parents to speak to the issues in video segments. There is a lot to listen to, read and assimilate, but the interactive quizzes at the end of each section help keep you on track. (No cheating: If you try to skip a segment, the computer lets you know you still have to do it.) And the cost is definitely manageable: Just $95 for a single parent or $175 for a couple.

I appreciated the forthright way in which the speakers addressed health and developmental issues, particularly Dr. Jennifer Chambers of the University of Alabama's International Adoption Clinic. Module five, "Leaving Familiar Ties" was an eye-opener: I don’t think I had ever seen or heard anyone address the grief and loss that an adopted child might face before this training. And I laughed in quiet recognition at the segment done by the Princes, adoptive parents of two girls from China, on how one adoption may not prepare you for another. I found that I learned a lot from the training, even after having been through two Russian adoptions and writing about them on a daily basis.

Would I change some things about the NCFA's course? Sure. Module three was way too long and some of the required readings were too long or technically dense for easy reading over the Internet. But those are pretty minor quibbles for something that could be so important to the lives of children and the parents who adopt them.

You can get a taste of the NCFA's training program by clicking here. For more information, call the NCFA at (703) 299-6633 or e-mail the program's developer, Chuck Johnson, at cjohnson@adoptioncouncil.org.