**4. Using new technologies to train families**

The use of the Internet has grown substantially over the last few years, with an estimated 260 million people now online in North America [24]. In addition, between 2000 and 2010 the proportion of Internet users who are black or Latino has nearly doubled, causing the In‐ ternet population to closely resemble the racial composition of the nation as a whole. Health information is one of the most important subjects researched online, and this is reflected in the autism community, where many families are heavily dependent upon Internet services for education, updates on autism treatment, and peer support via parent chat rooms [15].

However, despite the great interest in using the Internet as a resource for learning about au‐ tism, online parent training interventions are rare. Recently, considerable evidence has be‐ come available demonstrating that web-based feedback systems may increasingly provide feasible and cost-effective patient education [25] because they are available 24 hours a day and can be used repeatedly to enhance learning. Further, with wide-spread internet technol‐ ogy, it may now be possible to provide much needed training to families living remotely and to those representing previously underserved minorities. Clearly, there is an urgent need for clinicians and researchers who have manualized training interventions to adapt them for online use and systematically evaluate their effectiveness through clinical trials.
