August 20, 2006 - 5:00pm
Malaspina University-College graduate Arnold Guerin uses his education to save children and track down criminals for police officers across <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Canada.
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Guerin, a former Ladysmith resident and Saanich Police Constable, is presently working in Ottawa for the Technology Section of the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre at the RCMP headquarters.
Guerin uses his computer skills to deliver online training for an intelligence system called the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS). This system allows Child Exploitation Investigators to share information on child pornography. He also provides technology research to other Canadian police departments, administers the CETS intelligence database, works with Microsoft Canada’s CETS Centre, assists in investigations, provides technical support and researches emerging technology used to trade child abuse images on the Internet.
He does all this thanks to an online program he took at Malaspina University-College’s Nanaimo campus.
Guerin was one of the last students to graduate from Malaspina’s Internet Essentials Certificate Program (IECP) last spring before the program was merged with Malaspina’s Digital Media Technologies diploma program. The program was renamed Internet Production (iPro) for September 2006. Like the previous programs, iPro allows students to study their first year on-line, followed by a second year in-classroom option.
“The online mobility aspect of the course is what I liked best,” said Guerin, who worked full-time while taking the program and frequently completed his assignments on his laptop while waiting for flights at the airport, in hotel rooms and even from his mobile phone.
“It wasn’t just online learning, it was mobile learning. The skills I learned in IECP I put to use immediately at work.”
Alanna Edwards, iPro coordinator, loves delivering the online program and said the experience of studying online helps students become better Internet professionals.
“The students need to know how to design for the user, and by being a user themselves they know what works and what doesn’t,” said Edwards.
In iPro, students learn professional-level web authoring, cascading style-sheets, Internet Multimedia production, Internet Graphics and how to use visual and information design for the web. The second year allows students to earn a diploma, and those credits can also give them a two-year leg up on a Bachelor of Arts Degree.
Although much of the existing program remains the same, under iPro students can take the first year program online and be automatically enrolled in the second year program as long as they meet the academic requirements. Before iPro, students had to reapply for the second year, said Edwards.
The second year is taught at the Nanaimo campus in a simulated real-world environment full of high pressure deadlines, project presentations and teamwork. Graduates work in a variety of fields, including crime-fighting and web management.
For more information about iPro and other media-related programs at Malaspina, go to www.mediamalaspina.ca.
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