Recently, the new RCMP Commissioner has thrown his support behind an initiative to extend e-Learning solutions for improving the quality of practice within the organization. The following article in the Globe & Mail outlines this approach:
RCMP & e-Learning
While it's good to harness this form of distance learning, it is by no means new and in no real sense dramatic as an approach to the fundamental challenges facing this policing organization. There has been considerable availability of distance learning options for decades and the RFP that accompanies this announcement reveals some fairly pedestrian elements.
There is already a significant infrastructure in place for the RCMP to take advantage of for the purposes it outlines in its current Request for Proposal (RFP). For example, the College of Continuing Education at Dalhousie University has been providing a range of distance learning options for police officers through their Police Leadership Program (PLP). This includes the conventional correspondence course approach, as well as, more sophisticated e-Learning options across a number of topics relevant to modern policing. There are courses designed for legal issues impacting policing, strategic management, policing in a modern community, financial management among others. It would be a straightforward matter to enlist the existing capacity and structures available through the PLP at Dalhousie University to prepare curriculum offerings that would meet the present requirements of the RCMP for leadership development training, education and development.
They can become an outsourcing professional service provider which will help them expand their business capacity to more than their focused market, thus, opening more doors of opportunities for them in the market.
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