by Brian Robertson, B.A., LL.B.

President, Diligent Security Training and Consulting Inc

www.diligenttraining.ca

It has been 2 years since the Private Security and Investigative Services Act (PSISA) came into force in Ontario, over 6 years since the Province of Ontario stated its intention to include mandatory training as part of its regulatory reform package, and nearly 10 years since Patrick Shand died as a result of having been handcuffed and pinned down during an arrest in a parking lot in Scarborough.  This coming winter the first phase of mandatory training for licensed security guards and private investigators in Ontario will finally be implemented.  By next spring, it will have become an across-the-board requirement that all new guard license applicants have completed a 40-hour training course, and that all new PI license applicants have completed a 50-hour course, prior to licensing.

Early on in the process of determining what mandatory training in Ontario would look like, the Private Security and Investigative Services Branch (PSISB) decided that mandatory training would have to be delivered by means of face-to-face, instructor-facilitated, classroom-based learning.   The prescribed content has been set out in very broad general terms, and there will be no requirements for instructor certification, but the training will have to be delivered face to face.  No on-line delivery options will be permitted.  If a student hasn’t spent the requisite 40 or 50 hours in a classroom receiving instruction from a live instructor, he or she will not have met the Province’s mandatory training requirement.

There are many people in the security industry, including probably most trainers, who are generally convinced that receipt of face-to face instruction by a qualified instructor, coupled with the opportunity to ask questions and participate in class discussions, offers a way better learning experience for the average student than completion of a self-paced on-line course does. This may be true in many cases.  But not necessarily in all.

The young millenials who we all hire these days are a generation who were raised online. Online learning is second nature to many of them.  And the developments in on-line learning technology and pedagogy that have been made over the course of the last 20 years (i.e., since many of us went through basic training) have created opportunities for online learning that can be highly interactive.   Meanwhile, the ideal of rich, robust, interactive classroom learning that we all like to imagine pre-supposes the presence of an instructor who knows and loves his or her topic, who loves to teach, and who knows how to teach well.  It also pre-supposes that at least some of the students present will be the kind of thoughtful, motivated, active learners who like to participate in class discussions.  If one or other or both of these elements is absent, classroom learning can be a pretty tedious affair.

I’ll make the argument that neither on-line learning nor classroom learning are inherently any better than the other.  Everything we know about adult learning tells us that different learners have different learning styles, and all like to learn in different ways and at different paces.  Plus, online learning offers a practical learning option for students who live in the sorts of small communities and rural areas where the low numbers of people who will require training will mean that participation in formal classroom instruction is cost prohibitive.  It’s easy to organize a classroom-based course if you’ve got 24 students who need to take it.  It’s less easy if only one or two people in your town need to take it.

One of the reasons that the public regulators who set up mandatory training requirements tend to shy away from allowing online learning is their dogged commitment to the idea that training standards have to be articulated in terms of minimum training hours.  If you start with the notion that a course has to be 40 hours in length, how can you permit asynchrous online learning?  There’s no truly effective way to run a stopwatch on online learning.  But the idea of minimum training hours also flies in the face of everything we know about adult learning.  So a student sits for 2 hours in a room where a lecture on use of force theory is being delivered.  So what?  This tells us nothing about what that student has or has not heard, understood, and retained.  In the end, it will be the test administered by the PSISB that determines whether or not the poor fellow knows anything.  If he can pass it, who cares whether he acquired his knowledge from a 40-hour course, a 400-hour course, an on-line course, a good textbook, or from watching the discovery channel?  Either he knows the answers or he doesn’t.   If he does, why not let him go to work?

There are some well-qualified purveyors of on-line security training out there, and it will be interesting to see whether or not they attempt to bring pressure to bear on the PSISB to reconsider its position on on-line learning.  It will be interesting to see whether or not we in Ontario ultimately end up getting a mandatory training requirement designed for this century, or for the last.