You don’t need to have worked with dogs full-time, but to apply for the Academy course, you’ll need:
- Good dog wrangling/handling skills. You might have acquired these volunteering with a rescue or shelter, or through taking part in canine sports, such as agility
- At least 15 – 20 hours a week to commit to studying and practice training
- Access to dogs to demonstrate your training techniques in video submissions. You may use your own dog if he or she does not already know the behaviors. We provide suggestions on how to recruit demo dogs.
Since this is an online course, you’ll also need:
A PC or Mac (OSX 10.6 or later) with a usb socket, loaded with:
- Adobe Flash Player 10.3 or later
- An up-to-date version of an internet browser: Google Chrome 11, Firefox 4, Safari 5, Internet Explorer 10Opera 9.5, Netscape 7, AOL 8, CompuServe 7 or later versions of any of these
- A video camera to record your training for assignments sessions (you can do this on your smart phone with a suitable stand or holder)
Our webinars run on Adobe Connect to allow for video streaming. If your internet connection is slow, you can download and watch the webinar recordings, but you may struggle to stream them live.
We can’t offer individual tech support to students so you will need to be familiar with how your PC or Mac works for downloading and uploading material and be able to troubleshoot basic problems with your equipment. Additionally, you’ll need to know how to retrieve and edit video from your camera or phone to upload for video assignments.
