Animal-care training syllabus proves popular here and abroad
by Tim Lougheed
More than a year after the Canadian Council on Animal Care made a significant portion of its training material freely available on its Web site, the organization has found a ready market for the material as far away as South America.
The Web site offers 12 modules covering core topics in a syllabus the CCAC published in 1999 as part of its guidelines on institutional animal user training. For Canadian institutions to retain their CCAC approval, people working with animals must now update their training annually based on the syllabus (or its equivalent at institutions that have developed their own training programs).
CCAC is a publicly funded, independent agency responsible for setting and maintaining standards for the care and use of animals used in research, teaching and testing throughout Canada.
"The [goal] of the guidelines is the training of the investigators, the training of graduate students, and the training of research assistants and technicians," says Clément Gauthier, CCAC's executive director. "But the way the modules are conceived, it's a very flexible continuing-education tool for others." The material can be downloaded directly from the Web as HTML files or delivered in the widely used format of Web Course Tools.
In fact, formal requests for the material have come from Singapore, Tunisia and countries in Latin America. Singapore, for one, was granted permission to adopt the CCAC guidelines as its own national guidelines on animal care.
The modules, though, were aimed mainly at Canadian universities. Some of them faced significant challenges in meeting CCAC's new training requirements after these went into effect in 2003. The University of Saskatchewan, for example, had a well developed series of lecture courses that trained more than 70 people a year on campus. But when CCAC's revised policy was first announced in 1999, the director of the university's Animal Resources Centre realized that the university would need to do much more in future.
"We thought about it," recalls director Ernie Olfert, "and said 'Holy cow, this is a really big job we're going to have to do'." The new policy specifies that everyone handling animals must be trained regularly. This meant "some 450 people a year would have to undergo retraining."
At the University of British Columbia, the prospect was even more daunting. "We reckoned that around here it probably meant around 2,000 people," says Jim Love, director of animal care for UBC's Animal Care Centre.
Dr. Olfert and Dr. Love were asked to join a team of 66 animal-care experts from across the country who contributed to drafting the 12 training modules. The modules became one of the most popular portions of the CCAC Web site when it was first posted in April 2003.
"It's in a format that's quite flexible and makes it easy for institutions to implement whatever kind of techni- cal infrastructure" they have, says Dr. Gauthier.
It particularly appeals to smaller institutions that may have offered limited training before the new guidelines went into effect. The University of Regina, for example, has used the University of Saskatchewan's program to train people who use animals on campus. Allan Cahoon, U of R's vice-president, research and international, says this could begin to change now that the CCAC modules are available.
In the meantime, CCAC is tracking the international attention that its Web syllabus has generated, says Dr. Gauthier. "The openness and the comprehensiveness of our modules are unique."
