Hello,
Thank-you for visiting the e-Training for Dogs website and welcome to this unique online educational provider for all important things dog!
I am delighted to tell you the history of e-Training for Dogs and how it all got started!I worked at Colorado State Universtiy from 1994 until 2008. I moved to Colorado from Minnesota to go to graduate school here and just never left the beauty of the mountains. After I earned my Ph.D. in Social Psychology, I began working as first the Coordinator, and eventually the Director of an institute on the college campus called the Family and Youth Institute. I wrote several grants to address and tackle some issues facing families and youth in Colorado over the years. One day I was at a meeting on the eastern plains of Colorado. If you have never been to Colorado, you might picture it as a beautiful state full of mountains and streams. However, much of eastern Colorado is flat, semi-arid and desolate. You can drive on some roads for 90 miles and never hit a town and maybe see 5 or 6 cars the whole stretch. It is vast and it is sparsely populated.
I was at an after-school state initiative conference out on the eastern plains of Colorado in a very small town near the Wyoming, Nebraska state lines called Sterling. A couple of women approached me and asked if I was from CSU. I said I was. They then asked me if I could do something about making it possible for them to earn their bachelor’s degree in early childhood education online. I said that someone (after all, online courses crosses all state lines) somewhere must be providing a bachelor’s degree. They said no, no one was and they had to get one according to the No Child Left Behind Act that states that all educators in early childhood facilities must have a bachelor’s degree by the year 2011. They told me they, like many early childhood educators, had their AA degrees or a high school diploma, but not their bachelors degree and they simply could not move to Denver or Fort Collins and leave their families 3 hours away. They could not simply “go back to school.”
So, I went back to work the next day and verified that there were NO online courses for early childhood educators to get a bachelor’s degree outside of Minnesota and those courses would not work in Colorado. I then wrote a grant to the US Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Children, Youth and Families to develop an online degree completion course so these people could keep their jobs and not have to leave their homes to go back to school. I received the grant and the courses are now online.
As I went through this process, I had a litter of puppies from my German Shorthaired Pointer, Mazzy (www.outlandergsp.com). She is a talented and titled dog and my puppy owners expect that her puppies will do as well. They were calling me and dropping over and trying so hard to learn how to train their own pups to do the things their mother did. I would try to help them over the phone or on weekends but it just got so cumbersome for them and me that training would slip. They bought books, videos and went to seminars. They learned many great things, still no ongoing daily training for them was available. Worse, poor trainers might abound near them and that would be even worse than no training
That’s when I thought, HEY! I should put some courses online just like I did at the university. So, I started with the hunting dog courses and this just expanded into all realms of the dog world and here I am! I hope that you will be able to get as much joy out of spending the time with your own dog training it to do what you want as I do or developing your knowledge and skill levels to advance yoruself professionally within the dog world.
e-Training for Dogs is run much like a University. I am very particular about the individuals who join the e-Training for Dogs Faculty. They must meet strict criteria to be a member of the Faculty. Courses undergo rigid examination before they are published here and students complete anonymous evaluations of every course and faculty member that I personally see before the professor. Be assured that these courses and the professors that teach them are of the highest quality.
Welcome to e-Training for Dogs. I look forward to receiving your registration!
Cheryl Asmus Aguiar and Mazzy to the right and her daughter Flicker to the left.