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 This professional diploma program is designed to prepare students for a career as a professional dog trainer, family dog training instructor, and dog behavior counselor. This program satisfies the theoretical and practical requirements for board certification as a board certified Canine Behavior Counselor (CBC) granted by the Board of Professional Certification of the non-profit Association of Companion Animal Behavior Counselors. See www.animalbehaviorcounselors.org for more information.
The ACAS Canine Behavior Counseling professional diploma program is not an unsupervised home study or correspondence course. Online learning and assessment is delivered via the Internet in our Virtual Campus classrooms at www.amcollege.net. Courses are led by PhD, veterinarian, and Master’s degree level instructors who facilitate online theoretical coursework that consists of PowerPoint presentations, instructor course notes, video, supplemental readings from the scientific literature, applied research projects, field projects, online asynchronous classroom discussions, real-time class teleconferences, and student group projects. Students login to their virtual classrooms anytime, night or day, to access their course notes, discussion area, exams, and project drop-boxes.
 Academic residencies are face-to-face meetings held several times a year at our 20-acre Dream Pond Science Field Station and Reserve located in Northern Florida near Orlando and Daytona Beach. At an academic residency, students have the opportunity to work face-to-face with lettered faculty and test newly learned theory in classes, workshops and clinics with dogs and their caregivers. Students work at the science field station, local animal shelters and humane societies, animal sanctuaries, veterinary practices, or governmental animal control agencies. Academic residencies provide an opportunity for students to network and collaborate with other students from many states and sometimes other countries sharing ideas, cultural perspectives, and new learning experiences. Additionally, it is a time to work with many different breeds of dogs while under the supervision of an experienced faculty member and trainer.
This program for professionals typically takes 9-12 months to complete. A new semester begins in the spring, summer, fall, and winter of each year. Online semesters are 12-weeks in length. There are six, 3-credit 12-week online courses, one 3-credit 60 contact hour 5-day academic residency with dogs, and a 3-credit 75 contact hour field project with animals (real-world supervised experience) that may be completed in the student’s local community, or elsewhere with faculty approval.
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Students enrolled in this program are required to work with dogs in academic residency, field project or externship courses. Working with animals requires certain physical requirements including, but not limited to, responding quickly to animal movement, bending, use of hands to hold leashes, food reinforcers, and clicker signaling devices; restraining an animal such as a large dog on a leash, donning and removing training equipment used with the animal’s training, placement and removal of animals into cages or carriers, etc. Students should be confident that they are capable of performing these physical tasks, with or without accommodations, prior to enrolling in a program. If a student has questions about their ability to perform these physical tasks, it is advised that they seek the guidance of their personal physician before applying.
