2 00:00:03,780 --> 00:00:08,280 [John] Welcome to the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology.
I'm John Verrico and this is Tech Talk.
The Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology directorate is the research and
development arm that supports the enormous mission of the department. One of the things that we do, is we go
to the people who are on the front line of security, the front line of protecting
our nation, the front line of responding to disasters and we ask the people
what is it that you need to make your job better, safer, faster, more secure?
Whatever. And then we turn to industry, we turn to
other government laboratories, we turn to academia
to try to find those solutions. Those technological solutions to those challenges.
So in reaching out to the bright minds of academia
the Department of Homeland Security has established mission focused centers of excellence
through our university programs office. There are currently
nine of these centers of excellence, encompassing a consortia of
nearly two hundred individual colleges and universities.
it�s quite a large brain pool that we have of smart| people out there thinking about these things.
The COEs have three primary focus areas in research,
in education and in training and all three of those focus areas complement each other
and provide a foundation for how the COEs
will operate to meet those objectives. The ultimate objective of course
is to positively impact Homeland Security and they do this
by transitioning the results, the products and the outcomes in the form of
tools, technologies and knowledge products to the DHS components
and to state and local entities. Today's Tech Talk we are going to feature the
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism,
otherly known as START. It is a
DHS Center of Excellence(COE) led by the University of Maryland.
With me today I have Gina Harrigan, who is the Program Manager in the Science and Technology directorates
office of university programs. We have Liberty Day, who is
Assistant Director of Education and Training at START, welcome. And also
Joyce Rasing, the Graduate Education Program Coordinator at START.
So thank you all for joining us. We really appreciate having
you here today. So let's start off with the most basic of all questions and what
is START? [Gina] So START is one our first
actually our second Center of Excellence that was established about 12 years ago.
It is led by the University of Maryland, like you already said
and its focus is on the
I'm going to have to put my glasses on for this so I don't mess this up, but its focus is on
advancing science base knowledge about the causes and
consequences of terrorism and the effectiveness and consequences of
responses to terrorism. Through its research START provides actionable data tools
and training to assist the current and future Homeland Security workforce.
[John] Thank you. So tell me
about STARTs training program? [Joyce] Well over the last several years we've
really focused a lot of attention on developing our training capabilities as
specifically we wanna reach professional audiences who have the
ability to use the research in such a way that it impacts
policy and practice and so one of the ways that we've
done this is we've worked with the training program itself, which is
a team of training professionals, works with subject matter
experts from our consortium to identify appropriate content that we can then
build out into a training course. And so what's really great about that is that we
have over the last several years really developed a diverse
training portfolio. It's as diverse as our research
portfolios as well. We have trainings available on risk and
crisis communication, on encountering violent extremism,
on terrorism awareness for ferry operators.
And this just gives you a brief overview of
the range of possible training topics that we can provide.
[John] Wow, that's quite a broad spectrum. So what
is S&T's role in this Gina? [Gina] We have a federal program
managers and we make those connections between
the DHS components and the First Responders
to the actual academic sources of information.
We make sure that work that we do in academia is
mission relevant. It's not ivory tower, its mission relevant
there to deliver solutions for the Homeland Security enterprise.
[John] Excellent. So now our audience for these Tech Talks
is pretty much a broad spectrum of stakeholder, they could be First Responders,
they could be people in industry, they could be potential students
that might want to get involved in some of these programs. So are there any specific training
opportunities that we would like to highlight that might, that maybe they will be interested in?
[Liberty] Yes, one of the reasons we wanted to come talk to you all today
is based on the fact that we have a suite of training courses
on countering violent extremism, which has been funded by FEMA
and those courses, I'll give you an overview really quickly of
four courses, like our most relevant to this audience at this time
and these include both online courses and one in-person course.
The first one we released in March of 2017 and it's
Community lead Actions in Response to Violent Extremism, otherwise known
as CARVE. It's about a four. [John] Would you spell that out again please? [Liberty] Yes,
it's C-A-R-V-E, Community lead
Actions in Responses to Violent Extremism. [John] Thank you.
[Liberty] Yeah, so this is a four hour online course. It's self-paced.
It's available through the University of Maryland learning management system.
You do not have to be an affiliate of UMD to take the course and it is offered
for free. This course in particular is going to give you
an introduction to the radicalization of violence and from a research perspective
and it's also going to answer the question of what can a communities do
in response to violent extremism and so this is provided
to lay groundwork some of our other courses.
The next course that was just released earlier this year is
specifically for using non-integrating mental health and education approaches
and Encountering Violent Extremism and so that is a three and a half hour course
based online, available for free. You can go sign-up
and jump right into the course almost immediately and then you have sixty days to
complete once you are in the course space, but this really takes a look at how mental health
providers and educational professionals can
be included in the response.
So it explores this potential and actual synergy between
these areas of study and CDE itself and then we have a Countering Violence
Extremest Narratives. This course looks at five different types of
violent narratives that are and specifically what are the
messages that the violent extremist groups put forth in order to justify
the use of violence and so we take a look at
what those narratives actually are and the latter part of the course we talk about
the principles of how you can develop counter narratives or
alternative narratives to these violent narratives that are being put forth.
That one again is an online self-paced course and
is also available via the same platform. [John] Is that one also free?
[Liberty] Yes. That's an amazing thing, you don't normally hear that so I'll repeat
that these courses are free and that's an really important
that gives people a great opportunity to come on and learn
really important background issues. [Liberty] They are supported by FEMA, so FEMA
is actually covering the cost of delivery so. [John] That's fantastic. [Liberty] And then we have one final course
and this is an in-person course, so it's designed to be
much more in depth and really focused on building the skills within the community
but if it's focusing on coalition building and for CVE and community resilience.
It's designed to be provided be provided to groups of between
25, 35 individuals. We want to draw from multidiscipline
areas and backgrounds. So that everyone in the room has the opportunity to learn from each other
and to consider how they can build a coalition to develop
a community specific response to violent extremism.
And we have funding from FEMA to provide up to seven iterations of this and so
we are looking for communities who are interested in bringing us in to provide this training
and that one is also free. [Gina] And John, such a broad audience is
in line with the Homeland Security national preparedness goal. We recognize that
a secure and resilient nation requires a full community.
[John] That's brilliant, cause I was gonna ask
it sounds like these courses, you mentioned that
they'd be interesting to our audience and I was wondering if these were intended for Homeland Security
professionals or for that broader audience. [Liberty] Well
when FEMA tasked us with developing these courses, they specifically wanted us
to develop them for community partners and so we
defined that very broadly, because we do feel like it does take
a number of different professionals and disciplines to create an effective
response and so just for an example our first course CARVE
was released last year, that's been taken by emergency
management personnel, law enforcement, educational professionals
students, researchers, school research officers,
educators so we have a very wide potential audience that
were able to reach with these courses. [John] So what are the benefits
if I am a, let's say I am a Homeland Security professional in some capacity
whether in law enforcement, emergency management, school resource officer whatever, what are the
benefits of participating in these types of courses? [Liberty] Well the first is
just understanding how we are defining these different topic areas. There's a lot of different
definitions. When we first got into creating these courses, it was surprising
to us that there wasn't an agreed upon lexicon for
this particular topic area, so we do provide some really
basic information about what is violent extremism, what is terrorism, what is hate crimes
and how they are related. And so it gives a common language that people can use
that is academically informed. So the benefit of
all of our courses is that we do draw upon our research
findings and many of which are funded from S&T and so
it is an academically informed research driven content on this particular topic.
And in addition it
really helps identify the fact that this is a type of
issue that a full community will have to engage in and so
it does open people's eyes to the fact that I have a role in
this and what is my role? And so you get to explore those types of
topic areas. And then finally I will say, at least initially our
evaluations are very positive and at least three out of four
report that they have increased their knowledge skills and abilities. And then
CARVE in particular, 96% of people who completed the
course said they would recommend it to a peer and so we feel very positive about that. [John] That's excellent.
So are there any eligibility requirements that
people have to have as a prerequisite or something that, some baseline that they should know before
they even get in? [Liberty] No baselines at each level before you get in
and while we do feel like the courses are strongest
when taken together. We have tried to anticipate that not
everyone is going to be able to take the full suite of courses and so we do cover
a reduced overview. We do some basic groundwork in each of the courses so you don't have to take
all of them if one of them speaks to you more strongly than the others than that would be fine.
Some other prerequisites,
well actually it's not a prerequisite, it's just
some eligibility requirements that I would that I would want to make people aware of is the fact
that this is a FEMA funded course and because of that you
do have to be a U.S. citizen or a legal resident in order to
do qualify to take the course, however if you
are not a resident or a legal resident or a legal resident or
a citizen and you do want to take course, if you have a sponsoring agency
then we can fill out a foreign visitor request form and get
you access to the course. It's just a little bit more of a paperwork process to make that happen.
[John] And where can they go to register?
[Liberty] Well you can register for any of the online courses
via our website www.START.umd.edu.
[John] And that's on the screen. [Liberty] Okay and
there is along the top there is a section of our website
dedicated to training and so what you'll do is go to the training drop down menus
and select the trainings that you are interested in and then you'll be
taken to the registration page of our LMS,|now if you�re interested
and bringing us in to do the in-person training, then you would want to get in contact with me.
Which is training@start.umd.edu.
[John] Thank you and that's on the screen as well.
And just let me encourage people to, for those of you watching this please
if you have any questions at all just put them in the comments and we will get back to you
and we will respond to you and also you can reach out directly to
Liberty at that training email or go onto the STARTs website.
Let's talk about the
graduate certification program.
What is, kinda tell, tell us about it? Tell us about the certificate program. [Joyce] Yeah, so the program
is a four course, 12 credit, online synchronous program
at the University of Maryland of course. It provides graduate level education for
interested individuals wanting to learn about
thee causes, dynamics and impacts of terrorism in a domestic
and international realm. [John] So what kinds of courses
are a part of this graduate curriculum? [Joyce] Sure.
So there are four courses that each individual has to complete in order
to receive the certificate program. The first two are the
core courses, Motivations and Intents of Terrorist and Terrorist Group, Groups
Societal Impacts of and Responses to Terrorism.
So these two courses generally gauge thee
the discussion of terrorism and how it's defined in the
academic realm.
They discuss how global and global terrorist events and
terrorist are framed in the field in the academia.
There are a few elective courses, in which a student has to choose one of them.
Countering Violent Extremism, Policy and Practice and
Legal and communal Approaches to Encountering a violent Extremism. So the first course CBE or
Encountering a violent Extremism is a very popular topic in this realm so
they talk about the existing programs both domestically
and internationally. And lastly there is a research methods course in which a
student has to choose between qualitative and quantitative research methods.
[John] So how are these courses run? Are these
in-person or are they online? How do they do these? [Joyce] Yes, so they are
not in-person, but they are online. They are also synchronous
and they run after 6pm Eastern Standard time.
[John] So somebody has to login and watch it, when it's happening? [Joyce] Yes, so they
yeah the student gains access to the University of Maryland's systems, once they are admitted into
the program. [John] Great, thank you. So does S&T
envision that we will get a lot of people that already employed at DHS
that might pursue this certificate? So anecdotally we do
get contacted by DHS personnel that want to take
courses and so they ask us about the development
of those courses and a lot of our research has transitioned
and has provided the content for the course material.
[John] That's cool. [Joyce] I just wanted to add on to that,
that 25% of our students come from federal employers.
Some of them include DHS, the FBI, DOJ and NIJ.
And we also have a small population of students
that also have jobs within the military, but they're not active
duty or civilian military. [John] Now they do have to have a
bachelor's degree before doing this? [Joyce] Yes. [John]
But they don't already have to have a masters in something else? [Joyce] No, they
we only require a bachelor's degree for our program,
although we recommend that they have already obtained a masters degree but it is not required to have a masters.
[John] But this is a graduate level certificate? [Joyce] Right this is a graduate level. [John] Good, good. So what's the
application process like? What does it take to get into this? [Joyce] So the application process
will be through our website, which I'll mention later.
We'll require an online form,
which collects your demographics, as well as
your personal statement. A current resume or CVE,
as well as two recommendation letters from
your employer or previous instructors. [John] So the
recommendation letters are the real key to getting in the door and that's good to know.
When's the next deadline? [Joyce] So we have a few months until the next deadline.
January 12th, 2019 will be the next deadline for the spring
2019 semester. [John] Okay, so thank you. And they
sign-up on the website, which is www.start.umd.edu
and if they have questions, your email? [Joyce] Yes.
If you have any questions, you can contact us at education@start.umd.edu.
[John] Okay, so its training@start.umd.edu
for education at start.umd.edu?
Great, thank you. So Gina
this is very exciting what's going on at START and I know there are lots of great opportunities in some of the other
centers of excellence. If someone wanted to know about what's going on in some of the other
centers of excellence, where should they find information? [Gina] So I think the best is to log onto
the SciTech website, which I think is on the screen now. [website: https://scitech.dhs.gov]
Search under university programs and from the university programs
and centers of excellence. You can get a link to the other nine centers of excellence
homepages and on those pages you will learn about all the centers. [John] Excellent.
So that is for all of you out there
do not use www, it is the https:
back slash, back slash, but its SciTech, s-c-i-.-
t-e-c-h-.dhs.gov.
Search for centers of excellence or search for university programs and
either of those will get you to the information about all the different center and the
offerings that we have and the wonderful programs we have for universities.
So I want to thank all of you for joining us today. Before we wrap it up is there anything
you'd like to add, anything that you think people absolutely should know about the center?
We covered everything? [Joyce] I think
you've covered everything. Thank you. [John] Okay, great thank you. Well I to want to point out that START is
the home of the Global Terrorism Database and
it has all of the research covering
all terrorist incidents and responses to terrorist incidents going way way back to the earliest
recorded incident, so it's quite an amazing database. It is used by law enforcement
agencies and all sorts of organizations and research organizations around the world
and so that is kind of your claim to fame before you get into
these types of things, so keep that in mind. Thank you for joining us.
Join us next time for another Tech Talk.