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To remain fresh and relevant, online courses need to be continually revised and improved. Considerations of relevant laws and institutional policies should be a core focus of every curriculum redesign. Redesigning an online curriculum presents rich opportunities to integrate the latest thinking in given disciplines and to incorporate new methodologies for teaching and learning. New, emerging, and evolving technologies can greatly enhance work to update the curriculum of an online course.

S 25999On June 15, 2010 the DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the adoption of BS 25999 for the PS-Prep program.  BS 25999 (which comes in two parts) is one of three standards for use in the Voluntary Private Sector Preparedness Accreditation and Certification Program (PS-Prep). PS-Prep is directed by Title IX of the Implementing the Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007.

By leveraging the proprietary data in Delphi™, the world’s largest database of industrial system vulnerabilities, Wurldtech has created a solution specifically designed to help reduce the cost and complexity of mitigation activities for process control networks by integrating specific vulnerability intelligence into common security enforcement devices such as firewalls and intrusion detections systems. This allows common IT infrastructure to be tailored for industrial network environments and continuously updated with specific rule-sets and signatures, protecting control systems immediately, substantially reducing the frequency of patching activities and reducing overall costs. This update and support service is called AchillesINSIDE™.

New Technology Evaluation and Implementation Hospitals and healthcare systems are under greater pressure than ever to improve patient care, increase staff satisfaction, control or reduce costs, and meet insurance and government regulations and live up to industry watchdog best practices. To help meet these demands, providers must continue to implement new technology as part of the solutions or risk obsolescence.

The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games. Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The Air Force also took up the idea, by trying to use EEGs to “assess the operator’s actual cognitive state”  and “avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur.”

Now, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is soliciting small business proposals for an even more immersive trainer, one that includes voice-recognition technology, and picks up on vocal tone and facial gestures. The game would then react and adapt to a war-fighter’s every action. For example, if a player’s gesture “insults the local tribal leader,” the trainee would “find that future interactions with the population are more difficult and more hostile.” And, most importantly, the new programs would react to the warrior’s own physiological and neurological cues. They’d be monitored using an EEG, eye tracking, heart and respiration rate, and other physiological markers. Based on the metrics, the game would adapt in difficulty and “keep trainees in an optimal state of learning.”

The OSD isn’t ready to use neuro-based systems in the war zone, but the agency does want to capitalize on advances in neuroscience that have assigned meaningful value to intuitive decision-making. As the OSD solicitation points out, troops often need to make fast-paced decisions in high-stress environments, with limited information and context. Well-reasoned, analytic decisions are rarely possible