Loughborough University last month was the venue for the quarterly seminar for the masters degree students doing risk and security management. Mark Rowe was invited too, and went back to the classroom.
The security and risk men and women taking an MSc through the University of Loughborough were not the only professionals on campus that day – the England cricket team were there, practising the day before the Test match at Nottingham. The business school where the MSc students gathered was only a stoneโs throw from the training cricketers. Instead of the crack of bat on ball, there was the to and fro of discussion. While Loughboroughโs MSc course like others in the UK is offered through distance learning – to fit in with the busy lives of the students, who are often holding down security manager jobs and may have families to boot – quarterly seminars are a chance to chew over the course. Danie Adendorff, the new director for the security management programme, featured in the January issue of Professional Security, is (again like his equivalents at universities such as Leicester and Portsmouth) on the end of a phone, and is on Skype, and email. If students, may on overseas postings, are getting on with essay-writing or research in their down-time, and want to ask Danie for advice, they can get a reply at distance. Thanks to the ATHENS system, a student with a link to the internet – whether in Kabul or a diamond mine in Africa – can use their password and look at the online equivalent of libraries-full of books and journals. Sometimes, even so, you canโt beat a face to face discussion. Thatโs why some students were sitting in a Leicestershire seminar room listening to Danieโs distinctive KwaZulu Natal accent. <br><br>To recap briefly, the Loughborough MSc – under Danie and previously Tom Mulhall (who was there at the August seminar) – is headed by a former practitioner, who has gone into academia after taking the courses he is now teaching. At Portsmouth and Leicester, the courses and teachers have a more criminological background. While Danie has plans to develop the course that (understandably) he is keeping up his sleeve, in January we did report his idea of offering more in the MSc course about investigations (into fraud for example). <br><br>So, when Danie speaks to students, for example how to do better academic work – to write the things that the academic marker is looking for – he has sat where they are sitting. He mentioned that anti-plagiarism software is coming in, to run through studentsโ essays to search for โcut and pasteโ efforts, where the student finds something on the internet, and passes it off as his own work. We should stress that this is not to say Loughborough or anywhere else is plagiarising – another word for cheating. A criminology lecturer from another university I sat next to at the Association of Security Consultantsโ annual lunch in June told me that plagiarism is a โbig problemโ. It might simply be that a student doesnโt appreciate that if you use something written by someone else, you have to give a reference. It may be, at worse, that a student is paying someone to write their work. Quite apart from plagiarism in the internet age threatening to undermine university study, fraud investigators and employment screeners may suspect that the person who lies in one way may be deceitful in other ways. <br><br>Besides the need to reference whatever you quote, Danie invented a word for the way that some students write – โtwitterishโ, or English in the style of Twitter, in one brief spurt after another. He doesnโt approve; essays should flow. Danie went through some other doโs and donโts. For instance, donโt use Wikipedia, unless you want to get on Danieโs nerves. โI personally ban Wikipedia; I will penalise you, and penalise you severely, if you bring me Wikipedia [quotes].โ In brief, to do a masters degree, you have to do your work according to the academic rules; keep to the word length you are given – no matter how good your essay, if itโs too long or short, it will be marked down. That said, just as thereโs not a definitely right or wrong way to approach security risk, so there is not a right or wrong answer to whatever question youโre set. You support whatever you write with evidence that youโve read. You do original thinking. The idea – and the joy of learning that plainly enthuses Danie Adendorff – is that the MSc student takes the disciplined, inquisitive approach – and the ability to edit loads of data to present what matters – into their job. <br><br>Pictured: from the January print issue of Professional Security magazine, Tom Mulhall and Danie Adendorff.
