WNC selected for Academic Innovator of the Year Award

Courtesy Steve Yingling, Western Nevada College

EC-Council has selected Western Nevada College as the 2018 Academic Innovator of the Year Award recipient for lasting impacts on its students’ cybersecurity education and local communities.

WNC will be presented this award at the upcoming EC-Council 2018 Partner Awards on Sept. 12 in Atlanta.

“The need for secure information exchange impacts all aspects of our daily lives,” said WNC Career and Technical Education Director Dr. Georgia White. “WNC’s cybersecurity program will prepare professionals for this emerging workforce.  The Career and Technical Education team is excited to be named as an innovator. Hat’s off to Dave Riske and WNC’s advisory board. This award recognizes the student-focused and forward-thinking mindset of the CTE division.”

EC-Council is an international council of electronic commerce consultants and is a global leader in InfoSec Cyber Security certification programs such as Certified Ethical Hacker and Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator.

Each year, EC-Council runs North America partner awards to highlight the highest levels of education, training, executive leadership and instruction within its partner communities. This consists of its partnered academic institutions, commercial training centers, corporate organizations, CISOs and Certified EC-Council Instructors (CEIs).

“The 2018 Academia Partner Innovator of the Year Award is a very high honor within the EC-Council and the cybersecurity community,” said Wesley Alvarez, director of academics for EC-Council-Academia. “This is a very prestigious award as EC-Council has more than 1,000 academic partners from K-12, technical institutes, colleges and universities in North America such as the University of Phoenix, Strayer University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Naval Postgraduate School, St. Louis University and many more.”

Wesley said the award is based in part on the following criteria:

• Commitment to educate and make a difference in the cybersecurity workforce
• Instructor engagement and course development
• Student engagement and interaction (Hacker Halted, STORM Kits, GForce Expansion Packs, Global CyberLympics)
• Continuous technology development in the classroom

For more details, go to https://www.eccouncil.org/ec-council-global-awards/. To learn more about WNC’s CTE programs, go to www.wnc.edu/cte/.