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The president and CEO of B.C.'s largest private career college can remember a time in his life when five dollars seemed like a fortune. Dean Duperron was 18 and living on the streets. He had just enough money in his pocket to buy five one-cent candies — his sole sustenance for the next five days.

One day, a guy standing in front of him at the local Y brandished a five-dollar bill.

"In that moment you get a chance to see who you are," Duperron says now. "At that point, there was no chance I was going to be able to eat for the rest of the week."

But despite overwhelming hunger, the Alberta-born Duperron says old-fashioned values kept him from acting on his impulse to grab the money and run.

It would have been easy to steal, he says, and it would have been easy to beg for money. He did neither that day, or any other day for the next six to eight months on the streets after his father kicked him out of the family home.

It was a time of cold nights and meals plucked from dumpsters. Luck meant you'd just found a quarter lying on the sidewalk.

But it was Duperron's belief in the value of education that pushed him to get a job — first as a janitor at McDonald's, then as an assistant manager at Kmart — and eventually to initiate a reconciliation with his father.

"I realized people's lives are shaped by who they are and what they do rather than what they've done," says Duperron, now 53. "If you have an education, you can choose what you want to do, rather than life choosing for you."

He struck an agreement with his dad that allowed him to live in his two-bedroom apartment while he pursued an undergraduate degree at UBC.

When the agreement changed and relations once again became tense, he dropped out during his third year to take a job as a computer instructor at MacKay's Business School. A few years later he found himself at Control Data Corp., an American supercomputer firm.

Success followed. And by the time 1991 rolled around, he and his wife were able to buy 95 per cent of the then-fledgling Sprott-Shaw Community College.

Duperron transformed the college into a profitable operation with 22 campuses (20 in B.C. and two in Alberta), 250 employees and an estimated $50 million in annual revenue.

Sprott-Shaw eventually became the largest private career college in B.C.

Now that Duperron no longer has to worry if he has enough money to feed himself, he has turned his attention to a personal project in which he will hand out $1 million worth of educational opportunities to students from across the globe.

"I really like making other people successful," he says. "I get a charge out of a student coming up to me after graduating and saying it is because of you guys."

Hence the launch of Class Act Canada, an Internet-based international contest that will award 10 students with an all-expenses paid education — including living expenses, books, food and accommodation and spending money — at a Sprott-Shaw campus.

Applicants will be able to upload their applications in the form of a video clip to the contest's website, with an online voting system forming a part of the judging process. The first cull will whittle the group 100; the next round of cuts will pare that number to 20.

The 10 winners will be announced Dec. 1. The contest begins Thursday.

"Education changed my life," says Duperron. "If this works, we'll be able to say we've helped people succeed worldwide.

"I believe with the opportunity to become educated, an individual who is living in poverty or with extreme challenges has a door opened to not only change their own life but to change an entire community."

Class Act Canada affiliates include New Market Multimedia, The Fair at the PNE, The Vancouver Board of Trade and Free the Children — the world's largest network of children helping children through education.

Word of the contest has already made its way around the globe through Internet chat sites and word of mouth.

"This is an ideal opportunity for children across the world to get quality education in the beautiful setting of B.C.," says Moin-Ul-Haque, Consul-General for Pakistan in Vancouver.

Bensy Teo, a Shanghai-based marketing executive, expects to see a flood of applications from China.

Judges for Class Act Canada include Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, the Vancouver Board of Trade's Darcy Rezac, Province editor-in-chief Wayne Moriarty and former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford.

© Copyright (c) The Province

June 23rd, 2009 CNW Group: CIBT Education Group Inc. (NYSE Amex and TSX.V symbol: MBA) is pleased to report that it has been ranked by Business in Vancouver newspaper as one of the top 100 public companies in British Columbia. In addition, CIBT was also ranked as one of Canada’s fastest growing companies by Profit Magazine.

Business in Vancouver is a weekly publication serving Greater Vancouver since 1989. The rankings can be found in the June 23, 2009 issue of Business in Vancouver or online at http://www.biv.ca.

Profit Magazine is a bi-monthly publication that has a strong history of serving the entrepreneurial community since 1984. The rankings can be found in the June 2009 issue of Profit Magazine or online at http://www.profitmagazine.ca.

“We are pleased to be recognized by two prominent business publications in Canada for our rapid growth during the last few years”, commented Toby Chu, Vice-Chairman, President & CEO. “The company continues to strive towards rapid expansion and to realize our vision of becoming a global education player by providing advanced western education to students in emerging countries.”

About CIBT Education Group Inc.

CIBT Education Group Inc. (“CIBT”) is an education management and investment company with a special focus on the global education market. Its subsidiaries, CIBT School of Business, Tourism Training Institute (Beijing), and Sprott-Shaw Degree College Corp., which is comprised of Sprott-Shaw Degree College, Sprott-Shaw Community College (established in 1903) and Sprott-Shaw International Language College, possess a combined operating history of over 136 years in China and Canada’s education sectors. CIBT owns and operates a network of business, technical and language colleges with presence at over 40 campuses and teaching locations including Australia, Canada, China, Jamaica, Jordan, New Zealand, Netherland, the Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. CIBT delivers Western and Chinese accredited business and management degree programs, automotive, and diesel maintenance programs, IT programs, travel and tourism programs and career/vocational programs through its network of campuses and academic partnerships around the world. CIBT Group also owns Irix Design Group, a leading design and advertising company based in Vancouver, Canada. In 2008, Irix Design was ranked 15th in the list of Biggest Ad Agencies in Greater Vancouver by the Business in Vancouver newspaper.

CIBT Education Group Inc.

Robert Barron

If every household in North America with a computer paid their bills online, environmental groups estimated it would save about 34 million trees every year.

Efforts towards creating a paperless society in the new electronic and increasingly environmentally-friendly age are gathering steam, although many are still reluctant to change long-established habits, with most major companies encouraging their customers to switch to e-billing from the regular billing system, which uses lots of paper.

Even schools are beginning to follow suit and Vancouver Island's Sprott-Shaw Community College has dropped the use of text books in a number of their courses. Students are now required to research and do their assignments online.

Earth Day Canada, a national environmental charity, recently announced the launch of a "Save Trees, Not Paper" initiative designed to help Canadians go paperless by capitalizing on the opportunities presented by new software technology.

"The impact of the mass amounts of paper consumed in our day-to-day lives is staggering," said Earth Day Canada President Jed Goldberg.

"Most corporations have offered their customers the option of sending their invoices by email."

Software is also available to help people catalogue online bill payments. However, for people like Nanaimo's Lacey Metz, the convenience pf paying her bills online is not an attractive option.

She said she prefers to pay her bills in person and doesn't mind the time it takes to drive around and deliver her payments.

"I just don't trust the Internet and I'd rather pay my bills to people that I can see with my one two eyes rather than trust someone on the other end of a computer that I can't see or talk to," she said while paying her cable bill at Shaw Cable Friday.

"I work with computers all the time but I don't trust the system with my money. I guess I could change my mind over time, but not now." Telus has had an e-billing system in place for three years and plants a tree for every one of its 11.5 million customers who switch to paying their bills electronically.

However, while Telus spokesman Shawn Hall said "increasing numbers" of Telus customers are switching to electronic billing, he acknowledged that to date, just about 500,000 have chosen to use the paperless billing system.

"Our customers always have the choice to continue using the old system and many still do," he said.

"I firmly believe that electronic billing will increasingly become more common, but I can't predict when, or if, everybody will switch to it." Shaw Cable also offers its customers the option of switching to electronic billing and many have chosen to do so, but the communications company is reporting similar problems with customers reluctant to change.

"Some people like it and some people don't," said company spokesman Michael, who declined to give his last name.

"There are just some people who aren't comfortable using the Internet, and likely will never be comfortable using it to pay their bills."

However, Sprott-Shaw Community College is offering students taking 11 business courses at its seven campuses on Vancouver Island no choice but to get used to a paperless society.

The college has dropped the use of textbooks in these courses and students are now required to research material for the courses on-line. Bruce Wilbee, associate director at the college's Nanaimo campus, estimates that 26 trees have been saved since the college adopted its new strategy this year.

He said the courses are still "instructor-led" but web-based material is used instead of traditional textbooks, and assignments and projects are done online.

"Obviously, it's good for the environment but there are other reasons for our change in policy, including the fact that textbooks usually get out of date rather quickly while information on the web is current and updated all the time," Wilbee said.

"When you look around these days, how many people do you see pick up a book to do any research? They usually go to Google to get any information they need."

Jeff Bell

VICTORIA — If a tree doesn’t fall in the forest, online technology could deserve some of the credit.

Officials at B.C.’s Sprott-Shaw Community College estimate their efforts to cut textbooks from a range of business classes have saved 26 trees since last September. Textbooks are now passe in 11 courses at seven of Sprott-Shaw’s B.C. campuses, including those in Victoria, Duncan and Nanaimo.

Sprott-Shaw president Dean Duperron said the college is on the leading edge of a move away from textbooks, the so-called “greening” of classes in the post-secondary realm.

It’s territory other institutions are also exploring, including the public-education system. The Virtual School Society of B.C., created in 2006, develops distance learning for kindergarten to Grade 12 students through its LearnNowBC website, which is supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education.

Sprott-Shaw put a team together to take a closer look at the idea of going textbook-free about two years ago, researching the availability of material on the Internet.

That was followed by the decision to take a step toward book-less courses, Duperron said.

Sprott-Shaw’s Anne Wilkes said her students have adapted well to the approach, which the college is calling Great Green Learning — or G2 Learning, for short. In fact, student-satisfaction surveys show more than 90 per cent favour the move, Duperron said.

He stressed the online emphasis doesn’t translate to having students working from remote locations.

“We’re not treating this as distance education — we’re bringing this right into the classroom.”

Wilkes said the instructor is still central to the learning process. “What we’re doing is, we’re replacing the textbook, so instead of having one single source to tell the students something, they now have multiple sources.”

Beyond the environmental benefits of the program, it should eventually be a cheaper option, as well, Duperron said.

“In the future, it will be a money-saver to the students. Right now it’s in transition.”

So far, Sprott-Shaw has put a few hundred thousand dollars into the changes. That includes the purchase of 200 laptop computers for student use.

Online learning and collaboration are central to studies at Royal Roads University, but class resources don’t necessarily exclude texts or other forms of “hard copy.”

Barry Anderson, executive director of the Virtual School Society of B.C., said the idea of every student having a computer and accessing most of his or her learning material online “is not a situation that, 10 years ago, we were getting to in a hurry.”

But with computers dropping in price, the economics of online material replacing traditional textbooks are making more sense, he said.

“That said, now you have to come up to each school and imagine how the school is going to function. Do you have the Internet capability to actually have all the kids in a school opening up their computers at one time and looking at an e-book or an exam? And the answer to that is, ‘Not yet.’ That may be 10, 15 years away.”

The LearnNowBC website functions as a “virtual” school, which Anderson said offers 2,500 courses, some of them overlapping. About seven to eight per cent of the entire student body in British Columbia is taking at least one online course, Anderson said.

VANCOUVER, March 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - CIBT Education Group Inc. (NYSE Amex and TSX.V symbol: MBA) is pleased to report that its subsidiary, Sprott-Shaw Community College ("Sprott-Shaw"), announces that in an effort to improve the learning environment and latest information technology for its students, Sprott-Shaw Community College is eliminating textbooks in a number of its classes. As of September 2008, 11 of the private college's courses in seven of its campuses have implemented a redesigned curriculum to engage students with a combination of technology-based materials and face-to-face classroom sessions. The college's goal is to eliminate the need for up to 66,000 textbooks by 2014.