As JCCC heads into another unusual semester, some students have questions of what’s available on campus and what changes have been made.
(Andy Bowne) “When I think about kind of that front-end of the process for you as students, I think about our counselors and being able to receive the guidance you need as students, success center labs that we talked about the academic resource center those sorts of things that you need and what we’ve said to those departments is we need you to be open because not everybody does really well in a virtual environment and so we know that some students are going to need to come to campus, our expectation is that you are open, how you staff that, is up to you.”
Classes such as ceramics or culinary have been understandably difficult to teach and learn which is why these more hands-on learning department.
(Randy Webber) “We were able to, as part of the state’s plan what they call phase 1, it will return essential function to essential programs, so we talked those out in June and then the decision for fall and again in the spring was to allow for courses that require an on-campus presence to be on campus.”
(Weber) “And career and online health programs and a number of our development and educational courses online to help students who maybe need a little bit more of a refreshment to their academic journey to be to be face-to-face and not try to do all of that remotely.”
The transition from in person to remote learning has been a challenge for everyone. Luckily, the faculty at JCCC has been working all year to improve the experience.
(Weber) “We’ve been really intentional about in subsequent semesters is to make sure that we plan and execute what we plan in so we wanted to make sure that in the fall and spring we weren’t changing courses back to face-to-face to remote within a semester that was the most disruptive thing about spring ‘20 was students signed up for one thing and ended in another so we were really intentional about making sure even if we weren’t necessarily offering it in the way that some students maybe had preferred we were going to maintain what we offer.”
(Bowne) “It’s kind of that process innovation of really good people being committed to how do we keep doing a better job of the time.”
Reporting from The Campus Ledger, this has been Paige Winters.