The Nepean Community College regularly takes its lessons out of the classroom and into community-based contexts
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The diverse audience that the adult education institution Nepean Community College (NCC) is focusing on equipping with digital skills includes minorities, the disadvantaged, and people with disabilities.
The vision of the NCC includes instilling a love for life-long learning in the communities around the Penrith and Blue Mountains areas in NSW.
Eric Wright, principal at NCC, told HRD that this means a constant need to diversify its courses to meet the needs of its learners, who are also of different ages and from diverse technology backgrounds and experiences.
“If you think about a refugee woman who has come from rural Sudan, she may not have ever had the opportunity to hold a pen,” he said.
“Eight or so years ago we would be delivering English language and writing skills so that those women can navigate our society.
“This year, we are talking to them about learning to speak words with a pen and also learning to talk with a keyboard.
“So that gives you a sense of how essentially important IT is today, not just for the workforce but for the community as a whole.”
Moreover, the NCC regularly takes its lessons out of the classroom and into community-based contexts. For instance, they may conduct a class in the neighbourhood coffee shop so that the environment is comfortable and familiar to its learners.
One challenge the NCC has been faced with was needing its end-user devices to keep up with an increasingly diverse student demographic, a growing catalogue of classes, as well as increased enrolment.
Consequently, the NCC decided to deploy Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition to enable its fleet of close to 30 Mac devices to run Microsoft Windows as virtual machines (VM).
What have the results been of NCC’s training so far?
“If I just focus on IT, there are 14,500 people out there in our community at the moment who have skills that they wouldn’t have had, had we not been doing this,” said Wright.
Moreover, through deploying Parallels Desktop for Mac, NCC was able to reduce the need for separate devices to run different operating systems and enable NCC’s ability to deliver courses for both Mac and Windows software and applications.
The college was also able save money by avoiding the need to purchase and maintain new devices just for running Windows.
“We can teach senior citizens how to make home movies on iMovie in the morning, then easily switch over to small business accounting on Windows in the afternoon, all on one single device,” said Wright.
The result has been that 20 IT instructors and thousands of students at NCC can focus on their teaching and learning instead of wasting time fixing technical issues.
