College of New Caledonia’s (CNC) Lakes District campus in Burns Lake will be moving to online instruction for most of its programs.
Even though K- 12 students are going back to school this month for in-class instructions, the same is not being followed by colleges. CNC would be offering most of its classes and programs online to students for all campuses, including the Lakes District campus.
“There will be things like the pro cook going on on site and as well, there is a whole variety of continuing education activities. But like with most of our campuses, the overwhelming bulk of our programs have moved to an online format during the Covid pandemic,” said Dr. Chad Thompson, CNC’s vice president academic, adding that one of the unexpected advantages of this is that “students in Burns Lake now have the choice of a huge number of courses across all campuses, that they usually would have to access face-to-face on the campus itself.”
The Indigenous Pro Cook program, is ITA approved and is set to be offered this Fall, along with Early Childhood Care and Learning. This will be the only program for now, that would be offered in person, on campus.
“Early Childhood Care Learning will be starting up as a primarily online program for students in the Lakes District campus as well as the other campuses,” he said.
While the college campus will continue to remain closed for most courses, the continuing activities and short term courses would continue to be conducted on campus. The campus will also continue allow access to students for the computer labs and the library.
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“The students need to make sure they comply with our safety plan which really means maintaining physical distance, observing good hand hygiene; and we strongly recommend wearing protective face mask. But yes, students will continue to have access to the campus for the educational support they require,” said Thompson.
The college is however unsure of how long the online programming would last and they are yet to decided whether it would be just for the Fall or would continue throughout the academic year. Thompson said that CNC would continue to monitor how the pandemic progresses, will take student feedback into consideration and see what their needs are and would also heavily rely on the directives from the provincial health authorities. However, until they have a clear picture of things, the college will continue to offer most of its programs and courses online.
“It is very unusual obviously. We are a community college and seeing the students is what makes it so wonderful. So it is a very big change to not have students all on campus but obviously at this time it is a necessary change and we don’t want to put the health and well-being of students and staff in jeopardy in any way so we will definitely miss our interactions with students directly and we hope that we will be able to return to that at some point,” said Thompson.
Priyanka Ketkar
Multimedia journalist
@PriyankaKetkar
priyanka.ketkar@ldnews.net
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