Colorado Mountain College opens Continuing Education survey online
By Jonathan Satz
Over the past two years you may have heard about Colorado Mountain College’s new four-year degrees. Many people already know about CMC’s great tradition, for more than 40 years, of offering two-year degrees and occupational certificates.
But perhaps you already have a college degree or you’re not looking to earn one at the moment. So how can your local community college benefit you?
Equal to our mission of offering degrees and certificates, Colorado Mountain College provides lifelong learning opportunities, which we at CMC refer to as continuing and community education. Continuing and community education is often defined as noncredit, non-degree classes, or they may also include credit classes that are oriented towards learning a new skill (computers, business workshops and languages, for example) but are not necessarily tied to a degree.
These types of classes usually are offered in nearly every discipline, from business to art, science to languages. You might take the class simply for fun, but your goal might be to gain new skills applicable to your career or personal life.
We offer flexibility, not only in the types of continuing and community education classes we provide, but also in the format in which we offer them. Some classes span the entire 15-week semester; however, most of them are offered in shorter lengths: one night, one day, two days, five weeks or some other combination. Short classes and seminars allow more people to participate.
While we have offered continuing education in our community regularly throughout the CMC district since our inception, we are growing these offerings. We want to hear from you what we can better do to serve your continuing and community education needs and desires. To that end, we are conducting a community survey to give you the opportunity to tell us how to better meet your needs. We also want to know if you have some expertise or special skill that you want to share with your community. You are our continuing and community education teachers and can identify yourselves to us through the survey.
To take this 10-minute (or less) online survey, please go to coloradomtn.edu/CESurvey and register your responses. As an added incentive and to compensate you for your time, we will be selecting 10 random participants to receive a $50 certificate towards CMC noncredit classes at our Glenwood or Carbondale locations.
Summer semester at CMC starts in mid-May; our summer schedule of continuing and community education will be mailed to all households in the Glenwood and Carbondale (and surrounding) areas in early May. In building this schedule and other schedules in the past, we have considered the types of things we have heard from you in our community surveys.
So, how can CMC benefit you? Learning can facilitate and enrich many components of our lives. Whether you want to learn how to how to cook, dance, speak Spanish, maintain your bicycle, play guitar, use your computer and other technology, meditate, draw, get in shape or many, many other pursuits, we have a class for you this summer.
And you can help us decide how CMC will benefit you this fall. Please take our survey: coloradomtn.edu/CESurvey.
Jonathan Satz is the director of continuing education and director of the CMC Glenwood Center.