It has been said every cloud has a silver lining and Northern Essex Community College President Lane A. Glenn said that’s been true of the coronavirus cloud.
Glenn, a recent guest on WHAV’s morning program, and said the coronavirus has opened a new field of study and career path for recent graduates.
“A lot of colleges—and we’re starting to eye this—are looking at how to train people to be contact tracers. We already train a lot of first responders, so we’ve heard from a few businesses that need to hire recent graduates to take temperatures of workers as they’re coming back into the office, or back into the plant. So many of our graduates are going right to work in sort of new areas of healthcare training. Police, EMTs, healthcare workers—we train hundreds of those people every year. We’re very proud of that,” he said.
On another topic, Glenn said, remote teaching at the end of the semester went fairly well, but he admits there’s room for improvement.
“We know, because remote teaching is going to have to continue in some form, another, into the summer, or the fall, we have to keep getting better at it. If more students are going to need to take more classes—either fully online, or what we call hybrid, partly online and partly in the classroom—than every college and university has to get even better at teaching that way, and that’s what we’re working on with professional development for teachers and assistance to students. So, in the fall, we’re putting together a program so that all students can get a laptop, for example, and have access to classes and services that way. A lot of things are coming together,” Glenn said.
Glenn said Northern Essex started online classes more than a decade ago, when it was one of the first colleges in the state to have a fully online degree program in Criminal Justice. The school now has 11 different online degrees
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