COCC Names Schulz Head of Continuing Education

Central Oregon Community College’s Board of Directors recently named Gerald A. Schulz the director of the college’s continuing education department.

Schulz’s duties include ensuring overall profitability of the continuing education program, organizing contracted training and events throughout the district, monitoring and managing the department’s budget, researching and developing new continuing education programs, expanding the awareness and availability of the continuing education program throughout the region and supervising a staff of nine.

“Significant changes are taking place in the way education and training are delivered,” said Schulz. “My immediate goal is to guide a transition from traditional lecture-style classes to newer methods of engaging our students. I truly enjoy planning and collaborating to bring education to adults.”

Schulz came to COCC in 2010 as the office operations manager, a position that focused on automating and streamlining processes. He also teaches evening classes for COCC Community Learning: “Staying aware and involved with the students and the classroom experience enables me to be a better manager and discover new offerings and improvements for our program.”

Schulz earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California. A native of Pasadena, he worked as a research chemist before he and his wife developed and managed a computer training school for adults, growing it from 1984 until 2006 to become one of the largest private schools of its kind in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How many in my class?

Wondering how registration is going for your class? You can check it online at any time. Click on the link below to take you to our new registration system and do a search for your class by class title. For instance, I did a search for Macintosh Basics. It brought up the screen showing there were 7 seats. This means that there are 7 seats available. Now I happen to know that this class has a total of 20 seats so that means that there are 13 students signed up for this class right now.

If you don’t know the maximum seats for your class you can find it in two places. It is on your contract which was emailed, mailed or otherwise sent to you or you can call your Program Manager and ask her/him. We will send you a roster before your class, but knowing the number ahead of time can help you prepare.

http://selfservice.cocc.edu:7001/flexibleregistration/index.jsp?frc=CLMAIN

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly--PowerPoint Best Practices

COCC Community Learning has planned another opportunity to continue your professional development as an instructor. There is no charge for this evening session.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - PowerPoint Best Practices for Classroom Instructors. If you currently use or are considering using PowerPoint (or a similar presentation tool) to accompany your teaching, why not put some more pizzazz into your presentations? There is an art to preparing and delivering audience-engaging presentations. Come and explore . . .

* Best practices for effective presentations
* Tips and techniques to enhance your presentation
* A group work session on critiquing and improving slide design and flow

The details:
When: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time: 6:00-8:30 pm
Where: COCC Bend Campus, Boyle Education Center
Room 151
Facilitators: Annette Witzel & Charlene Schulz

(This is not a hands-on software class. It is a group session to discuss and view best practices.)

How to Register: Email Nancy Jumper, Program Manager at njumper@cocc.edu or call 541-383-7273 and let Nancy know you'd like to attend. In your email, please indicate your experience level with using PowerPoint. Do you use it regularly in your teaching, occasionally, or not at all and would like to start? Please register by email or phone by Monday, January 23.

New Year, New Changes in the Department

Flexreg, new director, new staff, new phone system, we have a lot of changes happening at the office. We are also into the Winter term and classes have started.

First, you can check the attendance in your class by going into Flexreg and seeing how many seats are left in your class. If you don’t know your max number of seats just give your programmer a call. Remember the seats showing are what is left. Also, if there is a waiting list, it starts at 40 seats. So if your class is full and showing 35 seats on the waitlist, then you have 5 people waiting to get into your class.

We are in the midst of choosing a new director for Community Learning. More on that when it happens.

We have a new staff person who is taking Natalie’s place as a graphic designer and marketer. Her name is Denise Rucci and she starts on January 17th.

Finally, the new phone system which is an IP phone. We can see who is calling us now and many other features. If we do it right, you’ll never know the difference.

Have a great New Year and thanks for teaching for us.

Paul