Prince George, B.C.- The college of New Caledonia has released its strategic plan which  lays the groundwork for the College  through to 2020 and the focus is on  promoting student success.

The plan is based on 5 key elements:

• Enhancing the student experience
• Improving CNC’s culture of service
• Supporting Aboriginal students and the integration of Aboriginal culture and knowledge
• Improving organizational culture and employee satisfaction; and
• Clearly communicating change and new directions with CNC’s stakeholders

While the plan, which took  several months to  develop,   is now  in place,  how  the goals will be  reached  has  yet to be finalized  “We are going to be developing an implementation plan and how we’re  going to implement these  five elements” says CNC President Henry Reiser who expects the  implementation plan will be  completed this fall once  the  College’s full team is back to work.

“A lot of this stuff  that we’ve identified in the strategic plan is work that we’ve been doing for over a year. So this has just formalized it” says Reiser  “I think all of the changes we were  expecting to see are in  process right now, it’s just a question now of smoothing that transition and getting on  with our business at hand  and that is to provide  post secondary education to people in North Central British Columbia.”

Reiser  sees the over arching  theme of  student success is the most significant  change  in this blue print ” Because all of the other elements will fit  within that  goal.  The whole notion of our broadening  and increasing our delivery platforms  we can engage more and  more learners if they want to remain at home (communities).”

The delivery platform he is talking about  would see more  programs delivered  online  to students and increased  opportunity to have  credits transferred  to University .  “What we are looking at is our digital delivery instruction, or our DDI.  What that is,  is a synchronous  real time, instructor led  mediated instruction.  Very similar to what they’re doing at UNBC with  UBC’s medical program.  It is used throughout North America and very common in Australia.  So the idea is that we will be offering more programming.  A good example is what happened with our pilot (program) last year between  Quesnel and Prince George.  We were delivering  programs to that community that would normally not be offered and  so there is a greater offering of programming.”

He says  they offered 8 courses through DDI last year,  and  look to expand that  to 25 courses this year “And then we’re going to expand that as the infrastructure is rolled out.”  As it stand now,  the infrastructure requires the monitors,  software, some hardware and while  there is a DDI  presence on all of the CNC’s campuses,  Reiser says there is a need to make those connections “two way”.   He says he’s thinking about  establishing “Centres of Excellence” on each of the campuses, so  class instruction can be broadcast  or delivered to any of the CNC campuses.  “Once we’ve got this system in place, then what  we have to do is open  it up to our partners in the North”.  Those partners include  the  Post Secondary Council  which  includes NorthWest Community College and UNBC.

“This is another tool in the tool bag to reach out and engage more and more students” says Reiser who says this model of education will be particularly helpful to those  students who want to upgrade skills before leaving their home communities  for other levels of study.

“What’s important about our plan though is,  every element is measureable” says Reiser,  “We will be analyzing the performance on the strategic plan  with the Board ( of Governors) on an annual basis.  If we find the strategic plan needs to be modified to address  how we’re moving forward,  that is the plan.”