With more than 8,000 students, BMCC’s Center for Continuing Education and Workforce Development is a college in itself. Now it has a new Web site to match. The new site for the Center will be easy to navigate and chock full of information: from course listings, certificate programs and online classes, to upcoming events and catalogs.
What is Continuing Education?
BMCC’s Continuing Education Center aims to enhance peoples’ opportunities to attain educational and career goals by offering more than 300 courses in a wide range of subjects.
Students include those who want to expand their credentials or move into a new career field, to some who want to simply learn more about a topic that interests them.
The curriculum is designed to be flexible so that students can learn anytime, anywhere. Classes come in a variety of offerings that include: the traditional setting, on-line offerings or corporate on-site training opportunities.
The Challenge
Over the years the Continuing Education staff funneled people looking for details of the curriculum to the Web site, hoping those students interested would find what they needed. But it was far from perfect.
“The old Web site was very circuitous,” said Dean Sunil Gupta. “It was like a maze. If you knew exactly where it was, you could find it — but if you knew where it was, it’s not a problem, right? So a consumer could never find things. There were dead ends, there were dead links.”
“Through just the normal evolution of it, the site became a hodgepodge of multiple patchworks of old programs and existing programs, so nothing looked cohesive. It wasn’t an attractive location for people to look for information.”
A Change Coming
Dean Gupta came to BMCC in early 2007 from Brooklyn Polytechnic University, where he was Executive Director of Continuing Education, Distance Learning and Workforce Development. One of his first priorities upon arrival was to evaluate and see where progress could be made.
“Over the last 10 months we’ve strategically tried to overhaul the program offerings. We’ve been working to improve the quality and strategically target the level of marketing that we do. But marketing can be very expensive. However, the Web is a 24-7 conduit to getting attention and getting people,” he said.
Gupta used consumer Web sites like Amazon and eBay as examples.
“There are shopping carts; it’s very attractive, it’s very simple, it’s very intuitive. Ours was anything but,” he said. “We were looking for a very clean approach that looked professional and was very easy to use, so that people could navigate through the system, get what they want and get out satisfied.”
A Step into the Big League
The new Web site puts BMCC’s Continuing Education Center on par with almost any continuing education program in the nation, Gupta said.
“I have no doubt this new Web site will increase satisfaction across the board. It will make easier for faculty who want to update their course descriptions and downloadable attachments for the students, which will in turn make things easier on the student. It will also allow us to showcase those teachers with bios and photos in a way that’s going to make it look very professional,” he said.
“This Web site,” according to Gupta, “will give the students the confidence that this is one of the best continuing education programs in New York.”
