2008 Woodie Awards
Extension Courses Offer Opportunity
Holly Dare
Issue date: 11/16/05 Section: Valley Life
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Valley College's Community Extension program is one of the most unusual in the Los Angeles Community College District in that it offers stand-alone certificate-based programs to train people in such high-demand career paths as paralegal, legal secretary, human resource assistant, commercial photographer and tax preparer. Students earn a certificate in their chosen field without having to take mandatory college classes as in other programs.
The program is celebrating its tenth anniversary and, unlike other segments of the community college district, enrollment is higher than ever. A self-supporting enterprise, the extension also offers more than 320 online courses and 200 personal development courses on the Valley campus. The cream of this crop of offerings is the unique design of certificate programs in which 25 lucky students go to the same classroom and their curriculum and instructors change periodically. When one subject is completed, a new instructor takes over. To earn their respective certificates, this group must complete between 115 and 400 classroom hours.
"I doubled my salary within a year," said Christine McCain, who completed her paralegal training in 1998. She works as an office manager at a law firm and has returned to the program to teach.
This type of structure allows students to focus on the task at hand. It also allows Annie Goldman Reed, dean of extension and outreach to easily make changes.
"We keep developing and improving it," said Goldman Reed. "The beauty of [the program] being not-for-credit is that I have more freedom to hire working professionals. I have judges and attorneys that teach for us."
Goldman Reed has been instrumental in implementing the certificate programs. In 1995, she was a paralegal instructor at Merit College in Van Nuys. The school went bankrupt and 100 teachers and 600 students were without jobs and training. She approached Valley's Dennis Reed, currently dean of Fine, Performing and Media Arts - and newly married to Goldman Reed - and convinced him to start a paralegal program that summer to help a few of the Merit students who were close to certificate completion. That summer 23 students finished their studies and Valley's extension was off to a roaring start.
The program is celebrating its tenth anniversary and, unlike other segments of the community college district, enrollment is higher than ever. A self-supporting enterprise, the extension also offers more than 320 online courses and 200 personal development courses on the Valley campus. The cream of this crop of offerings is the unique design of certificate programs in which 25 lucky students go to the same classroom and their curriculum and instructors change periodically. When one subject is completed, a new instructor takes over. To earn their respective certificates, this group must complete between 115 and 400 classroom hours.
"I doubled my salary within a year," said Christine McCain, who completed her paralegal training in 1998. She works as an office manager at a law firm and has returned to the program to teach.
This type of structure allows students to focus on the task at hand. It also allows Annie Goldman Reed, dean of extension and outreach to easily make changes.
"We keep developing and improving it," said Goldman Reed. "The beauty of [the program] being not-for-credit is that I have more freedom to hire working professionals. I have judges and attorneys that teach for us."
Goldman Reed has been instrumental in implementing the certificate programs. In 1995, she was a paralegal instructor at Merit College in Van Nuys. The school went bankrupt and 100 teachers and 600 students were without jobs and training. She approached Valley's Dennis Reed, currently dean of Fine, Performing and Media Arts - and newly married to Goldman Reed - and convinced him to start a paralegal program that summer to help a few of the Merit students who were close to certificate completion. That summer 23 students finished their studies and Valley's extension was off to a roaring start.
