In 10 years, I see GCC providing quality education that meets the needs of our students and their ever growing need for flexibility.

In order to meet the growing demands of flexibility from our students and their employers, we need to be willing to make schedules strategically. I am all for faculty teaching courses that they want, however the time, format, and frequency of class meetings need to meet the needs of our students. I would like to see us adopt a more positive outlook on reviewing our data. I want all of us to see how our students are doing as they progress from our course into the next. Are there areas that we can grow as instructors to better meet the demands of the next course in our students sequence?

Then I want us to look further into the students’ future careers. What are we leading them toward? What will their work environments look like? What areas can we as faculty grow in order to provide them with the skills they need in their future careers? Can we partner with companies to ensure relevance to our content and our students’ future work environments?

Our faculty are strong and more malleable than we know.. If we get back to the root of the reason why we are all teaching and given the evidence to support change for the betterment of students, we can overcome the discomfort change brings.

Our students are our customers and we need to be sure they want to keep purchasing our product, “knowledge.” We want to create classroom spaces that are collaborative and dynamic. These spaces require ingenuity and innovation. We are teachers but that is only the surface. We are learners and cheerleaders for our content and our students. We are already taking steps to bring more flexibility and change to our classrooms, curriculum, and college. We can see these changes in the online tutoring, the new modalities for courses (live online, flexible attendance), online test proctoring, student services chat systems, instructional videos, grace periods on assignments, allowing students to Zoom into a class session, and many more that I am sure I have missed.

We are well on our way to seeing a full scale change in our campus and yes it will probably take us 10 years to truly adopt the growing world of flexibility but it can be done and I cannot wait to see it.