As a leader in new and innovative educational programs, Collin College has hosted critically necessary training for educators across the country for 20 years with its Working Connections Faculty Development Institute.
The institute has hosted a training session every summer for the last 20 years to make the newest technologies and industry trends available to educators and encourages collaboration between educators and business leaders that strengthen IT educational programs.
Former Executive Director of Emerging Technology Grants at Collin College Dr. Ann Beheler brought the institute to the college in 2002-2003. Dr. Beheler, who has been in the IT field for more than 30 years, said that at the time companies like Microsoft were providing hardware and software to select colleges to build IT educational programs with limited training on how to use it. She saw an opportunity to help.
“Working Connections offers free deep-dive training in several tracks that cover a range of the most in-demand topics in IT,” Dr. Beheler said. “The goal of the institute is to provide instructors nationwide with the expertise needed to teach and bring updated information to their classrooms.”
More than 1,000 faculty from across the country have attended Working Connections, and the training they received has impacted more than 161,000 students.
Travel expenses have been funded by the National Science Foundation for most of the 20 years.
The event is typically offered face-to-face in July at the Collin College Frisco Campus. However, for the last two years the conference was held online because of the pandemic.
Mark Dempsey, assistant director of the Convergence Technology Center at Collin College, said the online conference provided an opportunity for more people to attend the event.
“For in person, on average we were getting 100-120 attendees, but in 2020 when we shifted everything online, we had nearly 200 people participating in the institute,” Dempsey said.
This year, the institute was held in person for the first time in two years but still offered online training workshops, keeping the accessibility open to a wide range of people.
Renee Blackshear is an IT instructor at Texas State Technical College and has attended the conference since 2016.
“Working Connections has aided our students and program in being afforded the opportunity to add high-impact curriculum to our degree plan,” Blackshear said. “Working Connections is an excellent opportunity to build on existing knowledge, skills, and abilities.”
Bill Saichek is an IT instructor at San Jose College in California and has attended the conference for at least 13 years.
“It has helped me create a very large support network of like-minded teachers from around the country, where we can all learn and assist each other in ways that would be very difficult without Working Connections,” he said.
Dr. Beheler said she is proud of how far Working Connections has come in the last 20 years.
“In our first year, we were operating in a gym with an old sound system. To see how we’ve come from nothing to something that we’re proud of is amazing,” she said. “We’ve made an impact not only on educators but on students nationwide.”