Collin Colleges Working Connections Celebrates 20 years of IT Training for Educators Nationwide

Aug. 11, 2022 Collin College celebrated 20 years of providing critically necessary training for educators across its Working Connections Faculty Development Institute on July 14.

The institute has hosted a training 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.

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 30 years, said that at that time companies like Microsoft were providing hardware and software to select colleges to build IT educational programs but had 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 attending Working Connections, and the training they received has impacted nearly 161,000 students.

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 at the expense of faculty being able to build strong relationships with other faculty. 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. 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.

Michael Harsh is a Collin College IT professor, and he has been attending the conference since its inception in 2002. The training offered at the conference provides up-to-date information on the technologies I teach in my classes, Harsh said. Throughout the years, I was able to share this information with my students.

Dr. Beheler said she is proud of how far Working Connections has come along in the last 20 years. In our first year, we were operating in a gym with an old sound system. To see how weve come from nothing to something that were proud of is amazing, she said. Weve made an impact not only to educators but to students nationwide.

For more information about the National Convergence Technology Center, visit www.connectedtech.org.

Collin College serves more than 56,000 credit and continuing education students annually and offers more than 100 degrees and certificates, including a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), a Bachelor of Applied Technology (BAT) in Cybersecurity,and a newBachelor of Applied Science (BAS) in Construction Management to be offered beginning fall 2022.The only public college based in Collin County, Collin College is a partner to business, government and industry, providing customized training and workforce development. For more information, visitwww.collin.edu.