Community Colleges – A Stepping Stone To University Education
If you are fortunate enough to live in a place where a community college provides classes, then you should make it a point to take advantage of the facility. This can be a great help to further your educational qualifications to advance your career. Community colleges provide some intensive courses in various educational areas. The courses are quite affordable and provide an impressive level of training.
Community colleges play an important role in providing affordable education; yet they are considered inferior in comparison to University education. This consideration is quite further from the truth. In fact, a good number of nurses are students of community colleges and are very well trained in their jobs. The associate degree nursing program provided by community colleges are rigorous courses that provide very good clinical experience and comparable to that of the bachelor of nursing degree courses provided by Universities. However, if you possess nursing training from a community college, most hospitals will not consider you a candidate for any administrative nursing position, as this requires a Bachelor’s degree.
There are many advantages of learning at the community college levels. One biggest advantage is the fact that the teachers at the community college are dedicated to teaching. They are more approachable and helpful to the students. They are not simultaneously working on their own projects and usually devote all their time to teaching at the community college. Students are never considered as an interruption in the pursuit of their own agenda.
Community Colleges are a supportive system for those individuals who are going back to academics after a long gap or for those who may not have been getting top grades at high school. The teacher to student ratio is lower in community colleges hence, the teaching faculty can provide personalized attention to the students. This is a great advantage to the students who require extra coaching.
Students who complete the two-year degree program at community college are likely to complete their four-year degree. Research indicates that students who start at universities for four-year degrees usually drop out of the course mid way. A two-year community college degree will also help to increase the earning capability of the individual even if he does not complete the four-year degree course.
There are some disadvantages associated with community colleges that one should be aware of. Some universities do not accept transfer credits of courses completed at the community colleges. Ensure that you check out the courses required at the university that you plan to transfer to for further education. Another problem could be the availability of certain courses that you may want to do, or the limited number of courses on offer at the community college.
In conclusion, the community college education can be a useful, instructive and an affordable option for formal education. It can be considered as a stepping-stone to the higher level of University education.
MIS – The Brain Box of College of Education – Jalingo Automation
M.I.S. is an acronym for Management Information System (MIS). It is a system or process that provides the information needed to manage organizations effectively. Management information systems are regarded as a subset of the overall internal controls/ procedures in a business, which cover the application of people, documents, technologies, and procedures used by the management staff of an organization to solve business or academic problems such as costing a product, service or a business-wide strategy, application, registration and result computation. Management information systems are distinct from regular information systems in that they are used to analyze other information systems applied in operational activities in the organization. Academically, the term is commonly used to refer to the group of information management methods tied to the automation or support of human decision making, e.g. Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems, and Executive Information Systems.
Because of the increasing demand for information by the various sectors of the economy, Information Technology has become very necessary for every sector to opt for. Globalization cannot be achieved without online activities. To achieve that, in 2009, the Management of College of Education, Jalingo under the leadership of Mr. Joseph Sule Isa, saw the need to automate its academic process to effectively control and manage all academic programmes electronically. Therefore, the College went into partnership with i-4cus Nigeria Ltd, an ICT company that designed the College portal. The portal constitutes the College website and result management database.
For effective management of the portal, it became imperative for the College to establish an MIS Unit as the engine room or brain box of the automation. With this, the Management Information System Unit (MIS) was established in February, 2010.
The MIS Unit among other things is vested with the following responsibilities:
* Managing the College Online Admission process by ensuring that only candidates that meet the admission criteria are admitted;
* Ensuring that every student of the College is properly registered through the Online Registration System;
* Liaising with the Examination Officers of various departments of the college to properly key-in students’ score into their database and encrypt the results using cipher technology to avert alteration by unauthorized persons.
* Using the portal to compute students’ results.
* Liaising with the Information Unit of the College to post approved students’ results to the College website; http://www.coejalingo.org for students to access them individually, after they might have logged into their accounts.
* Updating the College Management with vital information about students
* Managing complaints from students on irregularities during admission, registration and result computation process.
To this end, kudos to the College Management and the entire College community for embarking on this laudable project that will sanitize and effectively control students enrolment and graduation and above all will showcase the activities of the College to the global community.