West Valley students can earn certificates online

By Rebecca Ray

West Valley College students can now earn certificates without leaving home.

At the beginning of the spring semester, the college launched its first online certificate program, which leads to a certificate in administrative management. Barbara Lea, director of the program, says she believes the program is the first online administrative management program in the world.

In the program, designed for students with office experience, students take 12 units in human resource management, strategic management, organizational behavior and business communication. Students do everything online, from receiving syllabi and lists of required books to taking tests.

The college designed the program for higher-level students, because lower-level students benefit greatly from the one-on-one interaction that real classroom settings provide, Lea said.

Lea created the program with Melanie Gadener, member of the WVC Office Administration Advisory Board and owner of Productivity Plus Processes in Fremont. Lea and Gadener created the program in cooperation with the advisory board and the San Jose Chapter of the International Association of Administrative Assistants. The advisory board designed the program to accommodate the busy lives and schedules of professional adult students, as well as professionals who were recently laid off, Lea said.

In 1999, the board was concerned about office administrators who did several tasks at once to hold companies together, yet who received relatively low pay. The board also wanted to make sure that the college's curriculum matched the skills that office professionals needed in the real world. So the board obtained federal funds--a Vocational and Technical Education Act grant--for about $17,000, to study the tasks that high-level office administrators did that fell outside their job descriptions.

Gadener conducted the study by interviewing three high-level office administrators and their managers, who were from Hewlett-Packard, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a start-up company. The board used the results from Gadener's study to determine that the college needed an on-line management certificate program, and obtained a second VTEA grant for about $26,000 to get the program started.

Gadener and Lea also wrote a feature story about the study, called "Power Play," which appeared in the October 2000 issue of Office Pro magazine.

This spring, about 30 students are taking each online course for the certificate in administrative management.

For more information about the program, call 408.741.2098 or log onto westvalley.edu, click on the "programs" link and then click on the "career programs" link.

In other West Valley news:

Honors program--West Valley invites high school and college students to consider enrolling in its honors program. The honors courses, which are integrated and have small class sizes, are designed to equip students with problem-solving skills and strengthen involvement between faculty and students, says Dr. Joseph Samuels, West Valley vice president of instruction. The college intends the honors program to nurture both group and individual creativity and intelligence.

For more information, visit the honors office or call 408.741.2614.

Forum--The League of Women Voters of Southwest Santa Clara Valley invites the public to attend a forum titled "How West Valley College Can Better Support All the Communities It Serves." The forum will take place March 28 from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. in the Baltic Room. The room is next to the cafeteria on the West Valley campus, which is on the corner of Fruitvale Avenue and Allendale Avenue in Saratoga.

The forum is designed to encourage dialogue between the college and community. The forum will also serve as the local kick-off meeting for the League of Women Voters' statewide study of the community college system.

For more information, call 408.867.VOTE or check www.lwv-sw-santaclara-valley.org.

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