ACC excited about new additions
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ALPENA -- As the first week of Alpena Community College's spring semester draws to a close, students, faculty, and teachers alike express excitement about some of the new additions that ACC has in store for 2024.
One of these new additions is the Besser Co. Center for Manufacturing. Originally the old auto body lab space, the newly renovated learning center hosts a variety of state-of-the-art equipment.
"It's been exciting," said Andrew Paad, ACC's manufacturing instructor. "We got these new machines, so we're updating classes and getting ready for all the new programs that we can do in robotics and other new technology."
The new center provides students, new and returning, an opportunity to work with the actual machines they will see in various manufacturing careers and get hands-on experience that wasn't available before.
"I like learning all this stuff that's really intriguing to me, " said Bradly Pagels, an ACC second semester first year. "There's a lot to do here. There's no downtime. You can be doing production, you can be learning. There's trainers, there's actual machines here...The thing I'm most excited about is learning robots and learning automation; that's what the world is. If you learn how to run a robot, you can run lights out overnight every night."
"I personally am very excited about our new capabilities," said Paad. "We've added machines to the process, we've added robots to the process, we've added the new controllers to the process, and we're getting new tooling."
Beyond just achieving new facilities, according to ACC Vice President of Instructions, Paige Gordier, during their startup week preparations for the school, there was significant effort put into helping faculty better use automated programs as well as understand things like artificial intelligence.
"Last week, we had our Startup Week," said Gordier. "During that time, we get all the updates on the different kinds of computer programs that help us teach now, like, we have an automated syllabus program, and they're working on assessment of their classes, and they're learning outcomes. We had a presentation by Ashlie O'Connor, a three-hour presentation on artificial intelligence, which was really good, because we need to learn how to kind of use it, and how to guide the students in using it, but then stop them from using it to cheat."
Another area where ACC is seeing change is the expansion of remote learning opportunities for students which is something Matt Bedard, the program director and lead faculty for the business management and marketing programs, is excited to further implement.
"ACC was one of the pioneers of deploying remote learning to students," said Bedard. "That could take a classroom, that may otherwise never have that opportunity because they're geographically outside of our service area or commuting distance or they otherwise have life conflicts, work and family and jobs, that don't allow them to, come to take the class.
"What's exciting for me this year, is this is the first year that I've integrated remote learning into several classes that before we always just kind of presume that it wouldn't be a good fit. I've adopted this in probably 60% of my previous classes. There are two more classes this semester that are the first offering of this hybrid experience."