“Did You Know?: Empowering Students”

Monroe Community College is just that a college for the community. Like many colleges, our students come from a variety of backgrounds. When one has been downsized out of a job, 1st generation college, other abilitied, a veteran or any other barrier staying in college is a challenge. How can you bring hope? How can you create a viable engaged online community? MCC has integrated a number of programs to encourage each student to “SOAR”. There are a number of opportunities each student can utilize to give hope to completion if they only knew who to speak to, what the criteria was to qualify for or the programs available to them. The encouragement to persist semester to semester leads to retention, which in turn results in graduation. Our latest adventure is the creation of MCC-TV which is being launched to specifically reach out to the online community. The soft launch was during the Summer of 2019 with e sports, 292-Baby, life hacks, and student content from a Visual and Performing Arts professor, etc. During Fall 2019 the plan is to launch vetted submissions by students with content of interest produced by them. To reach our students we have already implemented a robust Starfish system, use Blackboard as our platform, recommend and transfer to the MCC and OPEN SUNY Help Desks, provide webinars along with information of several college programs that deal with life insecurities/challenges.