The Olympian

Issue date: 3/12/08 Section: Campus

After more than 10 years of pursuing an elite membership with the Navy College Program Distance Learning Partnership, Olympic College has not only succeeded, but has been considered one of the top colleges in 2007 offering military education.
Since the opening of the NCPDLP, only 17 schools had been accepted. According to Wendy Miles, OC director of military education and training, OC is now one of more than 30 schools that have partnered with this exclusive program to bring education to the doorsteps of the enlisted Navy via distance learning technology.
Miles said one of the reasons for the exclusive partnership rights at the program's opening was the limited amount of schools able to offer distance learning degrees at that time. She said another issue was that the NCPDLP wanted degrees that complimented one another rather than having unnecessary redundancy in the degrees offered.
It wasn't until recently that the NCPDLP decided to open up the partnership to other schools. The idea is to create competitive programs that will result in more current and better quality programs for the students.
So, last summer the Navy officially announced a restructuring of the program and opened it up to all schools who met new qualifications to better serve military students.
An application was submitted last fall detailing the three degrees that OC felt qualified for the partnership: AAS Business Transfer, ATA in Electronics and AAS-T in Organizational Leadership and Resource Management. Richard Strand, dean of business and technology at OC, said the AAS Business Transfer degree has been around the longest and has a record of students completing both via distance and on campus, so the NCPDLP immediately accepted. Strand said, the second degree, ATA in Electronics, was one of OC's foundation programs at the college, but it just recently started distance learning.
"We've never had a distance program in electronics before, so all of our work in the last three or four years has been focused on developing a distance-friendly program," said Strand. "Right now we have 80 enrollments in the program and 45 of those enrollments are from students taking USB drive courses."
"We are really excited about The Organizational Leadership and Resource Management program," said Strand. "It was really designed with the military in mind because leadership is such an important part of what they do. But because it is a brand new program, it's going to take three years of history in the program before they'll approve it."

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