Practical, Applied Education at UNM-Taos

Louis Moya and Enrico Trujillowork on the set in the Digital Media Arts studio.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have always had a personal fondness for Taos Local Television, ever since a few of us---Candyce O’Donnell, Gail Russell, Rose Rutherford, Rick Romancito, Kathy Cordova, George Chacon, Bob Romero and I, if I recall correctly---created a nonprofit corporation and formed the first TLT board of directors some thirty years ago.

Thanks to the dedication of many board members and only a handful of general managers over the years, most notably Ron Usherwood and Tom Myers, whose unique contributions and personal commitment were the mainstay of Cable Channel Two (now 22), the public access station has gone from a cinder block bunker in the middle of a cow pasture off Ranchitos Road with no heat, no plumbing and one bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling to its current locations upstairs over the Town Council chambers on Civic Plaza Drive and a fully functioning production studio across the street overseen by Louis Moya, the UNM-Taos Director of Development.

But here’s the exciting part: the station is now an integral part of a newly created UNM-Taos Digital Media Arts program offering both a 31 credit hour Certificate in Information Technologies and a 67 credit hour Associate of Applied Science in Digital Media Arts (DMA). Moya explained that the DMA program offers “a solid foundation in technology, a rich creative background in the arts, and the communication skills necessary to convey ideas in the digital realm.”

Students working toward the associate degree in media arts will gain hands-on experience by helping to run the station as interns at the Taos Channel 22 public access, education and government facility (the URL is www.taos22.com) and digital production studio along with pre-existing campus digital media and computer labs. This, in a way, represents the latest transformation of the station into an arm of the community college and, as the DMA program proposal puts it, “the program...provides a pathway for students into careers in IT and the growing field of digital media....[It] pursues these goals through practical, applied education geared toward entry level positions in digital media and IT support.” In other words, our public access station is now part of UNM-Taos’ workforce development and career readiness mandate. If that appeals to you, call 737-6200 right away and ask to speak to an advisor. The first day of fall semester is August 19.

Jim Sanborn, UNM-Taos instructor and Taos Municipal School Board member, is responsible for the second component of the DMA program, the Certificate in Information Technologies, which prepares students for entry-level positions in information technology support.

Speaking as someone whose IT skills pretty much begin and end with being able to charge my own cell phone, I have a genuine respect for those individuals that we rely upon to keep things running in our increasingly complicated world.

“We’re providing the opportunity to obtain a workforce certificate that positions you to qualify for an entry-level job starting in the $35,000 range, and accomplish that in as little as one year,” Sanborn maintained in a telephone interview. “This isn’t a disembodied training program. Our approach is performance based, and we use a software simulation package that is the industry standard. It not only speeds up the learning process but puts you in the real-world IT environment without risking business downtime and making mistakes that could damage equipment systems.”

In other words, it’s like a flight simulator that lets you crash the plane without hurting anyone.

In addition to core course work the program teaches IT support, cyber security, networking, visualization and business intelligence. If you are interested, whether you have academic training or workforce experience that you want to sharpen and expand, you can email Jim Sanborn at jsanborn@unm.edu. We expect interest in the new Digital Media Arts Program for either the design track or IT technical track to be considerable, so the sooner you look into them, the better.  

      

Institutional Effectiveness at UNM-Taos

Anita Bringas

Most of the staff at UNM-Taos wear more than one hat. Anita Bringas is the UNM-Taos Administrative Officer and the Title V Grant administrator. She handles data and institutional research for the branch and files reports to the state, the federal government, the Higher Education Department and the Public Education Department. In addition, she compiles the Institutional Effectiveness Report each semester, which is more of an internal document that makes it possible to track enrollment and demographic trends at UNM-Taos over the past five years. The IE Report is a favorite of mine because it creates an accurate profile of the college, its programs, policies and procedures, and although the finished product will be on our website (taos.unm.edu) toward the end of July, I asked Anita to give us a preview some of the more significant data.

“The IE Report is a comprehensive snapshot of how we have been doing over the past five years,” she began, “and this year, because it is our 10th anniversary of becoming a UNM branch campus, we will also include 10 year comparisons in some areas. The full report is all public information and will include an executive summary, a brief history of the campus, enrollment and degree data, and detailed demographic information.

“Our enrollment this past spring semester was 1,526, including dual credit, degree seeking and non-degree seeking students. Now if we break that down, we see we had 368 dual credit students, or 24 percent of our enrollment. That’s an impressive number of high school students able to take college level courses and receive both high school and college credit for them. This program is paid for by the state, so by the time these students get to their freshman year in college, they’ve already completed several of their core curriculum courses. That represents a considerable savings in both time and money, plus they have already become familiar with the college routine by then.

“There were 948 students working on a degree track last semester, which is fully 81 percent of the total. But the really remarkable statistic is that in spring of 2011 degree seekers were only 63 percent of the whole student body. So in just two years degree seeking students increased by almost 20 percent, and if you go back five years, to 2008, they represented only 43 percent of the total. So in five years we have almost doubled the number of students seeking a degree.”

Bringas credited UNM-Taos having more advisors and better advising for much of the increase, and noted that it not only indicated better use of limited financial aid, but was also one of the criteria in the new funding formula that determines state funding of higher education.

“We still offer personal interest classes,” Bringas added, “but students are far more serious about completing their degrees these days. That’s really important.

“Now when you look at a breakdown of ethnicity for last semester, we see that 58 percent of our student body was Hispanic, which closely matches the percentage in our service area. But what is more remarkable is that we are recognized as an official HSI--Hispanic Serving Institution---by the federal government, which qualifies institutions with at least 25 percent Hispanic enrollment for Title V funding. Title V is designed to increase enrollment, retention and graduation rates for Hispanic students. However, the intent of the grant and the way we are utilizing those funds is for capacity building, which means increasing the number of advisors, increasing their professional development, expanding the free CASA Tutoring program, working with peer-to-peer tutors, creating math and writing labs, providing exam prep and other workshops, all of which benefit every student at UNM-Taos. That’s what we mean by capacity building.

  “Another interesting demographic is gender. Historically, our enrollment, and this follows a national trend in community colleges, has been made up of mostly females. However, the number of male students at UNM-Taos has been slowly and steadily increasing in recent years, and we went from 37 percent to 39 percent this spring over last spring. I think this shows that in a community like ours, male students are beginning to get the support they need to get into school and continue with it, as opposed to the many other things they could be doing that aren’t as productive or fulfilling.”

And finally, I asked Bringas to give us a quick comparison between that first year as a branch campus, 2003, and our last full academic year.

“For the academic year 2003-2004, our head count was 2,415 students taking 16,882 credit hours. Now if we jump to the academic year 2012-2013, our head count was 3,228 and credit hours were 27,606. In other words we increased enrollment by 813 students and 10,784 credit hours in ten short years. This shows that we not only have more students, but we have more students on average taking more core classes toward a degree. This has enormous social and economic implications for our community.”

More than 600 students have already signed up for the fall semester at UNM-Taos that starts August 19. Fall schedules are in racks around town and 10,000 more will be inserted in the July 11 edition of the Taos News. The full enrollment team is on duty in Pueblo Hall on the Klauer campus Monday through Friday, and you can drop in or call 737-6200 to find out if UNM-Taos might be right for you.