From cooking to sewing and voice acting, the Odessa College Continuing Education Department is all about offering the community courses it wants.
“We’re really, really pushing our community classes right now. We have some cooking classes that include Instant Pot, make-ahead meals for when you’re on the go. We also are going to start offering ServSafe because the laws in the food industry have changed so more people will need the training to be able to be a manager in the business. We also have sewing, voice acting and that’s a really cool one … It’s virtual. One of our new ones that we’re really excited about is our ASL, American Sign Language. It’s also going to be for beginners, but also some mommy and me’s. … If you have kids you can participate in that one. We have Dutch oven cooking, virtual piano, virtual guitar,” said Reagan Paquette, head of Instructional Operations in the Continuing Education Department at OC. “We’re also starting our court reporting info sessions for the next class that’s going to start in March.”
Paquette said the information sessions are a chance to come in and gain more knowledge on court reporting.
“We’re also offering a lot more CPR. We have really cool deals that we can offer because of grants that we have …,” Paquette said.
“ … We’re really encouraging everybody that can to get CPR,” she added.
Continuing education determines what courses to offer by listening to the community.
“… We really do try to … figure out what the needs of the community are and offer the classes that will be able to help them ultimately,” Paquette said.
She added that they are also moving to expand into the region like Pecos and Monahans. They have a class in Rankin right now and Andrews and Crane.
Former Ector County ISD Deputy Superintendent Stephanie Howard is now superintendent in Crane.
“We’re really trying to work with her to create some more classes for that area,” Paquette said.
The start times for classes vary and there are a lot of on-demand courses for businesses, for example.
They can base the training off the needs of the businesses and sometimes they go to the businesses.
“We work with Southwest Bank some and we actually did trainings at their facility,” Paquette said.
“The last one we did was email etiquette for their employees. And they were willing to do CPR for all of Southwest Bank, but then COVID hit so we’ve postponed it until the spring,” she added.
For more information, call the Continuing Education Department at OC at 432-335-6580.
