Across from Avanti’s on Main Street is a small brown building that many students might fail to notice if they aren’t looking for it. Otherwise known as the Continuing Education and Professional Development building, this part of campus leads big projects throughout campus and the Peoria community.
Executive Director of Continuing Education Janet Lange said the programs are geared more toward current and prospective students.
“It really is service to the community,” Lange said. “Because the university is an excellent community partner … we can support [the Peoria area] by sharing this expertise and information and knowledge and learning with our community.”
Programs are often aimed at helping youth, especially prospective Bradley students, as well as professionals and senior citizens. However, other programs are based on faculty interests and can benefit current students.
For example, the mechanical engineering department will be pairing with Design Engine, a Chicago based company that leads training in Creo, a software program popular amongst employers. The goal will be to create a Peoria area user group on April 13, which is “a free opportunity for students to come and mingle with people using this software,” according to Lange.
For associate professor Kalyani Nair, this is an opportunity for students to learn more.
“The students do have the expertise, and therefore, when they meet other users, they can learn about other things they haven’t done before,” Nair said. “What we do in classes is so limited, we probably cover maybe 25 to 50 percent of the software, but it’s capable of doing so much more.”
Continuing Education’s main effort in this partnership is to handle all of the logistics, according to Lange.
“We handle the room setup, registration, food and audio-visual,” she said. “We handle all that so the faculty or the presenters … can really focus on what they want to speak about … so that they can do what they do best, which is teach.”
Perhaps a more well-known program of Continuing Education is the Bradley branch of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which focuses on providing educational travel, classes and study groups for the elderly. What started in 1994 with only 89 members has grown to include in 1,200 Peoria area residents today.
However, OLLI isn’t completely detached from student life. Communication professor Laura Bruns has her honors section of COM 103 interview and write legacy speeches about OLLI members.
“Getting to know somebody that is not like you fosters a sense of an understanding of diversity … The reason I chose OLLI too … is [because of the] people who have long interesting lives who are very smart, who have had multiple careers and tons of wisdom to share, so they made a natural fit for this [class] collaboration,” Bruns said. “Hopefully from those collaborations, students can tap into some of that wisdom and grow from it and learn from it.”
Anyone interested can visit https://www.bradley.edu/academic/continue/ for more information on their various programs.
