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October 16, 2007 Myra Saturen, 610-332-6547
NCC Director of Distance EducationLearning To Present at Three Major Conferences
Dr. Kelvin Bentley, director of distance educationlearning at Northampton Community College (NCC), will give presentations at three major upcoming conferences focusing on innovative uses of technology in education.
Next week, in Seattle, Washington, on October 25, Dr. Bentley he will participate in a panel presentation by the EDUCASE Evolving Technology committee, which promotes technology development and implementation on campuses. Dr. Bentley has served on this committee since 2006. The panel presentation is called EDUCAUSE: Imagining Tomorrow’s Future Today. Dr. Bentley’s role on the panel is to give a brief presentation about the evolving functionality of web conferencing programs. EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
Topics at the conference include Google applications for higher education, digital presentation, storage, information and management, advances in virtualization, Web 2.0 m-learning and more. Bentley is a member of the EDUCAUSE Evolving Education committee, which promotes technology development and implementation on campuses.
At the 19th Annual WCET (WCET’s (Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications) Conference) 19th Annual Conference, on November 7 – 10, in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Bentley will join two other panelists in demonstrating how their schools are using web conferencing to enhance student communications.
Dr. Bentley will also discuss collaborative benchmarks in distance learning at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education’s Annual Conference on December 9 in Philadelphia, PA. He will be a part of a 4-member panel He will describing methods to help an institution use benchmarking data to improve the overall quality of its distance learning efforts.
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Enrollment in Northampton Community College’s distance learning program has grown by 400% in the last six years. In 2001, fewer than 1,000 student registrations were registereds were registered;; in fall 2007, over 4,000 students are enrolled, representing an unduplicated headcount of over 2,500 students who have enrolled in one or more distance learning coursesnearly 3,999 are enrolled.
NCC’s Distance Learning Program enables students to earn a degree or take courses of special interest at home from their computers. Degrees in accounting, business administration, business management, sports management, early childhood education, general studies, individualized transfer studies, liberal arts, and social work can be completed entirely online, as can over 80% of the requirements for criminal justice, education, journalism, and special education: para educator training. More than 50% of the courses for the funeral service associate degree may be taken online. There are also many non-credit courses offered online. For more information about distance learning, visit or call 610-861-4160.
Dr. Bentley came to Northampton Community College in 2006 from Seton Hall University. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Delaware. He graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University.
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