COLUMBUS, Ind. — The Columbus Airpark campus has a new online presence.
The Community Education Coalition and the Economic Opportunities through Education (EcO) Network of Southeast Indiana have announced the launch of the newly designed AirPark Columbus College Campus website.
The shared campus website is part of an ongoing collaborative effort of several years to “increase student success” on the airpark campus, said education coalition Executive Director Kathy Oren. This initiative includes stakeholders from Ivy Tech Community College — Columbus, Purdue Polytechnic Institute Columbus, Indiana University Purdue University Columbus, regional employers, the community, the EcO network and the CEC.
More than 50 individuals have been working on the project, and the work has been facilitated by the education coalition, she said.
“In early summer 2020, soon after COVID-19 hit, the collaborative project teams decided there was a greater need for a web presence to lift up the entire campus as a whole,” Oren said. “COVID created an urgency to build out a campus website in order to help increase awareness of the excellent learning programs right here in Columbus, at a time when people were losing jobs and may be seeking to go back to school, and when students were reconsidering going away to college.”
The site also includes a focus on “increasing the number of regional employers who recruit for high-quality jobs on campus,” she said.
A simple version of the site was launched in June of 2020; however, the latest version went live on Feb. 5 and includes more detailed information and enhanced tools.
The airpark website is primarily broken down into pages for three groups — current students, prospective students and recruiting employers.
For current students, there are links to student resources from each school. There is also a student resource listing that provides contact information and websites for both college and community resources that can help meet a variety of needs.
The resource list includes financial aid and scholarship resources as well as help with career services. However, it also includes a variety of resources that deal with more personal needs such as childcare, food security, housing options, transportation and mental health counseling.
For individuals considering enrollment, the site also provides a series of tools to help prospective students make an informed decision about their post-secondary education. These tools include:
A list of subject areas and links for the schools that offer them
A campus map
Descriptions of what each school has to offer
Pictures of the different school facilities, as well as the Columbus Learning Center and the Advanced Manufacturing Center of Excellence
Admissions and contact information
A link to student housing options through the Annex of Columbus
The site also has a page focused on helping businesses connect with potential hires.
The page includes resources for posting job openings through each school, a map and photos of the campus, information about campus facilities, a list of subject areas and which schools offer them, and a link to Indiana INTERNnet.
The employer resource page emphasizes that students are connected to the community, “trained for today’s workforce needs” and from the state’s top three institutions.
The Airpark Columbus College Campus website also contains information about the campus’s COVID-19 protocols, links to the different institutions’ COVID-19 protocols, links to career and educational resources such as WorkOne Southeast and Your Next Step, and a place to submit questions about the campus.
Oren said that while the site is new, it has the same address that was used in prior years as a landing page for the Columbus Learning Center.
“When the urgent need came along last summer to deploy a site in response to COVID, we decided to use the existing URL for the new site,” she said. “We are in discussions about renaming the URL so that it better reflects the broader campus, rather than just the CLC building.”
Collaborative efforts have also included creating the official name of “the AirPark Columbus College Campus,” as well as visual branding. She said the new name aligns with the airport’s rebrand as the Columbus AirPark.
“This shared campus site and branding marks one of the first times that the three institutions have collaborated on external marketing efforts,” she said.
