Mid-Plains Community College |
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Mid-Plains Community College |
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Mid-Plains Community College, offering two-year academic transfer and pre-professional programs, originates English 102DL from the McDonald- Belton Campus in North Platte. As a member of the Southwest Nebraska Distance Learning Project, it can offer college credit courses to some of the most rural communities in the country across a 17,000 square mile area. "Four of the counties in this 15 county consortium have a population of less than 1,000 and are among the 20 least-populated counties in America" (ESU 16).
Students taking English 102DL on and off campus must adjust to speaking into a microphone and occasionally seeing their own pixilated images as they enter into discussions, ask questions, and propose answers. Encirled by nine television monitors, the class is outfitted with a full range of multimedia hardware and software: CD-ROM, laserdisk, videotape, Elmo, internet access, and presentation software.
The home of Scouts Rest Ranch (winter quarters for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), North Platte is a railroad town. Employing 2,000, the Union Pacific houses one of its main diesel shops here as well as Bailey Yard, said to be the largest railroad switching yard in the world. Amplifying a theme found among these pages, the population of North Platte went down from 24,509 to 22,605 over the last two census reports (Nebraska Blue Book 817). The City of North Platte, however, remains the regional center for healthcare, education, and commerce for western Nebraska.
