Rosslanders can now take training and academic courses through the local library.
Gale Courses — online, college-level, professional development, and personal enrichment programs, have begun to be offered by the Rossland Public Library.
“We’re excited to be able to offer Gale Courses to the residents of Rossland,” said library director Beverley Rintoul. “The courses are instructor-led and cover a wide variety of subjects.”
Gale Courses offers hundreds of courses in language learning, accounting, computer skills, design, writing, teaching and more all for free for library members.
“We are supporters of lifelong learning,” says Rintoul. “So we want to support our members in that way if they want to do that. Because sometimes it’s kind of difficult.
“When I was doing correspondence courses, we had to bring out homework to the post office and mail it,” she recalled. “So this is so much easier.”
Library members can sign up and log in with a library account anywhere they access the internet. With six-week courses, library users can join programmes year-round.
“This is not one of those programs where you start and drop out in two weeks,” says Rintoul. “There’s an instructor, there are classes, it’s very interactive.
“And if you don’t complete the first two lessons within the first couple of weeks of the course, you get booted off,” she says, but stresses that’s a good thing. “They want you to keep up, they want you to do the work, and you get a certificate for your pains at the end.”
Rintoul says the library’s just getting word out now that the programs are available, and so far a handful of people have joined up. She says they’ll give it a few months to see the public reception to the offering.
“We have two or three people signed up already, so that’s encouraging,” she says. “We’ll look at it in three months and figure out what’s going on.”
For more information on Gale Courses, contact the library at 250-362-7611 or info@rossland.bclibrary.ca.
You can also enroll in Gale Courses at https://education.gale.com/l-rossland/.