Page 36 - BusinessWest March 3, 2021

Mary Bidwell says hands- on training will always be critical, but the pandemic taught ACC about what can be accomplished remotely as well.
Manufacturing
Machine A
Learning
ACC’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology Program Adapts to Unusual Times
s pivots go, this one was
pretty smooth, Mary
Bidwell says.
But that’s fitting for an
academic program built on precision.
By Joseph Bednar
skills.
“We’ve pivoted well and created
online content, we created hybrid mod- els, we got students back in, and we’ve got good safety protocols in play — and we’re looking forward to getting even more students on the ground,” she told BusinessWest. “And now we have this whole portfolio of online opportunities we didn’t have before, and we’ve diversi- fied what we can offer the community, which is great.”
Innovation and adaptation are not foreign concepts in the field of advanced manufacturing, or at ACC, which has become a robust collegiate pipeline into the manufacturing workforce.
The Advanced Manufacturing Tech- nology Center at ACC has been around for almost a quarter-century, but it received a major overhaul four years ago with the opening of a 27,000-square-foot addition, more than doubling its space to about 50,000 square feet. It includes an 11,000-square-foot machining lab with 90 computerized numeric control (CNC) and manual machines, an additive-man- ufacturing lab equipped for both plas- tic and metal 3D printing, a metrology lab featuring computerized measuring
It was almost a year ago — March 13, to be exact — when Asnuntuck Commu- nity College (ACC) sent everyone home, including students in its Advanced Man- ufacturing Technology program, which Bidwell serves as interim dean.
“We finished online through April and the end of May, and by the begin- ning of June, we were able to open back up,” she said, adding that students were able to finish their hands-on training in fields like welding and mechatronics on campus through the summer. “We were one of the first departments back on the ground.”
In the meantime, the program rein- vented itself in some ways, turning to online content in ways professors and administrators hadn’t considered before, not only in classwork for the student body, but in community-focused courses for area workers seeking to boost their
36 MARCH 3, 2021
MANUFACTURING
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