Surry Community College has been selected by the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) to participate in the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) project.  The VCE is a collaborative cloud computing solution developed by NC State University in partnership with the NCCCS, with hosting provided by MCNC.  MCNC is an independent non-profit organization that helps various sectors of Community Anchor Institutions in NC to communicate with their constituents more effectively.  

Surry and two other community colleges were added to the NCCCS/NC State Virtual Computing Environment for the 2012 calendar year for a total of 17 colleges.  The colleges participating are: Alamance, Bladen, Cape Fear, Cleveland, Davidson County, Edgecombe, Fayetteville Tech, Guilford Tech, Mayland, Nash, Pitt, Roanoke-Chowan, Sandhills, South Piedmont, Surry, Tri-County, and Wake Tech.

Participating colleges will receive training, assistance, and VCE capacity to support two courses. The NCCC System Office will provide these services via a preexisting contract with NC State University. Training for the faculty and project administrators will be provided at no cost to the college. Each college is required to complete VCE administrator, faculty, and student evaluations in order to provide qualitative feedback on the project. Colleges must provide either an enterprise license or sufficient licenses for a limited number of concurrent users for each software application used through the VCE, unless the software is open source.

The VCE provides cost effective resources that save money for community college students by providing online access to expensive software applications, and for participating colleges by reducing costs for IT support and hardware for PC labs. Strong collaboration between the colleges and System Office provides the foundation for this project and allows the VCE to be used in the provision of innovative and flexible courses, programs, and services to colleges. This flexibility assists colleges in meeting the needs of the workforce and the economy by creating a means of delivering education and training in an innovative, efficient, and effective manner.

Contact
Marion F. Venable
Executive Director, SCC Foundation/Coordinator of Grants
Public Information Officer
(336) 386-3269
venablem@surry.edu