Banff and Buchan College, with an enrolment of around 12,000 students a year, runs a wide variety of full-time and part-time courses at its main Fraserburgh campus and at outreach centres.
It covers a wide geographical area, from Huntly to Macduff and Fraserburgh to Peterhead.
Stewart Chalmers is the client service manager.
“We’re in a unique position as we’re one of only two mainland institutions to run courses in Nautical Studies”, he explained. “We are also very strong in IT and Engineering. When other colleges were downsizing their Engineering departments, we were strengthening ours, perhaps because of our location, given the main industries in Aberdeen.
“We’ve used PROMT since its launch. As an interactive, internet-based database, it works well and is relatively easy to use. I’m ultimately responsible for updating all our information on PROMT and although Banff and Buchan is a fairly small college, this still involves a lot of different courses.
“To help with this, I have one person who deals with European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) and IT workshops, because they need refreshed every month.
Another looks after open learning details, and some other members of staff are drafted in whenever a major update is needed, for example when the evening prospectus is released. In all there are five people here using PROMT. I did everything at first, mainly because I wanted to learn how it all worked, and I have gradually transferred tasks to other people.
“PROMT is light years ahead of paper based systems and is particularly useful for ILA Scotland activity.”
“I hope the NLOD makes it clear at a national level what’s available at Banff and Buchan College. We certainly think it’s important to keep it up to date and we look on it as a national database for our benefit, managed by learndirect scotland but with the facility for us to maintain our own information”.