TWO colleges are continuing to run virtual open days for prospective students.

WCG (formerly Warwickshire College Group) says that based on the success of the virtual open events held in March and again in June across its seven colleges, it will carry on with virtual tours and tutor videos to enable students to find out about courses remotely.

Two of the seven are Evesham College and Pershore College, and across all the colleges the events attracted around 25,000 views in total.

Viewers were also able to post questions online with WCG tutors and staff responding live as they would at a physical event.

The plan is for the new online approach to open events to run alongside physical open events, giving students the ability to access the same information without the need to visit the colleges in person.

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The next main open events for WCG are due in November, with open events for higher education courses scheduled for September, and will be subject to government guidance relating to Covid-19.

Mark Whittaker, head of marketing at WCG, said: “We were due to run seven open events in March and were able to quickly move them online as we had anticipated the lockdown.

"We were probably the first college to run a virtual open event because we were ahead in our technology usage.

“They went well given the very short amount of time we had to turn them around and we decided to build on them with another set of virtual open events in June as whilst we don’t normally hold them then, we do normally have schoolchildren in for discovery days.

“The big difference with the June events was that every department head at all of the colleges recorded their own video.

“The viewing figures of around 25,000 exceeded our expectations. We had higher viewing figures for the March events than we would have had through the door, and both sets of events are continuing to generate student applications."

To find out more about WCG and future open events at its seven colleges, visit wcg.ac.uk.