The new program’s website has more than 250 offerings of courses and events around the community, in addition to 15 traditional evening college course offerings and 70-80 courses available online.

“The goal of the reinvention of the program is to get more people involved,” said Christopher Smith, assistant director of alumni enrichment for the Alumni Association. “MSU is wide open, and we want to engage with the public.”

Smith said although this kind of engagement was present in the original evening college, the model was flawed.

“We felt that the old model was limited in the story it was telling,” Smith said. “While it was great for people in town … we received a lot of feedback from people all over the world that wanted to be a part of it.

“We’re hoping to expand the demographic to anyone. It’s not just the retired demographic, it could be people in their 40s with kids who want to come back to campus and find things that are happening.”

One of the unique new programs offered through the LENS program is a series of language courses for children aged 3-18, a demographic previously not explored by the evening college.

French and Arabic senior Heather Brown, who works as a student assistant for the foreign languages department, said that the programs focus on basic language skills and are well attended.

“We have a lot of returning kids,” she said. “The kids pick up a lot.”

Scott Westerman, executive director of the Alumni Association, said that LENS is offering more courses than at any point in its history.

“The biggest complaint I hear from Spartans around the world is, ‘How can we get evening college stuff for us?‘” he said.

“What we did to evening college was reinvent it to make it bigger and better.”

Westerman said that before he came to MSU, he was one of the alumni that wished he could connect with the university, but couldn’t because he was located in New Mexico, not Michigan.

“Coming in, (LENS) was on my idea list for a long time,” he said.