DakarLive and X recently visited Los Angeles Southwest College for a firsthand look at how one of South Los Angeles’ most important educational institutions is preparing for its next chapter. Learn more about the history of LASC. Dakar Live can serve as the beachhead that turns Los Angeles Southwest College into a working broadcast, media-tech, and apprenticeship hub—not simply a place where students study media.
The strongest positioning is to make LASC the first campus demonstration site for a repeatable model: students learn in the classroom, produce real programming through Dakar Live, accumulate supervised work experience, and move directly toward paid careers in media production, live broadcast, AI-enabled content creation, and broadcast engineering.
The Dakar Live / LASC Beachhead
1. Turn the campus into a living broadcast laboratory.
Dakar Live would use the college’s auditorium, student center, classrooms, career center, athletic events, faculty expertise, student organizations, and community partnerships as the raw material for a continuous programming operation. Students would not wait until graduation to build portfolios—they would produce interviews, campus news, podcasts, sports coverage, documentaries, livestreams, multicamera productions, vertical social content, and community programming while enrolled.
2. Build the broadcast-engineering pathway behind the content.
The opportunity goes far beyond camera operators and editors. Dakar Live can expose students to the technical infrastructure that makes modern broadcasting possible: signal flow, RF transmission, networking, IP video, fiber, audio engineering, streaming, cloud production, graphics systems, replay, remote production, data management, equipment maintenance, and AI-assisted production workflows.
That creates pathways toward jobs such as broadcast technician, broadcast engineer, media systems technician, RF technician, livestream engineer, technical director, camera utility, audio technician, digital media technician, production assistant, editor, and AI-enabled media specialist.
Our host, Dean Sharon Dalmage, led the team through several of the developments taking shape across the campus, including the auditorium, the new student-centered spaces, and the college’s expanding career and workforce infrastructure.
This makes every production an apprenticeship opportunity.
Dakar Foundation’s role as managing partner is especially important because the Foundation brings the registered-apprenticeship infrastructure behind Dakar Live. Instead of students simply volunteering on productions, appropriately structured work can become part of an organized career pathway in which supervised experience, competencies, training, and hours are documented against the applicable apprenticeship framework.
That gives Dakar Live a fundamentally different value proposition:
The programming is the classroom. The campus is the studio. The productions generate experience. The apprenticeship converts that experience into a career pathway.
Dakar will use LASC as the proof-of-concept campus.
Rather than attempting to launch everywhere simultaneously, Dakar Live can establish LASC as its flagship operating beachhead. The college becomes the place where Dakar demonstrates that a community college can operate a student-powered media network tied directly to workforce development.
Once demonstrated, the model can be packaged for replication across other Los Angeles-area community colleges: programming formats, equipment standards, apprenticeship procedures, curriculum modules, employer engagement, production workflows, student recruitment, portfolio requirements, and placement metrics.
Dean Dalmage oversees Adult Education, Noncredit, Continuing and Community Education at LASC, making the visit especially important as Dakar explores ways to connect education, emerging technology, apprenticeship and employment opportunities.
We’ll bring employers into the campus before students leave it.
Dakar Live can operate as an employer-facing talent laboratory. Broadcasters, studios, sports organizations, production companies, technology companies, unions, equipment manufacturers, streaming platforms, and major-event production organizations can participate through demonstrations, challenges, master classes, mentorship, equipment access, project briefs, internships, apprenticeships, and direct recruiting.
The goal is to reverse the traditional model. Instead of telling students to graduate and then search for Hollywood, sports, or broadcast employers, Dakar Live brings the industry’s workflows and hiring signals onto the Southwest campus.
Dakar will create an LA28-era workforce pipeline.
The timing gives LASC an unusual opportunity. Southern California will require substantial technical and creative labor around major sports, entertainment, live-event, and digital-production activity over the coming years. Dakar Live can deliberately prepare students for those environments by recreating professional production conditions—deadlines, live transmission, multicamera crews, mobile production, credentialed field reporting, remote workflows, RF/networking fundamentals, and real client expectations.
The result is bigger than a campus television station. It is a South Los Angeles broadcast workforce development engine.
But this wasn’t just a campus tour.
It was a glimpse at what could happen when physical infrastructure meets intelligent infrastructure.
Joining the conversation was X, who brought her LiDAR robot to campus for a demonstration and discussion about robotics, spatial intelligence, AI and the technologies rapidly transforming the workplace.
The operating model
Los Angeles Southwest College provides the campus, students, faculty alignment, facilities, and institutional pathway. Dakar Live provides the media network, production environment, industry storytelling, and distribution platform. Dakar Foundation serves as managing partner, apprenticeship sponsor/pathway operator, and employer intermediary. Industry partners contribute technology, mentors, projects, demonstrations, equipment, hiring signals, and ultimately jobs.
The Cycle Becomes:
Recruit → Train → Produce → Broadcast → Document competencies/hours → Build portfolio → Employer validation → Apprenticeship/placement → Alumni return as mentors.
A demonstration sparkes a bigger question:
How can Dakar unlock Dakar Live and turn campuses like LASC into interactive gateways to the future of work?
Dakar Live is being designed as a two-way education and workforce network—broadcasting instruction, career challenges and industry access into classrooms while giving students the ability to broadcast, demonstrate and compete back. The goal is to connect learning directly to apprenticeship hours, professional experience and ultimately employment.
Dakar’s mission fits naturally with LASC’s Career Center, which already supports students and alumni with career exploration, professional development, internships, employment preparation and connections to opportunity.
Imagine a Dakar Live studio or campus channel where LASC students could participate in live AI workshops, robotics demonstrations, broadcast-engineering challenges, employer interviews and apprenticeship projects—without having to leave South Los Angeles.
If this works at Southwest, LASC does not merely become another participant in Dakar Live. It becomes the founding campus and operating prototype for a regional network connecting community colleges, universities, employers, entertainment, sports, technology, and workforce systems.
That gives Southwest a distinctive identity:
Los Angeles Southwest College: where South Los Angeles learns to broadcast, engineers the signal, tells its own stories, and builds the workforce behind the next generation of media.
DakarLive becomes the connective tissue between education, production, apprenticeship, distribution, and employment.
The possibilities go far beyond television.
AI. Robotics. LiDAR. Broadcast engineering. Digital media. Workforce development. Apprenticeship. The technology may be changing, but the mission remains simple:
Find the talent. Train the talent. Give the talent real work.
Our visit to Los Angeles Southwest College showed us that many of the pieces are already there.
Site Title 
Leave a comment