Cowboys and Mavericks and Educators! Oh My!

This week, we’re in Dallas attending D.R.E.A.M., Achieving the Dream’s Annual Meeting on Student Success. We spent Tuesday with the 15 DEI colleges talking about the ideal pathway to completion for students that are underprepared for college-level work. Today, we went to several great sessions—and, sadly, missed some great ones because we haven’t learned how to be in two places at once. Here are some of the highlights:

• This morning, a plenary panel moderated by Eileen Baccus, ATD coach, focused on equity. Steven Murray, Chancellor of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, shared how after several years of engaging the campus in conversations about race and class, Phillips is rolling out a community dialogue about racial reconciliation. Murray said that while the community has some significant tensions, and that there is no other institution as well-suited to start these much needed conversations about how to grow together.  Don Plotts, president of North Central State Community College talked about reaching out to a primarily African American and low-income portion of their community, by opening an Urban Center in a convenient downtown location. With feedback from students and community leaders, they developed the services of the center, which now include a business incubator. Tom Jaynes, executive dean for Student Development and Support of Durham Technical Community College spoke about how DTCC has been pushing for increased equity since they started their ATD journey. Jaynes noted that once you see the data improving, it can be easy to sit back and feel good about a job well done, but there is always more to do. DTCC is working to keep the wind in their sails with a new focus on connecting low-income students to financial aid and benefits. Finally, Millicent Valek, president of Brazosport College, said that because of ATD, her college now treats students as individuals with unique needs. This is a new way of thinking for them, and they are using the equity agenda as a driver for their student success work. Brazosport is sharing that message on campus with a video on equity featuring MDC president David Dodson.

• One of the first concurrent sessions we saw today featured Capital Community College and Housatonic Community College. These Connecticut colleges talked about how implementing the Statway program has given Connecticut community colleges a chance to take the benefits of the ATD core team model into a multi-college team to great effect. They’ve built on ATD data collection, enhancing it by adding additional variables and comparing across colleges; they’ve also seen how direct collaboration between researchers and faculty has enabled them to improve pedagogy.

• We spent part of the afternoon with five Ohio community colleges: Cuyahoga, Eastern Gateway, North Central State, Sinclair, and Zane State. These leader colleges have worked hand-in-hand with the Ohio ATD/DEI state policy and the Ohio Association of Community Colleges to convene regional and statewide meetings of ALL Ohio community colleges. They’re sharing Achieving the Dream core principles, committed leadership, data driven decision making, engagement, and systemic institutional improvement, in hopes that other colleges can realize some of the benefits that ATD colleges have seen. Some of those benefits have been changing the campus conversation, maintaining clarity about a student success agenda, and providing momentum  to pursue that agenda—all of these are particularly important as Ohio adopts a new performance funding system based on specific student achievement points. 

We know you’ll want more details and we’ll be providing them in posts in the coming weeks!

I D.R.E.A.M. of Dallas

We’ll be headed to Dallas next week for D.R.E.A.M., Achieving the Dream’s Annual Meeting on Student Success. Check out the agenda here; you’ll find many of our DEI colleges presenting on a variety of topics: scaling up math boot camps and accelerated courses, dev ed redesigns, ePortfolios, structured learning communities, how to organize faculty and staff across campus for a coordinated approach to student success—and much more. And we’ll be leading a spotlight session about bringing innovation to scale.

If you’re going, come find us at the Success Fair and check out some new DEI material; if you’re following from afar, we’ll keep you updated here on the blog and on Twitter. The event has its very own hashtag: #DREAM2012.

Are We Riding the Wave of the Future?

There are a lot of different ways that technology can influence classrooms, faculty, students, and campuses. In a Fast Company article last week, Michale Karnjanaprakorn presented a useful breakdown of the five buckets of technology innovation in education delivery:

1. Gadgets and blended learning: “Classrooms can be anywhere at anytime.”
2. Social learning and collaboration: “Teachers are using [new] platforms…to share content and lessons with each other online so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or keep content to themselves anymore.”
3. Open resources and classrooms: “Educational resources, data, and technology are becoming more accessible than ever....”
4. Adaptive, personalized learning: “Teachers are figuring out how to teach each student the way he or she learns best, and assessment is viewed as an ongoing process, since learning is not a constant.”
5. Creative certification: “The more people are culling unassociated resources and experiences to learn specific skills, the more urgent it is for there to be a place for them to record their efforts and success, to study with peers, and to present their learning portfolios to future employers or partners in a meaningful way.”

Often in the higher ed reform world we debate the broad merits of “online education” or “technology use” without really specifying what we’re talking about. Thanks to CCRC research, we are confident that delivering underprepared students a full course through online lectures doesn’t work very well. But we’ve seen in DEI how powerful some uses of technology can be in dev ed. The North Carolina Community College System is collecting best practices in a searchable online innovations database, and a few DEI colleges are using technology to individualize instruction. 

Karnjanaprakorn makes it all seem a little too simple, though. He doesn’t give much space to the major changes in infrastructure, policy, and practice that would be necessary to implement these in our current higher ed sector. (Of course, he may be suggesting a completely different structure for that system….) Still, institutions may be generally supportive of everything in those five buckets, but they must also consider the amount of capital required to do any of it well.  There are also questions about whether (or how) bureaucratic systems can escape the “weight of history”, as Uri Treisman says,  to make space for effective use of technology—and whether they can do it while ensuring equal access to technology for low-income students. Finally, one hopes there will be commitment—and capacity—to gather and make sense of the data required to see if this new technology actually achieves the results expected. 

Since Karnjanaprakorn digresses into a reiteration of the “who needs college?” argument at the end of his article, we have to choice but to follow him there. We think college is the right choice for a lot of people, and we can tell you why in just one chart:

Click Image to Enlarge

Associate’s degree holders make almost $150 dollars more per week than people who don’t go to college, and their unemployment rate is 3 percentage points lower. Whatever means we end up using to deliver it, it’s clear that connecting people to education and credentials remains essential to their economic security.

This can save you money.

Today’s post is our fourth installment of “SCALERS: Round 2.” Originally created by Paul Bloom at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, earnings generation, replicating impact, and stimulating market forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.)

Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. So far, we’ve covered staffing, communicating, and alliance-building. Below, Ginger Miller of Guilford Technical Community College shares what GTCC has learned about lobbying--or demonstrating impact, as we like to call it.


With a headcount enrollment of about 15,100 students, Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) is the third largest community college in North Carolina. Its developmental education program serves 4,780 students on three campuses. As with any developmental education program, the primary goal at GTCC is for students to take the fewest number of developmental education courses necessary and complete them as quickly as possible. Our focus here is to describe how COMPASS testing supports this goal. Reviewing and re-testing the COMPASS test can save you time and money. That is the message we emphasize to incoming students. As an example, if a student places out of two developmental classes in English, that translates into tuition savings for the credit hours as well as two semesters—a full academic year—of their time.

As part of the application process, students complete the COMPASS placement test. Among the biggest obstacles to accomplishing proper placement in development education classes is student misconception about the test itself. Students may confuse COMPASS as an entrance test, rather than a placement test. Since they know they are accepted by a community college, they may not do their best to score well. To address this, we emphasize during registration the importance of taking the review workshop and re-testing, depending on their score. They must complete a review workshop before they are permitted to re-test. This workshop, available online or face-to-face, reviews the question format and the content for the math, English, and reading sections of the test.

As a result of completing a review workshop, followed by a re-test, 1,288 students have tested out of one or more developmental classes from fall 2010 through fall 2011. This represents a total estimated tuition savings of about $370,600 during the past three semesters. The largest percentage of students to test out of developmental education coursework appears in English and reading.  For three semesters between fall 2010 and fall 2011, an average of about 61 percent placed out of at least one developmental course in English. About 59 percent placed out of reading courses. In math, the results are lower, at about 33, 39, and 29 percent, for fall 2010, Spring 2011, and fall 2011.





 
At GTCC, the numbers of students to use these workshop reviews have increased from 981 students in fall 2010 to 1,241 students in fall 2011. The greatest increase has appeared in the online reviews, as compared to face-to-face workshops. For example, in fall 2011, 73 students attended the face-to-face reviews, compared to 1,168, who worked online. We also continue to reach out to local high schools, explaining the importance of the placement test; we have arranged for graduating seniors to take the test, the review workshop, and re-test again.

Links we like!

• A new study from CCCSE makes the case for mandatory requirements. Inside Higher Ed has the details: “Community colleges have a growing arsenal of tools that research shows will help students earn credentials—like academic goal-setting, student success courses and tutoring. Yet the study found that relatively few students take advantage of those offerings.”
• Math is a huge barrier to completion for many students. An article from Joanne Jacobs in U.S. News & World Report tackles an important question: are we “overmathing” our students? Jacobs looks at Virginia’s decision to change math requirements for non-STEM students, and she highlights the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to redesign developmental math through Statway and Quantway.
• “I would suggest that it is time to move from a deficit to an asset model of student success. From a model where we keep trying to ‘fix’ our students to one where we turn the mirror on ourselves and consider that we might have to fundamentally transform how we approach the role of math in preparing a competitive workforce.” Check out the full post from Luzelma Canales of the Lone Star College System in Texas.
• Last week, we linked to a few articles on using technology to “flip” the classroom and individualize learning. A new post from Katie McKay on Digital Is reminds us that equal access to technology for students is increasingly important.
• JFF’s response to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address reaffirms the principle that “creating integrated, accelerated educational pathways directly tied to the skills needed by regional employers is the best road to success for those struggling to improve their lives.” That’s a statement we can all agree on!

From the Shadow of the Everlasting Cascades

It's time for another ATD/DEI State Policy Team meeting. ATD and DEI state policy teams have come to Seattle, WA, for two days of working, learning, and recommitting. Even the introductions were impressive as state team leads described their most significant work since last July's meeting. From TAA grants that will align adult basic education, developmental education, and workforce training to statewide developmental education redesign, states continue to advance the student success agenda, building on the ATD/DEI foundation of data collection, innovation, and supportive policy. There are leaders from state higher education offices, boards of regents, community college associations, state legislatures, the business community, and philanthropy, all here to contribute to the conversation. By the end of the day tomorrow, we'll have covered scaling innovation, performance funding, a state role in acceleration strategies, and much more. Stay tuned for more updates and a full recap in the coming days.