Group items tagged

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource hosts communities for members to contribute and share learning and teaching materials. The communities are categorized by higher education disciplines. In addition to contributing materials, members can comment about outside learning materials that are used, share information about themselves and knowledge about their discipline, put together personal collections to use in the classroom and become a Peer Reviewer of learning materials in member's discipline. In addition to discipline communities, there is the Community of MERLOT Partner Academic Support Services (COMPASS). This community is made up of ePortfolio, Faculty Development, Library and Information Services, Online Courses and Pedagogy. The ePortflio Portal centers educational resources around ePortfolio use in higher education, among students and faculty. Partner Communities like GLOBE extend the MERLOT network. The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Services Austrailia, LORNET in Canada, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan and MERLOT with the goal to "work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content." The majority of MERLOT members are faculty/instructors and the balance are students, campus administrators, librarians and other members of higher education who are concerned with online learning materials, technology, teaching and learning, and innovation.

By Thomas J. Snyder in The Hechinger Report, May 3 2011. Snyder, president of the nation's largest state-wide community college (Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana), argues that governors who cut funding to community colleges are being short-sighted, and argues for the importance of community colleges in the economic recovery.

By Evan Weissman, Dan Cullinan, Oscar Cerna, Stephanie Safran and Phoebe Richman, with Amanda Grossman. National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) Teachers College Columbia University. February 2012. Link to full report at the bottom of the summary on this page. The colleges in this study are two of six in the NCPR Learning Communities Demonstration, in which random assignment evaluations are being used to determine the impacts of learning communities on student success. NCPR has presented finding from all six colleges. They show that when one-semester learning communities have impacts, they tend to be concentrated in the semester in which students are enrolled in the program. Another report, a final one will be released in 2012. That report synthesizes the findings across all colleges studied and includes an additional semester of student follow-up at each college.

By Kevin Carey, Commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011. Community Colleges will now have an opportunity to vie for a top prize. "The Aspen Institute is awarding the first annual Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, with the winner and up to three runners-up sharing in the $1-million prize fund." Among the 10 finalists, Aspen Institute's evaluators conducted site visits and looked closely at employment outcomes, teaching practices and student learning. "The best community colleges, they found, were focused and intentional when it came to structuring the learning experience."

By Richard Perez-Pena, Education section, New York Times, July 20 2012. This article profiles the New Community College, CUNY's newest 2-year college, set to begin classes in September 2012. The school has been developed to test several leading theories of how to make community colleges better, including stricter requirements, no remedial classes per se (but all include a remedial component), experiential and collaborative work, and much greater student support. See tag ncc for related articles.

Our August launch meeting will be held on the New Community College campus; here is more about what makes the New Community College "new."

By Laurel Rosenhall in The Sacramento Bee, November 18 2010. A nonprofit association, the Community College League of California, calls for community colleges to educate 1 million more students by 2020, ensure that more students leave community college with a degree, and "do a better job educating Latino and African American students." Recommended changes include "evidence-based solutions," thinking differently and joining "Complete College America."

By Elizabeth M. Zachry, December 2008. Achieving the Dream model of instructional reform implemented for developmental education courses at three community colleges: Guilford Technical Community College in Greensboro, North Carolina; Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, Virginia; and Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville, Virginia.

By Ryan Brown in the Community Colleges section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2011. The article reports on a recent CCRC study of 51,000 community college students in Washington State between 2004 and 2009. In 2010, CCRC released a similar study looking at online learning in the Virginia community college system. Reasons for this gap are surmised to be "technical difficulties, a lack of structure, and isolation."

By Alan Greenblatt on NPR, March 29 2010. Greenblatt reports that there was initially great promise for community colleges in the health care reconciliation bill that was passed at the end of March. However, "Congress ultimately took a pass on restructuring the mission of the nation's community colleges." The $12 billion American Graduation Initiative recognized the important role that community colleges could play in producing more college graduates, but the initiative was not included in the final law.

See last paragraph for quote from Gail Mellow.

By George Lorenzo, 2011. A renewed interest in community colleges is resulting in looking at driving factors for the future success. This report looks at the potential solutions proposed in papers that came out of The White House Summit on Community Colleges held on October 5, 2010. These include industry partnerships, providing a more well-rounded education with career training, better support services at community colleges,etc. Lorenzo mentions The Learn and Earn initiative, technology with online and hybrid courses, open education resources and other ways to engage students. He looks at college readiness and what Complete College America, a new nonprofit organization, advises as ways to address this shortcoming.

Published by the American Association of Community Colleges, October 2011. Authored by Christopher M. Mullin. You can read the Executive Summary on this page, or download the full text PDF. The report concludes that community college enrollments have gone up considerably since 2007, and that "educational attainment for all key populations is increasing at community colleges."

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

By Debbie Garber, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol 5 (2), August 2004. This paper goes beyond technology to look at "the social process on which an online learning community if it is to flourish and be useful." Also stresses "importance of nurturing the community's health, and the natural life cycle of a virtual community...."

Part of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA)'s Mathematical Science Digital Library (MathDL), this site offers resources for math teachers who want to help their students better communicate as mathematicians. The site includes assessments, rubrics, sample assignments, and things that teachers might consider before adding a communication component to their math classes.

Published by American Association of Community Colleges, April 2012. From this page, you can download a PDF of the full report, as well as video about the report, information on the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges, and coverage of this report in the media.

Created by Cheryl Carter (n.d.). as part of the Southern LINCS database. From the database's home page, LINCS is "a national electronic information and communication system for adult literacy." The lesson's stated objective is to help learners understand "registers of language,...distinguish between different registers...and utilize these registers for more effective communication." This lesson is based on Ruby Payne's work.

TO'C taught a full lesson on language registers, week 13, semester 4.

Posted to the White House website (whitehouse.gov), unsigned and undated. On October 5 2010, Dr. Jill Biden will chair a White House Summit on Community Colleges, highlighting "the critical role that community colleges play in developing America's workforce and reaching our educational goals." There is both an online forum (see tag whitehouse_cc) and an opportunity to submit videos. The event will be webcast, as well.

By W. Norton Grubb, et al., published by Routledge NY 1999. The WorldCat page also enables a preview (through Google Books), which makes the table of contents available. From the WorldCat summary, "Based on extensive research on community college teaching to date, this book examines the nature of teaching and the institutional forces that shape it."

PA's comment: "There's an interesting book by Norton Grubb entitled Honored But Invisible based on a thorough qualitative study of pedagogy in a whole bunch of community colleges. His basic point is that while we claim to be "teaching" colleges, there is little support for improving teaching."

Edited by Angela T. Ragusa, published by Information Science Reference, 2010. Ragusa is a sociologist at Charles Stuart University (Australia). With contributions from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific, the book "looks at how we communicate and interact in a computerised, connected and inter-connected world..."