Group items tagged

By Elisabeth A. Barnett & Katherine L. Hughes and published by the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, October 2010. This Issue Brief was presented as part of President Obama's White House Summit on Community College (October 2010) and looks at partnerships that might improve college enrollment, college readiness at enrollment, and persistence in college.

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 Andrea Fuller in the Government section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2010. At North Virginia Community College, President Obama signs legislation that ends the bank-based lending system for student loans. The savings from ending this program will be used to provide spending on education. The president also announces that Jill Biden will lead a community-college summit at the White House in the fall.

This Carnegie hosted recorded webinar features panelists Anthony Bryk and Louis Gomez. They argue that the social organization of the research enterprise is badly broken and a very different alternative is needed. Instead, they support a science of improvement research and introduce the idea of a "networked improvement community that creates the purposeful collective action needed to solve complex educational problems." Webinar date, January 27, 2011.

Headed by Amy Bruckman, Associate professor at Georgia Tech, this Electronic Learning Communities center engages Ph.D. level students in studying the application of constructionist social learning online. They are doing some fascinating work, such as developing software to support leaders of learning communities, offering young A-A males the chance to be game testers and to use that experience credential as a route into computer science studies and careers, etc. These are but two research examples; there are more.

By Richard Schwier, Proceedings of EMEDIA 2009, Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education, June 2009. Schwier works out of the Virtual Learning Communities Research Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, and this paper looks at some of their key findings.

By Oliver Dreon, PhD in Online Education section of Faculty Focus website, May 13 2013. Citing research titled Critical inquiry in a text-based environment...from The Internet and Higher Education (2000), the author have 5 steps to improve the community aspect of online classes, including introductions and a "common area" for students to meet for discussions that are off-topic.

Confirming much of what we've learned with our communities.

By Josh Fischman, and part of The Chronicle (of Higher Education's) 2011 Special Report on Online Learning, published Nov 6 2011. Central Piedmont Community College developed an Online Student Portal learning system to improve retention among its students. They have had success with the system (in use 2004-2008). Now, with a Next Gen grant, they will roll the system out to 6 additional local schools to see if they can match the retention improvements. The system is based both on learning styles and on frequent intervention by students and counselors.

"An accessible and safe discussion space for conversations with more of your community. EngagementHQ has everything you need to engage your community effectively, efficiently and safely. PDF Brochure."

By Dawn Foster in Web Worker Daily, Jan 30 2009. This is a nice article (with slides) outlining what an online community manager does.

A program of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Statway focuses on helping community college students learn basic skills in statistics, data analysis, and quantitative reasoning as part of a one-year pathway. The ultimate goal of this pathway is preparation for college-level statistics. This home page to Statway also includes links to the project blog (called Pathways Connection) and to the project's mailing list. There are 19 community colleges affiliated with this project.

Published by Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2010. This report looks at the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), launched fall 2006. From the report, "To date, more than 91,000 students from 197 colleges in 37 states have participated in SENSE, thereby helping to create a wealth of new and actionable data about the entering community college student experience."

By Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, et al. on Academic Commons, September 9, 2009. The authors discuss the evolution of the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource Web site (VIPEr), an online collaborative site to share teaching materials and ideas and build a sense of community among inorganic chemistry educators.

The self-declared "Community of Practice on Communities of Practice," this site offers a variety of opportunities for connection, from education programs to a wiki to members' blogs.

This page describes Community Innovation, a book written by Pete Plastrik and Theodore Staton. The title is in question (an image of the book's cover refers to Innovation Communites)., but this page provides a description, as well as links to e-chapters, as they become available (as of April 2010, the introduction and first 4 chapters are available).

On PBS NewsHour, April 20, 2010. Jeffrey Brown interview with Mary Spilde and Hilary Pennington about the increased focus on boosting graduation rates in community colleges. Remedial education, innovative technology models and standards for accountabililty are topics covered.

Interesting look-see by retiring community college president Eric Reno in TX. He points out that the failure to get an AS degree is not an indicator of failure but simply that a person may have chosen a different transfer point to enter a four year college. Yet lawmakers and policy makers look to the AS completion degree as the end of story for community college effectiveness. According to this single measure, I am a failure because I did not obtain an AS degree but my sister who received an AS in nursing is a success! We both have master's degrees.

By Richard A. Schwier and published June 2011. This page offers free download of the .epub. Schwier is at the University of Saskatchewan and studies virtual learning communities. For more, see the scheier tag.

Gao, F. & Sun, Y. (2010). In C. Maddux et al. (Eds.) Research Highlights in Information Technology and Teacher Education. Article examines how to use VoiceThread to support online learning communities for professional development in teacher education

Blog and business site for Nancy White, a leader in "online group facilitation of distributed work, learning and community groups." The site includes both a blog that speaks to White's current work and interests, and also resources for online communities and related work.

White is a favorite of the KPI team.