Group items tagged

From the home page, "Welcome to the knowledge and learning community committed to college completion, where you can share and collaborate across stakeholders, learn about innovative projects, and read current college completion news."

Created by the Advocacy & Policy Center of the CollegeBoard and published in 2012. From About the Arch, "The Completion Arch is a web based tool that provides quick and easy access to national, state and initiative-level data that describe the progress and success of community college students." Click "Explore the Arch" for an overview and to get started.

By Marybeth Green and Lauren Cifuentes in Journal of Interactive Learning Research, vol 22 (1), 2011. The major finding of this article seems to be that "online follow-up with peer interaction increased the likelihood of completion of the professional development task." Abstract only available on this page. For full article check with your library.

Microsite produced by The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2012. This space provides data and analysis about completion for all aspects of the college spectrum: public universities, community colleges, private colleges, and non-profits. All data is from the cohort that began college in fall 2004.

A collection of related studies looking at college completion and student success from the ECS Research Studies Database. Studies are from a variety of sources -- not the ECS (e.g. Journal of Higher Education, National Bureau of Economic Research, and American Educational Research Journal).

Pachyderm is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.

This is no longer managed by NMC. The website for the Pachyderm open source community is http://www.pachyforge.org/

This project was completed in December 2006 and has now been archived. The online guide (link from this page) is of interest. Focus in this work: data sharing and archiving.

As of Sept 2012, this project page seems out of date (last updated June 2009); project may be completed. From the About Qualti page Mission Statement, "We begin from a position that methodology is a distinctive form of social practice and knowledge production, and that research methods must be considered with/in the social contexts in which they are practised."

By Thomas Bailey & Sung-Woo Cho 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 the integral role effective developmental education will play in improving community college completion rates.

By David Moltz, News column, Inside Higher Ed, June 21 2010. Jamie Merisotis (president, Lumina Foundation) and Stan Jones (president, Complete College America) urge President Obama "to prioritize the distribution of funds from the recently created Community College and Career Training Grant program to those institutions that radically remodel their certificate and degree programs to emphasize speedy graduation and job placement."

By Wick Sloane, in a column called The Devil's Workshop in Inside Higher Ed, September 20 2010. Sloane, previously the CFO of a public university, has embedded himself as a writing teacher at Bunker Hill Community College. In this column, he ties completion to the many varied needs of under-served students, many of whom live in poverty.

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."

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.

"What used to be known as remedial education now goes by either developmental education or basic skills. Lexicon aside, it's become apparent that these classes don't work. At least half a dozen reports released in the past year (two in the past couple of weeks alone) warn that the United States is headed for an economic calamity unless we can figure out how to get more students to successfully complete some type of postsecondary education program. It doesn't have to be a baccalaureate degree. It could be an associate's degree or a professional certification, but by the year 2018 about two-thirds of all jobs will require some college education, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Of those, 22 million will require actual degrees, AA or better, but at the current rate, we're already off track by some 3 million degrees."

Based in Washington State, the stated goals of this project are: (1) "aligning standards and expectations for mathematics....(2) increasing student success in completing math requirements in high school and college....(3) building capacity of teachers and instructors to align curriculum and instruction to standards....(4) communicating math expectations to students...." The project bridges the high school/college divide.

Website for the PBS Frontline documentary, originally aired September 2012. According the blog post, Introducing "Dropout Nation" (March 23 2012), this Frontline episode is part of the American Graduate: Let's Make It Happen campaign. The story follows a group of students in Houston Texas.

By Noel Harmon, Ph.D. and published by IHEP (Institute for Higher Education Policy), this is the first publication in a new series Lumina MSI Models of Success. Per the abstract, it highlights MSI institutions that "enroll more than 2.3 millions students or close to 14 percent of all students...." The full document is available as PDF download from this age.

Sample RFP for Learning Management System from Saba. Complete request for proposal with extensive list of detailed questions. Saba combines "learning, people management and collaboration technologies."

Login and register site for MOOC facilitated by Stephen Downes. Nice template though site is not complete; pages are under construction or improperly linked.