Group items tagged

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.

By Marc Parry, Technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2012. This piece profiles some of the new "Big Data" innovations at Arizona State University, the largest public university in the US. There are systems to track students against the requirements of their majors; recommendations about classes in which they might be successful, etc., all towards the goal of improving retention and graduation rates.

Many provocative ideas in this article, not the least of which is how these applications speak to various "recommender systems," whether telling students what courses to take, professors how to teach, administration how to track, etc.

"(I) Improved Learning Outcomes and Increased Competence; a. Retention to fluency (95% vs. 28%), b. Behavior change through accountable reinforcement, c. Improved application, d. Advanced individual performance and e. Advanced organization performance."

This center, based at the University of Texas at Austin, is looking at the relative success of various intervention/engagement/support methods at community colleges. Follow CCCSE tag for more about this project.

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.

Published by the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE), 2012. This is the first of three annual reports to look at "strategies that appear to be associated with a variety of indicators of student progress and success." For more on this project, follow the tag CCCSE.