Leveraging Technology and Engaging Students (LTES): Evaluating COVID-19 Recovery Efforts in the Los Angeles Community College District

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) has been consistently committed to student success initiatives, achieving a 5-percentage-point increase in three-year transfer and completion rates from the 2017 cohort to the 2020 cohort, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. To adapt to the evolving landscape of teaching and learning following the pandemic, LACCD has significantly enhanced its distance education course offerings across its nine colleges. Continuing its mission to bolster student engagement and outcomes, LACCD is expanding its course offerings to provide more flexible scheduling options while investigating what practices promote student success across modalities.

This project evaluates these changes, investigating how and why students choose different course modalities, and their resulting impact on academic success. Alongside academic outcomes, we examine the interplay between the evolving teaching and learning environment with faculty workload and wellbeing, and student engagement and psychosocial outcomes. We also estimate the cost of providing instruction and producing course completers in each modality.

The LTES project further explores the influence of non-academic services on student success by piloting and experimentally evaluating an enhanced coaching initiative within the Los Angeles College Promise to boost student persistence. Our research findings aim to guide LACCD’s ongoing efforts to elevate student success.

This project is fully funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305X220018 to the President and Fellows of Harvard College. For more information on the Leveraging Technology and Engaging Students project, visit the Center for Education Policy Research’s website.

Christopher Avery, the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, studies rating and selection mechanisms, focusing on the college admissions system. His current work considers college application patterns and college enrollment choices for high school students. He can be reached at christopher_avery@hks.harvard.edu.

Jon Fullerton is the executive director of the EdPolicy Hub at the University of Southern California. He has decades of experience working with education agencies to develop analytic capacity, evaluate intervention, and analyze the costs associated with these efforts. He can be reached at jonfulle@usc.edu.

Maury Pearl is the associate vice chancellor, educational programs and institutional effectiveness at the Los Angeles Community College District. He leads the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, Office of Attendance Accounting, and Office of Student Success to inform data collection, analysis, program evaluation, and dashboard creation for data reporting as well as strategic planning and decision-making by the LACCD. He can be reached at pearlmy@email.laccd.edu.

Deborah Harrington is the dean for student success at the Los Angeles Community College District and executive director of the California Community Colleges’ Success Network (3CSN). She brings together faculty and staff to design and implement programs that effectively support student equity, access, persistence, and success. She can be reached at harrindl@email.laccd.edu.

In January 2024, the LTES team tragically lost one of its principal investigators, Tatiana Melguizo, who unexpectedly passed away. Tatiana was a leader in community college research, a dedicated mentor, and partner of the Los Angeles Community College District for over 15 years. She was an energetic researcher who always had a welcoming and warm word for her colleagues, and whose commitment to doing rigorous work that directly speaks to and informs the pressing questions facing community colleges is a model for researchers throughout the field. Her loss will be felt deeply by the LTES team and the higher education research community broadly. To read more about her life and legacy, please see this tribute from the USC Rossier School of Education.