Upcoming Presentations

League for Innovation in the Community College

Beyond Engagement: Evidence-Based Strategies for Improving Learning Online

Date & Time TBD

Students and faculty both encounter challenges in the online environment. These challenges frequently manifest and are understood in terms of low student engagement. In this session, researchers and community college faculty will present a specific and actionable framework to bolster students’ abilities to remain motivated and manage their learning processes in online courses. The presenters refer to these mutually reinforcing mindsets and behaviors as self-directed learning (SDL) skills and they include motivational processes (e.g., self-efficacy), metacognitive processes (e.g., planning), and applied learning processes (e.g., help seeking). Presenters will describe a set of evidence-based instructional strategies to support SDL developed in collaboration with instructors at broad-access institutions. Speakers will share research findings on how the strategies have been implemented in postsecondary online STEM courses and their effect on student outcomes. A community college faculty member will share their experience implementing the strategies in an online biology course.

Presenters

Ellen Wasserman, Research Associate, CCRC

Allystair Jones, Department Chair, Science & Professor of Biology, Odessa College

Keena Walters, Education Research Associate, SRI Education

Putting Learning at the Center: Looking Ahead to the Next Decade of Community College Reform

Community College of Baltimore County Symposium for Developmental Education/General Education
August 22, 2019
Baltimore, MD

In this talk, CCRC's Susan Bickerstaff invited faculty to consider the strides the field has made over the last decade in its thinking on developmental education. Ten years ago, the problem of a multi-course sequence was only recently identified, the best solutions were not obvious, and scaling up promising practices was a major preoccupation. Today, the field has coalesced around a set of best practices—including co-requisite remediation, mathematics pathways, and placement reform—and in many contexts, those approaches are being implemented at scale. Bickerstaff argued that the great challenge in the next decade of reform will be to put learning at the center of our institutional improvement efforts. This will require institutional commitment to an assessment process that yields usable information for faculty, strong curricular materials aligned with student learning goals and evidence-based instructional practices, and a multi-faceted support system that helps faculty evaluate and improve their teaching. Bickerstaff drew on examples from K–12 and CCRC research to imagine what the community college reform landscape might look like 10 years in the future.

Participants

Senior Research Associate
Community College Research Center