THE WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA TECHNOLOGY CONSORTIUM: A COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO BRIDGING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

Community college presidents face an uphill struggle in preparing their institutions for the rapidly changing technological learning environment. Visionary presidents in rural community colleges are presented with yet another challenge: that of finding themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. This article describes how presidents of 12 rural community colleges in the mountains of western North Carolina formed a technology consortium to collaboratively address critical technology issues. Integral steps in the joint venture were a combined assessment and planning process authorized by the presidents, formation of the Western North Carolina Technology Consortium, and an e-commerce project designed to meet the needs of small busi-nesses and entrepreneurs in the region. Lessons learned and implications for practice are presented for community college presidents seeking ways to collaborate.     

The Key to Developing America's Workforce

Central Community College (CCC; Columbus, Nebraska) has taken the lead in several business, industry, and educational collaborations, beginning locally, then expanding statewide. This article shares two models that other community colleges may wish to replicate. The first describes the development of a collaborative team. The second shows that, by using the collaborative team approach, community colleges can generate substantial increases in both funding and full-time equivalents (a basis for community college funding inNebraska)while serving business andindustry.For example, since June 1998 CCC has generated nearly $1.4 million for its business and industry training programs. As a result of collaboration among CCC, the Nebraska Community College System, government agencies, and business and industry, the Statewide Interactive Multimedia Training Library was established.     

The Diverse Gifts of Dr. Leslie R. Williams

Preparing students in the early childhood field to work with children both with and without disabilities and to collaborate with different professionals is an important endeavor for colleges and universities. The purpose of this paper is to articulate a unique model of program collaboration between early childhood special education and early childhood regular education that demonstrates a cohesive preservice teacher education program across two departments within one university. This unique 10-year history of interdisciplinary collaboration and team teaching provides insights into many of the benefits and challenges of this type of program. This paper presents an historical overview of the development of this collaborative program and describes the logistics of operating an interdisciplinary program at the administrative level. Information collected from faculty and students illustrates the benefits and challenges of team teaching. Finally, strategies for developing a successful program are discussed.     

The School of Public Safety at Valencia College: visioning and implementation of a college-wide distributive and collaborative program model for the central Florida community

The central Florida region, faced with record tourism, a large service population, and significant population growth over the next few decades, must rely on a community-based institution of higher education with lifelong learning offerings, a local community college, to create world class public safety education and training for the region. Furthermore, the literature indicated public safety organizations served by community colleges operate in an open-rational system, while colleges operate in a natural system—and there is no current literature to explain this phenomenon. To establish a new School of Public Safety within these contrasting systems, Valencia College and the central Florida public safety community utilized a collaborative, creative problem solving model with a divergent and convergent thinking strategy to develop the school. It is a school with an on-going intentional public safety service integration training and education philosophy with distributed, isomorphic college-wide public safety programming. The open-rational and natural systems theory explains the strategy and how this theory enhances the School of Public Safety at Valencia College and in central Florida at the social psychological, structural, and ecological levels. The theoretical framework, the comprehensive visioning approach, results of the strategy, values to the student, and public safety organizations and community discussed in this commentary contribute to the body of knowledge on public safety education and training models at community colleges.     

Partnership as cultural practice in the face of neoliberal reform

This article examines the nature of an on-going educational partnership between a Higher Education institution and a number of Further Education (FE) colleges in the West Midlands region of England, forged against the backdrop of sectoral marketisation and neoliberal reform. The partnership originates in the organisation and administration of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses for FE student-teachers across a range of sites. These collaborative ITE programmes prepare students to teach in FE settings and conceptualise the FE teacher as a critically informed practitioner, equipped to engage with research and knowledge production practices in the sector. The permeable grouping of teacher educators that has emerged identifies itself as a ‘community of practice’ and uses this concept in the development of a pattern of cultural interaction that scaffolds the continuing professional development of practitioners across the region. This article outlines the underpinning values of the Higher Education (HE)/FE partnership and explores how the partnership has responded to the neoliberal policyscape. Through a number of examples, the authors illustrate how this community seeks to translate shared beliefs into everyday practice, not least through a critical and participatory approach to practitioner research activities which challenges the performative practices that have come to dominate FE in England.     

Cooperative Work Experience Education Program

Community colleges face a laundry list of challenges. In the forefront is the lack of bachelor's degree attainment of community college transfer students. Community colleges are taking a variety of steps to aid transfer. One of the newer trends focuses on the benefits of collaborative partnerships between a community college and four-year institutions. The impact of collaborative partnerships is especially significant to students in rural areas where access to higher education has been limited for several reasons. Nine years ago, Hazard Community and Technical College (HCTC) partnered with several public and private four-year institutions to provide students with increased access to bachelor degree programs. The resulting concurrent use partnership model, the University Center of the Mountains (UCM; http://www.ucmky.net), may be viewed as an example of the advantages offered by this particular step. UCM is a response to critics of the community college baccalaureate who point to a variety of potential problems when the community college mission is extended in this fashion.     

Strategies toward cooperation

The Quad-Cities Graduate Study Center is a voluntary, publicly funded, academic consortium comprised of ten colleges and universities from Illinois and Iowa. It was incorporated in 1969 as an experimental project to determine if a pooling of institutional resources was academically, financially and administratively possible. The Center now serves as a model of inter-institutional cooperation providing a solution to continuing education needs for persons who reside in areas remote from university settings.     

Examining the Earnings Trajectories of Community College Students Using a Piecewise Growth Curve Modeling Approach

ABSTRACT

Policymakers have become increasingly concerned with measuring—and holding colleges accountable for—students’ labor market outcomes. In this article we introduce a piecewise growth curve approach to analyzing community college students’ labor market outcomes, and we discuss how this approach differs from two popular econometric approaches: Mincerian and individual fixed-effects models. Our results suggest that three assumptions underpinning econometric approaches—that across-student variation is constant across time, that the model specifies a counterfactual that is appropriate for all members of the sample, and that the impacts of a given award are fixed across time—may not be well founded. We then highlight how insights gained from the growth curve approach can be used to strengthen evolving econometric analyses of labor market returns.     

A Model for Expanding Active Learning Regionally: The Greater Upstate New York Inquiry-Based Learning Consortium

What began as a small group of professors gathering to discuss implementation of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) in our classes has developed into a strong regional community of practice. Through a generous grant and a lot of hard work, we created the Greater Upstate New York IBL consortium with a mission to create, grow, and maintain a community of instructors across the region. We describe how the consortium formed organically and the way that it operates. We provide suggestions for creating your own regional community of practice for supporting the adoption and enhancement of active learning techniques.     

INCORPORATING FIELD SITES INTO SERVICE-LEARNING AS COLLABORATIVE PARTNERS

This article, which describes the service-learning program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, advocates incorporating the needs and perspectives of field sites selected for involvement in service-learning projects. Information is gathered through interviews with field site supervisors. Service-learning requires the active participation of both members of the college or university (e.g., students, faculty members, and administrators) and community partners in a collaborative process. When successful, this collaboration focuses on both mutual interests and common goals. Involving all partners throughout the process is crucial for successful collaboration. This article offers suggestions for the development of strong service-learning collaborations with community organizations. These suggestions fall into three broad categories: (a) level of site involvement throughout the project, (b) conceptualization of the project, and (c) managerial aspects of the collaboration.     

Experiential Learning through Community Co‐design in Interior Design Pedagogy

The profit‐driven tendency of interior design trends and styles today has developed in line with the decrease of social awareness in design. The majority of interior design students also decide to pursue interior design education for its marketable and profitable purposes rather than seeing interior design as a field of opportunity to contribute to the social welfare of their communities. Hence, the objective of this research is to implement community service through co‐design in interior design pedagogy. The article describes the learning and design methods used based on human‐centred design approaches of co‐design and analyses the resulting benefits from this approach. Findings reveal that the process of collective creativity and collaborative development with the community enables a direct experience of learning and fosters a deeper connection and understanding of users. They also promote novel multidisciplinary design innovations, accommodate the community's potentials in the society and stimulate a reflexive impact, allowing students to reflect on their future role as interior designers in bringing positive changes to their community against the profit‐driven tendency of contemporary designers today.     

Strategies for Improving Vertical Alignment: Implementation of a College-Readiness Collaborative of Secondary and Post-Secondary Educators

This article describes how one community college and region service center developed a collaborative of secondary and post-secondary English/Language Arts educational professionals to promote college readiness. Challenged by state mandates to test college readiness and by concerns about student performance in high school and college English classes, the collaborative examined standards and testing practices, high school and college cultures, college placement policies, course content, assessment practices, syllabi and sample assignments, and college preparation programs. The results of the two-year collaboration include a list of nine specific practices that educators can use to enhance students’ success in college Composition I. In addition, the collaborative implemented these recommendations in several area high schools.     

Strengthening education through collaborative networks: leading the cultural change

Educational partnerships with area-based approaches comprise an increasingly well-grounded and internationally extended strategy for equitable improvement. However, literature shows a lack of focused inquiry on the assessment of these educational collaborative programmes. This article aims to develop and validate an instrument to assess these types of programmes across countries. Two successful programmes were assessed in Spain and the USA in order to test the validity of the measurement model. Results confirm that the model provides a valid tool to assess the effectiveness of collaborative performance, helping school principals, district leaders and policy-makers to enact evidence-based decision-making.     

金融危机之后美国高等教育信息化的新特点和趋势分析——基于ECAR的系列研究报告

2007年开始的美国金融危机不可避免地影响到高等教育信息化的发展路径和战略选择。美国高等教育信息化专业协会EDUCAUSE下属的应用研究中心(ECAR)自2007年之始的一系列报告表明美国高等教育信息化发展呈现出如下的新特点和趋势:高等院校之间越来越积极地开展跨院校的信息技术协作,将信息技术服务外包,充分利用赛博基础设施促进高等院校的教学和科研,积极推进绿色IT和对身份管理(IdM)的日益重视。     

CRP: Collaborative Research Project (A Mathematical Research Experience for Undergraduates)

Abstract

The Collaborative Research Project (CRP)—a mathematics research experience for undergraduates—offers a large-scale collaborative experience in research for undergraduate students. CRP seeks to widen the audience of students who participate in undergraduate research in mathematics. In 2015, the inaugural CRP had 100 undergraduate participants from across the United States; they collaborated on a month-long research effort applying tropical geometry to phylogenetics. CRP is envisioned as an annual event, one that scales to accommodate large numbers of interested students. This article describes the motivation for CRP, its structure, and the results of its inaugural iteration, and closes by assessing its future.     

Six Workforce Development Initiatives That are Laying the Pathway to Success

Workforce development interventions have historically been heavily driven by federal funding, much of which was designated towards short-term training programs (less than six months) and rarely involved interaction or collaboration among colleges. The resulting efforts by the colleges to improve, update, or expand their workforce development programs typically focused on short-term localized improvement, resulting in competition over limited resources and notable variation in the quality of these programs. This article explores the recent changes in how community colleges and funding bodies are approaching workforce development. This is done by exploring the following six recent workforce development initiatives: Bridges to Opportunity (2002–2008), Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST, 2004–present), Breaking Through (2006–present), Shifting Gears (2007–2011), Accelerating Opportunity (2011–present), and Completion by Design (2011–present). Each of these initiatives has made, and continue to make, significant contributions to our collective understanding of how to create and sustain workforce development programs at community colleges that meet the needs of both students and industry.     

Short-Term Leadership Development: Meeting a Need for Emerging Community College Leaders

With retirements looming in the ranks of senior leadership, the need for short-term, intensive, focused leadership development targeting midlevel administrators has become acute. Through survey responses and in-depth interviews, this study examines leadership development needs of midlevel community college administrators who aspire to higher leadership positions. The plethora of short-term programs currently available through local colleges, states, and professional associations—while well-intentioned—are most often serendipitous and without clear focus or theoretical underpinning. This study suggests a framework for providing coherent, high impact, short-term leadership development opportunities to assist emerging leaders meet the challenges of today's increasingly complex colleges.     

Redefining Information Literacy to Prepare Students for the 21st Century Workforce

Information literacy instruction–a set of skills taught in order to identify and find the information needed to solve a problem—traditionally follows a formalized academic model. It assumes information skills can be applied universally and learned individually. However, this approach does not correspond to the social and specialized learning practices in the workforce. This article presents an argument for faculty and librarians to collaborate and redefine information literacy guidelines using specific disciplinary requirements while incorporating non-formal and informal workplace learning practices. This approach would better prepare students for the social and collaborative learning required in a 21st century workforce environment.     

Nonformal education and rural development in Ghana

This article describes and evaluates a nonformal education rural development project which evolved through a collaborative arrangement between a private voluntary organization in Ghana and a North American university. After extensive discussions a relationship developed between the University of Massachusetts' Center for International Education and Ghana's Peoples' Educational Association, a national adult education organization with links to the University of Ghana's Institute of Adult Education.The two organizations agreed to cooperate in the development and evaluation of several village facilitator models in which a much wider cross-section of the community would participate in a variety of development projects and educational activities. The models were to emphasize a shift from a leader-dominated perspective to more group participation with villagers taking responsibility for their actions, both in meetings and in development projects.