Funds granted to technology project for at-risk students

Dr. Lois Veath, CSC vice president for academic affairs, said the award puts CSC in select company, noting that only 30 of the 600 submitted applications were selected for funding. CSC is the only public master’s degree comprehensive institution in the consortium.

Designed and funded by the Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, NGLC focuses on identifying and scaling technology-enabled approaches to improve college readiness and completion by addressing a continuum of interrelated issues spanning secondary and postsecondary education from grades six through college.

NGLC is led by Educause in partnership with The League for Innovation in the Community College, the International Association of K-12 Online Learning, and the Council of Chief State School Officers. In addition to funding, NGLC is gathering evidence about effective practices, and working to develop a community dedicated to these persistent challenges. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation helped design the NGLC, as well as fund the initiatives.

The Kaleidoscope Projectwill implement a fully open general education curriculum across the seven colleges that serve predominantly at-risk students. The project’s use of open educational resources will virtually eliminate textbooks costs as an obstacle to success for low-income students. It will also allow institutions to collaborate to refine and improve course content, closing the loop between course design and student learning outcomes by using premier open educational courseware designed through millions of dollars of grant money by leading universities in the United States.

Chadron State will design three courses in transitional reading, writing, and English composition that use open education resources to reduce costs to students and to serve place-bound learners through distance education. Prior to the new project, the courses were offered only in the residential setting on campus, thereby shutting out adult learners in CSC’s expansive service region who may not possess the basic skills to be successful in college.

The courses will include individual modules for specific skill sets that enable instructors to customize the learning environment to the needs of individual learners. The modules will also be used to increase the retention and success rate of learners who will attend a summer bridge program prior to their first fall semester at CSC.

In addition, CSC will pilot courses designed by other Kaleidoscope partners including fundamentals in chemistry and biology, transitional mathematics and geography. A total of nine courses will be developed, piloted and refined in the first wave of the NGLC.

“Our core mission at CSC is to support the academic achievement of our students, many of whom are low-income or first-generation college students,” Veath said. “Participation in the Kaleidoscope Project allows us to bring to this critical charge the resources of the Gates and Hewlett foundations, the expertise of open education resources from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University and our innovative Kaleidoscope Project partners who include five community college systems and two masters comprehensive institutions that span the U.S. from New York to California.”

Led by Cerritos College, which serves as the fiscal agent for the project, the Kaleidoscope Project includes the following partners: Chadron State, College of the Redwoods, Mercy College, Palo Verde College, Rancho Santiago Community College Districtand Tompkins Cortland Community College. The seven colleges collectively serve more than 100,000 students annually; 69 percent of the students are at risk of dropping out.

A global team of open education experts will support the college partners including Norman Bier from Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Chris Coppola from rSmart, Cable Green from the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, Vijay Kumar of MIT, Kim Thanos of Thanos Partnersand David Wiley from Brigham Young University. The project will also benefit from use of the Sakai collaboration platformfor course delivery, and the use of both Sakai analytics and the Association of American Colleges and Universities VALUE rubricsto assess student learning.