Embedding Stackable Credentials in Postsecondary Programs: The Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education released a resource for community and technical colleges to help embed stackable credentials in their programs. The resource provides practical steps for enhancing employer engagement, a framework to design programs with stackable credentials, support for student completion and strategies for sustaining programs responsiveness to employer needs.
Creating a More Holistic Student Success Metric: In order to create a more holistic student success metric that includes more than traditional measures such as enrollment, graduation and retention, researchers from Ithaka S&R surveyed community college provosts to better understand their process of creating these metrics. From the survey results, the researchers present several key findings:
- Provosts emphasize academic and business priorities to determine success metrics.
- Provosts see social justice initiatives as highly important pathways to closing achievement gaps.
- Provosts believe community colleges should provide holistic support to students to in turn bolster performance and funding.
- Community colleges have limited capacity to collect additional data beyond traditional success metrics.
Postsecondary Perceptions of Online and Hybrid Classes: A majority of postsecondary students view online and hybrid courses positively, according to new survey findings. Responses came from faculty, administrators and postsecondary students who were registered in a postsecondary institution in fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters. A majority of students responded that they would take an online course in the future, and that they were open to taking a combination of online and in-person courses. Students also indicated that for in-person courses, they would like to see greater integration of technology in the classroom. All three groups of respondents ranked the top three challenges hindering student success the same: feelings of stress, level of motivation and having time to do homework.
Using a Comprehensive Framework to Provide Access to Good Jobs: The Community College Research Center released a policy brief explaining the Guided Pathways approach and providing examples of best practices from colleges who have implemented the approach. The Guided Pathways framework is a comprehensive reform approach, whereby community colleges fundamentally redesign the programs and support services to create clearer and more educational pathways to credentials that have labor-market value. 400 colleges in 16 states have implemented this reform, andthe authors provide best practices from their review of the colleges who adopted the framework.
Providing Pathways Between Education and Employment: A new report analyzed 316 organizations that were seeking funding to connect postsecondary education and employment to more closely examine the pathways they were building. The authors made several conclusions about the organizations:
- There is great potential to engage with employers more deeply.
- There are more opportunities for building bridges between education and businesses.
- There is a growing need for transferable skills (employable skills).
- More investments in wraparound supports for students are needed.
- There is a need for increased measurement of program effectiveness related to student success.
- Programs were under-leveraging technology (prior to COVID).
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