Brightpoint's HyFlex Pilot Program was a year-long project funded by the Online Virginia Network (OVN) to support faculty in the design and delivery of an actual HyFlex course. The cohort consisted of faculty who teach in the biology, architecture, early childhood, and web design disciplines. Participants worked in collaboration with one another…

Federal second chance Pell grants were recently made widely available to incarcerated students in the United States to fund undergraduate education. Piedmont Virginia Community College was a pilot site for this expansion and began full scale implementation of transfer-oriented associate degrees at three correctional centers in its service area.…

More than half of community college students nationwide intend to pursue a four-year degree; however, in Texas only one in four community college students transfer to four-year institutions successfully. Among students who do transfer to a Texas four-year institution, roughly 60 percent go on to graduate with a bachelor's degree. The result is…

This practice article describes the goals, strategies, and outcomes of a pilot project that grew out of the Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning for Curricular Coherence project, funded by the Teagle Foundation, at Community College of Philadelphia. Included are recommendations for creating and supporting sustainable multidisciplinary…

Data from past economic downturns show that "recession graduates"--those graduating from high school or college during a recession--may have worse outcomes in earnings and health for years or even decades to come. MDRC sought to work with stakeholders to better understand the challenges recent graduates are facing in the current context…

The Running Start Summer School Pilot program was established in 2020 by House Bill 2864 and enacted as Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 28A.630.600. To determine whether the summer term should be funded under the Running Start Program, a summer pilot was created to evaluate interest in and barriers to expanding the Running Start program to…

This article describes the development process of a project for heritage language speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese at a high-enrollment community college in the northeast United States. This pilot project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, aimed to empower minority group students through active reinforcement of students'…

In fall 2013, Career and Technical Education (CTE)-focused composition classes were piloted to accommodate Leeward Community College's requirement for college-level composition for students in the CTE majors. The first CTE-focused class was an accelerated developmental education reading and writing course for students placing two steps below…

This chapter tells a story of course reform, describing in a fresh and candid way the steps taken toward change and the results achieved. The authors emphasize that instructors need considerable support in order to teach differently, as well as underscore the need to consider scalability of reform even at the pilot stage.

This is the second guide of the Cutting Edge Series and is designed to help colleges apply strategies that will allow successful institutional change and student achievement initiatives to reach more students. Section 1 of this guide lays out the most common obstacles to successful scaling and serves as a sobering reminder of the complexity of the…

The Open Academic Analytics Initiative (OAAI) is a collaborative, multi-year grant program aimed at researching issues related to the scaling up of learning analytics technologies and solutions across all of higher education. The paper describes the goals and objectives of the OAAI, depicts the process and challenges of collecting, organizing and…

For southern New England, the middle-skills gap is projected to become acute by 2020, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Historically and currently, the middle-skills labor pool in Massachusetts has been significantly below national rates and has been recently experiencing a decline. Closing the middle-skills gap depends on improving…

Students and teachers are increasingly embracing tablets and e-book readers in their personal lives, but do these devices have a place on community college campuses? Several institutions are exploring answers to that very question by piloting mobile technologies inside and outside college classrooms. Scottsdale Community College (SCC) in Arizona,…

In a pilot study at El Centro College, an urban college in the Dallas County Community College District, students in a new-to-college educational framework class were offered an intervention intended to enhance the academic advising process. The intervention consisted of in-class career services advising, degree selection, degree planning, course…

This article focuses on the accelerated associate degree program at Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana) in which low-income students will receive an associate degree in one year. The three-year pilot program is funded by a $2.3 million grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education in Indianapolis and a $270,000 grant from the Indiana Commission…