FIPSE Authorizes Funding for JSRCC's Third and Final Grant Year

Just as JSRCC launched its QEP, the College was fortunate to receive a Funds for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant of over $400,000 to support the implementation and assessment plans for The Ripple Effect. The FIPSE grant helped to fund the first two years of the project, with the third and final year of funding contingent upon satisfactory progress in the College's efforts to implement the various areas of the plan.

Last week, this federal grants office issued its Grant Award Notification, informing JSRCC that its third and final year of FIPSE funding has been approved. This award of $164,553.00 will help the College to continue in its important implementation and assessment of the three critical areas of the QEP:  student readiness, student orientation, and faculty development in online teaching and learning. The grant assists JSRCC in many important ways during this upcoming third FIPSE budget year, which extends from January 1, 2012, to December 31, 2012.

Over 6500 Students Complete SmarterMeasure Assessment

Since its full implementation in Summer 2010, over 6500 JSRCC students have completed SmarterMeasure, the assessment tool that measures learners' readiness for online education. This assessment evaluates a student's skills and personal and external resources in seven critical areas:  Life Factors, Personal Attributes, Technical Knowledge, Technical Competency, Learning Styles, Reading Rate and Recall, and Typing Speed and Accuracy.

Results from SmarterMeasure are being evaluated in order to determine the areas of strength and weakness that our students bring with them to the distance classroom. In Spring 2011, Reynolds students demonstrated greatest strength in the SmarterMeasure assessment in Technical Competency and in Reading Rate and Recall. The two areas of greatest weakness were in Life Factors and in Personal Attributes. These two areas of the assessment are generally deemed to be the most critical for student success in learning -- whether that learning occurs online or on-campus.

Life Factors measurements focus upon the resources and the support that a student has for his or her academic pursuits. Such resources include not only financial and personal support but also issues of space and time available for academic effort. Similarly, Personal Attributes focus upon issues of a student's ability to manage time, ask for assistance, demonstrate responsibility for academic work, and so forth.

The new CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online focuses upon helping students develop the skills and identify the resources that they need to be successful. Building upon the evidence gleaned from SmarterMeasure results, the orientation module focuses primarily upon these areas of evident weakness in our student population.

--Ghazala Hashmi

QEP Coordinator