Initial Results of CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online Look Promising

A critical component of JSRCC's Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) focuses upon preparing students for online learning prior to their enrollment in distance classes. For several months in Spring and Summer 2011, faculty and staff members from various divisions collaborated in the creation of CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online, a new and vigorous two-week orientation module that introduces students to resources, key strategies for effective online engagement, and fundamental academic attributes for distance learning. The orientation integrates the use of Blackboard (Bb) technologies and features so that students also become familiar with the technical requirements of navigating a course management system. Students who successfully complete the various requirements of CDL001 receive a certificate. 

In a survey that is one of the exit assignments for the Orientation, participants report an overwhelming degree of satisfaction with the learning objectives and outcomes of the two-week module. They also report feeling a high degree of preparation for their online, academic classes.

Apart from participant satisfaction with CDL001: Orientation to Learning Online,  the College is also beginning to see evidence of academic success among those who complete the full two-week module.  The 47 students who finished the Summer 2011 pilot of the Orientation progressed forward to enroll in 65 distance learning courses in Fall 2011. In these 65 DL enrollments, students successfully passed 60 (or 92.3%) of their courses. While the success of the "oriented" students rests upon several factors, these initial results speak promisingly about the potential effects of a solid introduction to online skills and strategies.

Sleepless Since Seattle: Reflections on MLA 2012

As a teacher of first-year community college students, I’ve returned from the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2012 conference in Seattle, where as many as sixty sessions touched on digital pedagogy, more convinced than ever of our collective responsibility to wean our students and ourselves from traditionally packaged textbooks, course management systems, and assessments. It’s clear to me that my first-year college students need to be prepared for what Cathy Davidson calls the “keywords for a digital age” in her new book, Now You See It: things like “attention to work flow (multitasking, remix, mashup), interaction, process (publish first, revise later), collaboration, blended, interdisciplinary, “hard” and “soft” skills, and datamining.”

Asking our students to participate alongside us in the ongoing process of building a body of readings and resources can be a powerful way for us to encourage reflection about the social construction of knowledge.  By challenging our students’ and our own assumptions about textbooks and challenging the constitutive power they have held over our collective understanding of education, we can consider the implications of all the tools and lenses we use in our everyday teaching and learning lives. By foregrounding the full, messy context and often tortuous history of digital texts, and helping students to view digital content as dynamic and fungible, we can escape the blanching process textbook anthologies and academic databases use to promote the fiction of textual stability and consistency.

The generation of students left behind by No Child Left Behind is most in need of this disruptive gesture.  Our students have been taught by K-12 textbooks tied to rigid state curricula and standardized testing to “look through” a text as a window through which to see content -- to borrow Richard Lanham’s distinction in The Economics of Attention – rather than to “look at” a text in a way that foregrounds its medium, its genre, and the conditions of its production, dissemination, and consumption.  Eschewing a traditional textbook in first-year composition may be the best way to initiate a productive break from a standardized K-12 education while readying our first-year writing students for the new and richer kind of information literacy they’ll actually need in order to navigate the digital texts they’ll encounter during their academic and professional careers.

--Miles McCrimmon

Professor of English

J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College

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