Saturday, September 19, 2015

Another new ed fad sweeping the community college frontier

Everyone at the college is advised to read the Thomas Bailey and Shanna Jaggers, Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success. More later.

2 comments:

Professor Charles Evans said...

Since I have not yet read the book, I can only comment on what I have already heard from several admin. people about the idea of connected pathways, or focused pathways, or directed paths. In any case, it is some word combo like that which is supposed to imply that a student enters the community college, gets on a well-defined path, and completes community college and moves on. The student does not get bogged down taking non-essential courses, or does not get bogged down trying to figure out which classes, or which choices to take; it's all programmed for the student. No need for a variety of courses for a student to choose from, the alleged cafeteria model, because that just confuses a student and causes them to linger too long at the community college and lose focus. More later

Professor Charles Evans said...

Funny, that for some reason in higher education, despite all the lip service about technology and educating students to use technology effectively, high ed admin can't seem to use technology effectively. For example, there is a lot of hair-pulling over student advising, and student course registration (which is unbelievably inefficient, but no one seems o let technology work for us. Do you know how easy it is for someone to just program the SIS interface so that when a student logs in, the student seems exactly what courses he/she has taken towards he degree program and what courses remain, and maybe a prompt for suggested courses. Amazon.com can tell me what books to read, doesn't seem like that much of a leap to have our SIS advise students on what courses to take next.

Instead, we (faculty, students, staff) all waste time jumping around from one screen to the next trying to figure things out.