Our head in the cloud: Transforming work on college completion

Abstract

Global Skills for College Completion (GSCC) offers transformative use of social media – a Guided Digital Environment – a unique set of online tools and processes to capture, consolidate, and advance the effective faculty classroom work. The ambition of GSCC is to achieve a quantum increase in the historically low pass rates of basic skills students in American community colleges. The goal is to produce a rate increase so dramatic, consistently 80%, that it is “visible to the naked eye.” This increased success rate in basic skills would have the effect of accelerating remediation and increasing the probability of college completion. We believe community college basic skills faculty possess all the wisdom necessary to figure out how to improve these rates, given the right tools. In this chapter we describe the GSCC project, the Guided Digital Environment and the Tools and Routines provided to faculty to allow them to be research-practitioners in the project, and the research we drew on to build it. We include early information and observations on the essential design elements for identifying effective basic skills pedagogy. We also describe the innovative technological tools used to create an engaged community and leave a digital trail for analysis. GSCC is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through a grant to the League for Innovation as part of its goal to double the number of young adults in the United States with a postsecondary credential by 2020.

Citation

Woolis, D.D. and Mellow, G.O. (2011), "Our head in the cloud: Transforming work on college completion", Wankel, C. (Ed.) Educating Educators with Social Media (Cutting-Edge Technologies in Higher Education, Vol. 1), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 279-301. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2044-9968(2011)0000001017