Increasingly, people are looking for education and training options that are more affordable, flexible, can quickly open doors to good jobs, and--ideally--pave the way for further educational attainment. Businesses also want to hire workers with the skills needed for jobs in growing industries. Non-degree credentials (NDCs) can often meet these…

Purpose: To better prepare young people for the increasingly complex world of work in the global knowledge economy, apprenticeships are receiving renewed attention in countries without a strong history of vocational education. One of the strategies to promote and modernize apprenticeships in these countries is to offer apprenticeships integrated…

Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of teachers who have traditional…

Drawing on various disciplinary and scholarly approaches to the multiple roles of higher education in society, this paper offers a new conceptualisation of the non-economic contributions of higher education. The conceptual model identifies two basic dimensions in higher education's contributions to society. The first, axiological dimension…

The purpose of this project dissertation was to research, create and assess a hypothetical two-year musical theatre/music theater (MT) curriculum to serve as a model for future implementation at community colleges. As one of the fastest growing and most prolific forms of popular entertainment today, the 21st Century musical is uniquely poised to…

What if educational programs designed curriculum with the end in mind, teaching and assessing only the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the workplace and broader life applications? Competency-Based Education (CBE) provides an answer to questions such as this one that key stakeholders such as employers, learners, parents, and educators…

This study explores the use of micro-credential as an innovative curriculum design for addressing individuals' needs and the industry's demands. Specifically, since offering micro-credentials is relatively new in the Philippines, the study proposed a curriculum development model that will be useful in guiding curriculum experts and educational…

This study aimed to examine the relationship between student engagement and student retention of adult learners at community colleges. The relationship between student retention and the five Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) student engagement benchmarks (active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge,…

Although the structure and content of the sociology major has been addressed by a variety of scholars and several American Sociological Association (ASA) task forces over the past three decades, the structure, content, and even the purpose of the sociology minor has been ignored. In this article, we address this gap in the literature through two…

State Seals of Biliteracy (SoBL) are a growing trend and present a promising method of serving an increasingly bilingual population. Currently, state SoBLs have been available almost exclusively at the high school level. An Oregon community college initiated the opportunity for students to study and receive the state SoBL in higher education. The…

Micro-credentials research, which includes digital badges, is a relatively new field of study that seeks to inform the implementation, portability and sustainability of the ecology of meaningful delivery. This paper reviews literature relevant to understanding connections between universities' intent to offer micro-credentials and the environment…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…

This article offers a global overview of the burgeoning field of micro-credentials and their relationship to lifelong learning, employability and new models of digital education. Although there is no globally accepted definition of micro-credentials, the term indicates smaller units of study, which are usually shorter than traditional forms of…

Since 2016, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative has been developing the Total Learning Architecture (TLA), a 4-pillar data strategy for managing lifelong learning. Each pillar describes a type of learning-related data that needs to be captured, managed, and shared across an organization. Each data pillar is built on a set of…