This article describes how community colleges have evolved from early computers to virtual campuses and beyond in just a few decades.

Purpose: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Next Generation Courseware Challenge (NGCC) in 2014 to address the limited availability of affordable, high-quality adaptive courseware to postsecondary students. SRI International was retained to evaluate the NGCC initiative as a whole and to conduct impact studies for the NGCC…

Community colleges (CC) are obvious places to recruit more women into computer science. Enrollment at CCs has grown in response to a struggling economy, and students are more likely to be from underrepresented groups than students enrolled in 4-year universities (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008). However, we know little about why so…

California's three public higher education systems (University of California, California State University, the California Community College System) enroll nearly 3 million undergraduate students and employ almost 100 thousand faculty. In 2012, the California State Legislature directed the three systems to create an online library of open…

In this article, the author talks about telepresence, a combination of real-time video, audio, and interactive technologies that gives people in distributed locations a collaborative experience that's as close to being in the same room as current technology allows. In a culture that's still adjusting to iPhone-size screen displays and choppy cell…

Similar to the online revolution of the mid-1990s, hybrid-learning classes are redefining how community college students access higher education. Hybrid classes combine online and in-person learning to provide options for students, colleges. The author's perspective is based on experiences at two very different institutions: At Rio Salado College,…

Technology usage is increasing important for community college students, but whether nontraditional students differ from traditional students in technology usage and support was unclear. Further, it was not known whether Nontraditional and Traditional community college students feel equally connected to the college when using social networking…

This study investigates how community college students' current levels of computer technology competence, confidence and attitudes toward technology in learning at a community college are affected by current access to technology and by demographic characteristics as well as by past experiences with computer technology. The research questions…

This article talks about the latest trend in education, which is social networking. As this phenomenon continues to grow, community colleges are getting into the act, launching online initiatives and harnessing the technology to communicate, promote, and conduct important school business. School administrators believe that social networking can…

This study describes the efficacy of a novel tool, mini-lecture movies, in teaching Web based general chemistry. The analysis shows a marked improvement in student learning, as evidenced by a corresponding increase in homework and final exam scores. Students with access to mini-lecture movies scored 11.2% (p = 0.016) higher than students who did…

Online education is particularly well suited to the needs of community college students. Although community colleges have lower per-unit fees than four-year colleges and universities, many community college students still experience economic hardship. Even with fee waivers, students may have problems finding the money for textbooks,…

The California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) conducts policy research and analysis to support long-range planning and student success. The community college enrollment projection is the first in the "Ready or Not, Here They Come" series that will be developed over the next six months. Community college projections were…

This study examines the impact of a new Decision-Support System (DSS) on decision making in a community college in California. It looks at how attitudes and behaviors about data and their use were impacted by the implementation of a new DSS. The study found that the decentralization of data, through the DSS, produced a shift in terms of an…

Instructors have many tools to consider when offering online courses: chat rooms, discussion boards, and interactive Web environments, to name a few. The selection of applications for instructional purposes can be a complicated task as the number available grows. Not only must the application work, but it also must have a pedagogical purpose or…

Teachers at Irvington High School in Fremont, California are looking for meaningful and relevant connections between what students are learning in the classroom and the job skills companies are looking for in the years to come. For Irvington, a Bay Area public high school serving about 2,000 students, that pursuit of a "logical link" led…