The Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority (IADA) program, written into the Every Student Succeeds Act, gives up to seven state educational agencies the opportunity to launch innovative assessment pilots in their public schools, with the goal of eventual statewide implementation. As of August 2020, the U.S. Department of Education had…

Postsecondary institutions are under increasing scrutiny to provide evidence of student learning. Despite efforts to increase the number and frequency of assessments of student learning, many colleges and universities need help to make good use of assessment results for the improvement of teaching and learning. To address this need, in February…

States with an alternate assessment based on modified achievement standards (AA-MAS) that received a flexibility waiver from some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind are required to phase out their use of this assessment. And, on August 23, 2013, the U.S. Department of Education published a proposed rollback of regulation that allowed the…

Mississippi's community and junior colleges comprise the nation's oldest two-year system. Throughout history, Mississippi has prided itself on bridging the gap between dreams and reality through increased access to higher education. In the early 1990s, through advancements made possible through telecommunications systems, educators and leaders…

This article features a major statewide initiative in North Carolina that is showing how a consortium model can minimize risks for districts and help them exploit the advantages of cloud computing. Edgecombe County Public Schools in Tarboro, North Carolina, intends to exploit a major cloud initiative being refined in the state and involving every…

This article features the Career Readiness Certificate (CRC) which serves as the founding credential in the six states and one locality in the Career Readiness Certificate Consortium (Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C.). The Career Readiness Certificate was developed by the small consortium…

Engineering education directly supports the nation's capacity for economic growth, infrastructure renewal, and security, as well as environmental and human health. Numerous reports have recommended federal support to advance our understanding of how students learn, how faculty teach, and how teaching and learning are assessed. The U.S. National…

Ever since North Carolina State University Libraries launched their Endeca-based OPAC replacement in the beginning of 2006, the library world has been completely obsessed with ditching their old, tired catalog interfaces (and with good reason) for the greener pastures of more sophisticated indexing, more accurate relevance ranking, dust jackets,…

The Carolina Consortium came into being for one purpose: to conclude deals that would allow the sharing of both the costs and the content of a large number of academic journals from three major publishers--Wiley, Springer, and Blackwell. In just a few months--and without any central authority, funding, or administrative overhead--librarians from…

A consortium was formed to experiment in sharing instructional ideas and materials among the membership of the North Carolina community college system for the purpose of improving the quality and efficiency of instruction by increasing the availability of high quality instructional materials while at the same time decreasing the costly duplication…

Twelve rural North Carolina colleges facing decisions regarding campus technology investments chose to form a technology alliance to share information, identify critical needs, rethink budget development and funding formulas at local and state levels, leverage resources, and cooperate in new ventures. Includes recommendations for other colleges…

Project STEPE (Strengthening Teacher Effectiveness Through a Partnership of Equals), designed to improve instruction, involves collaboration between Western Carolina University and seven rural North Carolina school systems. The consortium also includes several institutions associated with education and rural issues, two community colleges,…

A collaborative change process under way in North Carolina uses teacher input and supports the notion of school leaders working cooperatively with many others interested in improving schools, including higher education institutions, the state education agency, colleagues from other schools, and consultants. In the North Carolina project, successes…

To increase the supply of modularized instructional materials to meet the need for preservice and/or inservice education of professional vocational educators, the National Center for Research in Vocational Education and seven interested states organized in 1978 a Consortium for the Development of Professional Materials for Vocational Education. To…

The North Carolina Rural Renaissance Project was initiated in September 1976 by a consortium of 10 community colleges located throughout the state. Its primary objectives were to provide teachers with instruction and experience in developing and producing audiovisual instructional modules; to design and produce modules on adult basic education and…