Improving Learning

College is a time of learning and self-discovery. It is exciting to finally be out in the world on your own – you don’t have to answer to anyone, and you can do whatever you want, more or less. But just because you have more freedom in your life doesn’t mean that you can abuse it. Learn from the example of some college students who didn’t take college quite as seriously as they should have, and now they are paying the price.

Top Academic Mistakes You Want to Avoid

College is where you will learn the information and skills you need to succeed in the “real world” as an adult. You will pick a major and then take all the classes you need to graduate with a degree in that significant, which will (hopefully) get you a job after graduation. Packing your class schedule with all the most challenging classes the school offers is unnecessary – you aren’t trying to impress anyone. But there are some common academic mistakes you want to avoid.

Here are a few of the most common academic mistakes first-year college students make:

Believing that college is just like high school.

In high school, your teachers hold you accountable for doing your classwork and showing up on time. However, once you get to college, it is on you to keep up with your classwork and homework and show up for class. This requires a certain degree of self-discipline, which some

Global Learning Made Accessible: Exploring Study Abroad Opportunities for Community College Students

For many students attending four-year colleges or universities, a semester abroad is a typical experience and one that offers a host of benefits. Students who study abroad have the opportunity to live and study within a new culture and often have the chance to hone valuable language skills. However, for community college students, many of whom have essential responsibilities outside of the classroom, spending months away from home and work is impractical at best and more than likely impossible.

This video offers some reasons why you should study abroad.

In recent years, several community colleges have identified the benefits of studying abroad and have acknowledged the unique challenges their students face in doing so. As a result, many community colleges now offer short-term study abroad and traditional semester programs. In the last decades, the number of community college students who take the opportunity to study overseas has expanded tremendously, from just fewer than 4,000 students back in 2001 to almost 300,000 in 2015.

Community colleges offer programs to fit the schedules and unique learning needs of almost any student:

• Short-term educational programs
• Traditional semester-long programs
• Short and long-term volunteer or service-learning programs

Community college students can work with study abroad program providers, who will coordinate with a student’s college to assess the credit available for different short and long-term programs. They can also

There are many perks to attending community college. From a financial standpoint, a community college education is far less expensive than one from a four-year school. Class sizes at community colleges tend to be smaller, so students can usually count on more individualized attention from their professors. Community college campuses are often closer to home as well, so students have an easier commute if they live off-campus. If they live on campus, there are more social and recreational programs available today than ever before.

But going to college can still be a hard transition to make. The coursework is more rigorous than in high school, which can cause some students to struggle to keep pace. Some students enter community college without all the skills they need to be successful as well. Fortunately, community colleges have made student support services a primary focus of improvement over the course of the last twenty years. With academic support services like tutoring and remedial classes, on-campus advising and counseling services, and job placement and transfer assistance programs, campuses offer assistance for students’ most common needs.

This video offers an overview of Gateway Community College's learning center.

Remedial Coursework Revisited

According to a report by the Community College Research Center, about six in ten community college students are referred to some kind of remedial course. For a healthy portion of those students, more than one remedial course is required.

The virtual classroom is here, but are online college courses right for you?

Thanks to modern technology, students can now attend class from the comfort of their homes. While online courses were once deemed inferior to lecture halls, the stigma has seemed to fade as technology advances and becomes a greater and greater part of a standard academic curriculum. Students, young and old, now have the choice to pursue online learning, whether through a single class or a fully online university course load. But are there benefits to online learning? Or is something lost in translation when education becomes virtual? We examined both sides of the equation with several leading educational professionals.

This video offers an overview of online learning in community colleges.

The Pros of Online Courses

Flexible Learning

A flexible schedule is one of the main benefits of taking online courses. Mary Stephens, Founder and CEO of PrepForward.com, points out that online education “allows individuals to study at their own pace and on their own schedule.” Digital “classrooms” can be accessed anywhere, at any time. Mary, who teaches online courses at institutions across the U.S., believes this is a prime benefit to online learning in a world chock-full of so many hectic schedules.

Professor Linda Williams, Founder, and CEO of Whose Apple Empowerment Center, goes on to add, “Online courses do not require classroom attendance

The essential difference between competency-based education (CBE) and traditional programs is that CBE measures learning without regard to time. They utilize direct measures of assessment to determine understanding of content, as opposed to requiring a certain number of credits or contact hours of class time in order to earn a letter grade. Students instead demonstrate what they know when they know it well enough to be deemed competent. In essence, it is much like an AP exam, only on a far larger scale: AP students must pass a test with a certain level of competency in order to earn credit for the course. Students in a competency-based program must do the same for each course they undertake.

The first program completely based on competencies rather than credits was green-lighted by the Department of Education in August of 2013 at College of America, a community college associated with Southern New Hampshire University. Since then, there has been a push for this type of system to be implemented at community colleges across the country. This movement is the result of several shifts in the landscape of higher education in recent years. As the cost of a college education continues to rise, community colleges, universities, federal agencies, and private entities have been exploring a less expensive way for students to obtain a degree or certification. The individualized pacing of CBE is seen by many as a solution to this problem, as it is a system of learning completely free of time-based