2016-2021 AMP Implementation Updates (January 2019)

• General Education Assessment Workshop October 12, 2018
• Dual Enrollment
• Employee Professional Development by ELITE
• Scholarship for Excellence in Teaching
• A Great Year at Workforce Development and Continuing Education
• Partnerships
• Achieving The Promise Academy One-To-One Program
• Extended Winter Session and Open Educational Resources
• Initiative Key (PDF, )

GENERAL EDUCATION ASSESSMENT WORKSHOP OCTOBER 12, 2018

Purpose:

Faculty to review General Education Assessment results and discuss how well their students progressed with competencies. Other features of the event:

1. Each discipline had a faculty mentor to work with them from the Collegewide Assessment Team
2. This was also a time for faculty to develop additional questions or inquiries about their students using General Education Assessment data.

Evaluation: 

Over fifty faculty participated and overwhelmingly indicated that they thought the workshop was worthwhile and should become an annual event.

Future Directions for Assessment

As a result of the Middle States visit, the College received the following recommendation: The Office of Assessment should streamline the assessment processes to make them meaningful and simpler to understand as well as provide better documentation of the use of these assessment data to improve teaching and learning.

As a result of this recommendation, there have been several focus groups with faculty, chairs, and deans to gather their opinions about how they experience our current system and suggestions for improvement. In the spring semester, the committees leading each of the different assessment processes will gather to review results from the focus groups and best practices from other colleges, and discuss how to create a more simplified approach to assessment. The three critical components that will be addressed with future changes in our assessment processes are:

1. Integration — How student learning outcomes assessment (Program Assessment and General Education Assessment) connects to evaluation activities such as College Area Review. • How can we integrate the processes? • What do we need to retain or delete from• How can we integrate the processes?
   • What do we need to retain or delete from these processes?
   • Do we need to keep them as separate processes?
2. Timing — What is the appropriate timing of assessment and evaluation for our current programs?
3. Communication and Training — What are some of the communication and training needs of faculty so that they can benefit from the assessment and evaluation efforts at the college?

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DUAL ENROLLMENT

Montgomery College (MC) and Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) have a joint interest in producing citizens who have the interpersonal and intellectual skills to be competitive in the local and global economy. Allowing high school students to experience college-level courses while providing opportunities to earn college credit is a critical component in our comprehensive efforts to prepare students for postsecondary study and work. MC and MCPS worked together to develop successful pathways to college and career readiness for every MCPS student, and to increase access to college coursework through Dual Enrollment programs, while simultaneously decreasing institutional barriers for all students. Our partnership has been very successful. Enrollment is strong, and we have made dual enrollment available throughout the MCPS system, resulting in a very diverse student body that includes 75 percent first time students rather than returning students. With data for the nearly 9000 courses that have been taken in the last few years reflected below, it is clear that these engaged students are very successful here. Their DFW grade rates are only 8.73 percent compared with the Collegewide rate of 23.6 percent.

Top 10 College Courses Taken by Dually Enrolled Students

• COMM108 Foundations of Human Communication
• SOCY100 Introduction to Sociology
• BSAD101 Introduction to Business
• STSU100 First Year Seminar
• ENGL101 Introduction to College Writing
• PSYC102 General Psychology
• MUSC117 World Music
• SOCY105 Social Problems & Issues
• MATH280 Multivariable Calculus
• ENGL102 Critical Reading/Writing/Research

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Employee Professional Development by ELITE

July 1, 2017 - June 30, 2018

• 766 total workshops
• 4,142 workshop completions
• 78 Multicultural/Diversity workshops
• 1,078 workshop completions

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SCHOLARSHIP FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING

The purpose for the Scholarship of Excellence in Teaching (SET) initiative is to enhance student success, student understanding, and student achievement. Selecting the top 12 faculty in the college via a rigorous application process, SET implemented many of the strategies found in Taking College Teaching Seriously: Pedagogy Matters: Fostering Student Success Through Faculty-Centered Practice Improvement. These strategies were implemented successfully at LaGuardia Community College and a consortium of thirty other colleges in the United States. However, the MC Scholarship of Excellence in Teaching has not only implemented these strategies but added major elements to create what many faculty have described as the equivalent to a graduate course in pedagogy for community college faculty. The framework of the Scholarship for Excellence in Teaching consists of five major elements: 1) weekly discussion boards, 2) monthly and individual meetings, 3) mentoring, 4) required reading of pedagogical textbooks for college faculty, and 5) the development, implementation, and assessment of the strategy they created to foster student understanding, achievement, and success.

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A GREAT YEAR AT WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT & CONTINUING EDUCATION

• Year in Review (PDF, )

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PARTNERSHIPS

Clinical Trial Project Management with Amarex

The 8th group of Clinical Trial Project Management (CTPM) students participated in a project presentation and graduation ceremony recently. The CTPM program, since its inception in 2012, has graduated 230 students and provided highly skilled workers for our thriving clinical trial industry in the region. MC offers this program once a year and usually has about 200 students wait listed for about 30 students for each class. These projects were based on real ongoing clinical trials that included cancer and schizophrenia drugs, diabetic foot ulcer and septic shock devices, flu vaccine and HIV Biologic. These projects were judged by Director FDA, CEO Amarex, Chair of Public Health at Morgan State and the VPP of Germantown Campus.

The CTPM Program was developed and is delivered in collaboration with Amarex. We did not use any new College resources, helped our region with talent development for an important industry, and generated revenue.

Bio-Trac

Projecting through the last workshop of 2018, 390 researchers will have attended one of the 24 Bio-Trac workshops conducted in BE in 2018. Bio-Trac introduced three new workshops in 2018 (Exosomes, Hepatocytes, and Single Cell RNA-Seq). Each workshop was offered twice a year along with a two-day workshop/symposium on Immuno Oncology Multiplexing that was co-sponsored by MedImmune. In 2019, Bio-Trac expects to conduct 30 workshops while introducing 4 new workshop offerings: Advance Gene Editing with CRISPR, Antibody Validation, 3D Cell Culture, as well as an Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing workshop. Since the summer of 2016, over 880 scientists have attended a Bio-Trac training program in BE.

Montgomery County Public Schools: Teacher Preparation

In October of 2017, MCPS issued an RFP to select Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) that would collaborate with MCPS to provide opportunities for MCPS support professionals (e.g., building and food service workers, paraeducators, security staff, and transportation employees) with varying educational backgrounds and experiences to become highly effective and committed classroom teachers. MCPS sought colleges that would provide programs for MCPS support professionals to obtain bachelors, masters, or other courses of completion so that they could gain Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) certification and employment as MCPS teachers, specifically in high-need content areas. Research showed that the 9,600 support professionals that they employed were far more diverse than the current ranks of graduates from our nation’s education schools, making this group of employees an ideal pool to target for talent development. The range of formal education levels for these 9,600 employees were also diverse, ranging from no high school diploma to earned doctoral degrees.

Applying a social justice lens to our response, we systematically outlined our ability to deliver a rigorous education preparation program. We included examples for previous successful partnership with MCPS, our ability to deliver course work in a multitude of platforms, our academic and social support structures, our willingness to look at alternative measures for placement, and most importantly, the quality of our faculty. We were thrilled to be awarded the RFP. We currently have 75 actively engaged MCPS Support professionals. Of the 75 participants, 38 attended an information session on October 24, 2018. We currently have 25 MCPS support professionals enrolled in our Associate of Arts in Teaching program. Many support professionals have degrees and have expressed interest in our ACET program, of which 13 have submitted applications.

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ACHIEVING THE PROMISE ACADEMY ONE-TO-ONE PROGRAM

The Achieving the Promise Academy (ATPA) is responsible for providing two services. The Academy provides any student with academic support needs, who so desire, with a one-on-one coach, and the Academy also embeds coaches in the classroom to provide supplemental academic support to students (See Initiative 1). Accordingly, ATPA provides embedded classroom support to students in a limited number of course sections—the highest enrolled courses with the highest collegewide failure rates. This program is transitioning from its infancy. The program began in fall 2016, initially with one-on-one coaching service. In alignment with the Academic Master Plan goal of embedded classroom support, the embedded coaching service was implemented in fall 2017.

One-on-one students have access to their coach until graduation and/or transfer and receive academic support in all of their courses. They also enjoy perks such as an assessment to identify strengths and weaknesses, weekly coaching sessions, a personalized academic success plan each semester, two targeted workshops per semester, laptop loaners, and tuition-assistance regardless of their financial aid status.

All students benefit from academic progress monitoring, assignment and exam preparation, weekly study sessions, tutoring, financial aid and registration support, referrals to college and community resources (e.g. Learning Centers, advisors, counselors, and others), a Learning Community of peers with similar academic and professional interests, and development of academic and life skills.

ATPA One-on-One Coaching: holistic, individualized academic coaching every semester for all courses and other areas of need until graduation/transfer.

• 350+ students
• Weekly meetings with coach (or as needed)
• PT and FT students
• Credit and non-credit students
• 15 part-time faculty coaches
• Monitoring of academic progress through collaboration between faculty and coach
• Financial aid and registration support
• Workshops
• A Learning Community of peers with similar academic and professional interests

Average GPA After ATPA One-on-One Coaching

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EXTENDED WINTER SESSION AND OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Extended Winter Session began as a solution to meet student needs. Traditional Winter Session is only three weeks, and while popular, many of our students prefer to have a five-week option which begins right after the fall semester ends and goes right through to the Friday before opening meeting. Retention to spring has consistently been 96% and the course pass rates have been as good or better than Traditional Winter Session. The offering has proven very popular with students, growing from enrollment of 267 in 2016 to nearly 1,000 prior to the start of Extended Winter Session in 2018. This option allows a student to take an additional class or have the option of spreading their credits out over the course of a year.

Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Growth in the number of students enrolled in Z-courses at Montgomery College, courses that have zero costs for instructional materials, continues. In the fall 2018 semester, we offered 413 sections of Z-courses with enrollments of more than 8,400. Last fall we offered about 320 sections of Z-courses with about 6,400 enrollments.

In the four semesters that we have been tracking Z-courses, it is estimated that we have saved students an estimated $2.4 million, money that can be reinvested into education, thus reducing the time to completion and adding to the economic spending within the county. While it’s exciting to talk about savings, we’ve moved the narrative toward learning outcomes and social justice. Using OER and other free material is an equity issue. Students have access to course materials the first day of the semester, putting them on a level academic success playing field since they don’t have to wait to gather necessary funds to buy expensive books. This results in success for at-risk populations.

Tracking the use of Z-courses at Montgomery College, we have found that underserved populations have been as successful or more successful than students in non Z-courses. Below is a fall to fall comparison of success in Z-courses by ethnicity and gender compared to success in all courses.

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