Feedback from Advising

Red Rocks Community College Retention Task Team
Recommendation	Learning Communities Currently, we offer few Learning Community options and they are difficult to fill because of students’ lack of familiarity and difficulty with online registration.  Improved marketing and registration efforts are necessary in order for fewer learning communities to cancel or detach and run separately. For example, in considering Degrees with Designation and AA/AS requirements it would be essential to market the co-req courses in the following introductory classes in hopes to fill these potential/proposed learning communities: DEGREE                     ADVERTISE IN:                     LEARNING COMMUNITY  AA- BUS:                         BUS115                                     BUS216/ECO201  AA- CRJ:                         CRJ110                                     CRJ125/SOC101  AA/AS:                           ENG121                                     ENG122/POS111        AA/AS                            ENG121                                     ENG122/GEO105 or 106  AA/AS PSY:                     PSY101                                     PSY102/PHI112  AA/AA PSY:                     PSY101                                     COM125/PSY226  AA PSY:                          PSY101                                     BIO105/PSY235  AA/AS                            ENG121                                     HIS208/ANT125                             Develop a way for learning communities to be clearly defined and linked in online registration – students are often confused by the required co-requisite as they were unaware that a class is linked with its designated co-requisite and give up registering for that specific section.
Responsible Department /	Instruction – appropriate department chairs and faculty Marketing
Time Line	For Fall 2014 classes – market spring 2014
Measurable    Outcomes	Full Learning Communities, fewer number of detached or canceled learning communities

Some Feedback

Here are some suggestions I received:

Some faculty are hesitant to do an LC because of the lack of institutional support (namely, fair payment).  When it comes to linking two courses over an entire semester, I’m very much a fan of Front Range’s system of paying each faculty for one extra course the first semester of running a LC; then 2 credits on the second run; then 1 credit each additional run.  (If I have that correctly?)

Other faculty are hesitant because they assume there’s a tremendous amount of work involved (and there is, especially when linking two entire courses).  What they don’t realize is the spectrum of ways to set up learning-in-common opportunities.

Therefore, aside from setting up fair compensation, our committee could share LC stories with faculty, what we’ve done, etc.  For example, when I asked a faculty member in Communication, Marlene Adzema, to partner in a small way with my Creative Writing class (not an entire semester of linking courses, but a one-week exchange), she realized she’d always thought of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, something that would take an entire additional course worth of effort.

As far as getting motivated to do them, especially in a more “bite-sized” exchange sort of way, Marlene was reminded of the Green Apps that Rick Reeves was in charge of, and how faculty sent in a proposal, implemented it with some compensation for doing so, and then posted reports on what we did and what we got out of it.   I wonder if we could locate funding for “Learning-Community Apps.”

Initial Questions

Here are the Learning Community Questions:

Remember the following questions I originally posed:

What is our rationale for offering learning communities?

What types of learning communities do we want to offer?

What expectations do we have for faculty who participate in learning communities?

What compensation should we offer for faculty who participate in learning communities?

How will we determine which and how many learning communities to offer?

These questions would also apply to team teaching.

In addition, Bill McGreevy added the following:

What resources, in addition to faculty compensation, will be required to implement and sustain learning community/team teaching initiatives?