Institute For The Future

Designing a 21st Century Community College for Working Learners

 

Community college has always been about being open and accessible.

It's meant to be a place where anyone can go to get the skills they need to move up in the workforce or the education they need to transfer to a university. And the advent of online learning has created an unprecedented opportunity for communities colleges to fulfill this purpose on a scale they never have before. Today, millions of people in California’s workforce need new skills and credentials to get ahead but can’t fit traditional college courses into their lives. To serve these students, Governor Jerry Brown has presented a proposal to create a new kind of community college—an online-only community college—to supplement California’s existing 114 campuses. But what would that college actually look like? How would we ensure it genuinely supports the experience of working learners? 

On April 4-5, 2018, Institute for the Future, along with the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, hosted a two-day workshop to kick start thinking and inspire imagination about what the 115th online community college in California could be—and how we can start to make that a reality. We convened over 50 experts from domains likely to impact the future of online learning in low-income markets—from faculty, students, and administrators to employers, union organizers, disability advocates, and tech innovators. We led them through a series of collaborative exercises designed to help them think creatively, critically, and strategically about the future, and the design process to come.

Gain some insight from our graphic recordings and the agenda from this event here.

To help frame the conversation, participants were exposed to research around the changing nature of work and organizations. And they heard from and engaged with current working learners with deep experience using online platforms and representatives from some of the most innovative digital learning platforms.

A key part of the workshop was exploring the foundational principles the 115th community college would be built on. On top of the principles laid out by governor Brown, who has stated that the college must be accessible, affordable, competency-based, and not linked to the academic calendar, participants highlighted that the college we create must have easy on- and off-ramps and be:

• Flexible Connected (with the higher education system and employers) 
• Personalized (via data and coaching/mentorship) 
• User-centric (particularly for working learners)

Throughout the workshop, participants stressed that this new college must be more than just content, and more than just another tech tool—it needs to be easy to navigate and truly support the complex needs working learners, who are already prone to falling through the cracks as they run up against roadblocks.

 

In the coming months IFTF will be publishing a full report outlining the process and the resulting set of design principles that will be used by the California Community College system to create an inclusive design process for this 115th college moving forward.

For more information on the process and a full participant list, you can visit the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office website.

Curious about the future of workforce development in the California Community Colleges? Check out IFTF’s 2017 report Charting New Paths to the Future in the California Community Colleges