20MM Spark Grant

Los Angeles Mission College was invited to participate in the grant below. We have been working with Chabot, Peralta, West Hills, Valley, East, Grossmont-Cuyamaca, and Lake Tahoe Community Colleges to develop a BI Dashboard for state-wide ZTC efforts. Emil Mubarakshin, Mission's Research Analyst from the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, has helped Mission develop the best dashboard possible. The project should be completed and launched in the Spring of 2025. Once launched, Emil will have to input LAMC's numbers before the official campus launch.

Project Description as Submitted by Chabot:

In collaboration with the OERI, Chabot College recently received a grant from the Michelson Foundation to collaborate with other community colleges across the state to work on creating a dashboard that can be used as a template across CCCs to track OER/ZTC at the section and student levels. Our goal is to create a template that all 116 colleges can use and modify to meet the needs of their individual colleges as well as partner with the Chancellor's office to create statewide infrastructure to support colleges in their OER endeavors. Colleges that have expressed interest in collaborating with us on this project include: West Hills College - Lemoore, Grossmont College, East Los Angeles College, and the three colleges of San Mateo CCD (Cañada, College of San Mateo, and Skyline). We'll ask that collaborators meet as a team once a month for 1-1.5 hour meetings throughout the year.

Grant Submission:

To efficiently track ZTC sections and student enrollment, Chabot College’s OER coordinators collaborated with the Office of Research, Planning, and Institutional Effectiveness and built two ZTC data dashboards. One dashboard found gaps in ZTC implementation by modality, division, and subject/course across semesters. The second dashboard tracked student-level characteristics to understand who is most likely to enroll in ZTC courses (e.g., by gender identity, race/ethnicity, disability and/or income status). To our knowledge, other colleges want to gather this data, but have yet to. Thus, the proposed project seeks to expand the knowledge created at Chabot to other, and ultimately all, California Community Colleges (CCCs).
 

Dashboard creation builds capacity to support the implementation of ZTC programs. Additionally, dashboards will raise questions that can be answered through further research (e.g., why are certain groups of students more/less likely to enroll in ZTC and how does coursemarking/course material price transparency impact student behavior/success). Consequently, this work can mobilize student/faculty participation in passing OER policies across the CCCs and understanding of students’ enrollment decisions. Further, these dashboards can promote student success, directly identifying potential ZTC impacts regarding course success, time to completion, throughput, and other metrics CCC Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO) uses to create policy.

Request, Usage, and Timeline:

We request $25,000 to scale the work completed at Chabot to a pilot group of other CCCs. The funds will be used to support professional development workshops and expand the creation of ZTC dashboards and to fund the institutions/entities involved (e.g., Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI), pilot colleges). Importantly, Spark Grant funds are unique in that it allows this project to be scaled and invites collaboration between colleges, creating system-wide impact. Other grants that support OER currently focus on individual institutions to develop ZTC pathways, but do not allow for duplication. Therefore, this project is not possible via other funding mechanisms.

The project has: support from OERI (e.g., to host workshops and reach out to other CCCs), colleges interested in developing and implementing dashboards at their respective institutions, and we already have dashboards to be used as a launching pad for future development. With the support of the OER Spark Grant, this yearlong project could begin immediately. The first quarter is for development of a dashboard template all CCCs can use. The second quarter is devoted to holding webinars for professional development and to receive feedback on the dashboards. The third quarter is used for making edits to the dashboard, and the fourth quarter is for the full release to all CCCs for free use as well as collaborating with the CCCCO to create infrastructure across the system.

Impacted Populations:

This project will serve as proof of concept that ZTC dashboards across CCCs are possible and desired across multiple populations. The success of this project is far-reaching, helping students, faculty, classified professionals, and administration across California’s diverse landscape. In particular, the project can impact students of diverse backgrounds that enroll at CCCs (e.g., low-income, BIPOC, rural/urban, and nontraditional and under-resourced students; further comments in demographics section).