ACE Newsletter Spring 2010

Ann Endris	Cabrillo College
Joy Adams-Jones	Community College of Baltimore County
Kevin Jonker	Cabrillo College
Maria Hernandez	Olive-Harvey Middle College
Matthew Trujillo	Olive-Harvey Middle College
Rebecca Arnesty	Cabrillo College
Rod Norden	Cabrillo College
Samuel Banales	Cabrillo College

Faculty Experiential Learning Institute (FELI) Practicants - Winter 2010 -
Hosted by Cabrillo College

Chris Lebo-Planas	Berkeley City College
Shannon Penn	Berkeley City College
Vicki Fabbri	Cabrillo College
Sadie Reynolds	Cabrillo College

**Congratulations also go out to the 51 graduates of the Winter 2010 FELI!

ACE CENTER LEADER REPORTS

Diego Navarro, ACE Executive Director & Founder

I'd like to thank the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett foundation for their confidence in the Academy for College Excellence and for their support through funding.

We're pleased to announce our new name: Academy for College Excellence. We feel that this name communicates our mission more effectively than our former name, Digital Bridge Academy, which caused confusion. Our former name caused some to think we were a computer training program or a distance education technology program. We're also excited to announce the launch of our new website: www.my-ace.org. I'm very impressed by the quality work our staff has done to bring this about.

I have been working to hire evaluators/researchers to do two studies on ACE. The first will be a five-year longitudinal study on student effectiveness at all ACE campuses, looking at how and why ACE works, as well as issues of selection bias. The second study will be on how faculty's participation in the Faculty Experiential Learning Institute (FELI) affects their student retention rates in their non-ACE classes.

I'm in the process of hiring a strategic planning consulting firm. I will work with them to develop a national expansion strategy, sustainable funding model and organization management structure to support the growth of ACE.

Jim Knickerbocker, ACE Director of College Partnerships

My team has worked hard to bring you this first newsletter, which I hope you find informative. This is a time of tremendous growth for ACE -- while this Spring semester has 14 ACE cohorts across 4 ACE colleges, by the Fall we expect to double, with 28 to 30 cohorts at 9 colleges! Congratulations to Truman College in Chicago, which started teaching the ACE Foundation Course to students this semester.

We recently defined a 9-phase Partner Life Cycle to show partner colleges the steps they can move through on their ACE journey. Look for the graphic in this newsletter showing colleges we are working with and their current phase. The new ACE website has a section describing the Partner Life Cycle - our major project this year is to create detailed information for each phase, so you know exactly what you need to do and have the tools and training you need to do it.

Please email me at [email protected] if you have any suggestions!

Beth Nelson, ACE Program Manager

We've been developing a system to collect information about all ACE instructors, including ACE courses taught & ACE events attended. We'll use this information to inform the instructor certification protocol, which will be drafted in the coming months. Also newly developed is an information sheet for all faculty confirmed to teach in a cohort. I've also taken part in the collaborative process to develop the spring ACE Community of Practice session, which we hope you will attend on March 27th.

I'm also participating in the Cabrillo institutionalization task forces on outreach and intake, scheduling, and the non-labor related costs of ACE. These task forces are opening many discussions and out of the box thinking on ways to institutionalize ACE into Cabrillo. As part of our expansion, we've been busy documenting our processes for event management & budget management. To the end of smoother operations, we've been optimizing existing administrative processes. The training of a new Program Specialist has also been keeping me busy.

Peter Fullenwider, ACE Curriculum Innovator

A central goal of the Academy for College Excellence is to provide curriculum/products along with supporting materials to colleges and institutions with whom we are affiliated.

Recent initiatives toward achieving this goal include:

- Standardizing how information is organized across Instructor Discs

- Moving printed instructor materials out of binders and into labeled folders in a file box.

- Prototyping methods for efficient, cost-effective duplication and delivery of course materials.

Much remains to be done to meet our quality and usability goals. With the support of the Gates and Hewlitt Foundations and especially your help, we look forward to delivering more effective and easy-to-use curriculum/products in the months ahead.

Antonio Alarcon & Natalia Cordoba-Velasquez,

ACE Student Recruitment

The Recruitment Kit is nearly completed! We are currently taking all of the feedback from our partner colleges and fine tuning the deliverables in the Recruitment Kit. We will have audio recordings, electronic documents and templates, and other essential items for building a sound recruitment plan.

We are also working on a workshop that will help partner colleges receive and understand the kit, while also providing insight into recruitment methods that have worked in the past. These workshops will be available online so that they are available at the users' convenience!

Our first Knowledge Nugget pilot has been completed and will be available for use shortly. This nugget provides tips on how to use your own experiences and knowledge of ACE and turn them into effective conversations that equip others with the information they need to help recruit for you.

Peter Bartlett, ACE Community Organizer

On Saturday, December 19th a group of DBA Community members braved the rain and the cold to come to an exciting meeting of the DBA Community of Practice (COP) open to all community members and potential members.

Despite the rain we had an exciting exchange of ideas. The theme for the day was 'Taking DBA to the Next Horizon'. The day was interspersed with thoughtful presentations by Diego Navarro and Jim Knickerbocker followed by small group discussion.

The afternoon concluded with the identification of what we called 'white space' topics that have become the centerpiece for the upcoming Spring COP session on 27 March at the Berkeley Community College. These topics include: Funding for Growing the DBA; Growing within the College; Integrating Curriculum & Making It More Culturally Relevant; and Strategies for Student Success.

Please join us at the Spring COP session!

ADOPTION PROGRESS

ACE Partner Life Cycle

ACE Partner Colleges

Name	Location	Phase	Adoption Activity
Cabrillo College	Aptos, CA	7	Institutionalization planning
Hartnell College	Salinas, CA	7	Expand accelerated cohorts
Berkeley City College	Berkeley, CA	6	Expand cohorts
Las Positas College	Livermore, CA	6	Expand cohorts
Diablo Valley College	Pleasant Hill, CA	6	Partial ACE implementation
Chabot College	Hayward, CA	3*	MOU & Implementation planning
Los Medanos College	Pittsburg, CA	3*	MOU & Implementation planning
Delaware County Community College	Media, PA	3*	MOU & Implementation planning
Truman Middle College	Chicago, IL	3*	Partial ACE implementation MOU & Implementation planning
Olive-Harvey Middle College	Chicago, IL	1*	Intake application & discussion
Southwestern Virginia Community College	Richlands, VA	1*	Intake application & discussion

*Colleges in Phases 1-3 are still considering ACE program implementation and have not yet made a formal commitment.

Closing Thoughts

"To the extent that colleges are seeking strategies for increasing the rate at which academically underprepared students complete 'gatekeeper' courses such as college-level English and earn college credits, the accelerated version of the DBA program seems to hold particular promise."

Source: Jenkins, D., Hayward, C. (2009). Educational Outcomes of the Digital Bridge Academy: Findings from a Multivariate Analysis. Columbia University Community College Research Center.

Editorial Staff

We welcome your submissions! Please send submissions, questions or comments to Kathryn Nation at [email protected].