Researching Community Colleges: Research Sources

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The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is a U.S. government program that helps many low income households pay for broadband service and internet connected devices.

“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has launched The Banned Book Club to ensure that readers in communities affected by book bans can now access banned books for free via the Palace e-reader app. The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers in locations across the United States where titles have been banned. The e-books will be available to readers for free via the Palace e-reader app. “At DPLA, our mission is to ensure access to knowledge for all and we believe in the power of technology to further that access,” said John S. Bracken, executive director of Digital Public Library of America. “Today book bans are one of the greatest threats to our freedom, and we have created The Banned Book Club to leverage the dual powers of libraries and digital technology to ensure that every American can access the books they want to read.”

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Campus Technology is one of higher education's top information sources — delivering valuable information via a daily site, monthly digital magazine, newsletters, webinars and online tools. It's the go-to resource for campus professionals — providing in-depth coverage on the technologies and implementations influencing colleges and universities across the nation. You'll discover valuable hands-on articles, best practices, industry trends, expert advice and insightful articles to help administrators, campus executives, technologists and educators plan, develop and successfully launch effective IT initiatives.

In 2001, The University of Texas' College of Education established CCCSE as a service and research initiative for community and technical colleges interested in improving educational quality through strengthened student engagement and student success. CCCSE delivers "aha" moments about the community college student experience based on insights that matter through survey research, focus group work, and related services.

Toward Inclusive Excellence explores issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, particularly, though not exclusively, as they affect the academic library community. This new content strand will incorporate weekly blog posts as well as occasional podcasts and webinars, in which contributors will explore the intricacies of racial identity as they relate to implicit bias, systemic racism, and ableism, among other pertinent topics. Among the goals of this channel is the development of a pool of knowledge and actionable resources for information professionals, undergraduates, and faculty seeking to understand racism from new perspectives and promote racial justice on their campuses.

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The Common Data Set (CDS) initiative is a collaborative effort among data providers in the higher education community and publishers as represented by the College Board, Peterson’s, and U.S. News & World Report. The combined goal of this collaboration is to improve the quality and accuracy of information provided to all involved in a student’s transition into higher education, as well as to reduce the reporting burden on data providers.

CCCOER is a growing consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources. We provide a community and resources to learn about the evolving practice of open education.

Community College Data is designed to help educators, practitioners, and policymakers involved in higher education, especially those working with at-risk community college students, learn about and invest in more thoughtful, well-supported, and data-based holistic reforms.

Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) U S Department of Education

The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) is the primary advocacy organization for the nation’s community colleges. The association represents nearly 1,200 2-year, associate degree-granting institutions and more than 12 million students.

CCRC studies community colleges because they provide critical access to postsecondary education and are uniquely positioned to promote equity and social mobility in the United States. Our mission is to conduct research that helps these institutions strengthen opportunities and improve outcomes for their students, particularly those from underserved populations.

The shortcomings of today’s higher-ed system are complex and intertwined—which is why CCA believes a three-part approach is the only solution. By helping states and institutions align policy, perspective, and practice, we’re working to replace the current system with an alternative that leads to more college diplomas and, therefore, greater opportunity for minoritized students.

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This guide provides an overview of digital privacy and the tools needed to protect libraries and its users, and thwart surveillance of our communities. This guide was developed by Library Freedom Project and Massachusetts Library Association.

Our mission is to provide our audience information that is honest, thorough and balanced. Diverse seeks to be a catalyst for change, and our ultimate objective is to contribute to the building of educational, cultural, social and economic structures that will allow every individual to achieve his or her full human potential and contribute to the greater good of the community and the nation.

As an award-winning education news organization, EdSurge reports on the people, ideas and technologies that shape the future of learning. In 2019, EdSurge was acquired by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), a nonprofit membership organization for educators. EdSurge operates as an independent news and research initiative of ISTE.

Research and Resources to Tackle the Rising Costs of
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We are a community of IT leaders and professionals working together to tackle challenges and leverage opportunities that are constantly evolving within higher education. We welcome diversity, in viewpoints and experience, and believe in the transformative power of uncommon thinking for the common good.

2021

Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) U S Department of Education

We cover inequality and innovation in education with in-depth journalism that uses research, data and stories from classrooms and campuses to show the public how education can be improved and why it matters

Advancing inclusive excellence in the higher education workforce

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Your primary source for information on U.S. colleges, universities, and technical and vocational institutions

The Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE) is a Diamond Open Access journal. The journal features content concerned with OER, Open Pedagogy, Open Access, Open Data, and similar topics focusing specifically within the context of Higher Education in the United States and Canada.

The MAPS Project is a student-centric initiative to chart the rapidly evolving higher education system and works to bring high-quality data and historically marginalized voices to higher ed decision-makers.

Massachusetts Colleges Online (MCO) is a consortium of the 15 community colleges and 9 state universities of Massachusetts. These institutions have joined to share their convenient and flexible online courses and programs with students throughout the state and beyond.

This site serves as a repository for the work created and collated by Massachusetts Community College (MCC) faculty as part of the MCC Go Open project.

The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.

Conducts unbiased large-scale evaluations of education programs and practices supported by federal funds; provides research-based technical assistance to educators and policymakers; and supports the synthesis and wide spread dissemination of the results of research and evaluation throughout the United States.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.

Supports rigorous research that addresses the nation’s most pressing education needs, ranging from early childhood to adult education.

The National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) was a partnership that included the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, MDRC, the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and faculty at Harvard University.

Sponsors a comprehensive program of special education research designed to expand the knowledge and understanding of infants, toddlers and children with disabilities.

The National Student Clearinghouse® Research Center™regularly publishes research that supports education, workforce, and learner success. Our research offers objective data and insights about student enrollment, mobility, completion, and other important student outcomes that are visible only through the Clearinghouse data. Our nationwide network of nearly 3,600 postsecondary institutions provides up-to-date student-level data that represents 97 percent of the postsecondary enrollment today. Our publications are to benefit and better inform the education community, policymakers, business leaders, and other community leaders.

Educational data through fast, flexible, and powerful tools.

We are a consortium of institutional members from both private and public colleges and universities throughout New England. The organization is run by a Board of Directors, which is formed with representatives from the membership.

The NEFDC Board is always open to new ideas, and seeks new board members every spring. Speak to any member of the Board if you have anything you wish to share, or if you are interested in joining the board.

During the summer of 2020, CCCOER created a five-week series of OER tutorials. The archives for these sessions are below and are free and open for anyone to use.
These are ideal for faculty, librarians, and instructional designers who are new to OER or need a refresher on basic concepts related to finding, adapting, and teaching with open educational resources.

Vision: Setting the global standard in online, blended, and digital learning.
Mission: Creating community and knowledge around quality online, blended, and digital learning while driving innovation.

A platform for sharing open educational resources created and adopted by faculty from Massachusetts Public Higher Education Institutions. Join us here as we collaborate, curate, and create high quality open educational resources that serve the needs of students of Massachusetts Institutions of Public Higher Education.

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.

May 2020

The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing is “[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking.” The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog aimed to help fulfill this mission by bringing together differing opinions, commentary, and ideas, and presenting them openly.

Connecting journalists, policymakers, and civic leaders with America’s top researchers to improve policy and strengthen democracy.

Boston Public Library is excited to partner with Interplay Learning to offer SkillMill for all-things maintenance training and skilled trades training course online. SkillMill offers the opportunity to:
Explore careers in the skilled trades including HVAC, plumbing, solar, and electrical and appliance repair.
Gain continuing education units and prepare for certification exams like EPA 608, OSHA 10, NATE and more.
Learn how to complete home repair projects.
A library card and an email address are required to use this resource. Complete the registration form, opens a new window to request access to SkillMill. All interested candidates will be contacted by a staff member of the BPL for confirmation and introduction to the Interplay Platform.

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Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) U S Department of Education

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Knowledge may be power, but there’s simply too much to know. Plus, we carry access to nearly all of humanity’s knowledge in our pockets. In today’s information (and misinformation) age, what’s more important is the ability to find reliable information and use it to draw reasonable conclusions.

We deliver client-focused solutions in the areas of applied research, program evaluation, organizational development, management support, educational programming, international exchange programming, training & technical assistance, and workforce development services.

March 30, 2023

April 2022

Chegg surveyed students from 21 countries about their mental health, student debt, perceptions of online learning and attitudes about their countries and their futures.

On the South African-born anthropologist John Comaroff and the political economy of silence in academia.

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The Dead River Review is an online literary magazine created in honor of Henry David Thoreau and his love of the Concord River (for more on the magazine name, see here). Dead River Review seeks to offer Middlesex Community College a venue where students and faculty can develop their craft as readers, writers, and editors of literature as well as gain professional editorial experience and publishing credentials (for land acknowledgement, see here). We are seeking to introduce experimental styles of writing to capture the essence of humanity through contemporary submissions of literature; as such, new forms of thought and expression will always be welcomed by the editorial committee. The Dead River Review is an outlet seeking professional literary standards and new styles of writing that show love of and dedication to the craft. We seek to provide a platform where writers and other artists can showcase their creative pursuits.

The Middlesex Community College group on OER Commons serves as a repository for OER materials created and/or collated by MCC faculty. The MCC group is part of the Massachusetts Community Colleges OER Hub.

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February 27, 2024

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Orientation video and making tutoring appointments.

From the American Association of Community Colleges.

The named topic begins at 19:00 minutes.

Tutorial from an established IT YouTuber.

May 13, 2024 23 minutes.

An interesting explainer May 6, 2023

June 9, 2024

May 7, 2023

August 11, 2016

A podcast series on issues in higher education.

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November 15, 2023 10 minutes

Developmental education is designed to bring underprepared college students up to speed in math or English so they can succeed in college-level courses. But too many never make it to college-level courses, let alone complete a program and earn a degree or certificate. The Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR) addresses this challenge to college completion by researching innovative practices in developmental education across the United States. CAPR’s goal is to inform policymakers and practitioners about common approaches to remedial education, promising innovations in course placement and instruction, and trends in developmental education reform. CAPR is a partnership of research scholars led by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University, and MDRC.

What is the role of developmental education in community colleges, how does it fit in with the access mission of the traditionally open-door community college, and how can it be improved to achieve better results for students and institutions?

MDRC is committed to finding solutions to some of the most difficult problems facing the nation — from reducing poverty and bolstering economic self-sufficiency to improving public education and college graduation rates. We design promising new interventions, evaluate existing programs using the highest research standards, and provide technical assistance to build better programs and deliver effective interventions at scale. We work as an intermediary, bringing together public and private funders to test new policy-relevant ideas, and communicate what we learn to policymakers and practitioners — all with the goal of improving the lives of low-income individuals, families, and children.

A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

This interactive database tracks state legislation related to student loan debt across several categories, including forgiveness, licensure, oversight and taxes. It includes pending, failed and enacted bills since 2015. The database can be searched by category, year or state. The database is updated monthly with bills identified by NCSL staff.

August 2024

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The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) is an independent, voluntary, nonprofit membership organization which partners with over 1500 public, independent, and international schools in the US and worldwide to assess, support, and promote high quality education for all students through accreditation, professional assistance, and pursuit of best practices. NEASC aspires to provide a process for meaningful, ongoing whole school improvement while honoring the unique culture and context of each institution we support. Founded in 1885, NEASC has been working to establish and maintain high standards for all levels of education longer than any other accreditation agency in the United States.

The New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) is the regional accreditation agency for colleges and universities in the six New England states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Three institutions in Greece, three in Switzerland, two in Lebanon, and one in Bulgaria, Bermuda, and Morocco, respectively, are also affiliated with NECHE. The Commission consists of faculty and administrators from affiliated institutions and public members. It is served by a staff led by Dr. Lawrence Schall.
The Commission is recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education as a reliable authority on the quality of education for the institutions it accredits. The Commission is also recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), affirming that its Standards and processes are consistent with the quality, improvement, and accountability expectations that CHEA has established.

Massachusetts residents can get a free ecard which will allow you access to a wide range of databases (https://www.bpl.org/resource/#azindex) beyond what you have access to through MCC.

This directory provides a list of preprint repositories that are available to the research community. It helps researchers find the most appropriate platform for them, enabling them to browse through existing repositories by discipline, location, language, functionalities, and other facets.

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent.

The General Index consists of 3 tables derived from over 107million journal articles.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 18+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.

A research support community for everyone, including genealogists, historians, and citizen archivists.

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Sign up for a free account for greater access to their collections.

This fulltext search index includes over 35 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and preprints crawled from the World Wide Web

JURN is a free online search tool for the finding and downloading of free full-text scholarly works.

The Open Library of Humanities journal publishes internationally-leading, rigorous and peer-reviewed scholarship across the humanities disciplines: from classics, theology and philosophy, to modern languages and literatures, film and media studies, anthropology, political theory and sociology

This tutorial demonstrates how to install and authenticate the EBSCO Mobile App as well as how to run a search and save articles to the app.

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MCC login may be required. Author Lee Gardner offers three ideas for community college administrators to move through the Covid-19 pandemic and come out stronger. This free report uses research and cases to illustrate the ideas included and how they can be adapted for every community college. If you are curious about how community colleges fared in the pandemic or are looking for inspiration, this report is a match for you. Access this report here.

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MCC login may be required. This report starts with the hard questions before diving into case studies. Those questions include, “does diversity training help?” and “why do diversity efforts often fail?” The case studies feature four colleges that tested ideas and evaluated outcomes in their diversification processes

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Does not require a paid subscription, but you will find it helpful to sign up for a free account which enables unlimited access.

MCC library login may be required. This report is a tool for examining your institution’s data-collection process and asking thoughtful questions about its data practices.