Consistency at Scale: A Crucial Shift for Prince George's Community College

As higher education quickly evolves toward more online and hybrid offerings and adapting to serve broader student demographics, community colleges like Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) are at the forefront of these shifts. PGCC has long been seen as a leader in online education in Maryland and beyond. But with students’ increased interest in online options, their online offerings needed an update that would provide a more engaging learning experience.

Beyond the need for more engaging online courses, PGCC faced a unique challenge specific to Maryland's higher education structure. Unlike some states, Maryland does not have a single governing body that automatically determines course transferability between community colleges (CCs) and 4-year universities. This autonomy creates a situation where individual colleges and universities have more control over determining course equivalency. Additionally, Maryland’s dual enrollment (or early college access) programs provide high school students the opportunity to take college courses. These programs can include both academic and career/technical courses and are designed to allow students to gain college credits while still in high school. To increase transferability and ensure their courses were valued by universities, PGCC needed to demonstrate consistency and quality across their online offerings.

Elevating Quality and Consistency: A Multi-Faceted Approach

To address these challenges, PGCC aimed to achieve several key objectives:

• Standardized Look and Feel: PGCC sought to elevate all their online courses to a consistent design and user experience. This consistency would drive student retention, create a more professional image, and demonstrate a commitment to quality across their online program.
• Developing Asynchronous Courses: With a growing adult learner base, PGCC needed to offer flexible, asynchronous courses that adult and high school learners could access on their own schedules.
• Proving Transferable Value: To increase acceptance by 4-year universities and support workforce development and continuing education programs, PGCC needed to establish their online courses as rigorous and equivalent to on-campus offerings.

While PGCC possessed significant educational value and expertise, there was a critical gap between their existing online educational capabilities and the engaging, flexible learning experiences students increasingly demanded. To bridge this divide and ensure effective learning for different types of students, PGCC needed to enhance the quality and accessibility of their online courses.

To make these big changes, PGCC looked for a partner who could help them efficiently upgrade their online courses to better serve student needs. They chose Everspring due to the company’s track record of providing quality educational experiences through data-driven solutions and best-in-class instructional design.

Creating a Blueprint for Exceptional Online Courses

The Everspring and PGCC partnership kicked off with intensive brainstorming sessions, bringing faculty and leadership together to craft a scalable strategy for overcoming online learning obstacles. Everspring laid out a visionary, sustainable framework aimed at elevating the quality and consistency of PGCC's digital classrooms, focusing on engaging a wide-ranging student body, especially the growing cohort of adult learners.

Everspring aligned their services to support PGCC’s online course standards and provided a strategic framework to amplify the quality and consistency of PGCC’s online courses, enhancing user engagement. This included creating highly interactive and accessible learning environments that would resonate with a diverse student population.

Actionable Initiatives for a Better Learning Experience

The cornerstone of Everspring and PGCC’s strategy was establishing a consistent course structure based on PGCC’s standards and targeting courses for redesign that would have the greatest impact on the greatest number of students. Together, they crafted a universal course template to serve as a comprehensive framework ensuring that every module and every week of instruction followed a consistent pattern, allowing students to focus on the academic content rather than where to find their assignment. PGCC knew their students were juggling school with jobs and family responsibilities, so they wanted to integrate a hybrid learning model that would mesh seamlessly into students' complex schedules, making education an accessible part of their lives rather than a burden.

With their technology and pedagogical expertise, Everspring tailored PGCC's educational content for the digital modality, resulting in a robust online curriculum. Everspring’s tools identified areas for optimization, allowing for precise refinements in instructional design and content delivery to engage PGCC’s learners.

Leveraging National Standards for Credibility

To guide the development of online courses, Everspring worked with PGCC to adopt a multi-pronged approach, leveraging their established standards and other recognized guidelines, including:

• Quality Matters (QM) standards: These rigorous quality benchmarks ensured effective instructional design and student engagement.
• Online Learning Consortium (OLC) standards: Adhering to OLC standards promoted best practices in online learning pedagogy.
• Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI): This ensures ongoing and meaningful communication between an instructor and students in an online course.

Everspring’s Work Included

• Dynamic Course Templates (Course Design Innovation): Custom templates were devised to simplify course creation, promoting consistency and aligning with online educational best practices.
• Tailored Faculty Support (1:1 Faculty Assistance Programs): Everspring provided individualized consulting to faculty, focusing on inclusive design principles to meet diverse learning needs and compliance with ADA standards.
• Enhanced Accessibility and Engagement (Accessibility Overhaul): An upgrade to digital content, multimedia, and overall course structure placed students' success at the forefront, positively shifting PGCC’s accessibility scores.
• Comprehensive Data Analysis (Improved Analytics and Reporting): Advanced data aggregation and analysis by Everspring provided actionable insights, fostering continuous course quality improvements.
• Robust Faculty and Student Resources (Faculty Help Desk and Support Materials): On-demand resources were deployed to build faculty capabilities, enabling rapid updates and continuous course enhancement.

Proving Transferable Value

With Everspring’s team of instructional design experts, PGCC has built a scalable framework for online course development that aligns with current best practices and increases transferability.

PGCC's new, standardized online courses have several key advantages that position them to better serve transfer, dual enrollment, and workforce development learners transfer market:

• Alignment with National Benchmarks: By adhering to established quality standards, PGCC demonstrates the rigor and effectiveness of their online offerings.
• Consistent Course Design: The standardized look and feel across courses makes it easier for students to focus on their work and showcases PGCC's commitment to quality online education.
• Focus on Asynchronous Learning: The new courses have flexible design that caters to adult learners and aligns with the needs of many 4-year universities.

Immediate Impact: Meeting Students Where They Are

The impact of the course redesign was immediate. Faculty received their new and improved courses well before their next academic term start date, boosting student experiences from the get-go.

Everspring's innovative approach not only improved accessibility scores by 10% but also set a sustainable path for increased access, engagement, and academic achievement.

More than setting a precedent, PGCC's refreshed courses now serve as the gold standard, establishing the benchmark for the future of online education.

Redefining Online Education: PGCC’s New Standard of Excellence

Leveraging the successes of their collaboration, PGCC is expanding its partnership with Everspring. This move aims to elevate the standard of online course development across more courses, underscoring the college's dedication to excellence in academics and innovation in digital learning.

PGCC and Everspring’s work together is set to continue making a significant, positive difference for the institution and its student body, pioneering a new era in online learning for the community college.

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