Kapi'olani Community College Vision continued

A variety of structural problems prevent an optimum flow of students through this workforce pipeline – adversely affecting the college’s responsiveness to community need. These problems affect program efficiency and student quality. The most significant problems are:

Course Based Learning Structures The fundamental unit of student learning is the course, which assesses student competencies in the aggregate. As a result, it is difficult to guarantee student competence for each competency upon course completion. In addition, course competencies tend to be concentrated on professional requirements and tend to be inadequate in addressing learning skills, the affective domain, and collateral workplace/student skills. In effect, traditional assessment of student learning occurs at the tree level, overlooking the leaves and branches that make up a tree.

Learning Relationships Educational institutions often perceive themselves as providers of knowledge rather than facilitators of learning, which tends to establish teacher – learner, knowledge bearer and knowledge receiver relationships. Although curricular and instructional structures are efficient and useful ways of guiding the learning relationship, they often overlook the fact that learning can and does occur outside of the classroom, and often times without the presence of a teacher. Returning to the forest metaphor, trees do have an ability to grow without gardeners always present.

To more effectively meet the state’s workforce requirements in health care, the college will need to focus its learning support services effort to more effectively address the structural flaws within its programs.

The Vision

Resource constraints at the college prevent traditional learning support methods from being scaled upwards. Development of online learning support services provide an alternative method of service delivery. It is suggested however, that to be effective, these support services need to be developed strategically and targeted at the structural flaws of traditional education.

The vision being proposed is not a technological solution, but rather an organizational strategy for delivering learning assistance at the program level.

Competency Based Learning Structures Focus on specific competencies found within the course to insure that critical competencies are developed among students. Online tutorials capable of assessing, remediating, and tracking student performance are ideal for this.

Areas of initial development by the college are tutorials designed to 1) perform work skills assessment, skills development, and tracking and 2) applied competencies not adequately addressed by prerequisite courses (health related math skills and emphasis on anatomy topics not adequately covered by introductory math/anatomy and physiology courses).

Program Based Communities An online community is perceived as essential for the delivery of online learning support services. The concept of a program based online community implies a mechanism through which communications can occur between students, faculty, advisors, and the public who are in some manner tied to a particular academic program.

The purpose of the community is to provide a thread that connects and creates learning experiences at the program level – above the course level. Initial efforts at the college will use the program based community to: 1) inform (program specific calendar or bulletin), 2) to manage program level learning experiences (program level coordination of service learning), 3) to provide learning assistance (peer tutoring/mentoring), and 4) to permit random/personal communications between students to foster student community building (bulletin board/email).

Multiple Learning Relationships Due to resource constraints, the scalability of online learning support services can only be achieved through automation (tutorials) or student involvement and management of community activities.

Summary

An academic program based approach has been adopted for the development of online learning support services. The desired outcome of these activities are measurable gains in the efficiency of the educational pipeline in producing quality health care workers.

This is to be achieved by developing micro competency based and macro community based learning structures designed to overcome structural weaknesses in the course based learning structure. These services are expected to be available 24/7, scalable across all educational levels from the high school to the workplace, and measurably provide a return on the investment involved. Technology requirements are affordable and available to most institutions when implemented in their simplest form.