| layout | modal-id | date | img | img-alt | img-author | img-license | img-license-link | video-link | webm-link | project-date | project-name | institution | oer-repository-link | categories | blurb | |
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6 |
2014-07-18 |
nisgtc_drawing.png |
This would be the image title |
Giulia Forsythe |
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
April 2014 |
NISGTC |
Collin County Community College District |
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Virtual labs and OER for IT jobs in high demand. |
#Overview [end]
It’s hard to conceive of a more vivid example of the power of open educational resources to constructively transform the education and job training landscape – and tilt it more toward inclusion, lower costs, increased linkages with industry and more transparent measures of quality -- than the National Information Security and Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC), organized by Collin College, in Frisco, Texas. The consortium’s focus: using open educational resources (OER) to reduce or eliminate the cost of specialized textbooks, lab exercises and other learning materials that often burden community college students more than tuition. Paying for learning materials can add up to more than three times the cost of attending many community college technical programs that lead to higher paying jobs. NISGTC also works closely with industry partners to help community college job training programs provide students, unemployed workers and employees seeking continuing education exposure to the specific skill sets employers are looking for in rapidly evolving technical fields. [end]
#Relevant to the workforce [end]
OER are learning materials that are in the public domain or that have been released with an intellectual property license that allows their free use and repurposing by others. All the new intellectual property produced by NISGTC, which includes curriculum, courses and online virtual labs, is being released as freely available OER. The OER reduces and in some cases eliminates a major expense community college students usually face – high-priced textbooks and other learning materials, including online access fees – costs that can rapidly escalate if they want to pursue a wide range of interrelated studies as they move toward their education, job training and career goals. NISGTC’s progress in breaking down those barriers has people talking.
“It’s a pleasure to work with these students,” says Tu Huynh, Vice President of Infrastructure Technology Services for Comerica Bank, a consortium employer partner and program mentor. “They are bright, they are smart, they are hard workers, and they are employable!” In something that is pretty rare, even remarkable for job training programs these days, dozens of employers now list job openings directly on NISGTC’s LinkedIn page.
One reason the accolades and attention are coming in from employers, students, and educators is the consortium’s focus on one of the most cutting-edge, rapidly growing fields: digital networking and related technologies, industries that are projected to maintain steady growth for years to come. The burgeoning networking industry is a magnet for individuals interested in innovation and progress. It is also a thriving business segment that relies heavily on open standards and open source software, using practices very similar to those embraced by the OER community that includes NISGTC. Another reason NISGTC is playing a new starring role bolstering community college job training programs is the careful way consortium leaders identified high growth labor market niches and related job training course components that would most quickly lead graduates into higher-wage employment. Called BILT (Business Industry Leadership Teams), the process engages business and industry leaders as participants in an ongoing oversight role that continuously adjusts curriculum to maintain workplace relevance. [end]
#Innovative program leadership [end]
But in the end, the praise directed toward NISGTC, which includes many online testimonials offered by recent program graduates, stems primarily from the expertise, experience and innovative stewardship of NISGTC’s program leaders, among them Ann Beheler, the veteran high-tech business executive who serves as NISGTC’s Principal Investigator at the consortium’s organizing flagship Collin College campus.
Beheler literally wrote the book (or at least one early, important book) on computer networking before she moved into academia some years ago. More recently, she took on the task of helping to modernize our nation’s workforce training system. Her goal is to see NISTGC serve as a model effort to demonstrate how to better meet the needs of today’s students, unemployed workers, and industries like the networking and technology markets she helped create during her pre-academic career, which included executive and board level service at leading firms such as Rockwell International, Raytheon, and Novell. [end]
#OER and virtual labs [end]
The BILT process, which was originally developed at the National Convergence Technology Center at Collin College, guided NISGTC toward developing or strengthening education and job training programs in four carefully targeted and tightly interrelated, high-growth industry segments: networking and data communications, applications development, geospatial technologies; and cybersecurity. “We were thinking with a 12 to 36 month employability mindset,” says Beheler, who points to surveys of employers in those industries indicating immediate average starting wages for open positions above $20 per hour. After identifying target industries and programs, the NISGTC team set about the process of identifying and organizing the most directly related, free, high-quality OER that could meet the academic and job training needs identified by the consortium’s business partners. In cases where free OER are not readily available or when what is available is not suitable for use by community college students, the consortium fills those gaps and creates new, free OER. All told, 200 open virtual online labs are being created, all of which can be freely used and repurposed by others. “The virtual labs make it possible for us to reach so many more students,” says Beheler, who adds that a single online virtual lab can take the place of six or even eight large, cumbersome physical machines, all of which would also require time-consuming, costly help from instructors to set up and maintain. Another benefit: “The virtual labs directly mimic what a student encounters in a business environment and students can do them any time including the middle of the night and on weekends,” she says.
Because the labs are open and virtual, others can see exactly what NISGTC students are learning and doing, transparency that makes it much easier to assess and evaluate program characteristics and strengths, including for purposes of credit transferability and portability. The transparency also makes it easier to continuously improve programs, since it is harder to improve curriculum and learning resources when only paid customers know what is in it and when changes can only be made by the original copyright holder. The economics are pretty convincing, too. Beheler calculates that some of the first students to benefit from the consortium’s work saved more than $125,000 in textbook costs alone in a single Utah community college course over its first four semesters. “And that’s just one college,” she adds. [end]
#Efficiency and growth through OER [end]
Winning another distinction, NISGTC is also one of the first Department of Labor federal job training grantees to share online the new open digital education and job training resources it is creating, including full courses, in advance of the formal deadline for doing so under the terms of the start-up grant it received from the U.S. Department of Labor. Last year, the Department of Labor designated California State University’s Merlot repository as the official future home of all federally funded open learning resources produced by NISGTC and other federal grantees in the same program. But even before the designation was announced, NISGTC had already begun uploading its newly produced open resources to the free open source online National Training and Education Resource website (https://www.nterlearning.org/), which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy. “We are eager for people to see what we are doing,” explains Beheler. “That’s the whole point of open educational resources. You do work in the open, share it freely, make it better, and everyone benefits.”
Beheler is a big believer in OER. So much so that she recently titled one of her talks “Free is Good.” But she quickly adds that her main point is that efficiency matters, and that if scarce educational funds can be spent to build renewable learning resources that benefit students, schools, and promote business growth, those investments are wise and practical. Beheler adds that she is particularly committed to using OER to open up opportunities in technical professions for more women, minorities, older workers, and anyone else who might otherwise be denied an equal chance to achieve success. The development, use and continuous improvement of open educational resources brings those goals closer within reach, she says.
The National Information Security and Geospatial Technologies Consortium is open to new institutions using all their materials and is funded by a nearly $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. At present, seven colleges in six states, including Texas, are participating. The other consortium partners in addition to Collin College are: Bellevue College, WA Bunker Hill Community College, MA DelMar College, TX Moraine Valley Community College, IL Rio Salado College, AZ Salt Lake Community College, UT
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