Calbright’s founding legislation calls for the College to serve as a research and development engine to expand options for adult learners across the California Community Colleges system and help solve the complex equation of how to best nurture adult learner success. This success begins with innovative solutions to drive students’ program progress and help ensure stronger career outcomes.
To further this priority, in 2023, Calbright partnered with Axim Collaborative to sponsor and design a track in the 2023-2024 Learning Engineering Tools Competition focused on making college more equitable, accessible, and effective for adult students. There were hundreds of submissions, and ultimately six teams won prize money to develop and implement their ideas. Winners in the Engaging Adult Learners in Higher Education track presented proposals that leverage technology and learning engineering to improve equity and access to higher education, particularly for adult learners from high-need demographics historically underserved by current education and workforce systems.
In the fall, Calbright and Axim facilitated a virtual Product Review Day, and the six winners, highlighting the tools for technical and industry experts, researchers, and others in the edtech space. Together, the winners presented their tools – which leverage cutting edge AI and learning engineering – and outlined their progress and received feedback on their designs. The goal was to accelerate winners’ progress with additional support and resources to maximize impact, and facilitate partnerships among fellow winners and other leaders in the field.
“The collaboration among the participants amplifies the impact and expands the reach of our shared work,” said Marisa Bold, Calbright’s Vice-President of Sustainable Growth and District Development. “By fostering these connections, we inspire innovation, build new partnerships, and drive meaningful outcomes.”
The winning teams who participated included:
- Personalized, Timely, Proactive Faculty Support of Online Students, Western Governors University – whose project is a machine learning model providing individualized feedback to online students.
- Wingspans – whose AI “experience translator” is designed to help students find career paths which fit their skills and interests, and where they will thrive.
- OATutor – which is developing an open-source adaptive tutoring system for adult learners driven by generative AI research.
- Campus Evolve – whose “AI guide” maps the array of a school’s supports to each student, at every stage of their learning journey.
- Unlocked Labs – which is creating a Competency-Based Education system for incarcerated learners, offering real-time insights for administrators and researchers.
- Mainstay – whose human-centered, AI-enhanced guide will empower adult learners to achieve their career goals.
Two of those projects, Wingspans’ “Experience Translator” and OATutor’s adaptive tutoring system, are being developed in partnership with Calbright, tapping into Calbright’s leading expertise and utilizing their student body of adult learners in order to center the voice and needs adult students in the design process.
“These opportunities for collaboration have a direct impact for our learners at Calbright and learners like them across California and the nation, and in turn means our student’s voices and experiences are shaping the design of these cutting edge tools,” Bold said
In all, the innovations emphasized equity and access – making high quality higher education available to more people, and more kinds of people. They also prioritized open science and data, with a measurement and outcomes focus.
It’s one more way, along with cutting edge pedagogy and innovative new systems, that Calbright is improving student success for online learners, pushing us further and faster towards increased program completion and strong workforce outcomes.
