The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office has awarded Long Beach City College with a one-year, $500,000 grant known as the Career Technical Education Online Teaching Improvement Project (COTIP).

Throughout the 2019-2020 fiscal year, COTIP will work to improve online Career Technical Education (CTE) pathways at LBCC through a collaboration between the Office of Online Learning and Educational Technology (OLET), the Department of Computer and Offices Studies (COS), Library, and CTE faculty to improve the number and quality of online programs.

“Online learning is growing rapidly in higher education and over the past few years at LBCC our online enrollments and class sessions have increased by 120 percent and our success rates by 14 percent,”  said Dr. Hussam Kashou, LBCC Associate Dean of Online Learning & Educational Technology and Principal Investigator of the COTIP grant project. “Last year alone, distance learning enrollments increased by 16 percent and distance learning success rates by 5 percent. Distance Education helps meet the needs of our student population and the primary goal of the COTIP grant project is to improve access to, and quality of, existing online courses, to develop fully online certificates, and enhance our online education services for faculty and students.”

The long-term goal of the grant period is to focus on professional development and improving the availability and quality of online certificates through instructional redesign, support services and resources for students and faculty. The project will pilot this process for five certificates in COS, one certificate in Library, and create a framework that will be applicable across different departments and types of awards.  

A CTE faculty cohort will be created and will soon begin reviewing pilot online courses, aligning them with the CVC-OEI Online Course Design rubric, and supporting the completion of various aspects of the grant. A Web Development “boot camp” will also be developed to help students quickly enter the workforce and increase their hourly earnings.

Other efforts include:

• Improving infrastructure and workflow of Online Education support services and resources for faculty and students.
• Developing and maintaining new Online Learning Services/Resources Websites for Distance Learning Faculty.
• Evaluating current infrastructure and workflow of faculty and student services for accessing and utilizing Distance Education tools, resources, and support services.
• Developing a Distance Education Faculty Handbook and Distance Education Student Readiness Handbook with input from college constituents.
• Developing and maintaining an OER/ZTC resource website to support the identification and integration of OER/ZTC resources into online courses. 
• Supporting the integration of OER/ZTC textbooks into online CTE courses.