Avenues of Impact – The Power of Community Colleges 

By Shira Segal, Senior Manager of Open Education Collaborations, MIT Open Learning

Note: This is the second article in a three-part series that tells the story of what happens when MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, collaborates with Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona and College of the Canyons in California in order to put free and open educational resources into the hands of community college faculty. In this project, generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we worked closely with 11 faculty members over the course of a year to help them find and adapt MIT OpenCourseWare materials for use in their curriculum. In doing so, we created a community of practice and learned the value of working together, the power of listening, and the impact of Open on student success. Read the series: Collaborating with Community Colleges to Amplify the Power of Open, Collaborations Across Higher Education Sectors, and Key Learnings from Collaborations. This series accompanies a special Chalk Radio^® episode.

In the previous installment of this three-part series, I reflected on the value of open education and MIT OpenCourseWare’s efforts to meaningfully contribute and shape the field since its launch 25 years ago. Here, we turn the focus to community colleges, highlighting how institutions like Maricopa Community Colleges and College of the Canyons are leading the way in making higher education accessible and affordable to a wide range of students. In the final article, I’ll examine what these collaborations have taught us about the power of Open and collaboration.

The unsung heroes of higher education can be found in community colleges. Inherently student-centered, community colleges are chronically underfunded and underestimated, but they excel at focusing on teaching and pedagogy as a primary value. They illustrate the power of resilience and innovation, knowing how to do a lot with very little, and to do so for anyone who enrolls. On top of that, their educational offerings are more likely to be tailored to the localized contexts of their students, responding to unique student needs in each community and further enabling their success. The high-quality educational opportunities they offer to first-generation college students from underserved communities open the doors to further education and opportunities.

“Community colleges were created to give access to education, to bring democracy to education, to make education more local,” explains Fernando Romero, a faculty member at Maricopa’s Chandler Gilbert Community College in Arizona who participated in our collaborative project, speaking in a reflective interview about how community colleges have long provided an affordable pathway for both traditional and nontraditional students to pursue high-quality post-secondary education. 

“We not only do the first two years better than anybody else, we also do job training and career enhancement,” says Anne Marenco, a faculty member at College of the Canyons in California who also participated in our collaboration. Describing community colleges’ embedded culture of caring and service in a reflective interview, she declares, “We’re not a junior college, we’re a community college. We serve our community. Our communities have such varied needs. And we take care of them.” (To hear more from Romero and Marenco, including audio excerpts from them and other faculty members that participated in our project, see this previous Voices from the Field article that highlights their reflections early on in our collaboration together.) 

Community colleges are vital leaders and implementers of open education initiatives, too, and may have strong infrastructure to help faculty implement open educational resources (OER) in their teaching. For instance, Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona, one of the largest community college districts in the United States, was the first higher education institution in the United States to enable students to search its course catalog specifically for no-cost or low-cost courses. Since launching the Maricopa Millions project in 2013, the Open Maricopa initiative has saved students over $270 million on textbook costs! Similarly, College of the Canyons, part of the California Community College system, the largest system of higher education in the United States, has long played a key role in advancing the use of open educational resources across California, including the implementation of a Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree program for 115 community colleges. At $115 million, this is the largest-ever public investment in open education. 

In their endeavors to make education accessible for all, minority-serving institutions with established, successful open infrastructure illustrate the power of supporting students and faculty alike. Sarah Hansen, MIT Open Learning’s assistant director of open education innovation, speaks to the reach and power of infrastructures of care when she interviewed faculty from Maricopa Community Colleges and College of the Canyons as part of our collaboration. In a special episode of Chalk Radio^® that describes this project, Hansen describes how faculty responded when asked if they were adequately supported in the open work that they’re doing. She says, “Every single one, without any exceptions, [said], ‘Yes,’ which I found just so incredible. They all felt super supported by their home institutions.” Thus, community colleges provide valuable models of what happens when faculty make use of open educational resources and how to effectively support faculty’s efforts to do so. 

An Opportunity to Collaborate: Infrastructures of Care

When the opportunity to work closely with these two prominent, minority-serving community college systems presented itself—thanks to generous funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation—MIT OpenCourseWare couldn’t say no. Collectively, we and our co-leaders at those colleges hoped to accomplish a few things: first, we wanted to learn about the needs of select community college faculty and to find ways to meaningfully respond to those needs with MIT’s open educational resources. Second, we wanted to develop and provide training in open educational resources for faculty looking to fill content gaps in their curriculum or to learn about open pedagogy practices. And finally, we wanted to build a community of practice that would provide a model of cross-sector collaboration rooted in an ethos of care and community-building.

We pursued the first goal by conducting numerous reflective interviews throughout the grant period along with guided discovery and active curation support, resulting in the integration and adaptation of MIT course materials into the faculty’s curriculum and teaching, and at times the creation of new open educational resources as well. The second goal was realized when the team at College of the Canyons developed Exploring OER and Open Pedagogy, a self-paced open-access course on open educational resources, as well as an in-person workshop on emergent technologies that impact our teaching and the field.

Our final goal led us to organize a two-day in-person community building summit at Phoenix Forge, a makerspace powered by Maricopa’s GateWay Community College, where we showcased the results of faculty members’ adaptation projects, discussed the impact of generative AI on open education, brainstormed how to adapt open educational resources with an eye on accessibility and inclusion, and—of course!—made things together from scratch under the guidance and instruction of Phoenix Forge staff. This provided an opportunity to learn about and from each of our communities, including the goals and history of MIT OpenCourseWare as well as the unique curriculum needs and pedagogical approaches of faculty from the California- and Arizona-based community college systems. We further supported ongoing community-building virtually in a “Sustaining OER Initiatives Through Connection” online event after the grant period ended, too.

Photos by MIT OpenCourseWare, including photo of College of the Canyons faculty member Isaac Koh.

In all, we connected with 11 faculty across the two community college systems and for a range of academic disciplines, covering curriculum in chemistry, communication, engineering, psychology, sociology, critical reading, history, and business. We learned from faculty what their course- and context-specific needs were, and provided further materials and support for their teaching and curriculum development, leaning on further expertise from MIT Open Learning in intellectual property and accessibility. We connected faculty with one another across state lines, and we carried forth the lessons of our cross-sector open collaboration with the open education community at a handful of conferences: OEGlobal 2023 in Edmonton, Canada; OER24 in Cork, Ireland; OpenEd24 in Providence, Rhode Island; and OEGlobal 2024 in Brisbane, Australia. 

And, now, we’re excited to foreground the valuable work of our community college colleagues to the wider public. Read about our key learnings from this collaboration in the last installment of this series, and tune in to a special podcast episode.

Keep reading in Key Learnings from Collaborations.

(Header image credit: Photo by MIT OpenCourseWare.)