Feeling connected with classmates and an instructor while learning online can feel like an oxymoron. Yet we know that thoughtful effort to nurture connection in online spaces pays off. Students who participated in pilot Quantway and Statway online courses this past year reported noticing and appreciating when their instructor facilitated community-building.

To help educators establish and maintain a sense of community among and with students in online courses, we’ve compiled a list of tips from educators in the Carnegie Math Pathways Network that can help you build community in your online courses. Students have reported forming friendships through these strategies, feeling connected with classmates, and being more engaged in the subject matter.

Tips to Establish and Maintain Connection in Your Online Courses

• Hold an orientation session at the beginning of the term that allows you to introduce yourself and the course, and gives students a chance to meet each other
• Keep in touch with your students on a regular basis via email to check in on their progress and well-being.
• Hold virtual office hours at which students can “drop by” to connect with you one-on-one.
• Create an instructor website or section in your online course with details about how and when to best contact you with questions and concerns.
• Whenever possible, create opportunities for your students to meet virtually and work through problems together.
• Post a “Question of the Day” to start conversations in your course. (Need some ideas? Here are some ideas compiled by a Quantway educator.)
• Facilitating group work? Have student groups share a Google doc with you to easily track progress and view their work.

Strategies to Make Online Collaboration Equitable

Students arrive to their online courses with a wide range of resources, technology-savvy, and life experiences. Comfort with speaking up and collaborating can be challenging at an individual level for shy personality types, but it can also be shaped by other external factors such as mainstream perceptions of gender, race, income, sexual orientation, or physical ability. It’s up to us as educators to cultivate a culture of inclusion that makes every student feel welcome, heard, and empowered. Here are some tips that can help with that:

• Explicitly state at the beginning of and throughout the course that it is ok to admit to being confused. Emphasize that asking questions is an important part of learning.
• Find out at the beginning of the term whether students have access to a reliable device to successfully complete their online course and help them create a study plan if they don’t.
• Learn about your students’ lives outside of your classrooms for a better understanding of what support they may need in your course and to build stronger relationships with them.
• Ask students whether they have access to reliable Wi-Fi and help them create a plan if they don’t.
• Provide training or a written guide on how to use the technology of your online course rather than assuming students know how to use the technology.
• Learn whether any of your students require hearing or visual aid in your course and work to provide them if they do.

We recommend consulting colleagues in your departments and student support staff on your campus for institutional protocols and guidance on how to gather the information needed to support students’ success while also maintaining their trust and privacy.

For more suggestions on building a culture of community and inclusion in your online course, we recommend the following resources:

Recordings, presentation slides, and QA documents from our 2-part mini-series on remote learning:

• They’re Enrolled, Now Keep Them Engaged
• Keep Calm and Teach On

No One Size Fits All: Participation in the Mathematics Classroom by By Megumi Asada and Pamela E. Harris, Mathematical Association of America Blog

We believe that mathematics should be a gateway to opportunity and not a gatekeeper. So does Strong Start to Finish, an organization committed to increasing college completion by improving student enrollment and success in math and English gateway courses in their first year of study.

We’re proud to partner with Strong Start to Finish and the State University of New York to bring the proven solutions of the Carnegie Math Pathways to scale.

You can learn more about our work with Strong Start to Finish here. Contact us at [email protected] to find how we can help your institution increase college completion by implementing effective math pathways.

Building on our steadfast commitment to expanding student access to high-quality math pathways options, we’re excited to announce that in partnership with faculty in our network and the adaptive learning provider, Realizeit, we have designed three new fully-online courses that will be available in 2020.

Adapted from the current Statway and Quantway in-class course models, Carnegie Math Pathways’ fully-online courses are reimagined for the online space without compromising on the key design and pedagogical principles that underlie the success of the original Statway and Quantway versions.

We’re using a learning platform that offers a robust, intelligent, and adaptive learning experience that will help us meet our students where they are, providing just the right resources at just the right time, while also supporting through the platform’s architecture collaborative learning, an essential element of the Pathways.

The system’s built-in features also offer the capability to not only replicate what we currently do with our Productive Persistence surveys, but also to utilize the data from those surveys to inform both automated student messaging and instructor intervention.

The course system is mobile friendly, ADA compliant, and integrates seamlessly into any LMS.

Interested in piloting the online Quantway or Statway College courses?

Online versions of Quantway and Statway College will be available for institutions to pilot in spring 2020. If you’re interested in piloting either of these courses at your institution in that term, please reach out to Lewis Hosie at [email protected].

The American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) has released a new instructional standards guide, IMPACT: Improving Mathematical Prowess and College Teaching.

The vision presented in IMPACT is to improve mathematics education in the first two years of college by presenting clear guidance on how to impact the mathematical prowess of students. This guidance is intended to inspire faculty, departments, institutions, and policymakers to examine, assess, and take action to improve every component of mathematics education in the first two years of college.

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Too many students leave remedial math classes wondering whether they’ll ever make it to graduation. Quantway can change that, argues Aaron Altose, assistant professor of mathematics and Quantway instructor at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland.

Cuyahoga Quantway students, he wrote for Inside Higher Ed, consistently outperform their peers in traditional remediation. In the 2015-16 school year, Cuyahoga Quantway students saw a 75% success/pass rate for Quantway students. In contrast, the national one-year success rate in a traditional development math class averages 29%.

Read the Op-Ed

The Southern California Institute, held on June 14-16 in Rancho Cucamonga, California, brought together attendees from 13 colleges and 3 high schools, and trained over 40 new faculty to teach Statway and Quantway this coming academic year.

The event also included a Pathways orientation and new sessions and workshops, such as our new dual enrollment workshop led by Carnegie Math Pathways and the WestEd Higher Aims team, a partnership to support Statway dual enrollment implementation in California. These sessions facilitated sharing across institutions and provided focused time for teams to build on the work from the first year of implementation and plan for improvements for next year.

As part of the professional learning and enrichment for network members, Carnegie Math Pathways also designed new workshop sessions on collaborative learning strategies and a refresher on productive persistence. The collaborative learning workshop focused on sharing ideas, building comfort and confidence among instructors, and illuminating the benefits of this instructional approach for students.

We also provided an introduction to A3 Thinking—a structured, continuous improvement approach that leads to systemic problem-solving—to support schools tackling institution-wide challenges. During this workshop, we walked administrators and instructors through a strategic assessment exercise to address a particular institutional challenge that teams identified.

The final highlight of the event was our student keynote, Yvonne Chamberlain, who the day of her speech had completed her last final before her graduation from Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC). Yvonne overcame a number of personal struggles, including a difficult childhood and a serious medical condition in adulthood, before returning to college. She’d seen many of her friends earn their degrees and pursue careers, but it didn’t seem attainable for her.

After the birth of her daughter, Yvonne was determined to make a positive change in her life and she enrolled at Mt. SAC. There, Yvonne found her passion in studying history and decided to make it her focus. Yet, to move on to a university, she would need to pass math. She placed into pre-algebra and was advised to consider Statway as an alternative.

Statway proved to be critical not only to helping Yvonne meet her math requirement, but she gained knowledge and understanding meaningful for her field of study.

“I started to make connections between what I was learning in the history program to the analysis of statistical information,” Yvonne said.

Yvonne applied what she learned in Statway to her research on women’s mass incarceration, Native American studies, and education, which inspired her to start a book drive for a local women’s prison in her community. After this project, Yvonne realized that she wanted to minor in Statistics. She feels strongly that “the integrated use of statistical data will help the field of history [be] stronger and help us, as citizens, understand the past better to preserve our future.”

Statway played a vital role in enriching Yvonne’s studies and in her ability to enact change in her community, and she’ll take that with her as she continues her studies at the University of California- Riverside this fall.

Multiple Paths Forward: Diversifying Mathematics as a Strategy for College Success outlines how colleges are creating math pathways that are aligned with students’ programs of study.

Aimed at community college practitioners, this report provides the rationale for diversification, including statements by mathematics associations; definitions of math pathways and research on their impact; learning outcomes associated with specific math pathways; and an analysis of math course-taking patterns in California community colleges.

Key findings include:

• In addition to providing algebra-intensive pathways appropriate for STEM majors, many states have developed options in areas like statistics and quantitative reasoning.
• California has diverse college-level math pathways, particularly in the area of statistics — a quarter of students take a non-algebra math course that can be transferred as a general education course to a four-year university.
• However, most students never take these courses — almost half of students only get as far as remedial math.
• By ensuring that any prerequisite or co-requisite requirements are aligned with students’ major, colleges can ensure that students get farther in math and acquire the skills necessary for career and life.

This report was produced by WestEd, Just Equations, and the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

Read the Report

The Carnegie Math Pathways Midwest Institute on April 26-28 drew 70 attendees from 22 colleges across the country. A member of Salish Kootenai College’s administrative leadership said it was inspiring to have a collective conversation with people “we don’t get to see every day,” and to see and hear about all the work taking place at other institutions. The event was indeed intended to be a space for people to share and learn together, and we’re delighted that this intention came through to attendees.

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we provided professional learning sessions designed to offer time and space for NIC members to improve their practice. We kicked off our professional learning with a full group reflection that opened the floor to thoughts, questions, and concerns and heard a number of moving testimonies during this discussion.

A math faculty member from Madison Technical College shared that the Pathways has been rejuvenating for his teaching career, and advisors from Tacoma Community College shared that gaining a greater understanding of the Pathways programs has helped them better discuss these math alternatives with students.

In later sessions, faculty shared best practices in supporting student group work, and collectively brainstormed culturally relevant topics and scenarios to incorporate in the Statway and Quantway curriculum to better support their students. We gathered more than three pages of lesson suggestions and look forward to engaging the network’s curriculum committees in developing these in the coming months.

Perhaps one of the most notable takeaways from this event was the student experience shared by former Ridgewater College student, Michelle Gay. In sharing her powerful story on the challenges she experienced with education and coming back as an adult student, she highlighted the profound impact Quantway had on her personally and academically.

“Quantway helped provide access to the most precious of opportunities, and completely altered the course of my future,” she said. “I needed a second chance. I got it in Quantway…My self-worth grew as I was encouraged to work through problems, digging deep for understanding.”

Michelle said she finished her transfer degree program and even managed to qualify for national honor roll status, graduating in 2017 with enough confidence to apply to the University of Minnesota.

It is through the stories such as this—and the shared learning by the faculty and administrators within our networks—that inspire us to continue the important work of making the Pathways more accessible to students. We want to thank our faculty mentors, administrative, and the TCU advisory committee members involved in the planning of this event. It is through their work and collaboration that we were able to hold a successful institute.

Our shared aspiration is clear: To transform student learning in mathematics and dramatically increase completion. Together, we are making an impact in our collective mission to provide students a clear pathway to college and career success.

Still, we cannot consider it complete until we can offer these opportunities and outcomes to ALL students. Carnegie Math Pathways and our network partners have come far in the way of breaking down the biggest barrier to college completion. Now, we’re on to the next: affordability.

That’s why, starting this fall, Carnegie Math Pathways is making Quantway and Statway materials available at a low cost to students across the network.

Members of the Carnegie Math Pathways network will now have customized institutional pricing options that maximize affordability for all Statway and Quantway students, further shifting the burden of cost away from students. This new fee structure will significantly increase student access to the research-based curriculum and digital support.

What does this look like?

• Electronic access to the Statway and Quantway workbook and the online student learning platform will start at just $35 per year.
• Statway and Quantway Fundamentals and Bridge course materials are available at no cost to students.
• To help further minimize costs, schools will also have flexibility in how they choose to order, print and distribute student workbooks.

And starting this fall, Carnegie Math Pathways will also offer Statway and Quantway as co-requisite courses, one-term combination courses designed to provide flexible resources for remediation. Keep an eye out for additional enhanced online course offerings launching in 2019!

As the leader in the national movement for remediation reform, we’re thrilled to be the first to provide an evidence-based, affordable pathways curriculum. For more information about the Carnegie Math Pathways network, please contact [email protected].

We look forward to connecting and sharing in our mission to transform learning experiences for all.

Sincerely,

Karon Klipple
Executive Director
Carnegie Math Pathways