Competitive EDUCAUSE Grant Bolsters MCCC Student Success Efforts‏

Blue Bell/Pottstown, PA —Montgomery County Community College (MCCC) is one of only 24 institutions in the country to be awarded up to $225,000 in funding from EDUCAUSE as part of a recent grant competition designed to help two- and four-year colleges and universities develop integrated approaches to student success.

The grant initiative, called Integrated Planning & Advising for Student Success (IPASS), was created with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. Participating institutions are required to launch or continue their development of comprehensive IPASS technologies by 2018, with the goal of increasing year-to-year student retention by at least 10 percent.

At Montgomery, the grant will build on the institution’s recent efforts to redesign student advising and educational planning through its Integrated Planning and Advising Services (IPAS) initiative, supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The goal of IPAS is for every new degree-seeking student to complete education, financial and career plans within his or her first semester at the College, and that these plans will lead to improved retention, progression and completion,” explained Dr. Celeste Schwartz, vice president for information technology and college services at MCCC.

Introduced by MCCC in 2014, IPAS employs a variety of technology solutions to connect students with their support teams—faculty, advisors, support services—and map out their educational plans, while allowing faculty and advisors to provide early/regular feedback and referrals. The redesigned advising process also requires all first-time students to meet with an advisor prior to registering for classes.

“Early indicators from the College’s efforts as an IPAS round one recipient are promising,” said Schwartz. “Montgomery has seen an institutional culture shift in its approach to advising students and is experiencing greater engagement of faculty in our collective student success initiatives.”

The EDUCAUSE grant will enable MCCC to extend its educational planning platform to include career and financial planning, as well as to deepen its use of predictive analytics in order to develop more customized interventions for at-risk students and student success.

All projects in the EDUCAUSE IPASS grant challenge focus on three broad student-facing outcomes: education planning, counseling and coaching, and risk targeting and intervention. The projects will undergo rigorous, third-party analysis of student outcomes and return on investment, led by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University. Outcomes from all 24 participating institutions will be shared nationally in order to accelerate the adoption of IPASS systems.

EDUCAUSE is a non-profit association and the foremost community of IT leaders and professional committed to advancing higher education. EDUCAUSE programs and services are focused on analysis, advocacy, community building, professional development and knowledge creation because IT plays a transformative role in higher education. EDUCAUSE supports those who lead, manage and use information technology through a comprehensive range of resources and activities. For more information, visit educause.edu.

MCCC Builds STEM Partnerships, Literacy Through PA Space Grant Consortium‏

Blue Bell, PA —Montgomery County Community College (MCCC) is the newest member, and the first community college in the Commonwealth, to join the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium (PSGC) under a three-year, $36,000 project, which is funded in part by NASA and is developed in coordination with Temple University.

In its role, MCCC is charged with inspiring educators and equipping them with the strategies, tools and resources to engage students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) literacy. This includes building strategic partnerships between formal and informal STEM education providers and the industry. Montgomery’s Engineering program will accomplish its objective in three ways: by building on the work of its Student Engineering Research and Nanotechnology Laboratory (SERNL); by offering engineering outreach programs at local high schools; and by investing in undergraduate internship and scholarship programs.

“These initiatives focus on mentoring engineering students and exposing them to innovative research opportunities throughout the educational pipeline—starting in high school and continuing through graduation from a four-year university,” explained Dr. David DiMattio, dean of STEM at MCCC.

Research is the key focus of MCCC’s Student Engineering Research and Nanotechnology Laboratory (SERNL), which functions as an incubator for emerging technologies. The lab was initially created in 2013 to support MCCC’s QuadForge Undergraduate Research Program, an open source research project that affords freshmen and sophomore engineering and computer science students with the opportunity to develop autonomous quadrotor flight vehicles, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

As part of the QuadForge project, students began developing and testing a world-first nanotechnology weatherization coating, in cooperation with industry partners, that allows UAVs to fly in bad weather environments, such as sea mist, snow and rain. The PSGC funding will enable students to continue experiments with advanced hydrophobic and superhydrophobic nanotech developments, as well as to explore new materials, such as knitted nanofibers.

“The work students are doing in our SERNL incubator has the potential of protecting NASA-related payloads and other industrial endeavors from water, oil and hydraulic fluids. This is groundbreaking stuff!” said DiMattio.

For the outreach portion of the PSGC project, MCCC will build on its successful partnership with North Penn High School (NPHS), where, for the past three years, SERNL students and faculty have introduced high school students to STEM disciplines, like mechanical and electrical engineering, chemistry, math and computer science, and key topics and concepts, such as design processes and tools and systems engineering.

This past summer, NPHS and MCCC students achieved another world first by immersing live electronic components in water for 11 continuous days without a failure and performing underwater assembly of multiple mechanical and electronic components. This fall, MCCC and NPHS’ Engineering Academy are partnering with Florida-based UltraTech International to continue their exploration of nanotech coatings for electronic components. The PSGC funding will enable MCCC to expand these programs to more high schools in order to increase STEM literacy among junior and senior high school students in the region.

The final portion of MCCC’s PSGC project will focus on growing undergraduate internship and scholarship opportunities for students by building strategic partnerships and linkages between STEM education and STEM industry.

“Internships and scholarships are critical tools in keeping undergraduate STEM students focused on their studies,” said DiMattio. “Select students can engage in research at a lower financial burden and can, at the same time, increase their skills and proficiencies in emerging STEM technologies.”

MCCC’s partnership with Temple University will also continue to provide students with unique opportunities. For example, last summer, two MCCC students had the opportunity to observe sounding rocket payload launches at Wallops Island, Va. as part of Temple Engineering’s RockOn grant project.

To learn more about Montgomery County Community College’s Engineering programs, visit http://www/mc3.edu/academics, then click on Areas of Study, followed by STEM.