WNCC 2010 Self-Study Report - Western Nebraska Community ...

Service Area Day Time
Independent Learning
and Assessment Center
Monday – Thursday
Friday
07:30 a.m. to 09:00 p.m.
07:30 a.m. to 04:00 p.m.
Writing Center
Math Center
Monday – Thursday
Friday
Monday – Thursday
Friday
09:00 a.m. to 06:00 p.m.
09:00 a.m. to 03:00 p.m.
08:00 a.m. to 06:00 p.m.
08:00 a.m. to 03:00 p.m.
Students fill out evaluative surveys about the effectiveness, convenience, and quality of
their visits to the Math Center, the Writing Center, and the Independent Learning and
Assessment Center (ILAC) each semester. Student satisfaction remains consistently
positive, as specific results of student opinions about the operations of these support
services will show when they appear elsewhere later in this report.
As previously mentioned, students can now access Smart Thinking online tutoring services
nearly any time of the day or night. WNCC purchased 5,000 hours of tutoring time spread
across the disciplines which Smart Thinking covers. Any student at any location registered
into a WNCC class may use the service, but it is anticipated that online enrollees are the
most likely to take advantage of the help available, and online instructors inform students
about the opportunity. The service has not been in place long enough to gauge either its
effectiveness or even the extent to which it will be used. However, providing the service
adds an additional dimension of available, multi-discipline tutoring for both online and
traditional students.
Observations and Possible Strategies to Address Needs
Enrollment
In order to maintain viable enrollments and for the good of the students who are not
persisting in their education, the College intends to launch a retention/success initiative in
order to collect more comprehensive information about student success, particularly in the
developmental courses, which, not surprisingly, have the highest attrition rates. Although
WNCC does not participate in the national Achieving the Dream movement, key program
organizers like Dr. Byron McClenney from the Community College Leadership Program at
the University of Texas--Austin urge people at other community colleges to collect the wellpublished
key data points that Achieving the Dream participant institutions use in order to
obtain information to help develop strategies to increase student learning and retention.
When the data collection is implemented, figures relating to the rate of student
advancement into other sequenced classes, success in subsequent developmental
education courses, and the tracking of individual performance into college-level work and
through to graduation or certificate, diploma or degree attainment, will be gathered.
College personnel seek to build a longitudinal data base to use for data-informed decision
making. Particularly, attrition rates are a primary concern, and the hope is that data can
help faculty and staff members create effective strategies that can be implemented when
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Western Nebraska Community College