Five Ohio community colleges are joining a new national push to explore how their schools can best offer more eight-week classes – or half the time of a standard semester.
The schools include Columbus State Community College, Edison State Community College, Hocking College, Lorain County Community College and Northwest State Community College.
Condensed class offerings are becoming more popular nationwide, especially at community colleges. Research shows those who enroll tend to complete their courses at higher rates and ultimately take more classes overall.
“It is a shorter runway and a deeper form of learning that really allows for students to focus on knowledge in chunks,” said Marisa Vernon White, Lorain County Community College’s vice president of Enrollment Management and Student Services.
Offering flexibility is especially important for community college students. The majority take classes part-time, often juggling work and/or additional responsibilities outside of their classrooms.
But moving to an eight-week schedule is a big, institutional-level undertaking. Financial aid departments need to adjust payment schedules. Registration processes for classes must change as students may take fewer, shorter courses at one time.
National non-profit and community college advocacy group Achieving the Dream wants that. The organization is spearheading a program where selected two-year publics learn how to best embed and sustain new systems to best offer the accelerated classes, according to a recent news release.
Eleven other institutions in Maryland, Michigan, and Virginia join the five Ohio colleges. Over the next four years, this program will offer resources that include hands-on coaching and strengthening the ways they collect and use data.
Short-term classes are more than “compressing everything from a 16-week course into an eight-week course”
Shorter courses are nothing new for many community colleges, including Lorain County Community College. The school already offers accelerated classes in several areas, including its nursing and culinary programs.
But leaders wanted help to figure out how to expand and sustain those offerings so more of the college’s nearly 10,000 students could take part, according to LCCC Provost Denise Douglas. She said a major part of that shift includes creating classes that are more “intentionally designed.”
“We don’t want to just look at it from the standpoint of compressing everything from a 16-week course into an eight-week course,” she said.
Through this program, each institution is matched with coaches to help them navigate those types of challenges. Participants will meet regularly with both their in-state and national peers. LCCC’s Vernon White said they’ll also take cues from colleges that already made these shifts, such as Amarillo College in Texas.
“There’s a lot of knowledge transfer that can be really valuable here,” she said.
LCCC leaders said the college plans to transition the majority of its classes to an eight-week schedule by the time the program wraps in 2029.