The typical 16-week college semester can be a challenging commitment for community college students who juggle jobs, families and a host of other responsibilities alongside their schoolwork.
A national education nonprofit Achieving the Dream wants to shorten the timeline. They’ve selected five community colleges in Ohio to pilot eight-week academic terms, or “mini-mesters”.
Columbus State Community College, Edison State Community College, Hocking College, Lorain County Community College and Northwest State Community College will test out the shortened timeline, in hopes of catering to adult learners’ needs.
“Especially [at] the community college level, you have adult learners, ones that want to come back and reskill and upskill and the length of time [a degree takes] often is one of the largest detriments to a student's success,” said Jason Lafferty, the associate vice president of academics at Northwest State Community College in Archbold.
How it works
“Mini-mesters” already exist for some courses at community colleges across the state. But, through the partnerships with Achieving the Dream, institutions like Northwest State Community College will scale up their offerings.
Lafferty said he wants more than half of NSCC’s coursework to be offered in eight-week terms.
“Here's an opportunity for a student to accelerate through a program in a year or in a year and a half, whereas in the past it took them anywhere from two to three years to complete it,” he said.
The shortened semester doesn’t necessarily mean condensing 16 weeks of work into half the time. He said the community colleges are focused on the results rather than mirroring the workload and style of traditional semesters.
“Whether it’s synchronous work, asynchronous work, testing, as long as the student gets the fundamental outcomes of what we think they need from that course, we can determine the period of time that they would need to complete it, which could be as quickly as eight weeks.”
Measuring outcomes
As they implement these shortened semesters over the course of the next four years, Lafferty said they also will be collecting data to study how these minimesters could be scaled to other colleges.
The community colleges will evaluate whether or not students complete the course and what their grades look like at the end of the minimester. Lafferty said they’re also looking closely at students who drop the classes.
“A lot of students withdraw and they withdraw in the first or second week [of the semester] because life happens,” he said. “They would have the ability to re-enroll in a second 8-week course during the same semester. So they wouldn't lose time to completion and they wouldn't lose their momentum.”
Most importantly, Lafferty said, they’ll track how many of their students who participate in shortened semesters complete their degrees.
He’s hopeful that having a flexible model will mean more success for nontraditional students.
“As an adult, I want to try to get that degree as quickly as possible, get those skills as quickly as possible so that I can use them as quickly as possible.”
