The state of California designed Calbright College to be both a groundbreaking college and a research and development laboratory for the entire California Community Colleges system. Calbright’s charge: creating ways to better serve and support adult populations in achieving their education and career goals and who find traditional colleges inaccessible.
We’ve succeeded in that vital goal.
Seven years later, at the end of its “start-up period” set by the California Legislature, Calbright has established itself as a state and national leader in research innovations that advance online education. Everything from user-friendly technology made for working-age adults to human-centered support that goes beyond academic needs to connecting education and job-skills training programs to the California job market adult learners actually find themselves navigating today.
Calbright’s in-house experts and accomplished faculty work with labor market data leaders such as Lightcast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and California’s Labor Market Information Division. Calbright partners with research powerhouses like UC Irvine, the Community College Research Center, and technology innovators through the annual Tools Competition. Calbright researches challenging problems in higher education, pilots job skills programs designed to address them, iterates with constant student feedback until these programs are successful, and then shares our findings with sister community colleges in California and national partners for the benefit of students, faculty, education, and workforce leaders.
These efforts are connected to the California Community Colleges Vision 2030, which calls for policy and education leaders to remove barriers to higher education and address the changing education needs of California students and communities, and with Governor Newsom’s State Master Plan for Career Education, which prioritizes strengthening skills-based mastery beyond traditional academic learning as a gateway to economic opportunity.
“The establishment of Calbright was a visionary endeavor and it was a signal by the state of California saying that we’ve got to start building a structure where every Californian has an opportunity to get to higher education,” CCC Chancellor Dr. Sonya Christian said. “You are the only – let me repeat that – you are the only statewide college taking on very difficult problems we haven’t solved before and you’re systematically solving problems with such detailed work.”
Broadly, Calbright’s most significant research has fallen into three categories:
- New ways to directly support students in their education and career journeys
- Innovations that drive economic mobility and growth for working-age adults
- Designing programs that meet both student and labor market needs
Helping Students Thrive
Working with behavioral science and design partners, Calbright has pioneered new approaches to helping students stay on track and complete their studies. It has established new best practices for pro-actively reaching out to students before they are in need. Efforts like the “Pace and Progress Timelines” developed with ideas 42 and UC Irvine have significantly increased both persistence rates and student satisfaction.
Research into ways to create supportive communities online have led not only to more ways that the College can support students, but also enhanced opportunities for students to support each other. Calbright is actively exploring ways that colleges can support adult students’ basic needs outside of the academic environment, ranging from food to housing insecurity. Calbright’s early research and surveys show that many students aren’t receiving public benefits that they are eligible for, and when access to food, housing, and health care are not addressed, students are at risk of dropping out of college programs.
Working with The Tools Competition, a multi-million dollar competition for edtech innovation, Calbright has become a leader in applying Artificial Intelligence to online education, and supported the development of cutting edge technology that can enhance every aspect of the student experience, particularly for working-age adults.
Calbright has supported the development of edtech for Calbright students and post-secondary students in a variety of settings, such as:
- Learning models that provide faculty with individualized, proactive, and timely feedback on their students’ academic progress within each course
- Personalized AI guide maps that show each student the support the college offers, at every stage of their learning journey
- Subject-matter specific tutoring tools
- Career navigation platforms that help students connect their learning journey with their career goals
- Software that helps adults manage the “higher education transfer system” that determines how much college credit they get for courses they’ve already taken, work they’ve already done, and experiences they already have, when they enroll in a new school
- 24/7 coaching software that answers most questions and connects students with a human coach when they need more guidance
… and more.
In just seven years, Calbright’s research has transformed best practices statewide and nationally for supporting adult students in online, competency-based courses.
Connecting Students To Better Careers
As we have found ways to improve student experiences and outcomes though technology and human-centered support, Calbright has also conducted research on how to develop a better “classroom-to-industry” pipeline, connecting adults with the skills they need to improve their careers, build on their experiences, and with industries that are hiring for upwardly mobile jobs.
Calbright’s research has made it a leader in the movement for businesses to hire on the basis of skills rather than degrees. We have pioneered research showing how changes in the hiring process for public sector jobs can address a hiring crisis in the public sector while enhancing the accessibility, quality, and diversity of job applicants. Our partnerships with California agencies and the private sector have led to creating a statewide hub for paid apprenticeships as part of adult higher education. And we’re working with CivicMakers to create and implement a “quality jobs framework” to help connect students to the kind of jobs they want, and show businesses how to enhance their recruiting efforts.
This is an unusual, perhaps even unprecedented, kind of research for a community college. But Calbright is the first-of-its-kind community college. With our extended reach across the entire state, we can tackle regional and statewide economic challenges, develop wider and deeper partnerships, and advocate for significant changes in how educational programs are built that lead to in-demand careers in California.
Developing Programs That Students Need
To drive economic mobility for working-age adults, Calbright’s Research and Development team identifies growing opportunities in the California labor market and the technical and soft skills needed to perform those roles. We work with labor market researchers and state data to determine which good jobs California industries are looking to fill now and that will last into the future; the kind of skills applicants need both to get hired and to thrive in the positions; and how business can connect to non-traditional applicants who have the skills they want.
Calbright research also covers the ways in which these essential skills – both technical and personal – can be taught effectively in an online environment, so that students can complete their courses quickly without sacrificing quality. Thanks to this approach, Calbright students can be ready for a new career in months rather than years, making long-term investments in their futures on a short-term timeline.
Calbright’s model involves Competency-Based Education, which emphasizes the skills students have rather than the amount of time they spend in class, and Calbright is collecting both its own research and other established best practices to develop the “playbook” for Competency-Based Education that can be shared with other institutions. Calbright’s President, Ajita Talwalker Menon, now sits on the board of the leading international non-profit Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), which i is transforming how institutions and employers advance skills-based learning
Any one of these research domains would be significant. Put them together, and it shows a research institution that matters for students, for California’s economy, and for the future of higher education and workforce development. Calbright’s programs, support, and technology make a profound difference in the lives of Californians – Calbright’s research is making a powerful difference on higher education and the future of work as a whole.
