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With the advent of Internet instruction, distance learning has taken on enhanced status in higher education. This paper describes how Internet instruction differs from traditional instruction, what changes must be made if an institution chooses to move into Internet instruction, and some ramifications of those choices. As a general rule, Internet instruction has nearly all the problems of traditional instruction, plus the difficulties intrinsic in doing something different within an organization that has stayed the same, as most colleges have. If colleges are to get serious about the Internet, they must commit funds, people, and time, and must change the nature of the organization. If not, they must recognize that they are not serious players. Instructors must be prepared for hard work. Times are changing, and so must the institutional mission if community colleges are to survive. Colleges should use Internet instruction as means of increasing student success as well as improving access and quality. However, they can no longer continue to focus on marketing themselves as the inexpensive alternative--they must sell quality, and do the things that produce quality. Contains 18 references. (VWC)

This paper evaluates the online services provided by the ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges, from the perspective of a psychology professor at Blue Ridge Community College in North Carolina. The author praises the ERIC site for its helpful links and virtual library, and also discusses ERIC's potential for a variety of users. He focuses on one of ERIC's primary strengths: its search engine/database. ERIC's search engine offers information on community college curriculum, institutional research, and policy research. In an evaluation of the ERIC system, the author finds its strengths to be: (1) immense size; (2) speed; (3) broad scope; (4) search results ordered by relevance; (5) clarity of search criteria; and (6) common-sense database search functions. Suggested modifications to the ERIC web site include: (1) eliminating the search confirmation screen; (2) modifying the structure of the search engine with increased user choice; (3) providing a way to filter items based on publication date; (4) improving currency; (5) providing for electronic submissions; (6) availability of full-text online retrieval; (7) developing a link to find articles similar to one's topic; (8) adding logical searching across fields; and (9) adding capacity to view multiple records at a time. ERIC is compared favorably with other search sites regarding content and accessibility, despite the fact that it does not yet offer online full-text retrieval. (AS)

Although the world has changed considerably in the past three decades, community colleges and their guiding missions have largely not adapted to changing conditions. College mission statements tend to be unfocused documents that provide overly broad goals. In the business world, the mission statements of effective companies are brief, crisp, and clear, while even governmental and religious agencies manage to develop mission statements that are more focused and succinct than those of community colleges. The questions for college officials, then, are why their mission statements are so unfocused and what benefits would occur if they were fixed. If vague mission statements are not seen as a significant problem, the use of the statement as a guide to college action is seriously called into question. Another question to address is why current college missions overlap so much with those of the 1960's, when so much has changed since then. Finally, college officials should consider the effects an unfocused mission statement might have on state officials seeking to implement stricter outcomes assessment and performance-based funding. An appendix provides a general education survey developed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, illustrating the increasing emphasis of state officials on the rationale and structure of college programs. (Contains 12 references.) (BCY)

Although private industry has been decentralizing for the past decade, community colleges have been slow to follow. For those colleges that have decentralized, traditional structured planning methodologies do not apply. The focus of strategic planning efforts at decentralized institutions is on the development of strategic themes to which individuals, empowered to use their own creativity, respond. While a formal model for planning in a decentralized institution would inhibit change and be counterproductive, the following ideas can be taken into consideration: (1) an institution must analyze its own identity and functions, rather than rely too heavily on ideas from the corporate sector; (2) routine processes ought to be re-engineered only when appropriate; (3) institutions must buy into the notion of wide-scale collaboration; (4) evolution is normal and is the outcome of decentralized strategic planning; (5) college members must be willing to yield to broader concerns even as they recognize that institutional interests sometimes conflict with their own; (6) an ongoing planning process is desirable and necessary; (7) there must be a large and widely shared information base; (8) planners should avoid limiting recommendations based on perceptions of the resources likely to become available; and (9) barriers within the existing structure should be razed and leveled. Since 1989, Virginia's Blue Ridge Community College has experimented with a decentralized approach, and the first decentralized strategic plan was published in 1991. Although application of the plan has been uneven, the college community has supported the plan and has been optimistic. (Contains 14 references.) (KP)

Focusing on the social forces acting upon community colleges, this paper reviews possible modes of response by the colleges, focusing specifically on the role of institutional research. The first section presents an overview of the social forces affecting community colleges, discussing the 16% increase in two-year college enrollments in the 1980's; the impact of limited federal, state, and local funding; the financial stress caused by growing prison populations, health care costs, and public school costs; increasing percentages of minorities and changing family demographics; and the declining availability of full-time work. The next section discusses possible modes of response by the community colleges. Likely responses include establishing or maintaining affirmative action programs, increased use of advanced technology to provide instruction, an increased importance assigned to institutional research to enable colleges to adapt, a continued emphasis on accountability, and a decision on the part of colleges to become more elitist or retain a traditional open-admissions orientation. The last section focuses on the role of institutional research in the changing world of the community college, emphasizing the importance of colleges taking a proactive, rather than reactive, stance. With a proactive approach, institutional research will produce more than routine descriptive statistics; it provide models for long-term planning in a rapidly changing environment. A 27-item bibliography is included. (MAB)

In the literature since the 1970's, the notion that education should serve as a social leveler has given way to the image of the educational institution as a business-like enterprise. This change in the perceived role of higher education has been accompanied by increased pressure on institutions to provide measurements of educational outcomes. For the last 5 years, the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) has required all of its member institutions to develop and implement student educational outcomes assessment (SEOA) models. SCHEV guidelines charge faculty at individual institutions with drawing conclusions from assessment data and making curricular modifications accordingly. A 1990 survey of faculty senate chairs, chief assessment officers, and curriculum committee chairs at every higher education institution in Virginia has yielded little evidence that SEOA has led to the improvement of any educational outcomes or that faculty have taken on the leadership role which SEOA requires. Thus, SEOA appears to have triggered a purely administrative response to an external mandate rather than an effective mechanism for actually improving student learning outcomes. On balance, however, the lack of faculty involvement may be good, as SEOA, and the larger assessment movement of which it is a part, reflects an outmoded logical positivist approach to education. Since the 1960's, intellectual and academic thought has been undergoing a significant epistemological shift led by critical theorists and radical deconstructionists. Although this paradigmatic shift to post-modernist modes of inquiry is evinced in education in the multicultural movement, and in the proliferation of women's and ethnic studies programs, educational practice tends to be reactive, and thus not attuned to contemporary issues and needs. If the state-mandated assessment movement is successful, it will leave the student trained for the past rather than educated for the future. (MPH)

"Cooling out" was identified in 1960 as a specific function of the community college in redirecting students who experienced academic failure. The "soft" cooling out process, which re-directs students into less demanding curricula or out of the college through counseling and advising rather than academic discipline, will increasingly become a reality in the four-year college and university as patterns of student attendance change. There are indications that many recent high school graduates who previously would not have attended college or would have attended a two-year institution are now entering four-year schools, and these students bring new goals, needs, and requirements. If patterns of student attendance change as suggested, three areas need to be reconsidered. First, each institution needs to consider the cooling out function and its appropriateness to the college's mission. Second, student personnel staff must be trained in academic advising and career guidance to strengthen the work done in these areas by faculty. Third, there must be options within the college curriculum to serve a diverse student body. Consideration must be given to alternatives to the traditional academic and liberal arts curricula to make remedial, professional, and career education more available, even within the four-year colleges and universities. (Author/DR)

Reviews social changes affecting community colleges and the continuing education (CE) programs at the colleges. Argues that current CE programs are isolated from academic units but should instead be integrated across the institution. Proposes an integrated model that would better serve the needs of the communities. (25 citations) (AJL)