Changing Courses: Instructional Innovations That Help Low-Income Students Succeed in Community College. Opening Doors to Earning Credentials Project Series.

MDRC's Opening Doors to Earning Credentials Project and its early reports found that community colleges are the local educational institutions with the greatest potential for helping low-wage workers earn skills and credentials that lead to educational and career advancement. Opening Doors also identified serious obstacles to realizing that potential (e.g., characteristics of the low-wage workforce, institutional structure and priorities of most community colleges, and external policy environments in which they operate). MDRC asked Jobs for the Future to look at curricular and program redesign strategies being used in community colleges today to speed advancement from lower levels of skill into credential programs and to shorten the time commitment for earning a credential. This paper presents a framework for understanding the range of experimentation with program and class reformatting and design, identifying programs that exemplify promising approaches. The framework focuses on: developmental education approaches that can help improve college credential outcomes (innovative approaches to redesigning developmental education programs and lessons from innovative college programs); curricular and program redesign of college credential programs (innovative college program models); and programs for young high school dropouts or graduates who are still not college-ready. (Contains 12 references.) (SM)