Just-in-time Learning of the Basics

The scene: a rural community college in the Southern US.

The activity: a visiting delegation of academics on a listening tour seeking methods to increase training for technicians in STEM fields.

In the briefing, a community college instructor exudes enthusiasm for her work. She describes building a coalition of automobile dealerships in the area around the school. The coalition has funded and completed a new training facility that will house a program training new auto mechanics, skilled in diagnostics and repair of the current computer-rich automobiles. The dealerships seek to employ graduates with the skills that they find in scarce supply in the region.

She noted that most of her students either dropped out of high school or struggled with the traditional reading and mathematics education of secondary education. For years, the school had insisted that the program’s students first demonstrate basic competency in reading comprehension and mathematics before they began the training program. In that sense, remedial courses became prerequisites before the students could work on cars.

Drop-out rates were high. The remedial education reminded the students of similar courses that demotivated them in high school. It seemed stigmatizing to be forced to go back a step before going forward. So, the result was that potential good auto mechanics were being lost. Further, those who dropped out wasted time and yielded no benefit for themselves.

So the school reconceptualized the curriculum.

From the very first day of the redesigned program, students were working on cars. But they were deliberately presented with auto problems that required them to read diagnostic and repair manuals. In that sense, the reading remediation was a seamless feature of what the students really wanted to learn. To achieve their personal goal, they had to improve their reading skills. It worked.

This redesign was part of a larger movement in community colleges between 2005-2010, where the notion of “corequisites” was launched. These courses transmit competencies needed to absorb the content of the full program in a manner that’s more integrated into program courses. Rather than prerequisites that must be taken before one enters the program curriculum, they’re designed to provide “just-in-time” guidance to provide skills needed for program content. For example, this might alter the content of a mathematics course away from algebra and pre-calculus thinking to the mathematical concepts key to the given program (e.g., data visualization from a variety of sensors or meters as the measurements are presented in a diagnostics course).

All this sounded promising in the 2010’s, but a recent report from Georgetown’s Future Ed notes that nationwide progress toward such “co-requisites” is slowing or even reversing.

Why is reform slowing? One reason is the fragmentation of the governance of higher education. While within a single state, one community college adopts the reform, there is no implication that another will. Further, as with much of higher education, community college faculty are given discretion in the pedagogy and academic program design they implement. Redesigning remediation courses to tailored corequisite courses is hard work. Further, there are revenue implications of moving to corequisites also – remediation classes used as gateways into all programs have higher enrollments and generate more net revenue for the schools.

The harm of the paused reform is that students with disadvantaged secondary education are most likely to drop out of traditional programs that require several remediation courses prior to entering. With job-market demand for technical skills growing, this pause in innovation threatens the nation’s future.