Competency-Based Education (CBE) for Working Adults at Salt Lake Community College

In this chapter, the authors share lessons that Salt Lake Community College (SLCC), a two-year comprehensive community college located in the most urban area of the state, learned in implementing CBE. The story begins with an explanation of the organizational context for CBE reform at SLCC. As one of two 2-year colleges to join the initial group of higher education institutions in the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), very quickly SLCC was thrust into the limelight as a potential leader in the newest national wave of CBE implementation. The story continues by describing full-scale implementation of CBE at SLCC funded by the United States Department of Labor Trade Adjustment Act Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grant. Lastly, the authors highlight major lessons learned through SLCC's journey and implications for future CBE implementation that focuses on institution-wide scale up at SLCC and consider what other higher education institutions may be able to learn from SLCC's experience.

Open Educational Resources and Student Course Outcomes: A Multilevel Analysis

<p class="3">Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) is Utah’s largest open enrollment college, and as an institution, is concerned about the expense associated with attaining a degree. All students face challenges in paying for their education, but SLCC students tend to have fewer resources to dedicate to school than students at other institutions in the state. While faculty and administrators have little control over the rising cost of tuition, they are able to offer students open educational resources (OER) to cut down on textbook costs. Salt Lake Community College’s OER initiative was implemented in Summer 2014, and has since expanded to include 125 sections in Spring 2016. We examine OER’s impact on three measures of student success: course grade, likelihood of passing, and likelihood of withdrawing. We use a multilevel modeling (MLM) approach in order to control for student, instructor, and course effects, and found no difference between courses using OER and traditional textbooks for continuing students. For new students, there is evidence that OER increases average grade. However, student-level differences such as demographic background and educational experience have a far greater impact on course grade and likelihood of passing or withdrawing than an instructor’s use of an OER text. Future research should focus on longer-term impacts of OER on retention, completion, and transfer.</p>

Continuous Commissioning of Salt Lake City Community College South City Campus

The State of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources funded two projects in Salt Lake City to demonstrate the feasibility of the Continuous Commissioning® (CC®) process. The two sites selected were a modern state building, the Matheson Courthouse [1], and a very old building, the South City campus of Salt Lake Community College [2]. This paper describes the measures and latest savings results from the CC® process at the Community College. The energy savings amounted to 15% of the annual utility bill. While most of the savings were attributed to CC, part was attributed to the on-site facility operators who implemented measures over and above those recommended by the CC engineers. It was an exciting team effort and a good example of the savings that can be achieved by CC engineers working closely with a good facility operations staff.