Meeting the challenges of higher education today, of course, is not just about balancing the books. It's also about performance. The flip side of recruiting is retention, and students who become frustrated by the learning process drop out of the system. We're proud that 95 percent of our graduates are placed in jobs in their chosen area. But our completion rate, which is above the national average, is around 45 percent.
To combat the challenge of increasing our graduation rates, we are continually looking for innovative tools and technology systems that enhance classroom experiences, provide value, and are not cumbersome in deployment.
Last year, for example, we initiated a three-year pilot of a web-based student learning system provided by Tegrity. We felt the system would help engage students and enable them to retain more course content. An instructor clicks on a button on his laptop to record a class lecture, which is later uploaded to a server. During the lecture, students take notes using a special time-coded pen and paper. Later, students can replay entire class recordings-or skip to specific portions of recordings-on their computers, on their iPods/MP3 players, or by clicking on words in their digital notes. This flexibility is important to our working students who are balancing education with busy home lives and careers.
Our marketing slogan is: "Get in. Get out.
Get on with it."
Like most colleges today, we are under increasing scrutiny by everyone from our legislators to accrediting agencies to demonstrate the quantity and quality of learning taking place in our classrooms and the value of the technologies in which we invest.
The Tegrity software was initially tested in some of our nursing classes. The reaction and adoption of this system by the faculty was probably the critical point. They liked it because of its ease of use. Our IT people liked it because it's fairly easy to implement and support. And the students loved it, because it allowed them to access their classes whenever and however they chose.
We are using Tegrity in all of our nursing classes now, ahead of schedule and at a time when we are just completing a $4 million renovation of our Winona campus. Nursing is our largest program; of our 1,600 full-time students, we graduate about 200 nurses each year. We're planning to eventually introduce Tegrity learning systems into many other programs at Southeast Technical.
The learning management system provided by Desire2Learn (which is the standard instructional management system adopted by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system) is another technology that's working well for us. In fact, as I write this, I just got an e-mail from our IT person who says more faculty and students are using the system to organize their course content, including Tegrity recordings, and to communicate with students.
We're finding that having a standard LMS like Desire2Learn is helping students better organize the process of learning. And if students are more engaged, then the faculty will be more engaged. The downside is that students send their teachers e-mails at 2 a.m. and grow impatient if they don't get answers to their questions by 7 a.m. Such is the price of progress and student engagement.
Enrollment Explosion
Even amidst tightened budgets and increasing tuition, we've experienced impressive growth over the past few years in two key areas within our college. One is in general education and the other in distance learning. We've experienced a growth of more than 400 percent in full-time students taking one or more online courses over the last three years. Online students have grown from 3 percent of our student base to 10 percent during that same time frame.
Instructional management systems have certainly aided in that growing process. We're currently experimenting with mobile technology that we believe will enable us to even better serve our students and increase their chances of leaving us with a degree in hand.
Am I optimistic about the future of higher education? Yes, and I say that as a technical college president. There's a lot of talk about jobs shifting overseas, yet I see a continuing need for qualified health care workers, building trades workers, mechanics in all fields, and technicians from air conditioning to industrial maintenance, to name a few.
And through the use of innovative technologies, we are turning out into the workforce more knowledgeable, higher-skilled workers than ever before, even as the resources to support our educational enterprises are becoming more diverse and more challenging to secure.
James Johnson is president of Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical, which has three campuses.
