Programs

About Making Connections

The Making Connections National Resource Center

The Making Connections National Resource Center at LaGuardia Community College supports systematic exchange across higher education, engaging creative educators on issues of inquiry, reflection, and integrative learning. Working with educators from a wide range of colleges and universities, Making Connections offers workshops, seminars, conferences, consultations, campus visits, and sustained collaborations. Building upon LaGuardia’s effective campus initiatives and best practices nationwide, Making Connections links theoretical insights to practical innovations such as ePortfolio pedagogy, learning communities, contextualization of basic skills mathematics, peer teaching, holistic assessment, inquiry learning, and faculty development. Sharing practice and generating knowledge, we advance teaching and learning at LaGuardia and colleges worldwide.

Current Projects

Connect to Learning: ePortfolio, Engagement and Student Success is a 3-year FIPSE-funded project coordinated by LaGuardia's Making Connections National Resource Center in partnership with the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-based Learning (AAEEBL) - an emerging international professional association with 100 institutional members focused on ePortfolio practice. Dr. Randy Bass of Georgetown University and Dr. Helen Chen of Stanford University serve as the project's senior research scholars. The Connect to Learning project works with a dynamic national network of 22 campuses - community colleges, private colleges and research universities - to collectively engage in a recursive knowledge-generation process. Contributing to a structured matrix model of ePortfolio development, with dimensions ranging from learning and engagement to assessment and institutional support, campuses will develop and test the strategies needed to measurably improve student learning outcomes.

The project focuses ePortfolio on reflective pedagogy and student learning, correlating improvement on student success measures such as retention with more nuanced assessment of student work using the AAC&U’s nationally normed VALUE rubrics. Project leadership will review, analyze, and synthesize the evidence provided by participating teams. Working in diverse institutional and multimedia environments, moving from learning design to broad testing and assessment, the project will produce and publish broadly applicable and effective national models needed to effectively focus ePortfolio usage on the pressing issues of student learning.

List of participating Connect to Learning campuses:

Funded through a 5-year Title V grant, the Making Transfer Connections: ePortfolio and Student Success Across CUNY program works with two senior colleges (Queens and Lehman) and three community colleges (Queensborough, Bronx and LaGuardia) in a partnership designed to facilitate transfer and ensure student progress toward the Bachelor’s degree. Under LaGuardia’s leadership, the five CUNY colleges employ ePortfolio practice in strengthening three areas pivotal to transfer success: instruction, advisement, and assessment. Together, these interrelated efforts will address a central goal – building a comprehensive academic pathway toward the baccalaureate degree for Hispanic and other minority and low-income students. The Making Transfer Connection partners will expand and strengthen the implementation of high impact ePortfolio practice on their own campuses. Building cross-campus collaboration and exchange, MTC will generate a more cohesive academic process that helps tens of thousands of Hispanic and other low income students succeed at community colleges and move more effectively to baccalaureate graduation. While benefiting large numbers of students from LaGuardia and partner colleges, MTC will create new transfer models for colleges at CUNY and beyond.

 

Background

Launched in 2007, the Making Connections National Resource Center emerges from the work of the LaGuardia Center for Teaching and Learning, the award-winning professional development center of LaGuardia Community College (CUNY). From 2008-2010, FIPSE supported and the Center ran the “Making Connections ePortfolio Seminar Program,” working with 30 NYC-area higher education institutions (community colleges through research universities) as they moved forward with their campus ePortfolio implementations. The Making Connections ePortfolio Seminar Program drew on LaGuardia’s experience, helping colleges in three Cohorts to launch ePortfolio pilots for enhanced engagement, learning, and assessment.

All Making Cohort Connections schools continue their work with ePortfolio beyond the program, and stay connected through the Blog and other face to face and online events, organized by LaGuardia.

List of participating Making Connections ePortfolio Seminar Program campuses:

Held at LaGuardia on in April 2008, our first major conference, Making Connections: ePortfolio, Integrative Learning, and Assessment, drew 600 faculty from 70 universities in 30 states and 5 countries. Shifting the Paradigm: ePortfolio, Learning and Change, the second annual Making Connections Mini-Conference, held in April 2010, showcased the ePortfolio work of Making Connections campuses across the NY tri-state area. Making Connections also sponsors exciting forums, such as the March 2010 workshop “Reflection and Learning,” with leading Dewey scholar, Carol Rodgers. Making Connections is a co-sponsored of the 2010 AAEEBL Conference: ePortfolios & the Emergent Learning Ecology.