| Today, community colleges face their most significant challenge in more than fifty years. Unpredictable changes in economic conditions, escalating demands for education from an increasingly diverse population, changes in students' learning styles, emergence of new technologies, and the inexorable transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age are creating a host of demands to which community colleges must respond. Colleges that will survive and succeed in this new environment will be forced to make significant, even radical changes in their administrative structures, their teaching strategies and their commitment to the advancement of society. This project identifies the basic elements needed to help community colleges change, and it creates a user-friendly online reference of best practices through a Web-based resource guide entitled, "The Virtual Center of Community College Transformation." A preliminary study delineates the need for such a resource as well as its essential content elements. Data gathered over several years and used to create the resource guide, include Web-based questionnaires and interviews of ten transformational leaders. A field-test assessed the effectiveness and adequacy of the product itself.; The Web-based guide (http://transformation.laccd.edu--also Appendix H) offers navigation through five gateways which build upon the research conducted for this study, the literature calling for the need to change, annotated bibliographies of contemporary transformational research, and case studies of best practices. The guide's home page welcomes its visitors, explains its purpose, and presents the navigation options. Several gateways enable visitors to post their own materials thus keeping the resource guide current and a veritable "living document." This Web-based resource guide provides a practical tool to assist community college leaders engage in organizational change by identifying and applying the strategies that may work for their institutions and by creating a global support network of transformational practitioners. |
