Part of the mission of California’s Calbright College is to serve as an R&D lab for the community college sector. And early results are in from the online college’s successful experiments in meeting the needs of working learners, with potentially broad applications for higher education.
Calbright had a slow start after its creation in 2018 by California’s Legislature. The statewide competency-based college was designed to be an affordable and flexible alternative to traditional forms of higher education, by offering free certificates in high-growth fields.
Enrollments were very small to start. And Calbright faced existential challenges during the pandemic, as its leadership turned over and state government questioned the college’s funding. Yet Calbright lately has been surging. The college now enrolls roughly 6,300 students, the vast majority of whom are over 25 and come from underserved backgrounds.
Calbright also is ready to step out with its research-and-innovation lab role, which seeks to engage students to develop solutions for the barriers they face.
“What we’re learning at Calbright College about bringing flexible education and workforce to adult learners, rather than waiting for them to come to us, brings a lot of implications for education and job training programs across the U.S.,” says Sarah Jimenez, a Calbright spokesperson.
The college has partnered with the University of California at Irvine and ideas42, a nonprofit that taps behavioral science to address social problems. The $4.1M, five-year research project is focused on student-success solutions including short-form mobile videos aimed at engagement, peer tutoring, learning communities, and reframing public benefits.
Finding the Right Pace: One of the collaboration’s most promising experiments centers on working with students to set personalized timelines for completing their coursework.
Being self-paced and online can be a big draw for working learners. But that flexibility requires students to be much more self-disciplined to stay on track. So, working with ideas42, Calbright tested suggesting program milestones based on data from past completers. Once the timeline is set, students receive weekly outreach to monitor their progress, and get help with making adjustments and accessing supportive services.
“I’ve rarely seen results like what we saw in our initial timelines project,” says Tom Tasche, senior director of innovation at ideas42, pointing to the “near doubling of the one-year program completion rate.”
The randomized test found that the bump in completed assignments held after the first month of a student’s enrollment. Much of the eventual 40% average gain in assignments completed and 400% increase in certificates issued can be attributed to the timelines, Jimenez says, citing related research and student feedback.
Calbright first experimented with the timeline program in its customer relationship management certificate track. It now offers timelines to students across all programs, which include IT support, data analysis, cybersecurity, project management, and network technology, with a pilot in HR learning and development and a localized medical coding program in Los Angeles County.
Tasche points to the power of helping students set a personalized target date for completion, and then visualizing what they need to do to reach that goal.
“This pilot demonstrated that we need to be honest with students about what it means to complete a program in, say, six months versus a year,” he says. “It means they should be prepared for a certain pace of progress.”
Most students ended up tweaking the timelines they set at the outset of a program, sometimes by deploying grace periods to accommodate changes in their life responsibilities.
“It was this middle ground—between totally open-ended flexibility, on the one hand, and the rigid term structure of most college programs, on the other—that helped students push through to completion more quickly,” says Tasche.
Creating a Network: Calbright takes a deliberative approach to adding certificates. It first tests the curriculum with a small group of students, faculty members, and support counselors. The next step is ensuring that the skills and training meet industry standards before offering a cert to a wider population.
Jimenez says the college also leans heavily on labor market analyses, conducted in partnership with Lightcast, a labor market data firm. “Calbright’s biggest driver of how we deliver education and job training is: Does this serve adult learners and achieve their education, job, and economic goals?” she says.
The next phase of the college’s work with ideas42 will be to move beyond just sharing findings with the two-year sector, says Tasche. The partnership seeks to create a collaborative network where other colleges, counties, and community partners actively participate in designing and testing behavioral solutions.
“We’re inviting partners into the process from the beginning,” he says.
Innovations the college is testing with ideas42 and UC Irvine can be adapted to fit various institutional contexts and budgets, Tasche says. For example, some student support formats are more costly than others—synchronous versus asynchronous, or text exchanges versus voice and video discussions. The goal is to figure out which approaches work best for individual students, and to offer support at scale whenever possible.
The college’s unique approach can be a great influence on community colleges nationally, says Lisa Larson, interim CEO of the Education Design Lab. She praises Calbright’s ability to consistently design credentials and services from the learner’s perspective, while also responding quickly to employer needs.
Larson, the former president of Minnesota’s Hennepin Technical College, says the research lab’s contributions can help shape state and, potentially, federal policy on nondegree credentials, competency-based education, and improving economic mobility.
The Kicker: “Calbright is in a great position as an innovative institution but also a design studio and testing ground for a new approach to higher education,” she says.