GCC Learning Center

Annual Report 2001-2002

Dennis Doyle and LC Staff

More Students Served

For the fifth straight year, student use of the Learning Center increased. In the 2000-2001 fiscal year, the Writing Center, Tutoring Center and the CAI Lab combined served 12,142 students; in this last year, individual student use rose to 13,705 students with a record 74,288 total student contact hours, up over 5,600 the previous year. The most dramatic increase was in client use of the Tutoring Center, resulting in an increase of over 7,000 student contact hours, though there was also an increase in Writing Center hours with small declines in the use of the CAI Lab. These increases were posted despite the crisis in funding that resulted in much belt-tightening in the spring semester. Some of the hourly increases can be attributed to the introduction of the second summer session and winter intersession last year.

Donations Help Us Make it Through Tough Times

Last December the Learning Center accepted the donation of $3,400 from the local Vons Market through their Vons Cares Foundation. Vons employees have small amounts deducted from their salaries to fund donations to charitable and educational organizations in the community. The GCC Learning Center was nominated as a deserving organization. The money came in particularly handy, as funding for student workers became very tight in the spring semester. We have spent about $1,000 of the money and will keep the rest in reserve to help us alleviate anticipated shortfalls in the coming year.

In addition, we accepted the donation of $1,000 from English Professor Steve Taylor, who gave us his entire honorarium that he won as the 2001 Distinguished Faculty awardee. We used the money to hire two adjunct English professors to work part-time in the Writing Center supplementing the good work done there by Andy Stires and Maria Shufeldt.

Status of the Learning Center Mini-courses

Starting in the fall 2000 semester, the Center offered English 182-Basic Communications: Vocabulary and English 183-Basic Communications: Grammar. These classes are interactive, open entry/open exit, and self-paced courses. The courses had not been offered in three years and were based on audiotape materials that are no longer available. We rewrote the outline and syllabi using CAI materials as the text, produced companion web pages, and walked the courses through the campus course development procedures. We are continuing to fine-tune the use of the materials and the syllabi of the courses. In the first year,102 students took these credit courses. This year 110 students took the classes.

CAI Software and computers

-We did our usual annual upgrade of the PassKey software and are currently in the middle of an upgrade of the main server with a faster CPU and more space on the hard drive.

Revision of the Learning Center Web Page

In the never-ending battle to keep the web page current and useful, we’ve spent time rewriting many of the Learning Center pages. To help instructors learn more about the Center, we included better reference pages to our services, a brief history of the Center, and have started publishing our statistics and annual report on the web.

Personnel Changes

Our Writing Center guru, Andy Stires took a leave of absence during the Fall and Winter semesters to work with his brother in New York City. Unfortunately he was in the city during the 9/11 terrorist attack. Laura Miller, Greg Knapp, Gretchen Davidson and Candace Eritano split his hours as substitutes during that time. Andy returned to us at the start of the spring 2002 semester.

Our longtime Student Services Assistant, Antoinette Ibarra, retired in December 2001. We sought and got an upgrade of the position to Instructional Lab Tech and hired adjunct English instructor Gretchen Davidson as replacement.

Improving Writing Center Service

In an effort to improve communication between faculty and staff, we reintroduced the use of 3-page Writing Center referral forms in which instructors can better direct staff about what areas a particular student needs tutoring. We distributed several hundred to English, ESL and other instructors, as well as had them available by the faculty mailboxes. We have seen steady use of the forms. Student use of the Writing Center is up slightly over last year despite funding cuts.

The crisis in funding for student worker staffing has had an impact on the Writing Center. The service is inherently labor-intensive: clients work with staff mostly on a one-to-one basis, yet in the spring semester, we had to limit the number of student tutors. Our commitment to allow drop-in service sometimes results in the Center being overwhelmed with clients and, on other hand, with staff waiting around with no clients at all. It was also difficult to predict how many student tutors were needed for the winter semester, as we had never done this interim semester before.

As stated earlier, hiring part-time instructors with the donated funds partially alleviated the problem. We also supplemented work-study funding with money from the Vons grant. We are also urging faculty to hold their office hours in the Center so that they might be an additional resource to students.

In the coming year, we plan to have Writing Lab staff do more group work with students, rather than having the main complete emphasis on one-on-one drop-in service. While still providing some drop-in service each day, we want to have more service by appointment and in organized study groups. We are also seeking to help instructors use the Center in a more collaborative way, as a supplemental instruction resource. These steps will hopefully help us do our mission better.

STATISTICS

Student Contact Hours in the Learning Center

Tutoring Writing CAI Lab Totals

Summer ‘01 5,642 368 1,821 7,831

Fall’01 24,318 1,765 8,451 3,4534

Winter’02 1,106 199 332 1,637

Spring ‘02 21,033 1,433 7,820 30,286

total 01-02 52,099 3,765 18,424 74,288

Past Years

00-01 44,855 3,697 20,082 68,634

99-00 45,703 2,266 18,928 66,897

98-99 25,643 2,009 17,935 45,587

97-98 16,505 3,846 1,382 21,733

96-97 11,621 4,714 1,795 18,130

This year we posted 5,654 more student contact hours than last year.

Total Individual Students Helped in the Center

Tutoring Writing CAI Lab Totals

Summer’01 858 233 447 1,538

Fall’01 3,054 888 1946 5,888

Winter’02 269 146 114 529

Spring 2002 3,233 824 1,693 5,750

totals 7,414 2,091 4,200 13,705

Past Years

00-01 6,160 1,980 4,002 12,142

99-00 4,566 1,601 3,570 9,737

‘98-99 3,056 1,449 3,634 8,139

This year we posted 1,560 additional students helped over last year.

Students Helped with In-Class Tutoring

Male Female Totals

totals 1,031 1,512 2,543

Past Years

00-01 1,110 1,628 2,738

99-00 1,148 1,960 3,108

The numbers are reduced because we had to pull some of the in-class tutors due to lack of funding.

Students Taking New Mini-Courses

First offered Fall 2000

Eng 182 Eng 183 Totals

spring 2002 30 36 66

Fall 2001 24 28 52

totals 54 56 110

Last Year:

2000-2001 47 55 102

We posted a slight increase in use of the minicourses.

Videotape Circulation

Viewed in the Learning Center

01-02 1,148

Past Years:

00-01 798

99-00 1,232

98-99 1,403

Telecourse Videotapes lent out for home use

01-02 304

Past Years

00-01 265

99-00 234

98-99 350

Totals 01-02 1,452

Past Years:

00-01 1,063 99-00 1,466

98-99 1,753

97-98 1,312

96-97 1,075

About 400 more tapes over last year. These figures ebb and flow depending on what telecourses are offered.

Testing

English Placement Challenge Exams

01-02 196

Past Years:

00-01 194

99-00 222

98-99 256

97-98 179

96-97 88

We average about 200 tests a year.

Make-up Tests a service for faculty, esp. adjunct

01-02 644

Past Years:

00-01 469

99-00 408

98-99 273

97-98 108

This is increasing significantly over the past years.

Distance Learning Exams

Proctored for other institutions

01-02 19

Past Years:

00-01 5

99-0 10

Up about 14 tests from last year.

Non-Credit Students, using Learning Center Facilities

01-02 132

Past Years:

00-01 367

99-0 75

These figures may not be accurate as we have no way to “check” these student “in” to our database. They don’t have standard GCC student ID cards

Total Student “Visits” (from laser counter)

01-02 128,828

00-01 158,257

99-00 184,459

98-99 156,254

97-98 140,694

96-97 151,634

95-96 128,224

These are the numbers of people walking through the doors. Fewer people walk through the doors now because Assessment services moved out of the Center in October of 2001

Reports sent out to Instructors

Instructors requesting detailed printouts of their students’ hours in the Learning Center.

01-02 112

Last Year

00-01 111

Goals for the coming Year

We will be working to provide the same or better level of service despite funding cuts.

We will work to promote better the CAI Lab as a place for students to drop in and brush up their skills and to expand the minicourse program which is quite economical to run.

We will continue to foster usage of the Center as a helpful place for learning and study.