LANSING – Mike Hansen, president of the Michigan Community College Association, on Wednesday applauded Governor Rick Snyder’s $1.1 million one-time appropriation to improve the virtual learning collaborative, saying it would help students access the courses they need.

“It’s really the direction that education is going, so we were very happy the governor chose to support this initiative,” Hansen told members of the Senate Appropriations Community Colleges Subcommittee. “The (Virtual Learning Collaborative) is a model across the country.”

The collaborative was set up some 15 years ago, Hansen said, and the appropriations would help to update and enhance its features.

“For the students, it’s seamless,” he said. “For about a million dollars, we can really do incredible work that will really serve the students.”

Sen. Darwin Booher (R-Evart), chair of the subcommittee, said he was interested in knowing exactly how the million dollars would be spent to enhance the system, but both he and Hansen agreed the finite details would be discussed by another expert at another subcommittee meeting.

The collaborative allows students at community colleges to take courses through another college, for instance if the course at their primary college was full, and the credit would transfer to the student’s primary school. As for whether those classes could then later transfer to a university, Hansen told the committee “typically” they would.

Among the plans for the funds provided by the state and the colleges, Hansen said, are a course aggregator, collaborative course repository, student services and marketing.

In a handout from the association, the $1.1 million would be divvied up between the course aggregator and infrastructure ($600,000) and the course repository ($500,000). The colleges, ideally, could put $400,000 toward the “help desk” (student services) and $100,000 toward marketing, while none of the state’s money would go to either.

The course aggregator is software that would identify equivalent courses that meet requirements for colleges and curricula, the association said. Currently, students self-identify classes but the colleges do not have a way of knowing if specific courses elsewhere would fit the degree needs at their own campuses. The state money would be used predominately for software development but also a small amount for upgrades in server hardware and other technology, it said.

As for the course repository, Hansen said its primary purpose would be for faculty and staff members of the collaborative. For example, he said, if a faculty member teaching an accounting class did not have good materials for a part of that course, he or she could see what others were doing and perhaps integrate that into his or her lesson plan. Those costs include development and hardware and software costs to hold the shareable content, the association said.

“With online instruction, many people think it’s cheap,” Hansen said. “To do it well, though, online education has to be very interactive.”

The association said recent reports indicated that one in three higher education students are taking at least one online course, and last year’s enrollment growth of 10 percent in online far exceeded the minimal 1 percent of total enrollment growth in higher education.

Of the budget as a whole (SB 199 ), Hansen said the 2 percent increase proposed by the governor was “a step in the right direction.”

The governor’s proposed budget allocates about $5.8 million in new General Fund money for performance-based funding, furthering the governor’s efforts to have 60 percent of citizens holding a high-quality degree or other credential by 2025, said Robbie Jameson of the Department of Technology, Management and Budget. That’s combined with $1.3 million in existing funding and distributed through a modified version of the funding formula from the current fiscal year budget.

The performance funding metrics include across the board distribution; two-year average number of weighted associate’s degree and certificate completions (highest weighted averages are for awards in the health, engineering, and technology fields); two-year average number of contact hour equated students; and local strategic value best practices.

Also included in that formula, new for the fiscal year 2013-14 proposal, is a percentage for the number of skilled trades program students placed in a relevant job or apprenticeship, with extra weighting for placing a student-veteran.

Total proposed funding is $335.98 million ($138.36 million General Fund, $197.6 million School Aid Fund). That’s a 14.2 percent increase from the current year (43.4 percent increase general fund, no change from the School Aid Fund).

Of that recommendation, basic community college operations make up about $298 million, $7 million of which accounts for total performance funding as previously described.

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