Vanguard Project

This text is directly from the League for Innovation web site.

Introduction

In the early 1990s, community colleges, building on their student-centered and teaching-centered values, began to add learning-centered values to their mission and program statements. Many community colleges embraced the concept of the Learning College which "places learning first and provides educational experiences for learners anyway, anyplace, anytime." Almost all the respondents (97 percent) to a 1997 survey of over 500 presidents of the League’s Alliance for Community College Innovation indicated that their institutions will move toward becoming more learning centered in the next three to five years. Many community colleges have made a commitment to become more learning centered, a commitment that represents a significant dedication to changing the traditional architecture of education.

In January 2000, the League received a major grant to fund the learning College Project, a project designed to provide opportunities for intercollege collaboration to help community colleges fulfill their commitment to learning-centered education. The League received 94 applications in response to its invitation to all community colleges in the U.S. and Canada to apply an international team of community college scholars and practitioners well-versed in Learning College concepts evaluated the applications, and 12 colleges were selected as Vanguard Learning Colleges. Ultimately, the 12 colleges will become incubators and catalysts for the Learning College concept for other educational institutions around the world. The project is funded for the first three years, and the League is committed to working with the 12 colleges over a five-year period to achieve the purpose of the project.

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