Good morning NECC Faculty and Staff:

NECC’s Integrated Student Experience (ISE) initiative began about eight years ago when we, like many colleges across the country, committed ourselves to implementing the strategies recommended by Community College Research Center scholars in “Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success.”

Those recommendations involved moving away from the “cafeteria-style” model community colleges had followed for decades, which largely involved students picking courses from a sometimes-bewildering array of choices with minimal guidance, and toward “guided pathways,” clearer, more direct programs of study that simplified choices and made credential completion more efficient, while adding support services and more opportunities for students to form meaningful connections with the college.

From the beginning, our three ISE guiding principles have been to ensure that students:

The ISE became the Academic Master Plan and was embedded within the college’s last Strategic Plan.  It was built upon the importance of that student sense of belonging, the guided pathways curricular approach, and meta-major academic centers where students might gather for programs and receive student services including advisement after a “hand-off” had occurred from the HUB advising centers. 

Eight years along, some important progress has been made, including significant reforms to our model for developmental education, major policy changes, vibrant academic coaching centers, the addition of our SOAR program modeled in many ways on our successful PACE program, and, course delivery options in/of both space and time.

And, significant challenges remain: the Academic Centers have not flourished as student gathering places, our student advisement model is likely not meeting student needs seamlessly as we imagined it would, and our six-year student success outcomes have worsened.

The world our students inhabit in 2024 is a very different place than it was in 2016, filled with very different expectations from our students for how, when, and where they interact with us.

Please join NECC President Lane Glenn and Provost Paul Beaudin at the next President’s General Staff Meeting for “The Integrated Student Experience 2.0,” as they present more information about the status of our ISE efforts, including the results of a recent survey about our advising system, along with recommendations for “ISE 2.0” and seek your questions and feedback. 

The meeting will be held Wednesday, April 30th, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. and telecast between TC103A/B and  LC301.  Please feel free to bring your lunch, and we’ll have cookies waiting for you!

Interpreting services will be provided at the Haverhill location.

Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

Lane A. Glenn

President

(978) 556-3855