The Air Washington consortium’s offerings are exciting for several reasons, says program director Carol Weigand. For starters, the consortium includes many of the best known regional aerospace players, such as The Boeing Company, Absolute Aviation, Janicki Industries, and Angeles Composites Technology, Inc., as well as the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (AIM) Union, Locals 751 and 160. The major employers, many other smaller firms, and unions all came together with a single, unified purpose: to prepare a workforce that can make sure the future of aviation happens in the state of Washington. Overall, Washington has roughly 1400 aerospace firms.

Air Washington’s industry and union partners came to the table to share and define current and future workforce needs. That led the consortium to focus on preparing students for jobs in growing industry segments, including advanced manufacturing/composites, electronic/avionics, aircraft assembly and aircraft maintenance. These positions typically pay skilled workers family-sustaining wages that rise over time.

“Students are also excited because these programs are less expensive,” says Weigand, who notes that many formerly significant costs for items such as textbooks and other learning materials have been eliminated or substantially reduced in Air Washington programs through the use of free, open educational resources, in accordance with the requirements of the $20 million federal grant that got the Air Washington consortium off the ground. The federal requirement that newly produced federally-funded curriculum be open and free is designed to ensure that students have access to the best possible learning materials at the lowest possible costs, promote instructor engagement in improving the materials, and also enable the free, open learning materials to be improved, customized and adapted over time to meet different needs.

One example: Air Washington has produced a free, open Aviation Vocabulary Dictionary specifically designed for students for whom English is a second language. “Aerospace has its own language,” notes Weigand. Non-native workers can sometimes feel locked out of those networks, she says, especially if they don’t know the lexicon. “We have this immigrant community and they are hard workers and many of them want to go to work but they don’t understand aerospace or the language. So helping them understand the language is a nice on-ramp,” she says.

The consortium has also produced a free, open math instruction resources textbook that helps students prepare themselves for successful entrance into Air Washington’s more technically complicated programs. More advanced open coursework includes instruction in blueprint reading, quality management systems, applied math, computer assisted design and drafting, aviation maintenance, workplace preparation and occupational safety and health training, among others. Some programs, such as machining and computer numerical control (CNC Technology) also offer job placement services as part of the final quarter of study.

The U.S. aerospace industry is one of the bright spots for U.S. workers. Overall, the industry posted export sales of $118.5 billion in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, which translated into a positive trade balance of $70.5 billion, the largest trade surplus of any U.S.-based manufacturing industry. What’s more, in the same year, 64.3 percent of all U.S. aerospace sales were made to customers outside the U.S. The industry directly employs about 500,000 workers in scientific and technical jobs across the nation and supports another 700,000 or so jobs in related fields. Over the next 20 years, the aerospace industry is expected to sell approximately 34,000 new large commercial airplanes, with a total value of roughly $4.5 trillion.

Air Washington’s creation and use of free, open educational resources supports the healthy industry growth rates needed, says Weigand. “It helps the whole aerospace industry across the state,” she says. “The more information that is out there about aerospace industry workforce training and development, it strengthens the whole industry, and it strengthens the economy of the Northwest.” The progress also makes it possible for more students to affordably earn industry recognized certifications that are required by aerospace employers both in and outside the U.S., such as the European Aviation Safety Agency’s B-1 certification, in addition to the domestic U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Airframe and Power Plant (A&P) certification.

There are some early indications that the strategy is working, and at altitudes that were never anticipated. In January 2015, SpaceX, the commercial space start-up company founded by Tesla auto creator Elon Musk, announced it would soon open a new facility in Seattle to be closer to the local workforce and its world-class, increasingly open training resources. “There’s a huge amount of talent in the Seattle area, and a lot of you, it seems, don’t want to move to L.A.,” Musk said in remarks recently reported by The Seattle Times. Instead, the jobs are coming to them.
Which makes sense. Why would anyone want to move when they live in a community that is creating free, high quality open educational resources designed to help companies and workers prosper together?

“To be able to provide career skills and training to our local residents and for our regional businesses is a tremendous boon to the future of the industry itself and to the local economy,” said Lee McMains, an Applied Environmental Technology instructor at Aims Community College, in Greely, Colorado, in a statement released by his college.

Open educational resources (OER) are materials that have an impact on teaching and learning, such as textbooks, multimedia audio, video and presentations that are in the public domain or have been released with an intellectual property license that allows their free use and repurposing by others. Colorado’s Online Energy Training Consortium (COETC) recently received $17.2 million dollars to help its residents plug into the energy economy and also to help redesign developmental education for community college students. The grant is one of three investments of similar size recently awarded to networks of community college campuses in the state through the same federal funding mechanism, each targeting different industries. The funds support change and innovation, including through the use of OER particularly in specialized technical disciplines.

COETC may not yet be a household name in Colorado, but its impact is felt from the Rocky Mountains to the great plains. Traditionally, Colorado’s energy sector has been fueled by oil & gas, mining, and utility industries, but recently, it has also been transforming into a 21st Century leader in green energy production. The Federal grant dollars enabled COETC and the Colorado Community College System to strengthen and improve its existing educational programs and create stackable certificates to align with the needs of the energy sector as it continues to change. The federal funds also supported the colleges throughout the system in freely sharing the new and redesigned courses, ensuring students are being taught skills that can be used state-wide The course and program redesign effort was guided by regional industry partnerships that identified specific workforce needs and aligned the needs with certificate and degree programs. The needs identified by industry generated new curriculum and helped target areas of existing curriculum ripe for improvement. Out of date course offerings were eliminated or modernized, new courses were built to address emerging needs and all materials were distributed throughout the consortium as well as made available online as OER.

“One focus has been on transforming our energy sector education and job training programs,” says one of the project managers, Pete Lindstrom, who notes that Colorado’s energy economy is substantial and diverse, including renewable sources such as wind and solar and more traditional oil and gas fossil fuels, as well as related processing technologies. “One of our goals was to make our programs and certificates applicable to any type of energy,” says Lindstrom. “Our students need a well-rounded education. It’s not enough for us to just concentrate on any one type of energy production in a program. And they also need to be able to earn stackable credentials so they can quickly get some training, get a job, and continue their education.”

A second aspect of the consortium’s work that has received national attention involves redesigning the state’s post-secondary developmental education programs. Experience and research indicated that the traditional model of post-secondary developmental education was preventing many students from obtaining a certificate or degree. Before the redesign, community college students in Colorado often spent as many as four semesters in non-credit developmental math courses and three semesters trying to move past developmental English instruction. These courses were intended to prepare students for college level work. Instead, in a scenario playing out on many other community college campuses across the country, Colorado’s developmental education courses often taught students exactly the wrong lesson, namely, that college was not for them. “We’ve redesigned the developmental education program so more students move on to college-level course work after just one term,” Lindstrom says. The work drew on findings of an 18-month, faculty led Colorado state task force that had identified key reforms needed to enable accelerated developmental progress, such as integrating contextualized developmental education into substantive for-credit coursework. “It’s turning into a big success for us,” says Lindstrom.

But the biggest success may be the most obvious one. The early results, based on a scan of COETC courses already online, shows that students in Colorado using these courses are now saving between 20 and 80 percent of the costs of learning materials they would have previously had to purchase, and in some cases, the new courses are entirely OER-based, which fully eliminates that expense. The savings allow students to use more of their limited personal resources or financial aid on necessary items such as rent, transportation, child care, food – and to pay utility bills to the industry many of them hope to join.

Strengthening developmental education and job training programs offered by Colorado’s community colleges in the energy sector has proven worthwhile, says Lindstrom, who adds that funding the use, development and continuous improvement of OER is a “transformative” investment that will generate benefits far into the future. “We are able to share the OER out there with the world and we can also use the free material that others are sharing so we can gather more information about what is happening outside Colorado,” he says. “Our workers need to be able to move throughout the country in order to be able to continue to develop their careers and skills. Having our materials be open and being able to access the open learning materials available elsewhere is just invaluable.”

For more information on COETC, go to the Colorado Online Energy Training Consortium website (https://www.cccs.edu/partnering-for-success/trade-adjustment-assistance/taa-coetc/). To access their OER directory, go to http://cccscoetc.weebly.com. COETC is supported by a grant of $17.2 million from the U.S. Department of Labor. All of the new intellectual property produced with federal funds from this grant will be made available via a public digital repository housed at www.skillscommons.org

The level of collaboration and cooperation across borders and instructional disciplines currently underway is unprecedented, according to Consortium members. And it has already created some big wins. For starters, the advent of the Consortium enabled educators in different labor markets to identify common instructional needs and combine their efforts to develop and continuously improve shared learning resources that match their requirements.

These shared open learning resources lay a common academic foundation for whatever each individual school or learner wants to do next, whether it is rapid job placement or more advanced studies. “We’re demonstrating how to work collaboratively across lots of colleges to meet the needs of those colleges and lots of other colleges as well,” notes Bosworth.

The Department of Labor’s TAACCCT grant program requires the use of an open license on all new intellectual property created with federal funds. As a result, the Consortium’s open, shared STEM curriculum redirects scarce community college funds away from a reliance on antiquated methods, such as requiring students to purchase textbooks or similar commercial online materials, and toward the development of online, often printable on demand curricula that instructors can customize, which in turn promotes more instructor engagement and deeper student learning.

Open educational resources facilitate this process, participants say, by allowing instructors to organize – or in the case of many STEM programs with often disappointingly high failure rates – reorganize courses and programs in ways that better help students build the confident mastery of STEM skills that is required to earn educational certificates prized by employers.”

The National STEM Consortium’s flexible, student-centered approach cuts the costs imposed on students through the use of open educational resources, and breaks down other barriers to student success as well. One hallmark is the Consortium’s STEM Bridge Strategy, which embeds competency-based, targeted STEM instruction directly into the core technical curriculum being studied to enable students to get the STEM skills development help they need when they need it. This “contextualized” approach to STEM instruction is an alternative to the traditional method, which usually requires students to first attend non-credit bearing developmental courses that all too often serve as a graveyard for academic ambitions. Instead, students whose studies incorporate one of the first five National STEM Consortium’s certificate programs can jump right into the academic field of study that sparks their interest and pick up or refresh the specific STEM skills they need to succeed while earning credits toward their certificate or degree objective, and without the stigma often associated with placement in a remedial track, where they might also be asked to review material or skills they already know.

Many studies have now demonstrated that one of the best ways to keep students, and particularly students at risk of dropping out, engaged is to avoid wasting their time on extraneous, unnecessary or redundant exercises that turn what could be a ladder of opportunity into an obstacle course. The National STEM Bridge Strategy’s use of open educational resources is designed to remove those barriers.

These flexible, open, online STEM learning resources and others like them help educators implement other cutting-edge innovations. Some of the colleges participating in the Consortium are, for example, offering new “cohort models,” that guide small groups of students as they work together toward common degree or certificate goals. “If we look at new or dislocated workers, cohort based short term certificate programs provide the technical training and a very high success factor, so that one can move from underemployment or unemployment to fulltime employment,” reports John Gajewski, retired vice president for workforce and economic development at Cuyahoga Community College, a Consortium member in Northeast Ohio.

Community colleges participating in the National STEM Consortium currently offer five, one-year, 30-credit STEM certificate programs in growing industries: composites, cyber technology, electric vehicle technology, environmental technology and mechatronics. The Consortium’s STEM Readiness Course is programmatically consistent across all five fields and fully transferable to other colleges, according to the Consortium’s website. It was designed to help students develop the critical skills identified by instructors and industry subject matter experts in all five programs. The open educational resources produced by the National STEM Consortium carry a Creative Commons BY license, which permits the use and repurposing of these instructional materials and resources by others entirely free of charge, with attribution to the original creators.

National STEM Consortium founding partners are: Anne Arundel Community College (MD) Clover Park Technical College (WA) College of Lake County (IL) Cuyahoga Community College (OH) Florida State College at Jacksonville (FL) Ivy Tech Community College (IN) Macomb Community College (MI) Northwest Arkansas Community College (AR) Roane State Community College (TN) South Seattle College (WA)

Several factors account for the success of the new program, according to Lindsay. Flexible course meeting schedules now permit students to do class work online at times that do not interfere with work or family demands. A hybrid approach carefully blends online and in-person instruction to benefit from the strengths of both methodologies. Local mining companies, grateful for the opportunity to help develop curricula tailored to meet their specific needs, have donated technical equipment and specialized gear that students need for hands-on instruction.

Utilizing the input from industry in curricula development and performance analysis data, NWCCD will make course materials available as open education resources (OER) so that other educational institutions can develop their own mining programs, reducing the time and cost of content creation. By using OER from other sources colleges can “draw from other subject matter experts across the country or possibly even across the world,” says Lindsay, “and then focus on what we do well to increase the quality of the education experience.”

NWCCD’s revamped Accelerated Mining Technology degree program is just one of several new or improved community college offerings in the state that help job seekers or workers rapidly obtain the training and certificates they need to land a good job or advance in their careers. The programs are the outcome of four rounds of federal investments in Wyoming’s community college and workforce development system from 2010 to 2015 provided by the U.S. Department of Labor. All told, these new federal investments have pumped more than $10 million into the coffers of Wyoming’s community college system to support efforts to develop and improve community college education and job training programs identified as high need by local educators and businesses in Wyoming.

“Federal funds for focused program changes and capacity building helps the college make significant changes without pulling the funding from other ongoing operations,” said Dr. Paul Young, President of NWCCD, when he announced the third round TAACCCT grant award of nearly $2.5 million to the NWCCD Board of Trustees in a statement released by the college. “The federal grants are game changers if we take advantage of those that are aligned with our priorities and this one is.”

Wyoming is expected to need an additional 11,000 skilled mine workers over the next ten years, according to Wyoming labor market research cited by NWCCD. An additional 1,000 engineers and technicians will also be required to meet anticipated demand. Tens of thousands of other Wyoming jobs rely on the recirculation of income originally generated by the mining sector. Thanks to the new, more flexible education programs students and workers can now earn an Industrial Operations Management and Supervision Certificate, an 18-credit-hour credential that some local employers accept as a qualification for promotion from entry level status. The credits are also applicable toward fully accredited Associate’s or Bachelor’s degrees.

In addition to the mining sciences program, other community college job training programs in Wyoming are now being modernized with the same recently awarded federal funds. Under the TAACCCT round three award, NWCCD is redeveloping technical education programs essential to the growth of the local economy, including the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), Machine Tool Technology, Welding Technology and Electrician Apprenticeship programs. In each case, the funds support the development and use of free open educational resources, online learning, and enhanced student support services. Nearly $600,000 of the most recent award will be used to pay for training simulators and equipment for the technical and apprenticeship programs.

In accordance with the rules of the federal funding program, all new intellectual property produced for use by any of the federally funded programs will be released with an intellectual property license that permits their free use and improvement by others. The requirement ensures that community college students in Wyoming have the highest quality learning materials at the lowest possible cost. It also discourages schools from asking students to spend money on learning resources when materials of equal or better quality are freely available elsewhere or when participating experts can create them.

The cost of learning materials in mining education programs previously prevented some students from taking a full load each semester, according to college officials. “One of the best things we can do with an open curriculum is to remove the costs of textbooks,” says Lindsay.

“The U.S. Department of Labor’s priorities have aligned well with the community college mission,” added Dr. Young, NWCCD President, in his statement. “This is especially true with our emphasis on career technical education and preparedness for the workforce.”

Virginia’s community college consortium uses the information to find, improve or create free open educational resources (OER) to meet the identified workforce training needs. OER are learning materials that are either in the public domain or which have been released with an intellectual property license that allows their free use and repurposing by others. Increasingly, educators are turning to the creation and continuous improvement of OER as a way to deliver high-quality education at lower cost and promote the professional growth and development of faculty. Participating faculty members get support, recognition and rewards for helping students gain free, permanent access to the instructional materials they need. In many cases, required learning materials such as textbooks, laboratory workbooks, and access to commercial online resources, can cost more than tuition at many community colleges, particularly in scientific and technical disciplines that lead to jobs with high pay.

The Virginia RETHINKS Health Sciences Education project is made possible by a nearly $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The funds were made available to applicants who agreed to release all the new intellectual property they created, including courses, lectures, guides, assessments, and any other instruction and learning tools, as OER. The OER requirement ensures that students, including unemployed workers, get access to learning materials for free if created with federal funds. Fortunately for Virginia, when the new federal money was offered, Virginia’s community college system responded with a winning application for the maximum amount available.

The Virginia community college system’s RETHINK process relies primarily on faculty-led teams. Encouraging higher levels of faculty engagement was part of the commitment to shake things up Virginia Community College System Chancellor Glenn DuBois made six years ago when he launched Vision 2015, an ambitious collaborative planning and reengineering effort. The fresh thinking encouraged by Chancellor DuBois supported Tidewater and its sister colleges as they set a goal many thought audacious: increasing the number of students served from underserved populations by 75 percent and boosting the number of workforce education certificates awarded by 50 percent, mostly by finding new ways to stretch existing resources, support faculty, and encourage a sense of ownership among other stakeholders, including local businesses.

“The perspective our faculty offers is critical to the success of this effort,” DuBois said when he launched Vision 2015 six years ago. “That’s why our commitment to them is so strong and will grow stronger over time… We must make a difference.”

That difference is now being felt all over Virginia. The health science RETHINK community college network is implementing seven complementary strategies statewide that increase student retention and reduce the time it takes to earn a degree. The strategies include the creation of a new Health Sciences Career Certificate that combines health sciences A.A. degree requirements with practical workforce training verified by local employers as sufficient for immediate employment. Other strategies focus on developing new OER for developmental education to help more students quickly qualify for placement in advanced technical programs, and the development of new open training and certification materials to support evidence-based coaching and counseling methods known to keep more students on track. The consortium’s business partners, who help validate the curriculum and programs, include a who’s who of major healthcare and health sciences employers in the state, such as the Fauquier Health System, Winchester Medical Center, Rappahannock General Hospital, and a dozen others.

“The immense economic scope of this project perfectly suits the mission of community colleges and the Commonwealth of Virginia as a leading choice for employers to build and expand their businesses,” said Tidewater Community College President Deborah M. DiCroce, who now leads the Hampton Roads Community Foundation, when the grant was announced. “This will ultimately benefit all students and any employer who hires a community-college completer,” she said.

Tidewater’s drive to provide the highest quality accelerated education opportunities at the lowest possible cost is now championed by scores of faculty members, administrators, and its current president, Edna V. Baehre-Kolovani, who co-stars in local television ads that feature Tidewater’s “Start Here, Go Anywhere!” motto. The ads emphasize Virginia’s creation of a seamless conveyer belt that now more affordably leads students and unemployed workers to rewarding careers in healthcare and other professions. A complementary program at Tidewater, its Z-Degree program, has also attracted international attention by using OER to offer students a chance to earn an associate’s degree in business administration with zero textbook costs, which saves each student thousands of dollars.

“Because of Tidewater’s Z-Degree Program, I did not have to choose between continuing my education and buying braces for my daughter,” says Melissa Hoch, 45, a Tidewater graduate who returned to school after a divorce and is now finishing up her Bachelor’s degree at Old Dominion University.

(Note: The video profile of this project says the Virginia RETHINKS initiative is producing 70-80 programs - it is actually producing 70-80 “courses” not programs.)

Like many rural states, Kansas is uniquely beautiful. It also has an equal distribution of talented, hard-working people in every region, no matter how remote, and an uneven distribution of high-quality education and job training opportunities. In that sense, Kansas is a microcosm: The same mismatch plagues much of the world. Fresh approaches to closing opportunity gaps are urgently needed, say experts. Not surprisingly, TRAC-7’s model is attracting attention.

“TRAC-7 is making changes in the way Kansas approaches education,” says Edleston. For decades, she notes, leaders in Kansas have worked to provide the best possible education and job-training to residents of rural communities, such as Cloud County, which has a population less than 6,000. Local educators have proposed a myriad of plans; usually, the only thing missing was money. So when a new federal funding opportunity came along that would increase rural student access to job training, certificates and degrees valued in the marketplace, the TRAC-7 team quickly assembled and jumped on it.

“Adult learners are place-bound,” says Edleston. “They will move for a job but they can’t move for a year of training or education.” TRAC-7’s solution: after students do as much work as they can online, “We take the program to them.” Mobile labs custom-designed by the TRAC-7 team now roam Kansas, parking wherever they can find eager students and electricity. Rural students in technical and scientific fields now get the same hands-on, lab-based learning experiences, and earn the same college credits that were traditionally available only in larger, more centralized urban college settings. The program reaches students whose family commitments or other responsibilities can make travel difficult or even impossible. “We’re crossing over barriers that have traditionally been there,” says Edelston. She adds that TRAC-7’s development and use of open educational resources also helps break down barriers between different education and job training programs within the consortium, including by identifying common curricular needs that can be met through collaboration.

TRAC-7 has opened up a wide range of new degree, certificate and job-training opportunities to residents of Kansas in higher-wage industries, with the ability to participate now determined by interest, not geography. The programs include Advanced Systems Technology, Agri-Biotechnology, Environmental Technology, Electrical Power Technician, Food Science, Risk Management and Power Plant Technology. Open educational resources including curricula and learning resources are being created for each of these programs. There is even an open floor plan available for a science lab with a detailed supply list so others thinking about starting similar programs will know where to begin.

Early results from the TRAC-7 partnership are encouraging, with employed program graduates finding jobs with annual average salaries in the range of $40,000. The best outcome, though, is new hope for a population that has often been left behind when new breakthroughs occur, particularly in education. With better solutions emerging that use open educational resources, leaders in Kansas are eager to share their success stories – and in particular the power of open collaboration – with others.

#Standing out with OER

“We have quite a lot to share and we are eager to share it,” says Susan Peek, a PAVES program success coach in Hanceville. “But one of the things that’s really different about us,” she says, “is the coaching.” PAVES’ project model places a strong, explicit emphasis on the person-to-person help and support often needed to ensure that investments in the latest educational technologies delivers real results.

The coaching supports a curriculum that relies on newly developed, highly-sophisticated open digital resources that make learning easier, or at least, much less intimidating. The more high-tech aspects of PAVES (technically, the Partnership for Accelerated Learning through Engagement, Visualization, and Stimulation) will eventually feature more than 140 graphically-rich 3D visualizations and simulations created or planned to address specific program learning objectives. The 3D digital learning resources are being produced by PAVES’ Advanced Visualization Centers to help students learn or demonstrate mastery of subject matter required to earn degrees and certificates in the fields of Advanced Manufacturing, Allied Health, Public Safety and Transportation. In the field of Allied Health, for example, cutting-edge, new simulations and visualizations of the circulatory and neurological systems provide students enhanced opportunities to more fully comprehend complex topics and concepts.

PAVES’ high-tech approach is also reflected in a new suite of open Prior Learning Assessments (PLAs) that let students quickly receive academic credit for specific accumulated knowledge or experience in cases where what they know or can do is demonstrably equivalent or richer than a directly comparable traditional for-credit course. “I can’t imagine any other institution that would not benefit from prior learning assessments,” says Peek, who notes that in the case of her consortium it was important to develop new open PLA’s that could be easily and freely shared across schools and programs. “If you just leave it to some type of general assessment or don’t have a system for this, there are lots of people who fall through the cracks,” she says. The PLAs are important in part, Peek notes, because studies have shown that when students earn credit for what they already know graduation and program completion rates can double.

PLAs are just one part of what is really a comprehensive web of support services that are designed to make sure more students accomplish their educational and job training goals. “Success never happens alone,” PAVES explains in its marketing materials. “Quite often, what we really need is simply the encouragement, discipline and resources to get us to the next level.” PAVES success coaches meet with each program participant at least 30 minutes every two weeks in person or via the Internet. The coaches are available to assist students with all the problems and issues that college students typically confront, from time management to handling financial matters while in school. Some students, particularly those from wealthier socio-economic groups, often get help with common problems like these from parents or other family members. But for community college students who may be the first in their family to attend college, or whose parents or family may not be in a position to assist, the Success Coaches play a critical role. The PAVES program’s website features a video of students praising the coaching they’ve received and encouraging others to apply.

Although the program is still in its infancy, PAVES has already shown a modest overall increase in student retention, with about six percent more students returning after the first term than before. PAVES program leaders expect those numbers to steadily increase as students and coaches create new expectations for one another. And there are already indications more success is ahead. PAVES licensed practical nursing program, for example, did not have a single coached student drop out during the first term, Suzanne Harbin, WSCC’s director of advancement, reported in a story published on the Community College Daily website. “Are there other factors involved?” Harbin asked. “Sure there are, but if you have 100 percent of our students who were coached and were retained, that says a lot,” she told the news site.

Most U.S. workers won’t work for the low wages prevalent in the global manufacturing sector, which has largely migrated overseas. But as good-paying unskilled production jobs continue to vanish in the U.S., a new class of often higher-paying jobs in advanced manufacturing is beginning to emerge. In those settings, where machines or robots do most if not all of the tedious labor, the relatively small number of production workers who remain must often possess skills far more advanced than was common for production workers just a decade ago. What’s more, the specific skills required in advanced manufacturing facilities often change very quickly both within and across industries. Workers able to stay ahead of that learning curve can earn premium wages. However, the new ways products are produced also pose new challenges for public education and workforce training systems, and frequently require them to improvise new job-training programs on the fly to match rapidly shifting market and employer demands.

Meeting these complex and interrelated needs for students, job-seekers, workers and firms, and ensuring a sustainable future for advanced manufacturing in North Carolina, is the goal of the NCAMA’s ten partner community college alliance, which includes Beaufort County, Craven, Fayetteville Technical, Nash, Edgecomb, Davidson County, Surry, Haywood and Asheville-Buncombe community colleges, along with many of the region’s leading employers, such as Campbell Soup Supply Company, Potash Corporation, and Carver Machine Works. The Alliance’s mission: reach out to dislocated workers, students, and employed workers who want to move up the wage scale, and help those individuals gain the skills and educational certificates they need in ways that fit with their schedules, family situations, and previous levels of education, experience and training.

“My greatest challenge while pursuing my degree is balancing school, work, and family,” a computer-integrated machining student at Fayetteville Technical Community College, Loren Kimmel, recently told blogger Tiffany Alford. Time and extra money are in short supply for students such as Kimmel.

“[We are] equipping them on an accelerated basis with the skill sets that our industry partners say they need to be employed in those industries,” says DeRay Cole, a veteran manufacturing executive in Lumberton, North Carolina, who thought he had retired but returned to work to serve as NCAMA’s founding Project Manager.

The number of new advanced manufacturing jobs in the parts of North Carolina served by Alliance member community colleges is, at least initially, still small as measured against the total number of unemployed workers in those areas. What’s more important, says Cole, is the fact the Alliance is helping students land those good jobs as they become available, and attract still more employers, while also helping others build skills and earn certificates and credits related to advanced manufacturing that are directly applicable to a wide range of industries. “We’re training machinists, electricians, industrial systems [specialists], food [science], mechanical, health care,” notes Cole. The focus on advanced manufacturing, he says, “cuts across all industries that are out there.”

There is at least some anecdotal evidence that the promise of a more highly skilled local workforce is generating forward momentum for the regional economy. In October 2014, for example, GE’s Aviation Division cut the ribbon on its new aerospace composites division in Asheville, North Carolina. The new factory is expected to eventually employ nearly 350 workers; it will be the first facility in the world to mass produce engine components made of advanced ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials, according to GE.

Because the Alliance was founded with nearly $19 million in start up funds from the U.S. Department of Labor’s innovative federal job training initiative known as TAACCCT, all of the new curriculum produced to support NCAMA’s advanced manufacturing job training, certificate and degree programs is being released under a Creative Commons BY license, which permits the free use and continuous improvement and adaptation of the learning resources by anyone else, with proper attribution. The freely available learning resources produced to date include more than 30 open courses and applications, labs, lectures, tutorials and other resources, providing practical building blocks which can be assembled into cutting-edge advanced manufacturing educational and career pathways, as well as integrated into on-the-job professional training.

At least one NCAMA industry partner, Campbell Soup, has already adapted one of the first NCAMA open educational resources developed – an open micrometer application created by Davidson County Community College – and integrated it into its training module for maintenance personnel.

The open educational resources requirement attached to the federal funds that were used to start up the Alliance is critical, says Project Manager DeRay Cole. “Being able to access [advanced manufacturing] curriculum 24/7 is important to our students,” he says. “It’s also important from an economical standpoint. Many of our students can’t afford to buy textbooks and without textbooks they are unable to achieve success. With the open learning curriculum they have access to the information without having to be concerned about “how do I pay for it?”

NCAMA programs also feature “Success Managers” who help students customize coursework to guide them toward more rapid employment in targeted industries, a process that is also facilitated by an open Human Resources Development (HRD) module, which can likewise be adopted and adapted for free use by any other school. The open HRD module was developed to meet industry partner requests for tracking and documentation of skills acquisition, including so-called “soft skills” such as appropriate behavior in the workplace, collaboration, and project presentation.

All of the open advanced manufacturing curriculum, modules, courses and other learning materials produced by NCAMA are initially being made available online via Apple’s iTunes University, in accordance with NCAMA members pledge to provide access to the resources as quickly and easily as possible. The same open digital learning resources are also being released as they are finalized for public distribution at the website designated by the U.S. Department of Labor as the official repository for federally funded open TAACCCT job-training learning resources, www.skillscommons.org.

OER are learning materials that are in the public domain or that have been released with an intellectual property license that allows their free use and repurposing by others. All the new intellectual property produced by NISGTC, which includes curriculum, courses and online virtual labs, is being released as freely available OER. The OER reduces and in some cases eliminates a major expense community college students usually face – high-priced textbooks and other learning materials, including online access fees – costs that can rapidly escalate if they want to pursue a wide range of interrelated studies as they move toward their education, job training and career goals. NISGTC’s progress in breaking down those barriers has people talking.

“It’s a pleasure to work with these students,” says Tu Huynh, Vice President of Infrastructure Technology Services for Comerica Bank, a consortium employer partner and program mentor. “They are bright, they are smart, they are hard workers, and they are employable!” In something that is pretty rare, even remarkable for job training programs these days, dozens of employers now list job openings directly on NISGTC’s LinkedIn page.

One reason the accolades and attention are coming in from employers, students, and educators is the consortium’s focus on one of the most cutting-edge, rapidly growing fields: digital networking and related technologies, industries that are projected to maintain steady growth for years to come. The burgeoning networking industry is a magnet for individuals interested in innovation and progress. It is also a thriving business segment that relies heavily on open standards and open source software, using practices very similar to those embraced by the OER community that includes NISGTC. Another reason NISGTC is playing a new starring role bolstering community college job training programs is the careful way consortium leaders identified high growth labor market niches and related job training course components that would most quickly lead graduates into higher-wage employment. Called BILT (Business Industry Leadership Teams), the process engages business and industry leaders as participants in an ongoing oversight role that continuously adjusts curriculum to maintain workplace relevance.

But in the end, the praise directed toward NISGTC, which includes many online testimonials offered by recent program graduates, stems primarily from the expertise, experience and innovative stewardship of NISGTC’s program leaders, among them Ann Beheler, the veteran high-tech business executive who serves as NISGTC’s Principal Investigator at the consortium’s organizing flagship Collin College campus.

Beheler literally wrote the book (or at least one early, important book) on computer networking before she moved into academia some years ago. More recently, she took on the task of helping to modernize our nation’s workforce training system. Her goal is to see NISTGC serve as a model effort to demonstrate how to better meet the needs of today’s students, unemployed workers, and industries like the networking and technology markets she helped create during her pre-academic career, which included executive and board level service at leading firms such as Rockwell International, Raytheon, and Novell.

The BILT process, which was originally developed at the National Convergence Technology Center at Collin College, guided NISGTC toward developing or strengthening education and job training programs in four carefully targeted and tightly interrelated, high-growth industry segments: networking and data communications, applications development, geospatial technologies; and cybersecurity. “We were thinking with a 12 to 36 month employability mindset,” says Beheler, who points to surveys of employers in those industries indicating immediate average starting wages for open positions above $20 per hour. After identifying target industries and programs, the NISGTC team set about the process of identifying and organizing the most directly related, free, high-quality OER that could meet the academic and job training needs identified by the consortium’s business partners. In cases where free OER are not readily available or when what is available is not suitable for use by community college students, the consortium fills those gaps and creates new, free OER. All told, 200 open virtual online labs are being created, all of which can be freely used and repurposed by others. “The virtual labs make it possible for us to reach so many more students,” says Beheler, who adds that a single online virtual lab can take the place of six or even eight large, cumbersome physical machines, all of which would also require time-consuming, costly help from instructors to set up and maintain. Another benefit: “The virtual labs directly mimic what a student encounters in a business environment and students can do them any time including the middle of the night and on weekends,” she says.

Because the labs are open and virtual, others can see exactly what NISGTC students are learning and doing, transparency that makes it much easier to assess and evaluate program characteristics and strengths, including for purposes of credit transferability and portability. The transparency also makes it easier to continuously improve programs, since it is harder to improve curriculum and learning resources when only paid customers know what is in it and when changes can only be made by the original copyright holder. The economics are pretty convincing, too. Beheler calculates that some of the first students to benefit from the consortium’s work saved more than $125,000 in textbook costs alone in a single Utah community college course over its first four semesters. “And that’s just one college,” she adds.

Winning another distinction, NISGTC is also one of the first Department of Labor federal job training grantees to share online the new open digital education and job training resources it is creating, including full courses, in advance of the formal deadline for doing so under the terms of the start-up grant it received from the U.S. Department of Labor. Last year, the Department of Labor designated California State University’s Merlot repository as the official future home of all federally funded open learning resources produced by NISGTC and other federal grantees in the same program. But even before the designation was announced, NISGTC had already begun uploading its newly produced open resources to the free open source online National Training and Education Resource website (https://www.nterlearning.org/), which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy. “We are eager for people to see what we are doing,” explains Beheler. “That’s the whole point of open educational resources. You do work in the open, share it freely, make it better, and everyone benefits.”

Beheler is a big believer in OER. So much so that she recently titled one of her talks “Free is Good.” But she quickly adds that her main point is that efficiency matters, and that if scarce educational funds can be spent to build renewable learning resources that benefit students, schools, and promote business growth, those investments are wise and practical. Beheler adds that she is particularly committed to using OER to open up opportunities in technical professions for more women, minorities, older workers, and anyone else who might otherwise be denied an equal chance to achieve success. The development, use and continuous improvement of open educational resources brings those goals closer within reach, she says.

The National Information Security and Geospatial Technologies Consortium is open to new institutions using all their materials and is funded by a nearly $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. At present, seven colleges in six states, including Texas, are participating. The other consortium partners in addition to Collin College are: Bellevue College, WA Bunker Hill Community College, MA DelMar College, TX Moraine Valley Community College, IL Rio Salado College, AZ Salt Lake Community College, UT