Walters State Community College has teamed with McGraw-Hill Education to offer an all-digital course experience designed to engage and drive the performance of its biology students. As part of the collaboration, students taking biology courses will receive their course resources, including content and assessment, through McGraw-Hill Connect and LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill Education's digital teaching and learning platform and adaptive learning technology for higher education.
Beginning this fall, all teaching and learning solutions can be delivered onto the students' mobile devices. The large-scale shift to digital will provide Walters State students with access to innovative learning technology on their mobile devices that they access anywhere, anytime and at an affordable price. For students with limited wireless access, there are offline options.
For the past three years Walters State has been involved in their mEngage mobile learning initiative. As evidence of the success of the initiative Walters State has twice been named an Apple Distinguished program. With the mEngage initiative, Walters State is focused on student engagement, access, and improvements in student performance. To help Walters State achieve their goals, McGraw-Hill Education will provide the teaching and learning platform, Connect, with several integrated McGraw-Hill Education adaptive technologies.
The science students will have SmartBook, an adaptive reading experience, as well as LearnSmart Labs and Anatomy & Physiology Revealed for science lab work. All of the teaching and learning materials are seamlessly integrated into Walters State's learning management system, desire2learn, and may be loaded onto the students' mobile devices. The assignments will be aligned with established course SLOs and the division will employ analytics from McGraw-Hill Education's Connect Insight to aggregate formative assessment evidence for accreditation.
Walters State sought McGraw-Hill Education's digital solutions because of their established track record of improving student performance and retention. In an effectiveness study released in 2013, McGraw-Hill Education demonstrated that on average, instructors using Connect reduced their grading time by 77 percent. Another study revealed that LearnSmart's adaptive technology dramatically improves student retention rates (+10 percentage points) and pass rates (+11.5 percentage points).
