The Foundation for California Community Colleges sets a new learning curve

Spanning the nation’s most populous state from top to bottom, the California Community College system is the biggest in the country. Comprising 73 districts and 116 different colleges, the network of schools aims to provide affordable education to everyone who needs it.

The Foundation for California Community Colleges (FoundationCCC) fundraises, seeks out grant opportunities and implements programs necessary to keep community colleges in California at the top of their game.

The locally driven nature of these colleges is one of their strengths, but it also comes with challenges. The FoundationCCC saw an opportunity to achieve greater synergy between each school and district by integrating them all into the same learning management system (LMS). They turned to Cornerstone to lay the foundation for every single one of their 135,000 employees to access learning to help them thrive.

Main Challenge: Integrate 116 different colleges, 73 districts and 135,000 employees into the same LMS

Solution: Cornerstone Learning Management

Results: Over the course of five years, the FoundationCCC and Cornerstone have helped California community college employees have equitable access to learning and collaboration spaces critical to the large scale transformation happening across the CCC.

It’s tough enough to get over a hundred thousand people onto the same LMS for training. It’s even more complicated when each team member works at a different facility with its own unique rules, needs and desires.

FoundationCCC understood the nature of the California Community College system and therefore knew that the local operations of each individual school or district are at least as important as the central needs of the system. Still, they also saw the importance of the new system goals of centrally driven learning initiatives for all CCC employees. Certain strategic and consistent training needed to go out to all California Community College employees to meet the goals the system set for itself.

“To achieve those goals,” FoundationCCC Director of Professional Development Beth Kay says, “we needed learning at every level of our system —statewide, from the state chancellor’s office, and throughout the districts, the colleges, driven by their local needs.”

Kay had spent years in the education system before joining up with the FoundationCCC. She was a high school science teacher, a principal and even founded three high schools. She first gained exposure to the nonprofit world when she founded an organization to support new schools just starting throughout the Golden State. All these experiences prepared her for the position she eventually took with the Foundation.

“I'm a builder,” she says, “I'm a craftsman. I like to create and build projects that serve students who haven't been well-served before. That's my mission. And I guess I would say that I am always looking for what's really working and maximizing that.”

When it came to finding a customizable LMS for the California Community College system, Kay shopped around with a primary focus: what company could manage the sheer size of the endeavor, much less the number of employees needing access? She decided Cornerstone could handle the course load.

“Cornerstone is known in the industry as the best in class,” she says. “And because they'd had large clients before us — the US Postal Service, Amazon, big, big companies — I knew that they could handle the volume, the scale that we were going to need to work at. They were going to have the support structures already in place to work with us and to hear our concerns and troubleshoot with us.”

Once the FoundationCCC had formed a partnership with Cornerstone, they got to work building their learning management system from the grassroots up. Cornerstone Learn allowed them to implement feedback and consider unique approaches to how different employees wanted to learn.

Most systems of higher education are hierarchical. They go from the top down when it comes to implementing these sorts of programs. For that matter, California’s UC and CSU systems reflect that mode of operation as well. A single head of operations can make almost all the decisions.

“The California Community College system doesn’t operate that way,” Kay says. “There is a single state agency that oversees the colleges and ensures that they get their money from the legislature to do their work. But each of those community colleges has grown up out of local community needs. They're governed locally. And so there is no hierarchy from the state level that controls operations at the local level.”

When it came time to implement Cornerstone Learning across all these campuses, the FoundationCCC wanted to ensure they could keep this local spirit alive. That way, the Foundation could maintain each district and college’s individuality while achieving a sense of coherence and consistency for every employee. It would be a tightrope walk, but Kay and her team were hopeful their partnership with Cornerstone was just the thing to make it happen.

It was a daunting task too. No one had ever tried implementing a single piece of tech across the California Community College system, for all the different classifications of employee. Generally, they’ve made local choices about the technical tools they need to achieve their own ends.

“This is the very first time, from a system-wide level, there's been a single tool implemented for all 135,000 employees,” Kay says. “We didn't even know we had 135,000 employees. We didn't know anything about them on a grand scale because previously the personnel data had been all self-reported by the colleges, not pulled directly from HR systems.”

But this didn’t deter Kay and team. They worked with HR teams across each of the campuses to ensure everyone knew this new piece of technology would help further the individual goals of each college. In their thinking, a rising tide lifts all boats. If everyone could get to the same starting line regarding employee learning, they could still head off in any direction they wanted afterward. And they’d be all the better for it given the tools they’d acquired in the meantime too.

The team have rolled out the full capabilities of Cornerstone Learning and have partnered with Cornerstone to meet the latest accessibility WCAG requirements for learning across the CCC system.

“Traditionally, there are nearly a quarter of workers that report some level of disability,” Kay adds. “Cornerstone listened to the challenges we were having. They now have developers that know accessibility and with their partnership, we are meeting accessibility requirements and continue to improve the learning experience and development for our employees.”

The platform has allowed the Foundation to maintain the individuality of each school and district while also creating a more far-reaching sense of unity. While FoundationCCC is still early in its new LMS journey, it sees a bright future ahead. Kay estimates there is 90% engagement — meaning the vast majority of the organization uses Cornerstone Learning at least once per semester.

The Foundation has been providing support for learning for decades, so it’s no surprise that its partnership with Cornerstone has been a resounding success. It’s just the latest step in ensuring everyone in their orbit gets what they need to succeed. From Siskiyou to San Diego County, FoundationCCC always ensures every California community college has what they need to make the grade.