Calbright College
From 2019-2021, I served as the Chief Technology Officer for Calbright College, California's online community college, designed specifically to meet the needs of working adults.
Origin
In June of 2018, legislation was signed and passed into law by then-Governor Jerry Brown, and the College was founded. The California Online Community College Act, codified as California Education Code §75000-75012 (PDF), details key aspects of the design of the college. In June of 2019, the college was named Calbright College, and in October of 2019, the college welcomed its first students.
Milestones
The enabling statute includes a schedule of milestones that the college is expected to achieve. The college publishes annual reports summarizing progress and status updates with respect to these milestones, such as the 2021 Milestone Report (PDF).
Projects
- Team building - Built a talented and committed remote-first technology team responsible for engineering, automation/integration, early product development, product management, systems, security, end-user support, UX design, data analysis, and external reporting.
- Hiring - Chaired or served on 25+ hiring committees.
- MVP - Implemented the initial version of Calbright's end-to-end student experience, leveraging no-code and low-code tools and integrations.
- CRM - RFP, Salesforce implementation, and continued iteration.
- LMS - Adopted the Strut learning platform, designed specifically for Competency Based Education.
- Accreditation - Preparing systems, processes, documentation, metrics, and reporting in support of the accreditation process.
- ERP & SIS - Extensive RFP process culminating in selection of Anthology.
- Automation - Invested heavily in automation and cross-platform integration from Day 1. Integrating and automating the wide large variety of technologies underlying Calbright programs in order to avoid exposing this complexity in the student-facing experience.
- A/B testing - Built a cross-platform A/B testing infrastructure, and used it to run and evaluate randomized controlled experiments with respect to student outcome metrics.
- Pace and Progress - Understanding pace and progress is a non-trivial problem in flexibly-paced Competency-Based Education (CBE) programs, but is critical to tracking progress, timing student support, and setting expectations around timelines. Data analysis and data visualization offer a path forward.
