These days, it’s not enough for colleges and universities to have a tool that simply allows students to document what they’re doing in the realm of civic and community engagement.
You also need to be able to capture information about what those students are actually learning through their community-based work as active agents of change in society.
That was the thinking that inspired Compact2Learn™, an online tool that enables campuses to capture student civic and community participation and learning.
Compact2Learn is a joint project launched by Liaison International and Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges and universities committed to educating students for civic and social responsibility and fostering positive social change locally and nationally. Liaison brings to the partnership thirty years of developing and supporting technologies to serve higher education, while Campus Compact brings broad experience in facilitating and assessing community-based learning.
Striking the right balance
“From the outset, we sought to create a tool that that balances customizability — so that it can look and feel and speak in the language of particular institutions — with a certain degree of standardization,” says Andrew Seligsohn, Ph.D., president of Campus Compact. “That way, the information it gathers can provide a base of data that will allow us to ask field-wide questions that matter to everyone.”
“Compact2Learn provides an opportunity within your organization, and across organizations, to standardize data collection in ways that enable real learning about what kind of activities are having what sort of impact,” Seligsohn explains in Liaison’s new on-demand webinar, Introducing Compact2Learn — Capture Student Civic Engagement & Civic Learning.
Learning more
During the webinar, Seligsohn is joined by Maggie Wilkerson, Liaison’s vice president responsible for Time2Track, the online tool for tracking, verifying and managing education-related experiences.
Together, they explain:
- How students log details about their experiences and activities in Compact2Learn.
- How to make sure you capture the data that matters most to your program.
- How to create your own custom assessments that complement Compact2Learn’s standard features.
- How you can export data captured by Compact2Learn into other information systems on campus.
- How schools can ensure that student activities are verified by site supervisors and course instructors.
- How students can upload their Compact2Learn reports to e-portfolios — and how they can download them to keep with their personal records after graduation.
- How early adopters can use Compact2Learn with small groups of students rather than immediately roll it out to their entire institution.
You can learn more about Compact2Learn here.
You can watch Liaison’s on-demand webinar, “Introducing Compact2Learn — Capture Student Civic Engagement & Civic Learning” here.