URI, CCRI get $600K for interactive ‘Roadmaps’

WASHINGTON – The University of Rhode Island and Community College of Rhode Island will receive a three-year, $643,117 federal grant to craft Web-based “Academic Roadmaps,” to help inform and advise students and their families about academic and career goals.
“I commend the University of Rhode Island and the Community College of Rhode Island for their leadership on this innovative project,” U.S. Sen. Jack Reed said today in announcing the grant.
The grant is one of 16 awarded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education; recipients were chosen from a pool of more than 400 applicants nationwide.
“This money will help schools streamline academic planning efforts and give their students greater access to information and advice about the academic and career opportunities available to them,” said Reed, a member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees federal education spending. In August, he wrote a letter in support of the program, saying: “Making it easier for students and their families to find information that can help them choose and successfully pursue majors, graduate programs or careers will go a long way toward improving higher education in Rhode Island and across the country.”
The FIPSE grant will be used to develop Academic Roadmaps for the URI and CCRI nursing and biology programs – following a template created last year for the fields of wildlife conservation, nutrition and dietetics, animal sciences, and geosciences – and to develop an interactive component for each field that will help students create plans tailored to their own needs and interests.
The project will improve academic advising at URI and CCRI and better align the schools’ curricula, said Deborah Grossman-Garber, the URI director of student learning, outcomes assessment and accreditation, who is one of the grant’s 11 principal investigators. The Academic Roadmaps also will be available online to students at other colleges and universities, she said.
URI President Robert L. Carothers said: “We are persuaded that students who have a keen sense of their intellectual interests, capabilities and career goals will succeed with greater commitment and efficiency. … This project provides a strong relationship between and among student learning, academic choices, and student advisement.”
CCRI President Ray M. Di Pasquale added: “To improve student recruitment and retention, all institutions of higher learning must first connect students and those who influence their career choices to accurate educational guidance, delivered in a format that is accessible and understandable. This, I believe, is what makes this FIPSE project so exciting: It creates not only a usable roadmap for life sciences education and careers, but also an accessible Web-based format that can transfer to a variety of learning environments.”