"Better than some, not as good as others."
Sometimes teaching at a distance may cause us to overestimate, underestimate, or forget whom we are educating.
The following is an overview of what the LAVC Office of Institutional Effectiveness has determined about our student population.
When reading this section, please keep in mind the following questions:
- Do you expect to experience the same challenges with your online students as with your face-to-face students?
- Do you think the challenges of under-prepared students will be easier or more difficult to overcome in a face-to-face class vs. an online class?
- Does this demographic information about our students influence how you will design your online course?
- What assumptions have you made of a typical LAVC online student?
- What do you think faculty can do to improve retention of LAVC online students?
Los Angeles Valley College is a diverse socioeconomic community. Many of our students work full time and/or have family responsibilities and/or have disabilities. Nearly three quarters of the student body attend LAVC on a less than full-time basis and a large proportion of these students identify themselves as working full-time. Complete student data that have been gleaned from various surveys can be viewed on the Office of Institutional Effectiveness website.
Student preparation and basic skills
The academic preparation of the students at LAVC can be described in part by the results of assessment testing. Although not all students participate in the matriculation process, the scores are a guide to the need for basic skills programming and also highlight the enrollment patterns in Math and English sequences that may represent barriers to student completion.
Only 5% of students test into transfer level Math, indicating that 95% of students will need at least one semester of Math prior to being able to take their transfer requirements. Eighty-five percent will need to take at least one course prior to reaching their graduation requirements, and a majority of students place 2 or more levels below the college's graduation requirements. As a result, most students will need a minimum of 3 semesters of Math to graduate and 4 to transfer. Given the unit loads of the required Math courses, this will slow a student's progress toward completion even when they complete each level in the sequence in consecutive semesters.
Similar results are seen in English, with only 12% of students testing at college level. A majority of students test 2 or more levels below transfer and will require 3 or more semesters of English prior to graduation or transfer.
Taken together with the Math results, a majority of our LAVC students will need to take at least 16 units of Math and English basic skills courses prior to reaching College Reading and Composition and Intermediate Algebra.
Basic skills sequences are often noted as potential barriers for student success. Given that more than 85% of LAVC students place into basic skills levels in English and Math, an analysis of these sequences is important. The District has provided data that indicates that there is substantial drop off as students progress through English and Math sequences. The data suggest that LAVC is performing below its peer group average on Student Progress and Achievement, Percent of Students Who Earned at Least 30 Units, Persistence, and in Basic Skills and ESL improvement rates. The college is more successful on measures of Credit Vocational Course Success.