The Fall 2020 semester marks West Virginia’s Remote Online Collaborative Knowledge System (WVROCKS) ninth year of service to institutions of higher education in the State.

The WVROCKS portal delivers quality online courses to Regents Bachelor of Arts (RBA) and Board of Governor’s (BOG) degree students from eight different institutions: Bluefield State College, Concord University, Fairmont State University, Marshall University, Shepherd University, BridgeValley Community & Technical College, Southern Community & Technical College, and West Virginia Northern Community & Technical College. Their winning formula of accelerated, affordable, and accessible courses covering a range of subjects from the humanities to mathematics and sciences has been well received by adult students who have some college education but were never able to complete their degrees.

Despite the unusual circumstances brought on by Covid-19, enrollments remained steady at 2,713 and retention rates increased from 91% during the 2018/19 Academic Year to 96% in the 2019/20 Academic Year, and pass rates remained constant from the mid- to high-eightieth percentile. Translated, that means that more working adults have the opportunity to successfully obtain a college degree by taking online courses that work with their busy schedules.  

The close working relationships that WVROCKS administrators and staff have with the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission as well as the hosting services provided by West Virginia Network have greatly contributed to their success.  

First2 Network (First2) is an expanding group of people and organizations across West Virginia that seek to improve Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) persistence among rural, first-generation, and other underrepresented STEM students. As many as 7 in 10 first-generation students leave a STEM major within two years. First2 is working to change that.

What started out as a pilot project in 2016 to provide rising college freshmen with early exposure to STEM research, has turned into a National Science Foundation (NSF) Inclusion Across Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) grant funded initiative. In September 2018, First2 received an NSF INCLUDES award of $7.15 million for the next five years to double the rate of STEM graduates in the state of West Virginia from 30% to 60%. This funding, coordinated through the Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC) allows us to develop a statewide network of innovative stakeholders who will collaborate to solve the STEM persistence problem and grow our economy. 

At our core, we believe that students should be co-creators of the solutions to STEM persistence. Therefore, in addition to building research skills, First2 programming is centered around transferring student agency and developing students’ leadership capacity along the way to graduation. If you or your company is interested in partnering with First2 to help the STEM students of West Virginia succeed, please reach out to the First2 Program Coordinator, Jade Irving, at jade.irving@wvresearch.org. For more information about First2, please visit our website at https://first2network.org/ and follow us on social media!

WVNET is excited to launch our new Teaching and Learning Commons— a re-envisioning of how we deliver IT services, expertise and support to the state of West Virginia. Formerly titled the “Distance Learning and Educational Services Division,” the Teaching and Learning Commons is still offering all of the services and support it has always provided; however, we are adding to these services a focus on structured Professional Development. To kick off the launch of our Teaching and Learning Commons, we will be offering Professional Development Week in July.

Professional Development Week will be a series of workshops, webinars, vendor presentations and product demos. Presentations will be done by the experts at WVNET, Educators throughout the state, and our vendor partners.

Professional Development Week

When: July 13-17, 2020
Workshops Sessions: 30, 60, or 90 minutes sessions available throughout the week from 9:00am-3:00pm
Format: Separate online sessions through WebEx and Zoom
Registration: https://tlc.wvnet.edu/training-calendar/ (Available July 1)
Audience: Higher Education, K12, State Government
Topics: Online Teaching and Learning, Banner, Cybersecurity, Office 365, and much more

A full calendar of sessions will be available on July 1^st.

The service that the Morgantown Area Meals on Wheels provides is vitally important year-round, but especially during this period of social distancing. Their network of volunteers prepares and delivers an average of 115 fresh and healthy meals each day to clients throughout Morgantown and the organization has experienced an increase in meal requests due to Covid-19. Thankfully they have had 20 new volunteers  help out with the daily deliveries. In addition, a number of community partners have stepped forward with donations of food and funding. 

“The new volunteers have been a blessing, as many of our regular volunteers fall in the more vulnerable populations and this allowed them to suspend their volunteering, knowing the clients will still be cared for,” said Sara Bishop, manager of MAMOW. “The assistance we have received from our community partners has been wonderful.  The financial support eases the worries of the extra expenses when we already knew we needed to raise additional monies to fill our budget gap.“

How you can help: While volunteers do the delivery, donations, grants and foundations cover the costs of preparation and food. All meals are subsidized by at least $4 and as much as $9 per meal.  The organization does not receive state or federal funding and faces a $15,000 budget shortfall this year. 

To support the MOW mission please go to www.morgantownwvmow.org   

The E-Learning department at Blue Ridge Community and
Technical College hosted its tenth successful Welcome Back Week in January
2020. The department’s e-learning support awareness program was started in the
fall of 2016 to educate students about the support options for Blackboard and
online learning while on campus.

During the first week of classes each semester, E-Learning
sets up a table in the café area on campus to serve as a one-stop shop for
login assistance and Blackboard support.

In addition to offering on-demand support at a convenient
location for students, E-Learning chooses a campaign theme for each Welcome
Back Week. Campaign themes highlight a specific technology tool or service. The
campaign topic for spring 2020 was Office 365. Campaign themes are a great way
to highlight the features of a particular technology tool. Office 365 was the
campaign theme for 2020 and was wildly successful. Many students successfully
logged in to and downloaded free Microsoft products directly to his or her
laptop before the end of the first week of classes.

In addition to providing a fun and engaging theme, The Help
Desk distributes informational handouts, offers free earbuds for use in the
computer lab and conducts a drawing each semester for a technology giveaway.
The E-Learning Help Desk has donated eight laptops and two e-readers as a part
of the Welcome Back Week student outreach campaign.

Blue Ridge CTC’s E-Learning Department is proud of the
technology support awareness that has developed on campus over the last five years
and hopes to continue to reach more students with improved programs and support
services in the future.

Remember SOC Worksheet?

Ellucian has quietly removed the SOC (Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges) worksheet from DegreeWorks 5.0.3, which was released on December 20^th. While DegreeWorks 5.0.3 contains a slew of enhancements and redesigns it also marks the end to several features.  In this announcement we take a look at those obsolete features.

Stay tuned for more details about 5.0.3 as we prepare to upgrade our DegreeWorks hosted institutions in 2020.

It’s the beginning of the end for these DegreeWorks features:

With 5.0.3 Ellucian has dropped support for the following:  

• SOC Worksheet
  The Department of Defense (DoD) announced the sunset of the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges (SOC) Degree Network System (DNS) and Career Technical Education (CTE) resource list on March 29, 2019 to focus on initiatives that better reflect today’s higher education landscape. Ellucian has dropped support for the SOC worksheet.
• PC Scribe
  For hosted schools still using the PC Scribe version, we recommend moving to Web Scribe as soon possible.  Please contact the WVNET DegreeWorks team for assistance with this transition.
• Course Signals Integration  
  The integration between this early alert software and DegreeWorks is no longer supported.
• Change Password feature on Admin Tab in the Worksheet
  This functionality was removed and placed in the DWshell.
• The Classic Student Educational Planner (SEP2)
  The “Classic Planner” SEP2 (shown in the below screenshot) is no longer functional. During DegreeWorks implementations, most schools chose to deployed the “Next Generation” SEP3 planner. 

The demise of SEP2 should not impact your campus.