I have to say that I have struggled with this project and being able to conceptualize it. I have been all over the place in my thinking about what I want to do and how I want to do it. I have explored doing several workshops on the soft skills needed for college to developing a virtual support center. I really had to put it down for a little bit and give my brain a rest. I think that I actually may have narrowed down what I would like to do and that is a blended class on effective communication. Effective communication seems to be one of the most needed skills for first-year students, and lack of it can really impede success. With that in mind several of my earning objectives would be:

Students will be able to:

Describe the elements of effective communication
Demonstrate that they can effectively communicate
Compare and contrast effective communication to ineffective communication
Evaluate different forms of effective communication

As I have been thinking about my project I realize that it is still very much a work in progress. I know that I would like to create a resource that students, instructors, or academic support departments can use to help support the college experience. Academic support has become vital to higher education especially as the student profile changes. Bates (2015) states, "Probably nothing has changed more in higher education over the last 50 years that the students themselves. In 'the good old day', when less than  third of students from high school went on to higher education,, most came from families who themselves had been to university or college" (p. 29).  As higher education embraces a more democratic notion of the educational system we see students who may not be from families that previously attended college.  Couple this with the fast changing demographic of our society as more immigrant families enter our nation, academic support services become more important. Bates (2015) suggested "...institutions must reach out to previously undeserved groups such as ethnic minorities (particularly Afro-Americans and Latinos in the USA) new immigrants (in most developed countries), aboriginal students in Canada, and students with English as a second language" (p. 30). What I have observed is though, that even though academic support service professional recognize the need for a stronger support system they seem to lag behind in adopting new technologies as a way to better serve the new student.

Bates discusses in chapter 10 the benefit of OERs. After reading this chapter I began to think about how I could use OERs to academically support learners. For the students Bates described in the above one of the biggest deficit these learner face is a lack of social capital, social capital in the form of close family and friend who have attended college and can provide the needed guidance to access college and support college attendance after admittance. In other words, provide guidance on how to get to college and stay until graduation.  As my project takes form I am thinking that creating a series of OERs addressing some of the soft skills need for college. These OERs would then be available to students, faculty, and staff to use as either in a learning center, during a First-year seminar, or students could be provided a link which allowed them to access them on their own.

Finally, let me how cool the ship with the links to all our blogs is!!!!! The last class that I took with Dr. Gal we used blogs but had to connect ourselves, the links are awesome!