The Midwest Center for Information Technology (MCIT) builds on the collaborations developed under previous grants to further the regional cooperation among ten rural community colleges in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota in partnerships with secondary schools, four year educational institutions and industry. Prior work emphasized the faculty. From lessons learned, the Center now focuses on the student. A centralized virtual portal for student participation and tracking, with direct college and employer participation, is added to the CareerLink website supported by the Applied Information Management Institute. The CareerLink site also facilitates more careful tracking of IT graduates from all ten colleges. The Center educates the entrepreneurial technicians required by small and medium sized enterprises through the development of scenario-based learning modules that can be infused into many technical classes and can be shared through virtualization. The Center also builds on past work to test, refine and research the efficacy of strategies to retain more women in IT programs and place them in IT-related positions. The extensive evaluation determines the impact that scenario-based learning has on student learning, retention and employability. The effectiveness of the virtualization platform in delivering course content relative to faculty collaboration across colleges, student performance and retention and business engagement is evaluated. The evaluation also investigates how the technological systems and shared evaluation increase the cooperation between the colleges.
