Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


New Education Design Lab Initiative Convenes Five Community Colleges to Reimagine Their Future

Education Design Lab, a nonprofit devoted to designing, prototyping, and testing education-to-workforce models, has announced the inaugural cohort of its Reimagining Community Colleges Design Challenge. The multi-year initiative will bring together five community colleges to develop strategic plans that reorient their program offerings around "new majority learners" (non-traditional students who now represent the majority of learners today), implement those plans, and measure their success, according to a news announcement.

Participating colleges are:

A key goal of the initiative is to "make learners' skills more visible to employers and educational pathways clearer and stackable and ensure learners have job-relevant applied learning experiences and equitable access to support services," Education Design Lab said. The colleges will work with the Lab over the next three to five years, using a human-centered design approach to envision a new age of community colleges.

"Students come to us with a vision of a brighter future and the belief that education can help them get there. It is our job to deliver on that belief by developing programs that help learners achieve an economic advantage and access meaningful careers," said Michael A. Baston, president of Cuyahoga Community College, in a statement. "Together with Education Design Lab, we are seizing a once-in-a-generation chance to transform the way we meet students' needs and shore up faith in community college as a pathway to greater opportunity."

"Reimagining community colleges isn't just an exercise in innovation — it's necessary to ensure that these institutions remain engines of social mobility and workforce development," commented Lisa Larson, senior vice president of college transformation at the Lab. "By embracing bold, human-centered design, we can support colleges in their missions to meet the needs of today's learners and tomorrow's economy. This work is about more than redesigning colleges; it's about reshaping futures."

For more information, visit the Education Design Lab site.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • abstract glowing circuit patterns

    Microsoft Reduces Copilot Integrations in Windows 11

    Microsoft is dialing back its aggressive Copilot push in Windows 11, promising a sweeping quality overhaul that puts performance and reliability ahead of AI feature expansion .

  • silhouette of business person facing wall of data

    Why AI Strategy Belongs in the President's Office

    Institutions that are succeeding with AI share one thing in common, and it is not a better committee, a larger budget, or a more sophisticated technology stack. It is a president who never handed off the steering wheel.

  • Profile silhouette of a person thoughtfully touching their chin, overlaid with transparent data visualizations and digital interface elements suggesting artificial intelligence and analytics.

    The Institutional Knowledge Shift Is Reshaping Higher Ed IT

    Higher education IT leaders are navigating a quiet but consequential transition: Experienced team members are retiring or leaving for private-sector roles, and the teams replacing them are smaller, newer, and often stretched thin. The result is a structural shift in how technology decisions are made, executed, and sustained.

  • large cloud icon on the right in an abstract world above a polygon with a dark blue background

    Cloud Security Alliance Expands Focus on Governance and Assurance for Agentic AI Systems

    The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) recently announced a series of CSAI Foundation milestones aimed at securing what it calls the agentic control plane, including a new catastrophic risk initiative, CVE Numbering Authority authorization, and the acquisition of two agentic AI specifications.