catalog.coloradomtn.eduColorado Mountain College - Acalog ACMS™

Javascript is currently not supported, or is disabled by s success through personalized academic and specialized training pathways as well as positive, often targeted, high-impact engagement. To accomplish excellence and achieve equity throughout the College, every member of the CMC community shares a responsibility to promote an environment in which all individuals enjoy respect and acceptance, civility abounds, and diversity of thought and expression are encouraged and celebrated. CMC strives to feel like a safe place for all who choose to interact with, work, learn and grow at the College. Care CMC is an integral part of Colorado’s high country and the only higher education institution operating in its region. These are both facts and treasured responsibilities. As the mountain economy goes, so too goes CMC. Therefore, as an essential component of its rugged and vast region, the College intends to deliver educational excellence while modeling ethical conduct and sincere appreciation for its people, its communities and its environment. In short, CMC cares . Innovation CMC is a preeminent rural college and Hispanic Serving Institution that takes risks for the benefit of students and rebuffs the status quo when it impedes progress. At the same time, CMC accepts that adapting to change is not a choice in higher education and that mountain communities continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace. Therefore, CMC must continuously innovate while upholding the tried-and-true strategies and practices that have enabled the success of countless students. Leveraging its unique structure and funding, creative capacities, and data-informed approaches, CMC must confidently reach students with exceptional teaching and learning, deliver personalized support services, and create bold solutions to address the needs of employees and the communities the College serves. Integrity CMC’s unique locations and funding model enable it to focus on its purpose without the fiscal stresses and distractions that are common in public higher education. While the College is held in high esteem in its communities and has stewarded its resources responsibly and ethically, these attributes are earned - not assured - and must be maintained with principled effort. To ensure that the College has the resources necessary to fulfill the commitments outlined in this plan, CMC must manage its affairs with steadfast integrity . By demonstrating a return on the community’s investments and forging thoughtful, strategic collaborations and partnerships, CMC will continue to dream bigger and accomplish more than might be assumed possible by a rural open-access college with few peers regionally or nationally. General Education Philosophy A general education benefits students by encouraging them to acquire intellectual tools, knowledge and creative capabilities necessary to study the world as it is, as it has been understood and as it might become. General education prepares students for fulfilling lives as educated persons, and effective contributors to a democratic society. To develop breadth of knowledge, general education courses familiarize students with methods of inquiry across various academic disciplines, as well as prepare students for employment. Effective general education helps students act ethically and responsibly, and develop habits of critical thinking, intellectual sophistication, and an orientation to lifelong learning and investigation. Understanding Student Learning Through Assessment Student learning is more than just grades. It is a deeper dive into evaluating what our students are able to master in terms of the cognitive (knowing), psychomotor (doing), and affective (expressing) domains throughout all of our academic courses and co-curricular student experiences. This requires an intentional and comprehensive methodology to assess how our students perform against the various outcomes that we wish them to achieve. This methodology in an academic environment is generally referred to as Assessment” and is an institution-wide initiative that encompasses all activities, academic and co-curricular, that involve our students. Through assessment of student learning, we continually modify our curriculum and instruction to ensure students receive the best instruction possible to meet their educational goals. We define our educational quality by how well our students learn and understand that the public’s expectation for higher education is that we are accountable to ensure that students learn what they need to know to attain personal success and fulfill their public responsibilities in a global and diverse society. CMC Institutional Student Learning Outcomes Colorado Mountain College prepares students for the world where they will work, play, live, and lead. As a Dual Mission, Hispanic Serving Institution, CMC expects students to gain mastery of Knowledge, Involvement, and Application in all our programs. These Institutional Student Learning Outcomes, described below, equip students with the skills, confidence, and abilities to thrive in today’s world. Knowledge Students will demonstrate various intellectual and practical skills for personal, creative, and professional pursuits by learning about human cultures and the world around us. Learning experiences are focused on engagement with big questions, both contemporary and enduring, and practiced extensively across the curriculum and co-curriculum, in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects and standards for performance. Inquiry and Analysis Inquiry is a systematic process of exploring issues, objects or works through the collection and analysis of evidence that results in informed conclusions or judgments. Analysis is the process of breaking complex topics or issues into parts to gain a better understanding of them. Critical and Creative Thinking Critical thinking is a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion. Creative thinking is both the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking and risk taking. Communication - Written and Oral Oral communication is a prepared, purposeful presentation designed to intentionally listen to others, acknowledge incoming communication, increase a listener’s knowledge, to foster understanding, and/or to promote change in the listeners’ attitudes, values, beliefs or behaviors. Written communication is the development and expression of ideas in writing. Written communication involves learning to work in many genres and styles. It can involve working with many different writing technologies and mixing texts, data and images. Written communication abilities develop through iterative experiences across the curriculum. Quantitative Literacy A competency and comfort in working with numerical data. Individuals with strong Quantitative Literacy skills possess the ability to reason and solve quantitative problems from a wide array of authentic contexts and everyday life situations. They understand and can create sophisticated arguments supported by quantitative evidence and they can clearly communicate those arguments in a variety of formats (using words, tables, graphs, mathematical equations, etc., as appropriate). Information Literacy The set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning. Teamwork/Collaboration Teamwork is behaviors under the control of individual team members (effort they put into team tasks, their manner of interacting with others on the team, and the quantity and quality of...