• City College of San Francisco

San Francisco, CA

MPICT coordinates, improves, and promotes information and communication technologies (ICT) education. MPICT directly serves 70 community colleges in northern California, northern Nevada, southern Oregon, Hawaii, and the Pacific Territories through research, conferences, faculty development, community building activities, business and industry interactions, best practice dissemination, and resource sharing.

MPICT Improves ICT Student Success

In the information and knowledge economies of the 21st century, people increasingly depend on information and communication technologies (ICT). The ICT term is used worldwide to encompass all rapidly emerging, evolving, and converging computer, software, networking, telecommunications, Internet, programming, and information systems technologies. ICT enables individual and organizational productivity in all industries.

Community colleges are the most cost-effective vehicle for pushing ICT knowledge and skills into American communities and workforces. MPICT efforts have affected as many as 50,000 students through engagement with over 900 faculty taking advantage of conferences, faculty development, and access to a content-rich media. With the receipt of a grant from the California Community College Chancellor’s Office to establish a California Community College ICT Collaborative, MPICT’s efforts are being leveraged to coordinate and improve ICT educational offerings to all 112 of California’s community colleges, serving 1 in 4 community college students in the U.S.

MPICT’s annual Winter ICT Educator Conference brings together more than 200 community college faculty members and industry representatives to share quality practices and resources. This event alone impacts 15,000 to 25,000 students annually. MPICT’s annual Summer Faculty Development Week helps 50 to 75 educators keep up with rapidly changing technologies, learn new course material, and practice effective pedagogies for teaching ICT. Educators also learn ways to use technology to improve student engagement and outcomes.

MPICT Engages with ICT

MPICT applies ICT in its dissemination strategy with a content-rich website at www.mpict.org which has had more than 40,000 page views and averages 20 site visits daily; a dedicated YouTube channel at youtube.com/mpictcenter that has over 60 videos and over 13,000 views to date; a Facebook page at facebook.com/MPICT with almost 60,000 post views; and a blog at mpictcenter.blogspot.com with almost 500 articles and more than 20,000 article views to date.

MPICT has pioneered remote synchronous and asynchronous access to its Winter Conference presentations through online collaboration tools, expanding the impact of the event beyond physical attendees.  Conference sessions have been viewed more than 2,000 times on a system available only to community college ICT faculty and several thousand more times for selected presentations converted and shared through MPICT’s YouTube Channel.

Developing a Skilled ICT Workforce

The improved student outcomes influenced by MPICT events and dissemination of best practices enhances the ICT workforce, which positively impacts most organizations, all industries, and the U.S. economy. MPICT, as a representative of ICT programs at 70 community colleges, engages business and industry representatives more effectively than most individual programs can achieve on their own. MPICT does this by creating leveraged education and business interactions to improve ICT education, workforce development, and placement.

Through ongoing studies and publication of its assessments of ICT workforce needs, MPICT has positioned itself as a major participant in the important task of identifying trends and guiding the curriculum-improvement efforts of its community college members. For example, a recent MPICT study surveyed more than 600 employers to quantify ICT industry and employment issues in California. The study found that the ICT workforce represents 1 in 20 U.S. jobs. This analysis of industry trends and demands provides MPICT’s community college partners with more valuable information than they could readily obtain through local advisory groups or from existing secondary data sources.

Pierre Thiry

pthiry@ccsf.edu

(415) 239-3594