In 2019, Peralta Community College District received $1.8 Million in grants awarded by the California Virtual Campus - Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI). A grant in the amount of $400,370.00 for Improving Online CTE Pathways with a Focus on ESOL and Adult Students was awarded to Laney College in order to create and expand online opportunities in:  Business Management and Supervision; Construction Management, California Green, and Sustainable Building Standards; Legal Community Interpreting; and provide wraparound support through counseling and tutoring.

In Spring 2020, CVC-OEI produced a video to show the excellent progress made by Laney College in putting that grant money to work. 

As outlined in the video, the OEI CTE Pathways Grant has allowed us to train faculty in the disciplines listed in the grant and align their courses with the OEI Course Design Rubric. In addition, the grant has provided resources for our faculty to support English Speakers of Other Languages in online education, which is significant given the large population of ESOL students we serve, as well as to provide tech tutoring and remote counseling services.

This grant came at what turned out to be a critical time for our college and the community college system, as our transition to online course offerings was accelerated due to COVID-19. The grant allowed us to leverage our resources to not only provide Professional Development to our Career Education faculty, but to other faculty members who were forced to transition to distance learning, many for the first time. Throughout cross-collaboration among college communities, we have identified our strengths and weaknesses for future strategic plans for DE programs and services. We are aiming to work harder to be a certified Peer Online Course Review campus in the near future. We would like to thank the Board for their support in our application and administration of the OEI CTE Pathways Grant.

The CTE Online Pathways Grant team includes Mark Fields (Principal Investigator), Alta Erdenebaatar (Grant Administrator), Karen Tellegen (Admin support), Chelsea Cohen (Distance Education support), Kim Glosson, Arturo Dávila S., Melissa McElvane, Suzan Tiemroth-Zavala (faculty leads), Ian Latta (Tutoring support), and Larena Baldazo (Marketing support).