With the possibility of free community college on the horizon, the best way to guarantee the success of the free college initiative is to ensure that students who enroll are college-ready.

Programs like Carnegie Math Pathways’ Quantway and Statway can better prepare more students for college-level work and help ensure this success, argue Stanley Litow, professor at Duke and Columbia universities, and Tina Kelley, a former New York Times reporter and co-author, with Stanley Litow, of “Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway from High School to College to Career.”

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We are thrilled to share that Carnegie Math Pathways’ new fully online courses, Quantway and Statway Virtual, are boosting students’ successful course completion by 3 to 4 times the rate of more traditional course sequences in math.

Uniquely addressing one of the key challenges of distance learning — social connection — these online courses leverage integrated video conferencing and digital analytic tools that help students meaningfully engage in learning, while providing instructors with targeted support to advance learning.

Quantway and Statway Virtual, in development since 2018 and launched in summer of 2020, reimagine online learning by thoughtfully adapting some of the most impactful elements of the Pathways in-class experience for digital learning environments.

The results? Students enrolled in the online courses are achieving success in these courses at the same rate as their peers who participated in the highly successful Carnegie Math Pathways in-person courses.

Designed by faculty with experience using the proven Pathways in-class approach, Quantway and Statway Virtual utilize an intuitive and adaptive digital learning platform. With the seamless integration of video conferencing, an additional external account is not required to enable collaborative, discovery-based learning that nurtures connection to peers, the instructor, and the course content. These elements are key to shifting students’ mindsets and deeply engaging students in the course, leading to improved student outcomes in the course and beyond.

“I think it’s huge that Quantway College Virtual was designed by faculty because the faculty are the ones who are in the classroom,” says Kelly Kohlmetz, math faculty and Pathways faculty designer at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. “We know what works in the classroom and have replicated that as much as possible in the online environment.”

These thoughtfully designed statistical and quantitative reasoning courses can flexibly support fully online, hybrid, or in-person instruction. Kohlmetz says, “One of the things I really love about the Quantway College Virtual class is that the Zoom [collaboration sessions] are built into the course. So the students actually work through the lessons together, as they would do in class — answering the questions, inputting their questions into the system, talking about their answers.”

And students are sharing positive reactions as well, such as Kristen Haner at SUNY Corning Community College who recently said the Quantway Virtual course was more rewarding than any classroom course she could take.

The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) is one of many institutions that are experiencing success as they deliver online courses to support their students remotely. RIDE partnered with WestEd’s Carnegie Math Pathways to offer a summer online transition course that helped more than 400 high school seniors and recent graduates prepare for college-level math using a custom course based on Quantway.

To learn more and try a demo of fully online Statway and Quantway, visit: https://carnegiemathpathways.org/fully-online/.