Throughout the State of Ohio, students are able to access college courses – and earn credit for them – while still in high school. This recently revamped program, renamed College Credit Plus, is designed to bolster students’ college readiness, lower their cost for higher education and improve their retention and success in college.
Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor John Carey notes in his recommendations for the program that, “As other states become more successful in getting a larger percentage of their students to participate in dual credit programs, they are likely to produce more students with competitive advantages that exceed those of Ohio students.” The College Credit Plus program will make Ohio’s dual enrollment opportunities more accessible and visible to students and their parents.
How does OhioLINK support this program and these students? Through College Credit Plus, enrolled high school students also have access to the organization’s resources through the statewide network of OhioLINK member institutions.
OhioLINK’s enormously rich shared collection is available to students, faculty and staff of its 90 members – whether public universities like University of Cincinnati, private research universities like the University of Dayton, two year colleges like Columbus State or Marion Tech, or private colleges like Hiram or Denison. In College Credit Plus programs, secondary school students have the same access to OhioLINK resources as any other college student, both on-campus and off. Students participating in College Credit Plus will be able to use the sponsoring institution’s remote authentication mechanisms to access ebooks, databases, and ejournal articles over the Internet without going to campus.
As College Credit Plus increases dual enrollment opportunities for Ohio students, they will also have access to more university level content than their peers in other states. More content from top publishers is available to all students via OhioLINK than is available at the average Ivy League institution –both electronic journal content from academic publishers in research disciplines, and the shared collection of books and other physical items that students can request from other OhioLINK institutions.
High school instructors accredited by their partnering institution of higher education to teach college level classes will also be able to use these materials to develop curricula and assign advanced materials to students. This includes over 10,000 journal titles from top publishers in the field, a wealth of database content, and over 50,000,000 physical items, including books, government documents, musical scores, and audiovisual materials.
OhioLINK has a long-standing partnership with the K-12 Library Consortium INFOhio to help support both secondary school students and instructors and to support college readiness. Librarians from OhioLINK institutions have been working with their INFOhio counterparts to develop information about college level materials and help for College Credit Plus instructors and students.
OhioLINK and INFOhio also recently implemented a search tool across K-12 resources that is also used at many OhioLINK institutions to perform a single search across the content available at each institution. This shared search environment can help students navigate the transition between high school and college libraries by offering a common and familiar set of tools to apply to the expanded collections available at colleges and universities.
For more information about INFOhio’s resources for College Credit Plus student research, go to http://libguides.infohio.org/collegecreditplus. For information on accessing OhioLINK resources, go to https://ohiolink.edu/student.
Editor's Note: On Feb. 10th at the 2016 Ohio Educational Technology Conference, OhioLINK sponsored a presentation with INFOhio’s Erica Clay on Library Resources for College Credit Plus. You can access more information about that presentation here.
