About NC-NET
NC-NET Mission
To promote quality teaching and learning in North Carolina Community Colleges through a collaborative, statewide professional development system committed to sharing best practices, leveraging resources, and avoiding duplication.
Project Background and Administration
Realizing that faculty and professional staff are faced with the substantial
task of subject mastery in evolving fields while teaching to an ever diversifying
student population, our colleges struggle with the perennial challenge of
attracting, retaining, and providing services for their instructors and
staffs. While North Carolina has countless examples of best practices and
innovative course instruction, too often efforts of the best and brightest
instructors serve audiences limited by course enrollment.
The North Carolina Community College System Office established the North
Carolina Network for Excellence in Teaching (NC-NET) in December 2003 to
create an infrastructure that will support a comprehensive approach to faculty
professional development. The project stems from the results published in
the October 2002 report
Framework for the Future: Professional Development Needs Among North Carolina
Community Colleges, which surveyed more than 2,100 North Carolina community
college administrators and faculty.
NC-NET offers a peer-juried and peer-moderated medium through which exemplary and timely professional development opportunities may be accessed. One of the major goals of the project is to eliminate duplication of efforts while providing access to the finest examples of North Carolina community colleges’ professional development efforts.
NC-NET catalogs, warehouses, and disseminates quality professional development resources developed by institutions across the state as well as create new resources such as online courses, workshops, and tutorials.
NC-NET advocates a “balanced” approach to professional development, organizing its resources into programmatic areas: 1) Teaching and Learning, 2) Discipline-Specific, 3) Career and Personal Development, 4) Classroom Technology, 5) Distance Learning and 6) Student Development.
To avoid duplication and maximize sharing, three colleges, Fayetteville Technical Community College, Wake Technical Community College, and Mitchell Community College, serve as NC-NET Regional Centers and have responsibility for developing faculty resources in specific discipline areas. The nonprofit education organization CORD coordinates project activities and the NC-NET Clearinghouse. The NC-NET Advisory Council, comprised of faculty and administrators from across the state, help guide the work of NC-NET, to ensure growth and sustainability of the system.
