Janelle Jennings-Alexander, Complete College America strategy director.
Complete College America (CCA), a national nonprofit focused on college completion, partnered with the Association of College and University Educators on the effort. The cohort launched Sept. 21 at Lawson State Community College in Alabama, Coahoma Community College in Mississippi, Baton Rouge Community College and Delgado Community College in Louisiana.
Janelle Jennings-Alexander, a CCA strategy director who oversees faculty development work, said student success efforts tend to live in advising offices and student affairs.
"We don't always think about the classroom as an opportunity or space for change," she said.
The completion problem is obvious: only about a third of first-time, full-time community college students graduate within three years, according to National Center for Education Statistics figures cited by CCA. Rates are lower for first-generation, low-income and historically underserved students. Access has widened. Free college programs are now available in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Education Data Initiative. But finishing remains the harder hurdle.
The pilot is part of the CCA Accelerator, which is funded through the Gates Foundation's Intermediaries for Scale initiative. Jennings-Alexander said the accelerator includes 86 institutions. Organizers chose to focus on community colleges because they rely heavily on part-time faculty, who are often left out of campus professional development.
"A lot of that energy is directed toward full-time faculty," Jennings-Alexander said. Yet adjuncts, she added, "still touch a lot of students."
CCA then looked for colleges with high financial need, including historically Black community colleges, and invited several to join. Four accepted, and each campus chose 10 faculty fellows.
The course is online and self-paced, with monthly live sessions, and runs through May. Over 24 modules, faculty complete assignments, review one another's work and get feedback from coaches. After each module, they are asked whether they have brought a new practice into their classrooms, such as a different approach to assessment or a way to build community among students.
"We're slowly – over the course of the year – transforming how they teach fundamentally, not just in a single class, but in all of their classes," Jennings-Alexander said.
CCA will track how many faculty finish, how many classroom changes they report and whether they would recommend the course to a colleague. Measuring student outcomes directly involves too many variables, she said, so the pilot measures what faculty actually do.
CCA also cites outside research. A 2026 Sam Houston State University study examined nearly 1,800 courses and was conducted without ACUE funding. It found that courses taught by ACUE-certified instructors had DFW rates, the share of D's, F's and withdrawals, 3.33 percentage points lower than courses taught by non-certified instructors. The study was published in the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.
All faculty and staff at the four colleges will also have access to ACUE Commons. There they can earn endorsements in areas including AI for higher education and holistic student support.
Jennings-Alexander said participants are excited. Many are adjuncts who have not had such an opportunity before, and a few are in their first year of teaching. Nursing and health sciences faculty learned the course can count toward their continuing education credits, a benefit organizers had not anticipated.
For one first-year professor, the course has already changed what good teaching means.
"Participating in the ACUE professional development cohort has reminded me that becoming an effective educator is not about having all the answers, it is about remaining committed to learning, reflecting, and growing alongside my students," said Carlie Caillier, adjunct professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Baton Rouge Community College. "ACUE has helped me become more intentional in how I engage, challenge, and support my students while maintaining the academic rigor they need to succeed."
"This experience is helping me build the foundation for the kind of professor I aspire to be: one who never stops learning and whose growth ultimately translates into greater opportunities for student success," Caillier said.
Asked what faculty need to bring to the program, Jennings-Alexander named only one thing: a willingness to grow.
"That's all we ask," she said.
