Sinclair gets $12M to help IT training

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) - Sinclair and two partner colleges, working in collaboration with Western Governors University, were awarded a $12 million grant from the Department of Labor Wednesday to create a revolutionary change in how information technology training is conducted.

This grant is the largest in Sinclair College’s history and will be focused in part on getting displaced workers retrained in the high-demand area of IT.

The project will develop competency-based training that will very efficiently target the exact skills needed by each individual student. This is one of the first applications of large scale competency-based learning, and is intended to directly connect community college curriculum with university level curriculum. The expected result is a more efficient and seamless transfer of students from community colleges to universities.

The Department of Labor has approved Sinclair as the lead college working with Austin Community College in Texas and Broward College in Florida.

The project has a goal of a 20% increase over current completion and employment rates. The college will take one year to develop the curriculum for the new program and will pilot test it for a year with the goal of becoming operational by 2015. The college will share information and curriculum with the grant partner colleges and will look to deliver the competency based learning model to other academic programs.