College Launches the ENDEAVOR Center for High Impact Practices

The College of Coastal Georgia has launched the ENDEAVOR Center for High Impact Practices that will help students articulate the transformation they’ve experienced at the College. The ENDEAVOR Center was launched at the Student Success Summit in May and is being led by Assistant Professor of English Dr. Mary McGinnis, who serves as its director.

The purpose of ENDEAVOR is to help students internalize and effectively communicate the different skills and concepts they’re learning in classrooms, assignments, through campus programming, events and more. The main feature of the ENDEAVOR Center is the ENDEAVOR tags. The tags reflect five different competencies. Students are able to earn tags through course assignments, internships, jobs, and engaging in co-curricular programming and activities.

The tags are:

Social Awareness & Contribution

Social awareness involves recognizing and acting on one’s responsibility to society, including the College community, and engaging diverse and competing perspectives as a resource for learning, citizenship, and work. Individuals should contribute to society in meaningful ways and demonstrate ethical reasoning and behavior.

Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

Critical thinking is a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion. Problem solving is the process of designing, evaluating, and implementing a strategy to answer an open-ended question or achieve a desired goal.

Professionalism & Personal Responsibility

Professionalism entails developing and adhering to a strong work ethic, maintaining effective work habits, and striving for excellence in all aspects of college, work, and life. An individual should demonstrate respect, integrity, perseverance, and personal accountability, including the ability to recognize and learn from one’s mistakes.

Written, Oral & Digital Communication

Written communication is the development and expression of ideas in writing, and it occurs across many genres, includes multiple styles, and can involve the integration of text(s), data, and images. Oral communication is a prepared, purposeful presentation designed to increase knowledge, to foster understanding, or to promote a change in the listeners’ attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors. Digital communication involves conveying information and telling stories using online or audiovisual media.

Collaboration & Teamwork

Collaboration is the process of working jointly with others toward the achievement of a common goal. An individual should be able to collaborate with partners representing diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, religions, lifestyles, and viewpoints, and to negotiate and manage conflict within a team structure.

In Fall 2022, McGinnis and nine faculty members piloted ENDEAVOR tags in their courses and awarded close to 500 tags. Overall, the tags were accepted positively by students. McGinnis shared that of students surveyed 81 percent felt the tags were a reward for their hard work, 80 percent wanted to receive more tags, 76 percent wanted to collect them all, 74 percent were excited to receive the tags, 71 percent found them meaningful and agreed the tags helped them understand course skills, and 69 percent agreed that the tags helped them explain their skills to other people.

“It’s been really successful so far with the students,” McGinnis said. “When you gamify concepts, people get more excited about them, and they want to get all the tags or points that they can.”

Part of this success has been adding the language and concepts of the tags to students’ vocabularies and driving attention to those skills.

“This lightbulb goes off and connects the things that they’re doing with the skills they’re gaining. Hopefully, when students graduate, they can go back and look at their ENDEAVOR transcript and remember their experiences. Students will know how to talk about their teamwork skills with employers and provide specific examples of when they used those skills,” McGinnis said.

In the portal, there is an ENDEAVOR tab that will show how many tags a student has accumulated and the event or assignments linked to the tag. Students can be awarded tags from their professors, employers, internship supervisors, and through campus programming. For example, if a student-worker exhibits great customer service skills in a particular situation, their employer could reward the Critical Thinking & Problem Solving tag or the Professional & Personal Responsibility tag. The tag would show up on the student’s ENDEAVOR transcript. Students will receive alerts for tags in D2L (Desire 2 Learn) that are granted in D2L from assignments.

A pdf version of the ENDEAVOR transcript can also be downloaded and uploaded to students’ ePortfolios. The ePortfolio is a great tool for students to collect and share their work from their time at the College with potential employers. ePortfolios connect students with their learning across courses, document the development of their self-assessment skills, can house professional resumes or projects, record and track personal and academic goals, and provide space for reflection on successful college and work experiences. Including an ENDEAVOR transcript in their ePortfolio can help students further demonstrate their development at the College.

To learn more about the ENDEAVOR tags and the different ways to use an ePortfolio, please contact Dr. Mary McGinnis at mmcginnis@ccga.edu.

For more information on how to acquire an ePortfolio, please contact COMPASS Career and Academic Advising at COMPASS@ccga.edu.