Daily Lumina News 033120

As a parent, college student, and program adviser, Ariel Ventura-Lazo, 29, works and attends class—while also coordinating drop-offs, pick-ups, bedtime routines, and play dates for his children.
Life was already a fine balance of responsibilities, commitments, and difficult decisions. Now, the coronavirus has intensified those realities.
Under normal circumstances, too many student-parents face struggles without the helping hand that can make a huge difference in their chances of success. Ventura-Lazo addresses those challenges in this essay.

About 27,000 of the young undocumented immigrants who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program work in health care, many of them on the front lines in the fight against the coronavirus.
Aldo Martinez, a paramedic in Fort Myers, Florida, is one of those individuals.
The coronavirus casts a new light on the contributions made by many DACA recipients—and the possible consequences of taking such talent off the battlefield in the middle of a pandemic.

Faced with closed campuses due to the coronavirus pandemic, community colleges are undertaking massive efforts to move classes online, train faculty, and make sure everyone has access to computers and the internet.
At Montgomery College in Maryland, 20,000 students were already enrolled in distance-learning courses, but many instructors lacked experience with remote teaching. Those teachers spent spring break learning how to convert face-to-face classes to remote settings on the Blackboard platform. Meanwhile, some campuses are lending a lifeline to students in need with laptops and other supports.

In a country that offers more than 730,000 credentials, the need for clear and consistent information about education and training opportunities has never been more important. Indiana, like most states, is investing in many education and workforce initiatives to secure the state’s economic future.
Technical applications built from these investments depend on data exchanges for information about career pathways, credentials, competencies, jobs, and an individual’s records of achievement. Yet, management of this data exchange process is siloed, which limits the potential value of these investments. That's changing.