Alamo Colleges District, in partnership with Rio Salado College and WCET (WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies), is launching a bold effort to improve retention for online students by addressing a known but often under-resourced challenge: the lack of connection and belonging among learners who are fully online. Despite being in good academic standing, thousands of students across both institutions do not persist each year. This partnership aims to reverse that trend by fostering more human, inclusive virtual spaces where students can build networks, access support, and stay on track to graduate or transfer.

With Axim’s support, the Alamo Colleges and its partners will scale the use of InScribe, a virtual community platform designed for broad access institutions, and pilot a new social capital feature called InCircle. Together, they hope these tools will help students form deeper connections with peers, advisors, mentors, and alumni. Peer moderators supported by AI assistants will help keep conversations responsive and supportive, while faculty will be scaffolded in embedding community tools into the learning experience. The initiative is expected to reach 22,000 students across the two institutions, with the goal of reducing the Alamo College’s non-persistence rate from 27.5% to 18%, and Rio’s from 66.5% to 56.5% for its program seekers.

This partnership is designed to grow beyond the Alamo Colleges. With support from WCET, project findings and practices will be documented and shared broadly with other community colleges, helping to spark adoption nationally. InScribe will use the pilot to strengthen its product and scale it to other broad access institutions. The Alamo Colleges and Rio have also built sustainability plans to shift the platform into their core budgets if results prove effective. For Axim, this partnership is an opportunity to support building out an evidence-based model for online belonging and persistence, one that could shape the future of digital learning communities across broad-access institutions.