About LSCHE

LSCHE seeks to identify and provide a cornucopia of ideas, resources, and tools for learning support professionals in higher education to enable them to create the best possible learning support centers for the ultimate benefit of all our students.

• A ‘Nearby History’ of LSCHE – whose resource roots go back to the 1960’s with Frank Christ and in the 1990’s with Rick Sheets.

A chronology of learning support center related events including seminal publications

LSCHE is the only web portal dedicated exclusively as an Open Educational Resource (OER) to Learning Support Centers in Higher Education. On this web portal, you can review the history of learning support centers in higher education, read relevant definitions of learning assistance, visit links to more than 3000 websites, find calendar events of interest, and find important citations of research and information in articles, books, theses, and dissertations focused around learning support and developmental education.

We hope this portal will speak to and update Leroy Sullivan’s plea made more than 35 years ago in his monumental work that was a comprehensive source of learning center information, networking, and dialogue (Sullivan, L. L. [1979]. A guide to higher education learning centers in the United States and Canada. Portsmouth, NH: Entelek.)

More importantly, LSCHE is reaffirming a commitment to dialogue, networking, and collegiality by echoing the words of Rick Thoman, Xerox Corporation former President and CEO: “For all of us to win in the knowledge economy, we need to unleash the knowledge in our document databases, use and reuse our past knowledge, find ways to create new knowledge and then share it across our enterprise.“

No resource of this magnitude can remain current and relevant while retaining foundational and archival information without the support of others.  LSCHE has expanded to meet the needs in this information age and invites others who would like to provide needed support to view, monitor, and suggest edits and additions to one or more of the many pages contained within the LSCHE website.

Many have helped LSCHE maintain currency over the years as editors, contributors, and consultants. These include Karen Agee, Salma Abdul Sultan Amlani, David Arendale, Hunter Boylan, Santos Cortez, Alan Craig, Johanna Dvorak, Russell Hodges, Meagan Hoff, Yuting Lin, Lucy MacDonald, Gail McCain, Saundra McGuire, Anthony Megie, Kate Sandberg, Norman Stahl, Penny Turrentine, Amy Webberman, and Daphne Williams.

LSCHE is now in its third incarnation as a website. The current LSCHE Coordinator Team members are Karen Agee, Santos Cortez, Alan Craig, and Russell Hodges (shown in alphabetical order below).

LSCHE Advisory Team (LAT), 2014-2016
Hands-on group in charge of identifying, advising, and implementing decisions about the LSCHE site contents, keeping its focus on learning assistance, while supporting related areas including developmental education.

The second iteration of LSCHE began redesign in 2012 and finished implementation in 2014. The design and implementation team:

• Rick Sheets
• Karen Agee
• Tutor Matching Service (TMS) team for LSCHE design and conversion
• Russ Hodges

LSCHE was originally conceived, developed, and implemented in 1996 and went live in 1997 as a full web support for the Winter Institutes by co-founders Frank L. Christ and Rick A. Sheets. It came into its own shortly thereafter as a stand-alone as the OER dedicated to learning assistance professionals and in support of the CLADEA (cladea.info) member organizations (now including ACTLA, ACTP, CRLA, NCDE, NCLCA, and NOSS). In 2006, Alan Craig joined as Associate Content Editor to update and add additional LSC websites. An image from the acknowledgements page of the first incarnation of LSCHE is shown below.

A special acknowledgement in honoring the memory and work of Frank L. Christ (1923-2012) for his insights, support, and dedication to learning support and technology for learning assistance professionals and his vision of LSCHE, one of his many legacies to the field.

His relentless dedication to the field, being known for providing the vision of a Learning Assistance Support System (published 1972), where learning assistance was first identified as a support for all (not limited to developmental students). He was one of the founders of CRLA, CLADEA, and one of the first CLADEA Fellows.

And in his other dream-come-to-life is the creation of a scholars and research library of hands-on resource materials for graduate students and learning assistance professionals now in place at Texas State University – San Marcos.

Thank you Frank !