On the heels of awarding $3.4 billion in broadband grants earlier this week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Wednesday awarded an additional $12.9 million intended to improve education and graduation rates at community colleges. This latest round of grants is part of the Gates Foundation's Postsecondary Success initiative, which aims to double the number of low-income students who earn a degree or credential by age 26.

Wednesday's grants are intended to advance the role of technology at community colleges, improve virtual learning improvements, incorporate Web 2.0 tools and social media, and create learning tools that are open and available to all students. Among the four organizations that received funding was Global Skills for College Completion (GSCC), which got $3.6 million. GSCC strives to come up with ways to teach math and writing skill using social media and technology in order to improve the pass rate for students in basic skills courses.

The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), meanwhile, was awarded $5 million to produce developmental math course material that will be available as an open educational resource (OER). The MITE project aims to increase the number of students that meet math standards so they can move into post-secondary educational programs. Individual students and teachers get free access to materials at hippocampus.org while institutions can get subscription-based access for a nominal fee.

"Using a mix of learning approaches, we can use technology to make learning more accessible to a wider range of students," Ruth Rominger, MITE's director of learning designer, said in a statement. "We can create learning environments that let students work through the courses in a way that is suitable for their learning styles."

Also on the list was Carnegie Mellon University's Community College Open Learning Initiative, which was awarded $2.5 million in order to improve the development, use, and improvement of Web-based, open-learning environments. The goal is to improve course completion rates by 25 percent.

Finally, the National Center for Academic Transformation received $1.8 million, which will be used to do outreach to community colleges to persuade them to integrate technology-based learning into their math programs.