The College Guidance Network ("CGN") Catalog hosts all of CGN’s proprietary and carefully selected third-party resources.
Topics Aligned to the Planning and Decision-making Journey
The Catalog is organized and continuously developed across the five stages of the college and career planning and decision-making Journey: Exploring, Paying, Applying, Deciding, Transitioning. The Journey stages are further contextualized through themes like Career Exploration, Alternative Pathways, Affordability, Testing, and College Fit amongst many others. We recognize that each student's Journey is unique and while there are certain important calendar-driven decision points in their Journey, they dictate the pace of their Journey and our Catalog enables student-by-student selection of resources at the right time for them.
Audience
Each resource in the CGN Catalog is carefully selected to satisfy the needs of our college and career planning audience - Counselors, Students and their families - across the planning and decision-making journey. Each resource is tagged in a manner to enable a variety of methods to search, find, and access resources by based upon an audience member's needs at any given time. Recognizing the various learning styles and needs of audience members, the CGN catalog includes resources with closed captioning (including 5 languages other than English; Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Chinese and Korean), podcasts for those that prefer to listen versus watch, and PDFs for those that prefer to read.
A Variety of Resource Formats
Catalog resources are planned and developed with a variety of user preferences in mind. Not all users prefer the same format and so, we provide resources in a variety of formats and certain resources in other languages in addition to English.
Playlists are topical grouping of resources selected by CGN editors in support of the need of a specific audience (Students, Parents, Counselors)
Videos, ranging in length from 30 seconds to over an hour, cover quick bites of information to full coverage of a topic and include user controls for pace of viewing, closed caption, etc.
PDF documents covering a single topics to comprehensive toolkits. PDF documents can be viewed online or printed for physical distribution. Note that certain PDF documents contain hyperlinks to other resources and when printing them for physical distribution, the links will not be accessible.
Podcasts provide information in an audio format that does not require visual representation to be a valuable resource.
Relevance and Currency
Each resource in the CGN Catalog is curated to ensure our audience has access to a valuable, comprehensive set of expert, objective resources. We also manage the Catalog with regards to relevancy of resources to our audiences primarily through their feedback and usage. This information helps to inform Journey themes, and types and lengths of resources (video, podcast, PDF, etc.). And, we continually monitor the post-secondary landscape as a service to our audiences to ensure that CGN Catalog resources do not contain outdated resources and do contain resources on updated topics or new topics of importance to the college and career planning and decision-making Journey.