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Executive Summary
As reported in last year's annual report,
the Intersegmental Major Preparation Articulated Curriculum
(IMPAC) project originated in the Intersegmental Committee
of Statewide Academic Senates (ICAS) of the California Community
College (CCC), University of California (UC), and California
State University (CSU) systems. IMPAC is a unique faculty
project designed to assist the student transfer process from
the community colleges to the UC and CSU systems in their
chosen major. The project, as explained in the introduction
that follows, is funded by a $2.75 million grant that supports
for five years the development of an infrastructure for faculty
from the three higher education systems to meet regionally
at regular intervals to discuss issues, concerns, and academic
procedures that impinge upon the transfer process for students
between the community college and the UC and CSU systems.
Specifically, the grant funds faculty discipline and interdisciplinary
dialogues that address prerequisite and lower division courses
students must complete prior to transfer to either the CSU
or UC systems.
In its second fully-funded year, the IMPAC
Project faculty participation across the state continued to
expand as more faculty discussed the project on their campuses
and encouraged their colleagues to attend the discipline meetings.
The project's Steering Committee continued to contact faculty
and administrators in all three higher education segments
to engage them in the on-going faculty-to-faculty dialogues
and to consider ways to "institutionalize" this
project within the on-going work of their departments. The
effort to request department representatives from each UC,
CSU and community colleges resulted in many new faculty attendees
who had been so designated. Steering Committee members promoted
IMPAC's efforts in more than 25 formal presentations to professional
gatherings of faculty, to systemwide administrators, to student
support service providers, to governing boards, and to state
legislators.
This year, in an effort to ensure that as
new lead discipline faculty are informed and trained about
the IMPAC project, an IMPAC handbook was developed. This handbook
provides lead faculty with important information about their
responsibility as faculty leaders as well as how to facilitate
regional and statewide meetings.
The project's work was communicated through
personal contact from faculty involved in the project, by
the IMPAC newsletter, and by numerous mailings. In addition,
the IMPAC website is updated on a regular basis with discipline
notes, lists of participants (both by segment and by discipline),
annual reports, as well as contact information for current
faculty discipline leaders and coordinators. This year an
online participation form was created to expedite the registration
process for regional and statewide meetings.
During 2001-2002, 382 (274 community colleges,
74 CSU and 34 UC) faculty attended the regional and statewide
meetings (see appendix A). Their findings, in turn, have been
reviewed by them and other of their discipline faculty colleagues
across the state. As a result of the IMPAC discussions, both
Agriculture and Earth Sciences/Geology have reached statewide
consensus and will now meet only annually to review their
curricular recommendations. Those recommendations will appear
on the IMPAC website under a section called Final Recommendations.
Discipline Issues, Trends, and Concerns:
More than 52 issues and concerns are identified by the faculty
in the 14 disciplines and are reported in this report. Across
the disciplines, faculty identify such concerns as these:
· Faculty in all segments continue
to share concern for standards and seek to ensure rigor.
· Faculty partnership between the four-year universities
and community colleges is critical to meet the needs of Tidal
Wave II.
· Faculty in community colleges cannot simply require
prerequisites (either a single course or series of courses)
without the validation called for by statute; this validation
process needs to be better understood by members in all segments
so that four-year institutions provide adequate lead time
and notification when changing their own prerequisites.
Recommendations for Specific Action: To address
these issues and concerns, faculty in the groups made specific
recommendations for further action. For example:
· Publish and disseminate more widely
a document explaining what IMPAC is and is not.
· Meet with legislative aides and Round Table participants
to further their understanding of IMPAC's objectives.
· Urge four-year institutions to maintain close contact
with their area community colleges to alert them early in
the process about proposed changes in the curriculum, including
major course modifications. This communication is especially
important if the proposed changes could affect articulation
agreements.
· Work with Articulation Officers (both new to the
project and continuing) to design an "on-site" articulation
mechanism.
· Strongly urge transfer students to complete most,
if not all, preparatory courses at the community college level.
· Ensure that community colleges' CAN numbered courses
are articulated to four-year universities.
Recommendations brought forward from last
year's report ask for:
· Greater communication with potential transfers, using
websites and brochures.
· Posting of university syllabi on web as indicators
of changed approaches, new textbooks, or new emphases that
should be monitored and considered by community college faculty.
In addition, several of the disciplines have
developed or are developing general statements and recommendations
for community college faculty and counselors. These statements
contain recommendations about sequencing of courses and specific
topics and elements students should encounter (see Mathematics
Annual Report Appendix A).
Cross-Disciplinary Recommendations: The faculty continued
to recommend in this category the call for greater collaboration
and joint study for resolution, and a new examination of related
coursework that can be viewed as complementary but not necessarily
required in the major. Again, these recommendations will become
the nucleus of discussions among the disciplines in the next
year.
Intersegmental Transfer Initiatives:
The discipline faculty made recommendations to several intersegmental
organizations. Last year CAN accepted the recommendations
of the IMPAC Project for 16 new CAN course descriptors and
6 revised descriptors and one core curriculum for biology.
In addition, disciplines made specific recommendations about
increased collaboration with the CAN and ASSIST projects.
Last year during many of the regional discussions,
questions arose about the articulation process and agreements,
establishment of local requirements, and the problems associated
with prerequisites or case management approaches; moreover,
representatives of some colleges and universities appear ready
to form or revise articulation agreements but are uncertain
as to how to formalize the new understandings they have reached.
The Steering Committee felt it was vital to connect the discipline
faculty on campuses to the articulation process. At the beginning
of the year, the Steering Committee, working with the California
Intersegmental Articulation Council, appointed one articulation
officer to serve on each of the sixteen discipline clusters
for 2001-2002. These Articulation officers were recruited
and assigned to discipline discussions, resulting in at least
20 new articulation agreements between colleges and universities.
As mentioned in last year's annual report, the faculty have
also called for a uniform statewide articulation process (and
form) to ease their review work. This effort is currently
being sponsored by ASSIST, and IMPAC faculty hope to have
an opportunity to review their work. The addition of the Articulation
Officers will assist in this statewide articulation process.
This year, participating faculty discussed
a new proposal calling for a general education (GE) transfer
pattern to provide science and engineering students an alternative
to the IGETC pattern. The proposal attempts to address the
problems specific to science and engineering majors who follow
the IGETC pattern. For example, science students who complete
IGETC often transfer with severe deficits in the math and
science requirements for the major. This outcome for students
occurs because the minimum math and science requirements stated
in IGETC were designed, and work well for, most non-science
majors but are not suitable for most science majors (see Biology
Annual Report Appendix C for proposal information).
This report concludes with a look toward
next year's efforts and appendices that validate this year's
valuable progress.
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