Engineering

Minutes of 10/25/03 IMPAC Meeting San Jose Sheraton

Attendees: Karen Groppi - Cabrillo College, Laura Demsetz - College of San Mateo, Gill Cruz - Las Positas College, Dan Chang - UC Davis

1. Prior to the meeting, communication with Darlene Mathias (Cosumnes River College), Jo-Ann Panzardi (Cabrillo College) and Gary Ford (UC Davis) took place to attempt coordination of the IMPAC meeting with the northern California Engineering Liaison Council (ELC) meeting that took place on the previous Thursday (10/23/03). Material was distributed to the group that was prepared by Jo-Ann Panzardi and that was presented at the ELC meeting. Laura Demsetz and Gill Cruz, who had also attended the ELC meeting, shared issues discussed at the ELC meeting.

2. The 2001-2002 IMPAC Annual Report for Engineering was distributed to the attendees. In addition, Karen Groppi and Gill Cruz, who had pre-registered, also received the 2002-2003 draft IMPAC Annual Report for Engineering by e-mail. No changes to those reports were suggested, but several issues alluded to in those reports were reaffirmed. For example, it was noted that often in engineering programs at community colleges, there is only one full-time faculty member and that is supplemented with lecturers and part-time staff. Thus the statement made in the 2002-03 report, "We also note that engineering articulation is most successful when focused on primary feeder schools" is successful in part because the primary instructor and adviser of the students is intimately familiar with the programs of the 4-year schools receiving their students. Furthermore they are aware of tools available to them such at the ASSIST grid. Additionally, some campuses prepare detailed articulation matrices for specific feeder schools. Examples of such grids prepared by UCD for Cabrillo and Las Positas Colleges are attached.

3. An important item brought out at the group meeting relates to a recommendation contained in the 2001-02 IMPAC report, "The consensus of the engineering group at the April IMPAC meeting was that expanded dialogue between IMPAC and ELC would be mutually beneficial and that a meeting of at least the engineering group with IMPAC should be held in conjunction with the Fall Meeting of the ELC." The primary reasons for that recommendation and which was reiterated at the fall (10/23/03) ELC meeting held two days earlier, are: 1) ELC has been working on the articulation problem for some two decades and has developed a system of coordination of articulation, especially through "feeder" institution transfer agreements reflected in ASSIST, and 2) there is a critical mass within the ELC (meetings are attended by some 45 to 50 faculty, administrators and staff from the Community College, CSU and UC systems). A statement of the purpose of ELC was included in the invitation mailed out to the engineering education community in California and has been reproduced below for review and serves the purpose of illustrating many of the common goals of IMPAC and the ELC.

" The ELC is dedicated to strengthen and improve the quality of engineering education; and has been serving a very important and critical function in engineering education since 1947. The ELC continues to work on improving articulation between two- and four-year programs of engineering and engineering technology; ensuring uniformity of basic concepts in core courses; establishing up-to-date and accurate guidance information; and collecting statistics pertaining to the numbers of incoming and completing engineering majors. The ELC meets biannually with meetings held alternately in the northern and southern sections of the state. More information about the ELC can be found at www.caelc.org."

4. A more specific recommendation is offered by the group this year, and that is that IMPAC request that ELC be the engineering component of IMPAC. Attendees cannot afford the time to attend duplicate meetings, and given the much greater participation rate within the ELC, IMPAC could provide benefit to both programs by selectively encouraging attendance at the ELC meeting. In particular it is noted that community college faculty are the primary participants at the ELC, whereas the CSU participants are mainly faculty that hold administrative positions as well, but that the UC participants with few exceptions are staff from the institution's Dean's Office. It was felt that encouraging faculty from the UC's and CSU's to attend the ELC in addition to the administrative staff would be most beneficial in coordinating course articulation, e.g., IMPAC could support that effort by covering travel to the ELC meeting of a faculty members from the 4-year institutions and key Community College faculty, e.g., committee chairs within ELC to both IMPAC and ELC.

5. Three issues related to engineering articulation were discussed:

a) The 4-yr institutions, esp. UC's, have a "mind of their own" in terms of packaging their courses that relates to different philosophies regarding major requirements and professional accreditation (ABET) requirements. An example of accreditation influence is that in recent years ABET changed its model from highly prescriptive topics and moved to an "outcomes-based" model that encourages incorporation of practice-oriented material, e.g., design, ethics, economics, etc. considerations into courses throughout the curriculum. Many institutions have responded by integrating these aspects throughout both the lower and upper division curricula by incorporating them into existing or totally new courses. This has increased difficulties in obtaining one-to-one correspondence of courses since the choice of course used to introduce the material has differed from one institution to another. An example of a "major" requirement need can be seen with regard to programming languages and topics to be included in those courses. Majors at UCD, other than Electrical and Computer engineering (ECE) or Computer Science Engineering (CSE), have elected to replace the FORTRAN programming course taken by freshman with one in problem-solving based on new computational tools such as MATLAB. Thus at the lower division the first programming language course is not specified at this time for several majors, while for ECE at UCD, ENG 6 and a programming language ECS 30 (C) and a programming applications course EEC 73 (C++) are required, and ECS does not require ENG 6, but does require two programming courses ECS 30 (C) and 40 (C++)!

b) Articulation of GE requirements for the CSU system are well spelled out. However, GE requirements at the UC's are inconsistent, vary from campus-to-campus and several campuses require that a minimum number of the GE courses be taken on the campus. Coupled with maximum unit limitations, students are faced with the difficulty of differing requirements when preparing to transfer to either CSU or UC systems. It is for that reason the "Proposed Transfer A.S. Degree Program" included as an Appendix to the 2002-2003 Engineering Report was included in place of the Appendix entitled "IMPAC Engineering" in the 2001-2002 report. It is felt that the Transfer A.S. Degree is better guidance to the students.

c) A discussion of updating CAN descriptions was brought forward at the ELC meeting and the consensus was that it would not be a productive use of time. None of the UC's use the CAN descriptors, and it is understood that while CSU campuses accept the courses for unit credit, not all CSU campuses adhere to the CAN descriptions for subject credit of a major requirement. Certain CAN descriptions, for example in Mathematics or Physics may be useful guidance for students, however. An alternative recommendation to use of CAN descriptors for all lower division engineering courses was to further improve the information provided to advisors, faculty and students through the ASSIST matrix. Such improvements might include indicating that there are course prerequisites for certain lower division courses. A recommendation will be forwarded to the ELC to determine if this can be easily implemented.

6) The group briefly discussed the possible need to revise the description of the Surveying course, CAN #ENGR 2. Only one UC campus (UCD) continues to require a course in surveying in the Civil Engineering curriculum, and that course has been coupled with an introduction to AutoCAD. Further changes to incorporate GIS into that course are being contemplated. Thus development of a new CAN description may not be useful for those courses which no longer have common core competency expectations.