ASSIST: A Curriculum Tool You Can’t Live Without Joanne Benschop, MiraCosta College Dave DeGroot, Allan Hancock College Melynie Schiel, Copper Mountain College

“Articulation System Stimulating Interinstitutional Student Transfer” We love our acronyms! “Articulation System Stimulating Interinstitutional Student Transfer” Awesome System Supporting Institutions’ Stellar efforts To develop good curriculum…  Love this slide!!

Common Curriculum Development Questions Will the course I am developing be accepted in the CSU or IGETC general education patterns? Ref documents: http://icas-ca.org/standards-policies-and-procedures-manual http://www.calstate.edu/eo/EO-1033.html Then course search function What courses do students in the major need for transfer? Does my existing course articulate and, if so, where?

Common Curriculum Development Questions (continued) How does our current course inventory meet the GE area needs? What courses are other local colleges using for general education areas? What courses have been designated as transferable AKA “baccalaureate” by other curriculum committees?

Assist has a front and back end.. Front end: Major requirements and major articulation One-to-one report List a college’s courses in inventory that meet specific criteria CSU General Education areas IGETC Etc. Listed courses deemed “transferable” by the curriculum committee (different than articulation)

Assist has a front and back end.. Allows for key word searches of all courses in ASSIST inventory Permit searches by various criteria CSU or UC accepted Outline on file Number of units LDTP qualified Does not have Recently updated limiter C-ID information C-ID Course numbering will be coming soon!

ASSIST ACCESS Access to the front end is available to everyone. www.assist.org To get into the back end and search the database, you will need a username and password from your articulation officer. It is different from the password he or she uses to update the database.

Focusing on the database… If forget how to get into the database, you can always go to the main page: www.assist.org and click on “ASSIST Information Center” The direct link is http://info.assist.org.

CAUTION Enter at your own risk. Searching the ASSIST database for the first time can overwhelm you with powerful knowledge and extensive ideas. Be cautious and have a question in mind before using the database. Enter at your own risk.

Updating An Introduction to Literature Course What, if any, general education areas are met by a course like this? What other courses do we have in our inventory to meet this general education requirement? What content is covered by other colleges? What books are they using?

ASSIST

“Database,” then “ASSIST Maintenance Reports”

“Click here to go to the ASSIST Maintenance Reports”

Enter Username and Password XXXX/ XXXX This pager can be book marked to safe time in the future.

Click on “Course Search”

Under “Institutions” select “All Community College Campuses” Users can obviously select other groups of institutions or any individual institution.

Enter name of course in “Search in course title” box It is advisable to try different variations of courses titles as it will often bring up other courses.

Select “Courses with any IGETC qualification” in “IGETC Areas” Focus on IGETC for this question. This will narrow the field.

Scroll down and click on “Continue”

Find course with similar title and click on “curric”

Clicking on “curric” will list transfer status and IGETC area Current course is on top. Notice the begin and end dates.

If available, Click on “PDF” for course description and outline To find more examples of curriculum you wouldn’t want the search limited by IGETC… but that depends on the question brought to the ASSIST session.

Another research question An institution is thinking about burying their Death and Dying course. What impact will that have on transfer going forward?

ASSIST

ASSIST Again can book mark this page to save time in the future.

This requires that you know the name of the course you want to look up.

If an articulation exists, use the drop-down menus to see where/how.

By looking at the CSU and UC articulation report I learn that This course is articulated in two majors, a liberal studies major and a religious studies major. Is the course part of a list of options? Is the course required?

Follow up question The Death and Dying course is given new life after reviewing the articulation agreements and the student major data at our college. We decide to revise the course and want to make sure the content will give the students as much mileage as possible in terms of transfer and articulation. Are there some relatively current course outlines we can peek at?

Again different titles may bring up other course variations.

It is important to reiterate that the report eventually DOES load. 

Program review As part of program review, faculty should ensure that their courses are articulating. Where a course may fit in a general education pattern isn’t always easy to spot. Business program faculty heard that some schools had a financial literacy course fulfill a certain area of the general education pattern. Is that true?

Whoah… lots of info I can now browse for how other schools articulate courses for GE areas… Can this make a course more viable? Hmm….