The California Community College system has been very successful in providing affordable and accessible education to diverse student populations by allowing them to complete all of their lower-division course work and then transfer to a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree. Recent developments, however, have threatened the viability of engineering programs in California community colleges, endangering this very important pipeline in the engineering educational system. The increasing divergence of the lower-division requirements among different four-year institutions and among the different fields of engineering, coupled with the recent State budget crisis has forced many community colleges to cancel low-enrollment classes and high-cost programs including those in engineering.
In response to this situation, Cañada College, a federally designated Hispanic-serving institution in the San Francisco Bay Area, has developed an innovative program entitled Online and Networked Education for Students in Transfer Engineering Programs (ONE-STEP). Funded by the National Science Foundation Engineering Education and Centers through the Innovation in Engineering Education and Curriculum, and Infrastructure (IEECI) program, ONE-STEP aims to improve community college engineering education through the use of Tablet-PC and wireless network technologies. The program includes a Summer Engineering Teaching Institute that will assist community college engineering faculty in developing a Tablet-PC-enhanced interactive model of engineering instruction, and implementing online courses using CCC Confer—a videoconferencing platform that is available free of charge to all faculty and staff of the California Community College system. ONE-STEP will also develop partnerships with community colleges currently without an engineering program to design and implement a Joint Engineering Program that is delivered through CCC Confer. The program has the potential to significantly increase the viability of engineering programs by increasing teaching efficiency and effectiveness with minimal additional costs.
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Developing a Summer Engineering Teaching Institute for Community College Engineering Faculty
The California Community College system plays an important role in providing affordable and accessible education to diverse student populations by allowing them to complete all of their lower-division course work and then transfer to a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree. However, the increasing divergence of the lower-division requirements among different four-year institutions and among the different fields of engineering, coupled with decreasing enrollments and resources, has forced many community colleges to cancel low-enrollment classes and high-cost programs including those in engineering.
To address this issue, four community colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area developed an innovative program titled Creating Alternative Learning Strategies for Transfer Engineering Programs (CALSTEP). Funded by the National Science Foundation through the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, CALSTEP aims to enable small-to-medium community college engineering programs to support a comprehensive set of lower-division engineering courses that are delivered either completely online, or with limited face-to-face interactions. In addition to developing and implementing curriculum materials and resources for the core lower-division engineering courses, one of the main components of CALSTEP is disseminating the curriculum widely in California community college engineering programs. This is done through the Summer Engineering Teaching Institute, which is a two-day teaching workshop that introduces community college engineering faculty to the CALSTEP curriculum, and assists faculty in implementing the curriculum and developing alternative teaching and learning strategies to increase enrollment and improve teaching effectiveness. Results of curriculum development and the implementation of the Summer Engineering Teaching Institute will be highlighted in this paper, as well as future plans to maximize the impact of the program in increasing access to engineering education among thousands of community college engineering students and strengthening engineering transfer programs in the state.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1430789
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10063234
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Education
- Volume:
- 2018
- ISSN:
- 0092-4326
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- https://peer.asee.org/30018
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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