campus partner(s)

Association of American Colleges and Universities

state(s)

DC, TX, NC, NV, PA

amount

$300,000

initiative

Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence

award date

05.2017

project director

Tia Brown McNair

Association of American Colleges & Universities

Grant Summary

$300,000 over 36 months for the Association of American Colleges and Universities to convene and support four institutions – University of Houston-Downtown, Winston-Salem State University, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) – with implementing curricular reforms that guide students to higher levels of learning while improving degree efficiency and curbing instructional costs. The four-year campus partners will streamline upper division offerings and ensure these courses reinforce both institution- and program-based learning outcomes. Campuses will inventory courses, especially electives, to determine whether all are needed to achieve program learning outcomes and how they could be removed, combined or updated to better address current disciplinary or market needs; identify courses to be shared across departments; reconsider lengthy prerequisites for major courses. The two-year campus partner is in the midst of implementing guided pathways and aims to streamline, simplify, and integrate its general education requirements so they are clearer to students and more consistent with the guided pathways model. For instance, CCP aims to develop thematically linked courses aligned with a particular pathway to satisfy general education requirements, recommend general education course sequences to students based on their degree and transfer aspirations, and remove courses from their catalog that are not aligned with the new curricular pathways.