NOTE: In January 2007, the Presidents of the CTCs decided to
reconsider major aspects of the CCN plan. The Instruction Commission will
meet on February 15th to make their recommendations. NOTE: This website and the information is authored by Art Goss based on information from the common course numbering website and other sources. I (Art) am solely responsible for its content. (agoss@bcc.ctc.edu)
NOTE: In January 2007, the Presidents of the CTCs decided to
reconsider major aspects of the CCN plan. The Instruction Commission will
meet on February 15th to make their recommendations. Click
HERE to see the
list of "common courses" as of 2/21/07Click HERE
to register as "Faculty Member with Serious Concerns about CCN".
It only takes a minute!
Unanimous faculty resolution from Bellevue Community College
Letter from Edmonds CC Faculty President to Edmonds Board of Trustees
Statement from the Northwest Biology Instructors' Organization
Resolution of the
Natural Sciences
Department at Tacoma Community College
The PowerPoint presentation the author of this page made regarding CCN is available here. It was presented to the CTC presidents (The WACTC) on 9/29/06.
BCC's Curriculum Advisory Committee (CAC), BCC President Jean Floten, and BCC Executive Dean Ron Leatherbarrow all strongly opposed the idea of common course numbering. This website is to inform the campus about it, and to answer questions.
You mean the four-year Universities are NOT a part of the CCN process?!
"Common course numbering is the re-labeling of community and technical colleges’ equivalent courses with the same three-digit Course IDs and Titles. Courses that are not equivalent will be re-labeled with unique Course IDs."1
Common course numbering (CCN) means that an academic course taught at any community or technical college (CTC) campus in Washington State will have its course designation, number, and name (ex. “ENGL 101 English Composition”) changed so that it will exactly match all the courses at all the other CTCs that have been deemed “equivalent courses”. Apparently, professional/technical courses will also be changed if they are potentially transferable.
As of 9/14/06 the Chair of the CCN project, Dr. Sunny Burns announced that the starting date has been pushed back from summer of '07 to summer of '08. Nevertheless, much work has already taken place in determining equivalent courses.
Originally, we had received a list of 94 courses.3 As of 9/14/06, we now know that list will be altered to using four-digits. Based on that list, the following is true:
In their fall 2006 newsletter, the CCN committee states: "The Articulation and Transfer Council, comprised of academic deans and student services representatives, took about a year to review courses for equivalency, cross-referencing them with four-year colleges’ equivalencies. As common courses are identified, college contacts are providing feedback regarding accuracy. For those courses where uniqueness or commonness remains unclear, faculty experts will be making the determination at a faculty workshop on Friday, December 1." (2006)
Further, they describe the process of determining equivalency as asking:
§ " Is the course description in the official college catalog similar enough to be accepted as equivalent at a receiving college for transfer purposes? If yes, it is common."
§ "Would a student be required to take another course with similar content to meet degree requirements? If yes, it is not common."
NOTE: Although the committee is now soliciting faculty experts to sort out problem courses, all the work done so far is by "...academic deans and student services representatives..."
The Fall newsletter does claim,
"From its inception, faculty members have served on the CCN Steering Committee and its sub-committees. The vice presidents of instruction and the Faculty Association of Community and Technical Colleges (FACTC) members have discussed common course numbering at their quarterly meetings. Vice presidents of instruction are charged with faculty project communications on their campuses."
However, the implementation committee lists only one faculty member, an economics instructor from Tacoma CC. The list of "group leads" that were assigned the actual task of making the list is composed entirely of administrators. The process for determining equivalency (directly above) reveals that faculty were not involved in any decisions about equivalency. The FACTC minutes from late 2004 and early 2005 do indicate they were briefed about a plan to changed "50 to 80" courses, but no opinions were solicited, and no vote taken. The plan to change "50 to 80" courses was scrapped and became the current plan to make ALL academic courses (and some professional/technical courses) common. While some faculty were apparently involved in some of the planning, there was no state-wide systematic involvement of faculty. Indeed, whole campuses of faculty were unaware that CCN was even happening.
The plan until spring of 2006 was to change the names and numbers of only the most common "50 to 80" courses. One of the many plans they considered would have uniquely identified these common courses by changing them alone to four digits, or possibly even by adding a "C" to the course designation to indicate they were one of those most common courses. When objections were made that any such unique identifiers would improperly signal to students that those courses were somehow more desirable, these plans were dropped. However, for some inexplicable reason, instead of changing the 50 to 80 courses to a common name/number and simply NOT giving them any unique identifier, the committee suddenly concluded,
"As a result (of dropping the unique identifier), the scope of the CCN project needed to expand to include all Direct Transfer Agreement (DTA) courses, both common and unique, in order to retain transparency for students, advisors and receiving institutions.
The impact on some of our staff will be enormous. Here is a quickly-thought-out list of tasks that must be done: (NOTE: In most things listed below, we cannot just delete the old lists and create the new lists... we must maintain both lists because for many years to come we will have students who have taken classes from the old, and classes from the new.)
At BCC, hundreds, perhaps over 1000 new courses must be mounted on the HP.
Not just courses must be changed, but the web of prerequisites for those courses.
Degrees and certificates must be redefined with all possible combinations of both sets of numbers.
Course catalogs must be re-written with both sets of numbers.
The goldenrod advising sheet and all advising sheets must be re-done with all possible combinations of both sets of numbers.
All online information about degrees and certificates must be overhauled with all possible combinations of both sets of numbers.
Advisors and advising faculty will have to become conversant in both systems to give advice to students. In a very real sense, the amount of information they will have to process and clarify for students will double.
This is the important question.
If the long-term benefit is really great, then the hardships of transition might be worth it. The fact is, however, that having CCN will have very little impact on the transfer process. After CCN, transfer students will still have to submit transcripts and wait for BCC evaluators to look them over and decide how their courses transfer. There will be nothing substantially different in the transfer process due to CCN -- nothing will become simpler, automatic, or more transparent. BCC transcript evaluators have said that they already have methods in place to assess in-state transcripts (we have been doing this for 40 years) and common course numbering will not change or speed up the process.
The short-term effect of CCN on
our transition students (students with some classes before CCN and some after)
will be confusion. Consider all the difficulty in advising students
now... the issues of student completion rates, and the quality of advising, and
the recent difficulties of getting into four-year universities and the questions
about the value of our degree with the current state of the DTA... and now
imagine that, in the middle of thousands of students' academic careers at BCC,
we switch all the numbers on them. How much chaos will this cause?
How much trouble will they have transferring out of BCC with this split
transcript? How apparent will
it be to a student checking the quarterly schedule that the "BA 240
Statistical Analysis" course they took is now the "MATH 1114 Descrip-Inferential
Stat" which looks interesting?
The four-year Universities are not participating in CCN. They have not agreed to accept the CCN process, and the new definitions of "equivalent courses". They will continue to transfer our courses on a course-by-course, college-by-college basis.
Yes, that is exactly right. The four-year Universities are NOT a part of the CCN process.
Only Washington State Community and Technical Colleges. This process will not have any affect on transfer students from out of state, or transfer students to or from four-year Universities.
The deciding body seems to have been the organization of CTC presidents (WACTC), although it was also approved by the Vice Presidents of Instruction (Instruction Commission). Once the presidents approved it, implementation fell to the VPs of Instruction (Instruction Commission) and Student Services Deans (Student Services Commission) although to the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges staff are heavily involved. It was not a "State Mandate" in the sense of a legislative mandate, although the State Legislation played a key role in this (See "why is this being done" below)
The supporters of CCN on the state level would say, "no", but read "Is there anything we can do about CCN?" below.
Washington's CTCs are state-funded. In the past few years, the Washington State Legislature passes several bills that became law, that deal with perceived problems within the higher education system. From the CCN executive summary:
"In October 2003, Washington’s community and technical college presidents commissioned a feasibility study that would outline options for improving course articulation among the 34 colleges... Several factors influenced this study: legislative focus on making it easier for students to transfer credits and efficiently complete degrees... The Lingering Student legislation of 2003 called for colleges to implement plans for ensuring that students were efficiently moving toward earning their credentials. House Bills 2382 and 3103, passed in 2004, call for the Higher Education Coordinating Board to improve articulation between two- and four-year colleges in several specific ways including creating a statewide system of course equivalencies."
(bold added)
The legislation cited does require that "a statewide system of course equivalency" be created, but it does NOT mandate common course numbering. In fact, in the substitute house bill 2382 that was passed by the Senate and became law, common course numbering was specifically removed from the bill. The house bill report4 states, "Common course numbering is no longer required as part of the statewide course equivalency system."
So why did the presidents vote to do CCN when it was specifically removed from the bill? In the CCN "Working draft - Three Course Numbering Options"2 which was available on the CCN website, they give three "additional reasons" to do CCN. They are:
- General public’s view is that the CTCs’ courses are already commonly numbered
- Ease of students’ experiences who move from CTC to CTC
- To do it our way before decree by legislature
Note bullet three. Apparently, as a preemptive strike to keep the legislature from forcing us to do CCN, we have decided to do it to ourselves.
Yes! First, the establishment of course equivalencies IS mandated by the legislature, so in our presentation to Jean Floten and Ron Leatherbarrow, the CAC advocated that the work to establish equivalent courses should proceed.
Once equivalent courses are determined, though, there is no real benefit to forcing common course numbers. Instead, there are two possible solutions:
A) A user-friendly website that allows easy checking of course equivalencies between any Washington CTCs. Transfer students could click on their old CTC and courses, and click on their new CTC and see exactly how the courses will transfer. Perhaps links could then send them directly to the next step of arranging for a transcript to be sent and informing the receiving college. It ought to be possible for the software to alert both the sending and receiving institutions and maybe even cause a secure transcript to be sent electronically. This is as close as the transfer process could come to "automatic"! (NOTE: there is a grant application being considered now in association with the Higher Education Coordinating Board to pilot software to do this sort of thing.)
B) If it is decided that we really need common numbers, then a secondary tier of common numbers could be created that exist in addition to the current numbers. This is the route that California took, creating the “California Articulation Number” (CAN) system. http://www.curriculum.cc.ca.us/Curriculum/DevelopCurOutline/CANSystem_FacParticipation.htm If a course is deemed to have an equivalent course taught in that state, the course catalog description in each institution’s catalog lists their common CAN number at the end of the description.
From the May 28, 2004 minutes of the presidents group, " It was moved and seconded that WACTC (1) approve the system task force’s recommendation to pursue common course numbering."
Apparently CCN was the recommendation of the "system task force". It is not clear how much the presidents were aware of these alternative choices when they voted.
If you agree the current CCN plan is a bad idea, then help spread the word to faculty on other campuses. Many campuses have faculty who know little or nothing about CCN. Many have been told that it is "a done deal", or that "the state is making us do this and we have no choice." Neither of these statements is true, and faculty need to know that they can still affect the outcome.
The only hope to stop this is
Faculty on other campuses can:
If enough faculty voice their concerns, there still may be hope of affecting the plan so that it can be more effective, and/or less expensive and disruptive.
Good luck to us all.
First, it is very important your VPs (or executive Deans) of Instruction get a copy, as well as your college presidents. You may also consider sending copies to your boards of trustees.
Send a copy to the secretary of the Executive Director of the State Board for community and technical colleges at doderman@sbctc.ctc.edu, and ask them to distribute copies to the state board members. You can also snail-mail the state board at:
WA State Board for Community and Technical
Colleges
PO Box 42495
Olympia, WA 98504-2495
But it also very important that the following people hear from you. Please send a copy attached in an email:
State Board staff people:
Exec, Dir. Carl Earl
Education. Director Jan Yoshiwara
Chair of the WACTC (community and technical college presidents group) Linda Kaminski
Chair of the WACTC education committee Tana Hasart
Chair of the state CCN project Suanne Carlson and Sunny Burns
You might consider sending copies to your faculty state-level union representatives Sandra Schroeder and Ruth Windhover:
And if you don’t mind, send me a copy too (agoss@bcc.ctc.edu) . With your permission, I’ll post it on our website with other similar statements from other campuses.
(2) Common Course Numbering group "Working Draft: Three Course Numbering Options" October 2005. This was previously available on the CCN website.
(3) List of first 94 BCC courses and how they will be changed to CCN system
(4) go to http://search.leg.wa.gov/pub/textsearch/default.asp . In the green section click Bill information 2003-2004. In the green section type HB 2382 and click "search".