Program Upgrades

2010 turned out pretty busy for me. I wrote a proposal for updating the Engineering and Mechanical Engineering programs at my college. At our college, we have a "Two Meetings" rule - the course or program proposals pass through a rather lengthy governance process that consists of two meetings at each of the following levels: departments, divisions, academic standards committee, and general body meeting of the college faculty. During the first meeting, the course comes in for "Information only" and then in the second meeting, the committees/departments/divisions have to vote on the proposal. If the course withstands the scrutiny, it passes to the next level. The procedure took about a year and half to approval and implementation. The course and programs were approved in Spring 2010 and were implemented this year (2011).

One of the major changes we made to the program was inclusion of an engineering computation course. The course is an ambitious course that can serve as introduction to engineering and gives students access in their early, formative years as engineers to state of the art tools, and technology. This kind of access is particularly important when the schools are struggling to keep students interested in the STEM careers, and to graduate more engineers and scientists. I will write about my experience about teaching this class soon.

Just when you introduce a new course, it becomes important to take a hard look at your existing offerings. The programs at community colleges have to be in harmony with those at the four year institutions where the CC students transfer. Most four year schools only accept a limited number of credits from community colleges, and therefore programs at CC can never be too heavy in the number of credits.

We have tried our level best to ensure that we offer a leaner, cleaner program that would allow students to transfer maximum number of credits when we made these changes.

The process was no doubt lengthy and sometimes even frustrating to some, but is also very educational. Not only you learn about programs at other institutions, but you also learn about the college, the governance processes, and most importantly about the people who make this happen: your colleagues from your divisions, and faculty and staff you would have no chance of knowing otherwise.