Architectural, Engineering and CAD Technologies Honolulu Community College 2007 Annual Assessment Report

Transcription

1 Architectural, Engineering and CAD Technologies Honolulu Community College 2007 Annual Assessment Report College Mission Statement Honolulu Community College s mission is to: Serve the community as an affordable, flexible, learning centered, open-door comprehensive Community College that meets the post-secondary educational needs of individuals, businesses, and the community. Serve the Pacific Rim as the primary technical training center in areas such as transportation, information technology, education, communications, construction, and public and personal services. Program Mission Statement The Architectural, Engineering and CAD Technologies program's mission is to: Provide students with state-of-the-art technical training in preparation for employment in architectural, engineering, and related jobs. Meet the needs of students with specialized interests and objectives who need or desire similar training. Provide students with the general education skills, attitudes, and values for effectively working with others, contributing to the AEC industry, and accepting the responsibilities implied in support of a safe and sustainable natural and built environment. Part I: Quantitative Indicators for Program Review DESCRIPTION QUANTITATIVE VALUE Current and Projected Positions State 1078/50 Current and Projected Positions County 864/28 Annual New Positions State 7 Annual New Positions County 4 Number Applicants 116 Number Majors 84 SSH for Program Majors all Program Classes 1726 SSH for all program classes 1164 FTE Program Enrollment 34.7 Number classes Taught 23 Average Class Size 19.5 Class Fill Rate 77.1 FTE of BOR appointed faculty 2.0 Semester Credits taught by Lecturers 6 Percent classes taught by Lecturers 9.5% FTE Workload 2.2 Majors per FTE Faculty 37.5

2 Degrees Certificates Earned 17 Persistence of Majors from Fall to Spring 64.8% Licensure Information Where Available N/A Perkins Core Indicator - 1P Perkins Core Indicator - 1P Perkins Core Indicator - 2P Perkins Core Indicator - 3P Perkins Core Indicator - 3P Perkins Core Indicator - 4P Perkins Core Indicator - 4P Part II: Assessment Results for Program SLOs How do you know that students are achieving your stated Program SLOs? 1. Job placement. A goal of the program is to prepare students for employment in the AEC industry, and the very best measure of our success in doing that is the number or percentage of students who do obtain such employment. Apart from a couple of students who transfer to a university baccalaureate or doctoral program in architecture or engineering, plus usually a couple of students who enroll in the program with specialized or personal goals unrelated to employment, all AEC graduates obtain employment in the field. 2. The AEC program will develop an exit survey that will specifically address program student learning outcomes. What kinds of evidence can you provide? (It helps if you provide some samples such as pictures of projects, descriptions of capstone projects, or other relevant samples) 1. The department annually publishes a student directory that shows where previous-year students went after graduation. It lists students by name and the names of the firms where they gained employment (or the university or other place where they went).

3 2. A number of AEC students obtain part-time employment prior to completing the program, and employer feedback, student-reported advancements, and movement to full-time positions upon graduation attest to their success. 3. Students in the field shadow experience course are regularly placed in prominent architectural and engineering firms, and students meet as a group twice to share their experiences. Invariably they report having met former students of our program employed there. Most often the former students have been there a number of years have worked their way into positions requiring leadership and responsibilities far beyond the work for which we prepare them. Students use the AEC program to prepare for careers as well as jobs. 4. Second year courses and one first-year course involve lengthy projects where students create sets of drawing or numerous drawings of buildings and other structures requiring detailed design and drawing. The projects are too bulky to present here. Some of them are presented at an end-of-year portfolio presentation where they are judged by AEC Advisory Committee members. Part III: Curriculum Revisions How many of your courses have up-to-date curriculum forms (on file in building 6) with the stated course student learning outcomes, methods of evaluation, and methods of instruction? (Check your course files at the central file collection on the 2 nd floor of the administration building the goal is to have all courses up-to-date within a 5 year period) Unknown at this time. Department course records, however, are complete and up to date. All forms were updated and were reviewed by the curriculum committees in 2001 when the entire program was updated. Since then, student learning outcomes have been developed for all AEC courses. Which courses, if any, have you made revisions to, briefly describe the revisions made, and when were the revisions implemented? The department continually updates courses as needed. The vast majority of courses are software-based, so continual updating is essential. Most updates do not require new catalog descriptions or curriculum committee review. An update this year (effective Fall 2007) was replacement of our AEC 80 Basic Drafting course with a new pre-program AEC 81 Basic CAD Drafting. AEC 81 was an online manual drafting course, and there was always a significant number of students who enrolled, remained on the roll, but never appeared in discussion or submitted assigned work. Too many other students were not successful in the course, most likely because of the online format (the department no longer has a manual drafting lab). We have also found that students who enroll in our regular-program CAD courses do better if they have previously had almost any exposure to CAD. The new AEC 81 course will both be a classroom course and provide students with an introduction to CAD. Do all of your instructors (both full-time and part-time) include the course (not program) SLOs in their syllabi?

4 Yes. All instructors furnish each student with a written course syllabus on the first day of classes, and it includes student learning outcomes. The outcomes are also discussed on the first day, and knowledge surveys being developed will address them. Where do the instructors get the course SLOs from? Part IV: Analysis of Data The department has a list of student learning outcomes for every course in the program, and outcomes are pulled word-for-word from that. How well are students progressing through the program? (Do they complete the certificate/degree within the specified time-frame?) The majority of students do finish the program in two years. Students who are employed full-time, occasionally flight attendants who must rearrange their schedules to attend classes regularly, single parents with young children, and infrequently students who are enrolled because of interest alone take longer. Students who do not have important outside constraints and are interested in finishing in two years can almost always do so. Students who want to take longer to complete the program are perfectly free to do this, and the AEC program has purposely been designed to accommodate them. There are very few courses that must be taken together. Proper sequencing is ensured by prerequisites rather than blocking. We try to be student-centered by accommodating students with different interests and outside obligations, and we have not had significant problems of program fit for different groups of students. Are the measurement of your Program and Course SLOs providing adequate information to evaluate student learning or should new measures be developed? The AEC program has always been in reasonably close contact with the AEC industry and employers, and we have made changes in both program design and course emphases as a result of advisory committee input. We have always been responsive to industry changes (evidenced in part by the fairly recent program reorganization that we initiated without the administrative prompting that frequently precedes such reorganizations) and have always kept an eye on the future, emerging technologies, and industry trends. Our students are quite uniformly successful in obtaining jobs, employers regularly contact us when they have openings and are looking for skilled technicians, and feedback from both employers and graduates has been positive. The challenge now is to formally measure and document success for the satisfaction of others as needed. We are currently in the process of developing knowledge surveys for all courses, exit surveys administered to students leaving the program, and better employment documentation. Does the program have sufficient resources to promote student learning? Are other resources needed such as personnel, facilities, or equipment? If additional resources are required, what evidence/rationale is there to support this?

5 Currently we have the personnel, facilities, and equipment needed. Up-to-date computers are essential for this program, and we are currently in the process of replacing old computers in one of our two labs. Computers are not unusable when we replace them, but evolving software requirements rather quickly overtake the capabilities of the hardware that was perfectly suitable when purchased earlier. 3D drawing and object manipulation is rather quickly filtering down to the basic skills level from what was earlier an advanced or specialized level. Industry standard AutoCAD was recently (2007 version) upgraded to include much more powerful 3D functionality, and problems in attempting to teach it on machines that originally operated on the Windows 98 platform were too numerous and serious to attempt the same thing again. Computer replacement will continue to be a need of this program. The workload of the current two instructors cannot be increased. Both instructors are currently officially overloaded, and, although by his own design, one is over overloaded with a class designed specifically for Construction Academy teachers. At the same time, we are aware that there may be needs for evening courses particularly in engineering CAD, courses in kitchen and bath design (that would be most appropriate for this program over any other in the UH system), and courses or other training in rapid prototyping (in conjunction with courses in computer modeling that need to go with it). Emerging needs will likely be met with evening and weekend courses and therefore not seriously impact facilities and equipment. But additional software and personnel will be needed for any expansion of this program. All of the needs that we recognize now will likely be met somewhere at some time. It would be in the best interests of this program and this college to consider the speed at which the industry is moving, its evolving needs, and the value to the existing program and the community to stay in front. Are all safety issues addressed? Yes. There are no more safety issues involved in our AEC courses than there are in any other computer-based courses. For a trade-type program, the AEC program may be inherently the safest of any. What challenges exist for the program? Other than keeping up with software and other technologies (plus keeping up with supposedly crucial and immediate but always passing new requirements of academe), there are no special challenges. The department is used to change and embraces it. Challenges that lead to change are part of our industry. What opportunities exist for the program? Part V: Action Plan See the latter part of the sufficient resources response three sections above. What tasks/goals have you set for the upcoming year (Fall 2007/Spring 2008)? This department recently completed [essentially] a five-year review, and the tasks/goals enumerated below are roughly developments of those.

6 1. Develop or repeat use of a pre-graduate survey that addresses the program student learning outcomes. 2. Further develop SLO-focused knowledge surveys to be administered at the beginning and end of each course. 3. Continue a new program or routine whereby second-year students mentor or tutor first-semester students. 4. Ensure the continuation of a re-established AEC Club. 5. Ensure that the AEC Advisory Committee meets at least once during the school year. 6. Continue and refine an end-of-year portfolio presentation where graduating students present their portfolios, resumes, etc. to advisory committee members, and invited employers. 7. A new goal is to figure out a use for our ovular program map in which we, along with most of the rest of the faculty, invested so much time in training to develop and then in creating. Certainly with the amount of resources invested by the college (like in PEAKS training a number of years ago), there must be a purpose or use for it somewhere. A goal is simply to discover it. Who will be responsible for completing these tasks/goals? Both instructors (Mike Jennings and Doug Madden) will be responsible. What is the timeline for achieving these tasks/goals? 1. The pre-graduate survey will be developed and administered prior to the end of the Spring 2007 semester, refined and administered prior to the end of the Spring 2008 semester, and compared to the results of the 2006 survey. Comparisons will be graphed, and areas needing improvement will be noted. 2. Knowledge surveys are being developed during the school year. More will need to be developed and put to use in , however. 3. A mentoring/tutoring routine was developed in Fall 2006 and was very successful. Besides first-year students benefiting, second-year students reported it being a good learning/skill-refreshment experience. The task will be to get it underway a little earlier next year and to keep it going. First-year students who benefited this year should be more ready to participate in helping others next year. 4. A goal in the five-year review was to re-establish the AEC Club. That was accomplished just recently. The task now will be to ensure that it carries over to next year and soon becomes an understood and beneficial component of the program. 5. The AEC Advisory Committee was revived and partially reconstituted in Spring It will be reconvened this Spring 2007 semester and hopefully Spring The first AEC portfolio presentation was Spring With mainland speakers, food, signage, room monitoring coordination, food arrangements,

7 Part VI: Budget Implications fundraising, and both ing and postal mailing to over 1000 people and firms, it turned out to be much more work than expected (especially during a term when both instructors were teaching an overload). Then with a first-time CAD Camp sponsored by AutoCAD Users Group International just a few weeks later, and that group s inviting the very same speakers, we decided to scale our event down. This year we will invite advisory committee members (who will evaluate student portfolios), field shadow course sponsors, selected employers, and graduates to the portfolio presentations without inviting guest speakers. We will see how it goes and hopefully establish a format that will benefit all and be easily repeatable. By Spring 2008 we should know what we re doing. Are there any budgetary impacts for carrying out your action plan? Although there are budgetary impacts involved in regular computer replacement and program expansion, there are no identified impacts in respect to carrying out the action plan per se. Do any of your action plan items require integration into the strategic plan? (If so, have you notified your division chair / Dean of this action?) No. None of the action plan items requires integration into the strategic plan.