ASSISTance: October 2019

Read on for ASSIST updates from the month of October.

General Updates

• Upcoming Office Closures – in the month of November, ASSIST staff will be out of the office in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday (28th and 29th).
   
• New Agreements on ASSIST – We are pleased to share that CSU and UC Articulation Officers have now gained the ability to publish any type of articulation agreement. As such, users may begin to see an increase in the number of recent course-to-course, major, and general education agreements (2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2019-2020) between community colleges and four-year universities. Please note that the type, number, and academic years for which agreements are published will vary from institution to institution. Some institutions are waiting for articulation related issues to be fixed before they can publish certain agreements as well. To date, more than 553,000 department, prefix, major and general education agreements have been published.
   
• Legacy ASSIST Agreements on ASSIST – Over the summer, the Fairway team worked to address a subset of legacy ASSIST agreements that were still awaiting display on the public site. All articulation agreements are now present. A very small subset of pre-2001 transferability lists are all that remains to be updated and that work will be completed by the end of November.
   
• 19-20 UC-Transferable Course Lists on ASSIST – All CCC 2019-2020 UC-Transferable Course Lists have been published to www.assist.org, including any decisions on appeal.  As always, CCC AOs are highly encouraged to carefully review their lists and to contact the UCOP Transfer Team with any questions.
   
•  Articulation Analysis Workgroup – In October, ASSIST and Fairway Technologies, LLC partnered with 12 CSU and UC Articulation Officers to kick off a multi-month collaboration to analyze and gather requirements for an articulation area redesign. 
   
• Data Integrity Review Process – We continue to receive questions related to CCC courses that have been suppressed from transferability lists displayed on the new ASSIST public site. In October, we provided documentation to each CCC campus that identifies suppressed courses, as well as any other courses with remaining course data work to be completed. While CSU and UC campuses do not have courses on the transferability lists, documentation was also provided to each four-year institution regarding any course data work still remaining for their campuses. As a reminder, less than 1% of the total courses in ASSIST were suppressed from the transferability lists. They were suppressed because they were identified during the data integrity review process as needing some type of correction. As corrections are completed, the courses are made available again on the transferability lists.
   
• Coming soon! New Announcements Feature on ASSIST – We are currently working with a Fairway User Experience Expert to design a tool for us to communicate important information and announcements on the homepage of the ASSIST website. We are additionally gathering stakeholder feedback regarding initial designs. Stay tuned for more information over the next few weeks.
   
• Coming Soon! Interim Explore Majors feature – We are happy to announce a partnership with Los Medanos College in order to provide access to the basic component of the Legacy ASSIST Explore Majors website - a search tool that will allow users to select an area, a discipline and view associated majors along with which CSU and/or UC that offers that major. A related institution-specific link to the campus in question will also be displayed. CSU and UC Articulation Officers have begun providing updated major information. The process of updating any old information will take place over time and appropriate messaging will be displayed on the tool website. We still anticipate that the tool will become available to the public before the end of November. Once available, a link will be placed on the new ASSIST public website and a communication will be sent out. We appreciate your patience while the work is completed to make this tool available.
   

For Articulation Officers and Data Managing ASSIST Users

• Agreement Publication Reports Available – In October, we began providing articulation officers with a daily list of published articulation agreements through the CIAC shared drive. 
   
• Data Integrity Documents – In October, ASSIST provided each articulation officer documents containing institution-specific curriculum impacted by the data integrity review process. No additional action is required of articulation officers other than to share the information with campus staff as appropriate.
   
• Regional Meetings – In an effort to further increase your access to ASSIST information and support, please contact us if you would like a member of the ASSIST team to attend your CIAC regional meeting. Attendance may be by telephone or in-person depending on location.
   
• Curriculum Corrections – Please continue sending any back-dated curriculum corrections (for example, a title changed in Fall 2002 and it never got changed) to your assigned Articulation Specialist. Back-dated curriculum corrections are sophisticated and may require additional ASSIST admin actions.