ASSISTance: Summer 2019 (July/August/September)

Summer 2019 (July/August/September)

General Updates

• New Department Agreements on ASSIST – In an exciting advancement, CSU and UC Articulation Officers gained the ability in mid-September to begin publishing a subset of course-to-course articulation agreements, by department or prefix (no major agreements quite yet). As such, users may begin to see an increase in the number of recent course-to-course agreements (2017-2018, 2018-2019, 2019-2020) between community colleges and four-year universities as progress is made. 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. We anticipate that a limited number of major agreements will begin to be published before the end of October. To date, more than 266,000 department and prefix 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 legacy ASSIST agreements should be accounted for by the end of October.
   
• Viewing Individual Agreement versus All Agreement – Users have reported the system returning “an incorrect agreement” when clicking to view a specific *Legacy ASSIST* department or major agreement (for example, a user clicked the “Chemistry, B.S.” major agreement, but sees “Administration, B.A.” instead). In some cases, when an individual department or major is not yet available as a single agreement, the agreement including all departments or all majors will be shown instead (often one that begins with an “A” due to the alphabetical order of the all departments and all majors agreements). You should still be able to locate the individual department or major you are seeking within that document. In those specific cases, you should see individual view agreements become available again before the end of October.
   
• 2019-2020 UC-Transferable Course Lists on ASSIST – While UCOP continues reviewing community college curriculum during October, existing UC-Transferable and UC Transfer Admission Eligibility approved courses for the 2019-2020 Academic Year have now been published to www.assist.org. If additional courses are approved during the October review, the lists will be published again for applicable institutions.
   
• Compton Community College – Compton has regained accreditation independent of El Camino College and the 2019-20 course transferability lists are now available on www.assist.org. Availability of the 2019-2020 Compton articulation agreements will be influenced by the development work needed to publish articulation agreements for all institutions for the most recent academic years.
   
• Data Integrity Review Process - With the start of the 2019-2020 academic year on many campuses, we are beginning to see an increase in questions related to CCC courses that have been suppressed from transferability lists displayed on the new ASSIST public site. We are currently working on putting together documentation for 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 will also be 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.
   
• Summertime User Support – In addition to general user support tasks, during the summer months the ASSIST team focused heavily on supporting the activities that take place as part of the UC Office of the President UC-Transferable Course Review Cycle as well as new articulation officer training. In order to provide expedited support with the roll out of the new system, we continued to provide a variety of ASSIST users with multiple avenues of support - telephone, general email (help@assist.org), and direct contact with an ASSIST Articulation Specialist.
   
• Collaboration with the Development Vendor – Daily meetings, status updates, and ongoing engagement with the Fairway development team keep the new system progressing each day.  This includes the ongoing work necessary to allow CSU and UC articulation officers to complete and publish agreements for the most recent academic years.
   
• Software Development Vendor Announcement - Speaking of the ASSIST software vendor, Fairway Technologies, Inc. has joined the Product & Platform Engineering Services of Accenture essentially offering  them a corporate structure within Accenture. Everything we love about Fairway will be amplified with the depth and breadth of Accenture’s full stack engineering capability, and the innovative solutions that help their customers succeed. Accenture brings access to domains beyond technology, including strategy, operations, digital and consulting. They are combining the deep Fairway engineering expertise we trust with Accenture’s global capabilities, allowing them to speed delivery, increase reliability, broaden our services and, ultimately, provide more value to ASSIST.
   
• 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 public 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. We 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. The process of updating any old information will take place over time and appropriate messaging will be displayed on the tool website. We appreciate your patience while the work is completed to make this tool available.
   
• Public Site Feedback – If you have not completed the new ASSIST Public Website Survey (link also available on the website Support page), we strongly encourage it. We regularly review feedback, provide summaries and statistics to system leadership, and refer to this data when making decisions.
   
• Upcoming Office Closures – in the month of November, ASSIST staff will be out of the office in observance of Veteran’s Day (11th) and Thanksgiving (28th and 29th).

For Articulation Officers and Data Managing ASSIST Users

• Agreement Publication - We will continue to provide updates to all articulation officers regarding the status of articulation agreement publishing through our ASSIST listservs. Please pay careful attention to those communications. Thank you! 
   
• UC/CSU AO calls – This summer we began ASSIST hosted calls for UC and CSU AOs. Given the current intensive focus on articulation related development work, these calls provide a dedicated forum for the CSU and UC AOs to receive updates directly from ASSIST, review specific issues, and discuss future development.
   
• Welcome new CCC AOs! - If you are a new AO and have not already done so, please contact us to get a user account established and to coordinate training and support.
   
• 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 send 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.