Projects
Projects
With its commitment to facilitate more comprehensive understanding of the ever-changing BC post-secondary environment, BCCAT conducts and coordinates a wide variety of research and technology projects to inform and support institutional planning, procedures, and policies, and to enhance educational opportunities and experiences for BC post-secondary students. The projects listed below comprise the work approved by Council in the BCCAT workplan that are currently underway.
The list of Completed Projects contains information on earlier workplan projects. For published research, search Publications.
Transfer Mechanisms & Innovation
This study aims to assess the timing of syllabi distribution and its influence on student engagement and retention at BC Post-Secondary Institutions.
As part of the Council work plan, this project will conduct a review of the BC Transfer System Membership policy, which was last updated in 2018. This work is expected to be complete in 2024.
The project will use a review of literature and of institutional websites, as well as interviews with Indigenous post-secondary organizations to explore how Indigenous approaches to research could inform BCCAT’s approach to research.
This study aims at assessing the volume and flows of international students in transfer pathways from programs designed for these students, including at selected private PSIs.
This project examines how both sending and receiving institutions manage Letters of Permission (LOPs), and the transferred credit associated with them.
This project will conduct an environmental scan on the processes and criteria used by BCTS members to determine whether to grant transfer credit to courses or programs from external institutions.
Student Performance & Mobility
The project is aimed to identify successful pathways from upgrading to undergraduate programs at BC open access institutions.
The Student Transitions Project links student data from the B.C. Ministry of Education with public post-secondary student data. The data allows investigation of student transitions, mobility, and outcomes from the Kindergarten-Grade 12 (K-12) education system to the public post-secondary system, while protecting individual privacy. The Student Transitions Project is governed by a steering committee with representation from British Columbia’s public universities, colleges and institutes; the Ministries of Education and Advanced Education, and BCCAT. Find out more about the Student Transitions Project.
The term “summer melt” denotes students who, having received an offer of admission, do not enrol anywhere in their first fall semester following high school graduation. The project is aimed at reviewing existing literature and identifying aspects of the phenomenon that may impact its expression in BC.
The goal of this project is to analyze current trends in the performance of transfer students at BC public universities as compared to direct-entry students enrolled at any time in the period 2018/19 – 2022/23.
This pilot project is aimed at assessing quantitative institutional data on transfer student and transfer credit volume from several Alberta and BC institutions to several BC and Alberta institutions respectively.
Data & Decision-Making
BCCAT has been working with BC Transfer System members and government on capturing transfer credit granted at most BC public post-secondary institutions. Currently, the work focuses on improving data consistency and reliability, and sharing the data with post-secondary institutions and system-level groups in order to better understand credit mobility in the province and beyond.
This study aims at creating a repository of institutional surveys in order to summarize key findings, and to provide a resource for institutions designing surveys in the future.
This project explores how the affordability of post-secondary education is assessed and defined in different sectors and institutions.
This project is aimed at exploring PSIS and other Statistics Canada datasets to assess their usefulness in tracking inter-provincial mobility of BC students.