Pathways Project
Overview
The Pathways project aims to address challenges faced by our transfer students and BC’s post-secondary institutions when mapping bridging and laddering learning opportunities. The project utilizes the existing Transfer Credit System (TCS), leveraging the already familiar system-wide workflow, data tables and data management tools, to aggregate course-level program requirements and facilitate the creation and maintenance of program pathways.
The TCS Program Pathways tool includes the following:
- Programs module: allows PSIs to build a program profile, defining the graduation requirements at the course level. This module can operate stand alone and allows for program progression checks, assisting staff and students in program and course planning.
- Pathways module: this workflow enables pathway focused articulation work between PSI partners and their programs. The tool highlights potential transfer credit gaps and pathway strengthening opportunities as partner PSIs build pathways agreements with one another.
- Allows for transfer system members to access centralized repositories of programs and pathway agreements.
Proof of Concept
Two groups of stakeholders are involved in the TCS Program Pathways Proof of Concept (POC):
The Northern Consortium stakeholder group includes the College of Coast Mountain, College of New Caledonia, Northern Lights College and the University of Northern British Columbia. These four institutions are geographically located in the BC North and represent a transfer ecosystem wherein a natural volume of student mobility activity occurs. The POC focuses on programs that are aligned with high opportunity occupations identified in the BC Labour Market Outlook 2021 and these programs provide a good sampling data of potential program laddering opportunities which helped us design, develop and test the concepts in the TCS Program Pathways application.
The Engineering stakeholder group includes representatives from Douglas College, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia-Vancouver, University of Victoria and Vancouver Island University. Engineering programs in BC have mature program-to-program transfer pathways built upon the agreements established through the ‘Engineering First-Year Common Core’. The Engineering experience allows the POC to gain insights into the existing engineering pathway process and aims to provide technology-supported solutions that help facilitate the pathway work that is already underway within this discipline.
What's Next
The proof of concept provides a limited scope foundation that can be extended to accommodate other program structures and types of pathway opportunities. Future development includes working with other program areas, other partner post-secondary institutions, and identifying pathway priorities that benefit learners and post-secondary institutions.