Section III: Programs

(Educational Programs Standards for All Educational Programs)

3.4.6.  The institution employs sound and acceptable practices for determining the amount and level of credit awarded for courses, regardless of format or mode of delivery.

JUDGMENT OF COMPLIANCE

Compliance.

NARRATIVE/JUSTIFICATION FOR JUDGMENT OF COMPLIANCE

Northeast Alabama Community College demonstrates compliance in the employment of sound and acceptable practices for determining course credit. The college complies with State Board Policy 717.01, which requires system colleges to utilize The Alabama College System Course Directory, accessible online through the Alabama College System Web site. Courses offered at NACC are from this directory, with standardized content, course descriptions, and numbering. 

State Board Policy 705.01 addresses the conversion of contact hours to credit hour equivalencies. The policy requires system two-year colleges to operate on a semester system, defined as a fall semester, spring semester, and a summer term. The semester hour of credit, or credit hour, is “based upon the average number of hours of instruction taught weekly.” The hour of instruction is defined as not less than 50 minutes of instructor/student contact. The ratio of weekly contact  hours to credit hours varies with the type of instruction employed. Six general categories of instruction are defined: Theory, Experimental Laboratory, Manipulative Laboratory, Skills Laboratory/Clinical Practice, Preceptorship, and Internship. The ratio of credit to weekly contact hours is defined for each. 

The policy specifies that “A variety of class meeting schedules that fall within this structure may be present within the institution.”  For example, a three-credit-hour theory class has the same contact time whether the course is taught in three 50-minute periods on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday or on two 75-minute periods on Tuesday and Thursday. Whether day or evening, the contact time is the same.

Additionally, the Alabama College System ensures that all transfer courses adhere to the standards established by the Alabama Articulation and General Studies Committee (AGSC),

under whose guidance faculty committees, with representation from public institutions of higher education throughout the state, formulated a General Studies Curriculum for the first two years of study. All transfer courses must adhere to the AGSC Course Requirements and Guidelines:

1.     Courses must be collegiate-credit courses at the freshman or sophomore level (i.e., 100 or 200 level).

2.   Courses must be broad in scope, present major intellectual or aesthetic ideas, and not be specialized or vocational in purpose.

3.      Courses must present the essential characteristics and basic processes of inquiry and analysis in the discipline.

4.   Courses must encourage the development of critical thinking skills and require students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge.

5.    Courses must consider the subject in its relation to other disciplines and its application to    human concerns.

Particular attention is given to ensuring that courses delivered through distance formats are equivalent to the corresponding courses offered in the classroom. The description of how this equivalence is verified is found in NACC’s application to the Commission on Colleges for substantive change in regard to online coursework, the only distance format employed, presented in Table 1:

Table 1

The example documentation provided in the response statement in support of the equivalence statement of Table 1 consists of syllabi for ENG 101 and ENG 101-Internet, and for MTH 112.  ENG 101-Internet differs from the classroom ENG 101 in only three lines: under Methods of Instruction, “Use of overhead projector for study of sample writing and students’ writings” and “Lecture and discussion on material presented in the text” are omitted on the Internet syllabus, and the reference to the Learning Resources Center mentions only individual use rather than use as a class. The MTH 112 syllabus serves both the classroom and distance deliveries without modification.

Northeast’s application for substantive change in the area of distance learning was approved by the Commission in October 2003.

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