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Articulation |
Table of Contents
- History
- Current Situation
- How to Use This Guide
- Policy, Procedure and Record-Keeping
- Assessing Transfer and Articulation Requests
- Formal Articulation Versus Case-by-Case Assessment
- Functionality of the TCES
- Technology and Transfer Credit
- Training Needs within Institutions
- Effective Date Ranges
- Consistency of Process
- Volume of Articulation Requests
- Timeliness
- Cost of Articulating
- Some Principles to Live By
- Appendix 1
- Appendix 2
- Acknowledgement
In this Section
14. Cost of Articulating
The Articulation Costing Report (Jarvis 2004) estimated the annual province-wide cost of the articulation system to be $4million to $7.5million. Each course submitted by a sending institution to an average of 6.7 receiving institutions costs each receiving institution $122 per year to maintain. A major component of this cost was faculty attendance at annual articulation meetings, held for almost every discipline. An institution's change from sender to receiver should not change the amount of faculty attendance at articulation meetings or, therefore, the associated average costs of articulating.
The same report estimated that a receiving institution expends annually between 30 and 50 hours of faculty time per academic department in course articulation. This may represent the best approximation of the true annual impact of changing from sending to both sending and receiving.
14.1 Staffing Levels
Formal articulation via TCES itself gives rise to very few staffing issues, except if large sending institutions make wholesale changes to course numbers, as occurred several years ago when Langara College and Kwantlen Polytechnic University each adopted a new SIS at about the same time, necessitating a new course numbering systems for each institution. Later, in 2004, when DOUG adopted 4 digit course numbers to replace their 3 digit numbers, prior consultation with BCCAT led to a faster and smoother transition, greatly reducing the work of implementing some 10,000 TCES changes.
| The TCES-derived load on faculty assessors tends to be broadly spread. Volumes are higher between September and May and lower from June to August. TCES work for administrative staff is less demanding than for student-specific evaluations. The course outline is usually online and in an acceptable format. The external institution is well known and usually has many other articulated courses. The external institution has an ICP, who is available in the same time zone (or the next one) by telephone or email. | Case-by-case transfer evaluations cluster in the spring and summer months and are almost always time-sensitive. |
Institutions are much more heavily impacted by case-by-case transfer evaluations. They cluster in the spring and summer months and around the start of each new academic year and they are almost always time-sensitive because many enrollment systems prioritize access by seniority of credit earned and utilize extensive course prerequisite structures. It becomes increasingly difficult for an institution to make timely decisions once a backlog has developed: dissatisfied applicants absorb such amounts of staff and faculty time that service levels can spiral downwards. At UVIC and at SFU only 1 to 1.5 positions handle TCES requests at the administrative end (more are involved at the assessment end) and these are rarely overwhelmed unless they are assigned to other duties. At the same time, multiple admission staff collect and forward student-specific (case-by-case) transfer evaluation requests at peak times.
Formal articulation and case-by-case evaluations are of critical importance to students, yet too often they receive insufficient funding, perhaps because they are poorly understood. These functions require, but rarely receive, adequate resources. Institutions that attempt to expand their services without providing sufficient resources will not be able to deliver or sustain high quality student service.
BEST PRACTICES - RECEIVING INSTITUTION
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