City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME V
Lecture Series, which provides honoraria and publicity. The College and the Department also support the
Center for Habitat Restoration, which sponsors academic and research internships with agencies in the
Bay Area. The Department has 52 instructors, 20 full-time, eight of these hired within the past ten years,
and 32 part-time. A majority of the faculty started in the 1960s and 1970s and are either in the process of,
or can be anticipated to be, retiring in the next few years. The chair, new to the position in Fall 2004, and
the faculty who met with us were all relatively recent new full-timers and could be viewed as the “new
wave” of instructors who bring enthusiasm and a strong commitment to improving the Department.
Organizational means to identify and make public student learning outcomes. The Department seeks
feedback from CCSF Allied Health faculty and administrators on what students who are taking their
pre-requisite courses in Biological Sciences need to know when they move into Allied Health programs.
Biological Sciences instructors would like to have College support to give them more time to meet with
Allied Health instructors. The instructors we interviewed stated they mostly use resources outside the
College to help them identify learning outcomes students need to achieve. Allied Health students from
CCSF feed into the Nursing programs at San Francisco State University (SFSU), the University of San
Francisco (USF), and the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), and some students transfer to outof-state
programs. The Department would like College assistance to track the success of these and other
transfer students. Some of the more recently hired instructors in the Department still have professional
ties with the SFSU and UC systems and are able to get feedback on what students need to learn. They
also look at comparable courses elsewhere and at recommendations from professional association guidelines
to help identify desired learning outcomes for their courses. Instructors have also attended state
Intersegmental Major Preparation and Articulated Curriculum (IMPAC) meetings and are participating
in developing uniform statewide curriculum standards for Biology. Instructors feel they need more training
in understanding the articulation process.
The Nutrition instructor has recently developed new course outlines and is impressed with the help
for developing outlines available from the College Curriculum Committee’s website. The Department
is currently working on getting all Department outlines updated to the current format. The Department
finds the technical review that the Office of Instruction provides for reviewing outlines before they are
submitted to the Curriculum Committee helpful and the chair reports it has saved them from a lot of
unnecessary errors and additional preparation. There is some frustration with the frequency with which
the outline formatting guidelines change, but overall it is not seen as a big problem.
The Department does not currently have a professionally produced brochure but would like to develop
one for attracting students to programs and one for attracting new faculty. The Chair would like more
help from the College for developing professionally appealing materials. She has asked the Graphic
Communications Department, which designs and produces brochures for many departments and
programs at CCSF, for help, but that Department is often overloaded with requests. Instructors in the
Department often resort to using their own resources and designing their own materials to advertise classes
and wish the College had a budget to provide for such. The Office of Public Information has provided
some help in advertising classes but the Department Chair would like more support from the College for
advertising new or low-enrolled classes. The Department has a website that includes links to the Catalog
descriptions for all the Department offerings, the seminar program co-sponsored by the Department,
the Center for Habitat Restoration, 1 job opportunities, faculty links, and scholarships. As of Spring 2005,
nine instructors had their own web pages with course syllabi. The webmaster received some release time
to develop the Department website but now maintains it voluntarily. The chair feels that each department
should have a webmaster but that it is difficult to maintain a website without some way to compensate
a webmaster.
1 Founded in 1997, the Center for Habitat Restoration (CHR) provides opportunities for students and volunteers to participate
in local habitat restoration. Through City College of San Francisco (CCSF) and the Department of Biology, CHR sponsors
academic and research internships with several agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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