2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper outlines the progress of a five-year National Science Foundation Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project, entitled “Engineering Pathways for Access, Community, and Transfer (EPACT).” The project utilizes a consortium model, uniting faculty from three community colleges and a large western land-grant university in the same state. This project, in its second year, has successfully implemented a community of practice among community college and university teaching faculty, who are collectively developing second-year engineering courses for community college students. These courses will be delivered using a shared learning management system, adhere to ABET accreditation standards, and mirror the rigor of in-person university engineering courses, while fostering a sense of community, engineering identity, and belonging for transfer students.
In the first year, the project focused on creating cohesion within the EPACT team by holding a two-day symposium to establish clear roles and responsibilities, and to align expectations. Participants in the symposium consisted of members of the community of practice, the principal and co-principal investigators, a change expert, two project mentors, and the project external evaluator. The symposium enabled the faculty to share knowledge, skills, and assets, ensuring that everyone understood their contributions to the project’s goals.
One major aspect of the project is to design and deliver effectively three required middle-year engineering courses at the community colleges, preventing the need for early transfer to the university, and helping students stay on track for graduation. By providing these courses locally, students will be able to reduce the time and costs associated with transferring to the university, ultimately improving their success rates measured by transfer and graduation with an engineering degree.
Additionally, the project emphasizes the importance of building community among both students and EPACT faculty. Community college engineering faculty often work in departments with multiple disciplines, limiting opportunities for collaboration. This project creates dedicated spaces for faculty to share curriculum, pedagogy, and a vision for student success, while also ensuring alignment with university-level engineering programs. In year two, the focus will be on developing the learning platform for these courses, ensuring consistency across institutions, and meeting the unique needs of community college students, while celebrating the diversity of our students, their backgrounds, and experiences, creating an inclusive learning environment, and fostering a sense of belonging, and engineering identity among this population of engineering transfer students. As part of the project, a mixed methods engineering education study will be performed, both on the EPACT CoP faculty and community college students. The research study will utilize two well-tested survey instruments, well tested rubrics, and focus group interviews.
The project hopes to showcase organizationally, how community colleges and universities within a system of higher education can collaborate and share courses effectively through the lens of student success in transfer programs. We also will emphasize the importance of faculty collaboration across institutions with a common goal, and show how that collaboration can be effective in helping engineering transfer students to complete their degrees in a timely manner and enter the workplace or graduate school.