As a faculty member, you are charged with constructing effective curricula which meet the needs of students and also the requirements of statutes, regulations, and guidelines of reviewing bodies. The task involves melding your professional skills within the framework of those requirements.

A key aspect of producing effective and appropriate course outlines is training, both of curriculum committee members and of the faculty in general. Begin with a subcommittee of dedicated curriculum committee members. Use the resources available both on and off campus. Your college has a wealth of knowledge in its articulation officer, transfer center director, chief instructional officer, curriculum chair, academic senate president, and matriculation coordinator. Use their expertise in training those who write and review course outlines. A number of excellent resources are just a phone call (or e-mail!) away. The appendix gives the names and addresses of those responsible for curriculum review and articulation in the Academic Senate, Chancellor's Office, California State University and University of California. The members of the Academic Senate Curriculum Committee are particularly interested in providing workshops to your campus faculty.

Use this core group of trained on-campus faculty to work with other faculty. When the faculty in a given discipline is revising its curriculum, have one of these trainers go out to their meetings and work with them directly. In the vast majority of cases, the primary hurdle is the writing of the course outline of record, not major revisions to the course itself. As taught in the classroom—but all to often not reflected in the outline—most of our courses do, indeed, meet the requirements cataloged in this paper.

Develop a college curriculum handbook which includes the information on standards and process that faculty must have to design, review, and approve courses, the step-by-step procedures for getting a course outline reviewed and approved, and key contact people to assist with the process. Most colleges use a check-off list to assure that everything is in place. While such check-off lists are not part of the course outline, they do assist those involved in the process in making sure that all steps have been followed. A word of caution is appropriate here. Checking off a box that a required component, such as critical thinking, has been met is not sufficient. The course outline itself must demonstrate that all required components, such as critical thinking, are an integral part of the course. Often the college curriculum handbook will provide examples of various types of course outlines: general education, non-credit, non-degree-applicable, vocational certificate, etc. Annotations on these samples stating the purpose of each of the components are also useful.

The effort of revising and upgrading our course outlines of records should continue to be a priority for those of us in the classroom. It is through our unique approaches to curriculum that community colleges continue to contribute to and enhance higher education in California and the nation. Our curriculum, as expressed in our course outlines, assures those in business and industry that our students are prepared for their careers and assures our university colleagues that our students are ready for upper division work. The course outline of record is our work product, based on years of collaborative effort, that testifies to the academic integrity of our classes, programs, institution, and system.