Fast Path Initiative

The initial idea for Fast Path grew out of a recognition that students at our South Extension Site were not completing degrees due to both a lack of consistent course offerings and scheduling challenges. As we began to explore the feasibility of developing a cohort-based guided pathway, the vision of the project expanded to include cohorts on our main campus as well.

As Project Lead, I worked closely with my colleagues and stakeholders from advising, the registrar’s office, IT, marketing, finance, institutional research, Faculty Association leadership, as well as staff from our Teaching and Learning Center and Online Leadership Committee. These efforts led to several additional innovations at the college. Indeed, our approach was to look at this pilot as an opportunity to try out a range of new ideas and approaches.

For example, our marketing team used Fast Path as an opportunity to test and implement geofencing for the first time as part of its broader strategy of updating the college’s social media outreach efforts. Similarly, our student services team used Fast Path to test the capabilities of KCC’s Student Planning Module, including curriculum mapping and automated registration.

Outcomes

Fast Path began enrolling students for Fall 2018 with the goal of running a cohort of 20 students each at our South Extension and Riverfront campuses. Since then, the program has successfully helped over 150 students earn an AA, and is currently registering students for Cohort 7.

Another significant impact of this project was that faculty and administrators came to agreement about the need to simplify our transfer-level curriculum around what we now call our General Education Core. Guided by our motto, “Start Here, Finish Anywhere!” for many years KCC expanded its curricular offerings in an attempt to provide students an increasingly diverse range of courses they could use to transfer into nearly every conceivable program. But this attempt to maximize the options available to students resulted in a confusing array of courses, as well as competition among faculty seeking to attract a shrinking student population into increasingly specialized “elective” courses.

Less is More

As a guided pathway program, Fast Path required faculty to came to consensus about their core curriculum–those courses we believed to be most critical to the intellectual, ethical, and cultural development of our students. Thus, rather than 17 different courses that could potentially satisfy our Humanities General Education requirement, we reduced that number to three: Art Appreciation, Introduction to Philosophy, and Introduction to Humanities. Similarly, rather than 12 different options for satisfying our Social Sciences requirement, we have reduced the number to three: Sociology, Introduction to Psychology, and American Government.

While these efforts were initially focused on creating a streamlined curriculum for Fast Path, we began applying this same framework to the broader schedule.

Another impact of the Fast Path initiative was that faculty embraced blended learning/hybrid courses. To that end, we ramped up our pedagogical training and support efforts around hybrid courses, including creating a formal training option for faculty (the Hybrid Course Development Group), as well as peer-to-peer mentoring and support with the Humanities and Social Sciences division. We also expanded the number of hybrid courses offered within our traditional course schedule for Fall 2018, including tripling the number of hybrid courses we offer at night.