To enhance the minority participation in undergraduate engineering, strategic partnerships with community colleges have been identified as an essential component in the U.S. STEM Education system with a total of 1,738 2-year institutions: 967 public, 100 non-profit and 671 private.1 In 2012, there were over 20 million students enrolled in an academic institution across the United States with over 6 million being educated at a two-year public institution.2 These public twoyear institutions also have a large population of underrepresented minorities with approximately 34% of the total number of African Americans enrolled in an academic institution and 46% of the total number of Hispanics students enrolled in academic institutions.3 In addition to expanding underrepresented minority participation through institutional partnerships with twoyear public institutions, 33% of the total female population that was enrolled at an academic institution was enrolled in a two-year public institution. The state of Texas is positioned to be a key contributor to the overall increase in the both the number of STEM graduates and the increased number of underrepresented minorities graduating with a STEM degree, for four reasons: 1) Texas is ranked second in the nation as having the largest number of public community colleges 1 , 2) Texas will experience the largest headcount growth of high school graduates over the next ten years with over 87,000 additional graduates by 2025 4 , 3) As of 2010, Texas is one of five majority-minority states and 4) In fall 2014, Texas was noted as having the second highest estimated enrollment across the Nation with 1,442,610 students, second to California whose estimated fall 2014 enrollment was 2,497,958. 5In response to this anticipated growth and the increased demand for engineers, a co-enrollment Engineering Academy was successfully launched in fall 2013, through a strategic partnership between Texas A&M University Dwight Look College of Engineering and Blinn College-Bryan. The inaugural class consisted of 113 prospective engineering students. By 2014, after a full year of participation in the program, 21% of the participants successfully matriculated into their major of choice within the Look College. Forty-four percent remained in the program as co-enrolled students, taking courses at both institutions. Unfortunately, 35% of the participants were not retained in the program due to grades (19%), voluntarily opting out of the program (13%), or choosing to not return as a continuing student (3%).
The Bologna Declaration is leading to a change of paradigm in the context of higher education in many countries of the European Community; it has a significant impact at the level of curriculum and learning models. Therefore, any reflection and decision work on the processes of teaching/learning imposes the curricular reformulation of higher courses in an innovating way, supported by new references and assumptions. In the context of a project financed by European Community program Interreg III A, we have created a workgroup to o propose the reformulation of several courses that belong to Business Computing, from ESTiG-Portugal and from ESPZ-Spain, in an attempt to create harmony between both study plans, considering the socioeconomic specific context of the border region between Bragança (Portugal) and Zamora (Spain). This article intends to describe a case-study related to the work done to achieve a curriculum for Business Computing; it describes the changes due to the recent recommendations of Bologna and governmental reflections of Portugal and Spain.
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