Program Design

Goal

Design the program, not just the courses, and design it backward from what the field hires for. This is backward design at the program level: a close, ongoing industry advisory board reviews the curriculum, looks at students’ final portfolios, and hosts the internships, then says plainly what a graduate’s portfolio has to contain, what software students must know, and what workplace skills get them hired. Everything downstream is built backward from that target.

Audience

Two audiences at once. Students, who need to finish with a portfolio that actually gets them hired and a path they can realistically complete in two years. And the institution, which funds programs on enrollment, completion, and workforce outcomes. Good program design has to serve both, which is why it is an enrollment and equity problem as much as a curriculum one.

Process

From the advisory board’s target, the required skills are chunked and mapped across the whole program: parsed into existing courses, or turned into new courses and credentials where there is a gap. Every course is then backward-aligned to the portfolio, so students build one portfolio across the entire program rather than a pile of disconnected assignments. The redesigned AVC 100 starts that chain: because many students arrive undecided and self-selected, it opens with short orientation modules to the college and the programs, carried as institutional learning outcomes, and sets up each student’s portfolio account, so the portfolio the advisors expect begins in the first course and grows in every one after.

The same evidence habit runs the program’s structure. Before 2012 the discipline was split into several small programs, separate Animation, Multimedia, and Graphic Design degrees plus two web certificates, and the narrow, low-enrollment courses meant students often could not get the classes they needed and stalled short of graduating. Consolidating them into a broader Digital Media Arts degree, combining low-enrollment courses, and later adding online and mixed-modality sections meant students could finally complete, while the hybrid shift helped keep them enrolled through work and family demands. The stackable microcredentials come from the same logic. An existing certificate, designed at another college in the district and adopted here rather than built in-house, required nearly a degree’s worth of credits without ever granting a degree; the redesign reworks it into small, stackable blocks that add up to one.

The same alignment runs up to the district level. As her department’s representative in Maricopa’s two-year Guided Pathways initiative across all ten colleges, she helped align a course bank that had drifted: ten colleges each building their own way, degrees split across two to four non-adjacent campuses, and students who swirl between colleges needing courses that carry cleanly from one to the next. Aligning district-wide is what lets programs be offered coherently instead of duplicated thinly, and it is where Animation was restored as its own degree.

The read on the field is quantitative too. The programs are checked against Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data, and that is what is driving the current pivot from a standalone graphic-design track toward a UX Design course arriving in 2027: user-experience roles are growing, while graphic-design jobs increasingly expect a bachelor’s degree, which makes a two-year graphic-design credential harder to place. Designing the program means watching where the work is going, not only where it is.

Technology

• The every-three-years program review as the decision instrument, backed by Maricopa IRIS enrollment and completion data.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data, used to steer the program toward where the field is actually hiring.
• An industry advisory board that sets the target portfolio, the required software, and the workplace skills a graduate needs.
• District-wide Guided Pathways alignment of the course bank across all ten Maricopa colleges.
• One portfolio, begun in the redesigned AVC 100 and carried across every course, as the backward-design target everything else is built from.

Outcomes

The measures are the ones a program is actually accountable for, and the program review shows the redesign moving them. Graduation nearly doubled, from an average of about twelve Digital Media Arts degrees a year to twenty-one in 2019 to 2020, while enrollment stayed roughly flat, so the gain came from students finishing, not from more students arriving. The review attributes it to a redesigned advising model with proactive, one-on-one outreach before students drift, supported by the hybrid and online shift that helped keep them enrolled and the restructuring that let them actually get the courses they needed. Staffing followed the same evidence: a campus-wide comparison of students per full-time faculty across the occupational programs made the case for a second full-time line in a program that had exactly one, and it now runs on three full-time faculty and about five adjuncts. The same case-making helped secure the grant that now funds the design studio as paid professional work, four students at $18 an hour for nineteen hours each. Consolidating the program fixed the labs, too. Three siloed labs, one each for photography, animation, and graphic design, each with its own technician and each closing at five, became a single central lab staffed by three cross-trained assistants who also covered video and cinema, and it could finally stay open early, late, and on weekends. Industry input on the tools students must learn shaped the space, and the 2012 program review made the case.

The program’s quality shows in what its students win, as program awards rather than any one instructor’s. A student earned a Rocky Mountain Emmy for animation and visual effects. In the Artist of Promise Awards, the Maricopa district-wide competition that draws entries from all ten colleges, the program near-sweeps the Animation category most years, taking the majority of its awards against nine peer institutions. The Traveler has won multiple College Media Association Pinnacle awards, including College Literary Magazine, alongside recognition at the AIGA Design Week competition.

Status

Ongoing program work, as faculty now and as Program Director from 2011 to 2022, when the every-three-years program review was the instrument behind these decisions. The current front of it is two moves that came straight out of the latest reviews: the stackable microcredentials, and a new UX Design for Interactive Media course, written to follow the labor-market data toward where the field is actually hiring. Both have been approved by the college curriculum committee and are now in the district approval process.