Meeting & Agendas

The meeting was called to order at 11:58 AM by Paul Dubiel. Rudy Garza mentioned to the committee membership that two faculty members, Karla Eaton and Justin Maxwell will be retiring. Karla is retiring on December 15, 2013 and Justin Maxwell will retire on January 31, 2014. Heather Wilson, who was hired earlier in the Fall Semester as an Adjunct Faculty Member will be taking Karla's position on an Emergency Basis. The Department is currently waiting to hear from HR as to when the program will be able to hire someone for Justin's position.

Rudy Garza informed the committee that the program was in the process of getting ready for final examinations. At this point in the semester, the 2nd year students are all doing well and progressing normally. The first year students are also working hard to prepare for the final examinations. The Program is preparing for their entry into the clinical education part of the program this Spring. We will not know the exact numbers of students that will begin the clinical part of the program in the Spring until after Finals.

Agenda Item #3: Program Continuing Accreditation Process The program is in the process of preparing for a new accreditation cycle. The last time the program went through re-accreditation was in 2006 when the program was awarded the maximum accreditation period of 8 years. At the present time, the program is working on the Self Study Document which is due on March 1, 2014. It should be noted that unlike in the past where the program had to submit a tremendous amount of documents and paper work, the process today is going to be 100% on line. This will be accomplished by the program logging in to an ""Accreditation Portal"" at the Joint Review Committee's Web site and responding to questions on the Self Study Template. Additionally, any documentation that the program will need to submit will now be required to be scanned and uploaded to their site. So far, most of the narrative for the Self Study has been completed and now the most labor intensive part of the program will begin (uploading documentation).

There are many items that will need to be addressed in the preparation for the accreditation site visit and the fact that today we have two campuses will essentially double the amount of work that needs to be completed. We will be working on the following items: Curriculum preparation: Since our last accreditation visit, the program has gone through significant changes that include the conversion of the program curriculum/courses from traditional instructional delivery methods (Lecture/lab) twice a week to the hybrid-classroom format. The majority of the program courses are now done via the hybrid classroom format where all the lectures/instruction are available to the students on-line 24/7 and there is one required class session per course per week. The class session is designed to answer any questions that students may have or to address the main topics of the lecture. To date, it appears that there has been a very slight improvement in the program retention for the past couple of years since we instituted the hybrid classroom format. It is not certain if this improvement is reliable as of yet because we really need to see how the students will perform after we have had at least 3 – 4 cycles. It really will also be influenced by the student preparation before they enter the program. The types of things that need to be consistent is the delivery of the instruction at both campuses. The program does have different faculty members at both campuses and in some cases, the same faculty member can teach at both campuses. What is important is not who teaches the courses but to ensure that each faculty member teach to the same objectives and this appears to be working well, based on the results we are seeing.

At the present time, the program has 26 clinical sites that are used on a regular basis by the program. We have also requested an application for recognition of a new Austin Radiological Association site (Westlake office) that we can hopefully begin to use in the Spring Semester. We will only be placing first year students at this new site. To prepare for the on site evaluation that the JRCERT will conduct, each of the clinical sites will be informed as to when the visit will take place as soon as the program knows. There are a couple of things/procedures that are part of the on site accreditation visit. The Clinical Instructor at each of the sites will need to be interviewed by the site visit team. What we are planning to do is to invite all the clinical instructors from each of the sites to a luncheon meeting during the time that the site visit team is here in Austin. We will be contacting each of the clinical instructors and directors of the departments regarding this important requirement. We should have plenty of time to schedule this since it is not until September 2014.

One of the components of the onsite visit is that the Joint Review committee will schedule a number of clinical site visits during their time here in Austin. The Program will not know which sites will be visited until we are informed about who will be coming and in that letter, they JRC will identify the sites that will be visited. During the visit, the site visitors will want to speak with the clinical instructors, any students that may be on site, perhaps the Department Director if available, and also if there are graduates from the program, they will want to chat with them. Typically, the site visitors will spend anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes at their assigned clinical site that they will visit.

Because the program now uses two different campuses and we have lab and faculty offices at two campuses, it is anticipated that the site visitors will want to see both campuses. We anticipate that the site visit team will most likely consist of at least three members so that at least one of them can visit with the faculty at Round Rock and review the program information and lab facilities there.

The program has developed an on-line survey that the students can access to conduct an evaluation of the clinical site they were assigned to. These evaluations will be done at the end of a student's rotations. The Program will provide this feed back to the Clinical Officials so that they can be informed regarding the student's reviews of the clinical site.

A very important part of Program accreditation is the on-going assessment process. As this committee is aware, the program reviews many different things as part of making sure that things are working well and so that the program is consistently making any necessary revisions to improve the program. At this date, the program faculty are still working on the assessment plan for 2013. While there is a significant amount of data available, there are two crucial parts that are still pending. Since graduation for the class of 2013 in August, the faculty are still collecting data about employment stats. There is a new policy by the JRC regarding employment status of graduates. The JRCERT benchmark for employment of graduates, is that at least 75% of the graduates should be employed within 6 months of graduation. Because employment rates have been rather slow across the country, as of January 1, 2014, the time to be able to collect this employment data has been extended to 1 year rather than just six months. Because of this new factor, we will now need to wait until August to determine this data unless we know that all the grads have jobs. The ARRT credentialing examinations usually are completed by most graduates relatively soon after graduation, however, there are always some graduates that either delay writing the test or in some cases, do not take it at all. So far this year, we have 100% pass rate to date and we will have around 3 individuals that need to be tested. So far, 28 out of 30 graduates have tested. The ones that have tested all passed and two graduates have applied to test but have not yet taken the examination.

At the last meeting of this committee, (July 2012), a revised admission process was discussed. At that time, we were exploring adding a pre-entrance examination as well as having the potential students participate in a shadowing session at local clinical sites. It should be noted that the committee approved the addition of the HOBET (Health Occupations Basic Entrance Test). The purpose for the revised admissions requirement is to attempt to ensure that the incoming students are well prepared and ready to participate in the program. It is not unusual for students to come into the program with a high GPA. However when they are involved with multiple radiology classes such as what is part of the first semester, some of the students experience difficulty and sometimes do not succeed. The purpose of the test is to identify those areas where a student may be deficient and to be proactive and request that the student participate in remediation work. Shortly after that meeting in July 2012, the Health Sciences at ACC had a meeting where we had an official from our Students Services Department that indicated that because of new requirements, we could not mandate remediation if a student has already been assessed by the college or if they are exempt from the College Assessment Examination. At that point, the program set aside the plans for instituting the HOBET test. The other component that we were going to add to the admissions process was shadowing. This is to say that each of the applicants that were candidates to the program would participate with a shadowing session at a department. In order for any person to be eligible to observe in a radiology department, they would need to be oriented and it was suggested that perhaps the Volunteer Department at the hospitals could help with the training. It was determined that the volunteer departments did not want to help train individuals that were only going to do shadowing rather than to stay longer to truly volunteer in a hospital so because of the large numbers of students that would be participating in this process, it was taken off the table because it was not going to be feasible to train the radiology program applicants. Since that date, clarification has been provided regarding the use of the pre entrance examination and it was determined that can be used for what is considered differentiated measure utilization. This is to say that the test could be used to evaluate specific criteria that might be used for awarding points to be used in the admission process. Examples of ""differentiated measure utilization"" are items like a student's GPA or amount of work experience. A student who has already been tested for admission to the college by the state mandated TSI Exam (Texas Success Initiative Exam) can be administered the HOBET exam and the scores may be used for ranking the student, but there cannot be any score below which a student could not be accepted. Because the program has the Joint Review Committee on Education in Radiologic Technology Accreditation Self Study and Site Visit pending in 2014, we will need to delay implementation of any Admission Process Revisions until after the accreditation site visit has been completed.

Rudy discussed the development of a CT Program or rather the re-activation of a revised version of a CT Program that was offered by ACC in the early 90's. At that time, the program only had one faculty member. The program was discontinued because of changes in required academic faculty qualifications. Prior to the time that the CT Program was offered, there were no specific degree requirements for faculty that were adjuncts in small imaging certificate programs. The faculty member that we had at the time, was credentialed in CT and Radiology however, he did not have a specific degree in Radiology and so we had to discontinue the program. Today, the Radiology Program does have faculty that are CT qualified and at minimum, have an AAS degree which will permit us to offer the program. There was significant discussion by the Advisory Committee on the development of the program because it is becoming common practice to have a greater number of radiographers that should be able to step in and perform CT studies. Because of the strengthening of accreditation requirements at hospitals and private imaging facilities, it will be important for all individuals that perform CT examinations to be credentialed in CT by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists. The program will be designed as a one semester program with all courses (except the clinical component) to be on line. It will be designed this way to ensure that those Technologists that are currently performing CT studies but are not credentialed specifically in CT will have an opportunity to take the courses that will help them prepare for the ARRT examination in CT. The Advisory Committee also discussed that the program should include an enhanced pathology section to ensure that the Radiographers be well prepared to perform the scans and recognize pathology. This will help those technologists that only need the didactic part of the program. Because the CT courses will be on line, students will be able to access them 24/7. A vote was taken by the Advisory Committee members to recommend approval for going forward with the CT Proposal. The vote for approval was unanimous.

Because the meeting was running over the designated amount of time reserved in the conference room, this last item was tabled. Rudy mentioned that the committee members would be contacted via email to give their opinion on the current program mission and goals statement. Since the meeting in December, each of the committee members was sent information on the mission and goals statement and it was determined that it is not necessary to change the statements at this time. The vote was unanimous to maintain the current statements.

There was no additional information discussed and Paul Dubiel adjourned the meeting at 1:15 PM.