AcademicAffairs@NOVA: Curriculum and Control

January 9, 2025 / @NOVA

You’ve likely heard the phrase “Faculty control the curriculum,” and you may have wondered what exactly that means. Our accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) specifies that colleges place “primary responsibility for the content, quality and effectiveness of the curriculum with faculty” (Principle 10: Educational Policies, Procedures and Practices). As the discipline or subject matter experts, faculty have the primary responsibility for designing, evaluating and revising the academic content of courses and educational programs (i.e., majors, degrees, certificates) within NOVA and the VCCS.

Faculty may propose new courses and programs, recommend revisions to existing programs or suggest closures of underperforming programs. This work is influenced by student and employer demands, industry trends, transfer partner programs, NOVA’s budget, Virginia Community College System (VCCS) policies, state and federal regulations and SACSCOC principles. Faculty, individually and within their discipline groups, determine course readings and assignments used to meet the learning outcomes, which are aligned with NOVA’s course content summaries and the VCCS master course file.

NOVA follows SCHEV and VCCS policies on curriculum development. (You will need to be logged into myNOVA/VCCS Intranet to view this link.) Our processes and procedures for creating, updating and sunsetting courses and programs are published in the Curriculum Procedures Manual.

Proposals for new curricula including degrees, certificates and majors go through a rigorous review process, which includes:

  1. Discipline Group (all full-time faculty in a particular discipline)
  2. Pathway Council (Pathway Dean and faculty representatives from disciplines in related fields)
  3. Curriculum Committee (CAO and teaching, professional and administrative faculty and classified staff from across the college)
  4. Admin Council (President’s cabinet)
  5. NOVA College Board
  6. VCCS
  7. State Board for Community Colleges
  8. State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV)

The Office of Academic Affairs, which is part of the larger unit of Academic Affairs, oversees curriculum development and hopes to streamline some of our current processes. To that end, we are updating the current Curriculum Procedures Manual now for the next academic year. Your feedback on possible revisions is welcome! You can email your suggestions and recommendations to AVP Jen Daniels at JDaniels@nvcc.edu before January 31, 2025.

If you have questions about the program development process, please reach out to Jen Daniels or Dr. Casey Lukszo, associate director of curriculum and innovative education, at CLukszo@nvcc.edu.

Submitted by:
Dr. Eun-Woo Chang, CAO/VP, Academic Affairs