Infused activities and stand-alone courses account for most instruction in generic technical skills. In programs intended for transfer students, several colleges infuse word processing skills into written communications courses. For instance, Merritt and San Diego City Colleges in California have several sections of English Composition which are Macintosh-based, and at San Jose City in California and Oakton College in Illinois, keyboarding and common software are infused into marketing courses. At San Jacinto Community College in Texas, students in literature classes write newspaper articles about characters in short stories, using the newspaper template in popular word processing software, and research information about social conditions in the stories via the Internet [II-4]. Monroe Community College in New York offers three versions of computer courses--practical, mathematical, and technical. Kennedy-King College in Illinois offers Microcomputer Usage for Nursing. To achieve the same goals, some colleges--including Pulaski Technical College in Arkansas, Colorado Mountain College, the Community College of Philadelphia, Prince George's Community College in Maryland, and Hudson County Community College in New Jersey--require a stand alone computer or keyboarding course for graduation.
The skills of preparing and analyzing graphic displays of data can be naturally infused into occupational courses. Nursing students at Cape Cod Community College in Massachusetts use criterion-based decisionmaking and modified Harvard Case Studies to evaluate hypothetical nursing situations. [II-24] At Fayetteville Technical College in North Carolina, students use flow charts to show the decisionmaking process in dental treatments, and accounting students depict effective accountant competencies using a network tree.
Occupational safety, another common technical skill, is a stand-alone course at Guilford Technical Community College in North Carolina, the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, and Monroe Community College in New York. Other colleges require first aid or CPR in certificate programs. Guilford [N] also requires a course in Small Business Operations for several technical diplomas, universal knowledge for graduates wanting to become employed in or open their own small enterprises. At Washtenaw Community College in Wisconsin, students who complete and pass exams for Food Service Management earn certificates in CPR and Techniques of Alcohol Management (TAM), generic requirements in the food service industry. [N]
Quality management techniques are included as both content and pedagogy in the technical programs at two colleges surveyed. In some courses in the Quality Management program at Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky, student teams help design the course syllabus, determining academic and attendance expectations. Because students often cannot decide on absolute attendance policy, the classes typically agree that group approval for excused absences is required. Faculty at Elizabethtown note that the interpersonal responses of teammates serve as a better behavior control mechanism than faculty-made regulations. In this way, students gain practical experience in team decisionmaking and implementation strategies common to high performance workplaces. [N]
In another application of quality control techniques, students calculate the mean of test scores, and students who score above or below one standard deviation from the mean write a short essay on why they did (or did not) do well on the test. Without student names, the essays are distributed to the class for students to compare successful and unsuccessful production (test preparation) strategies.
Among other Total Quality Management courses at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, students can enroll in classes which teach, apply, and practice Quality Customer Service, Writing for Quality Results, and Leadership for Front Line Employees.
The universality of generic technical skills is demonstrated by the difficulty they have in locating a "home" department. As one Department Chair noted in relation to offering generic business and quality control procedures,
One of our problems in the community college is that everyone says you're in this or that. Wait a minute! We're all in business. Business is not a department, it's part of every job. Academic faculty look down on business courses because they aren't intellectual enough. But really, business is a generic term.As an illustration of this view, the manufacturing department at Butte Community College in California noted the need for high-performance workplace training for technical students, and designed a new course for approval by the curriculum committee. The Business Department argued that the new course content was similar to that included in current business courses, and that HPW techniques should be offered to a broad group of students. The Business Department was successful in redesigning a business course to meet manufacturing standards and avoided a new and competing manufacturing course being initiated. [N]
However, at the developmental level, generic technical skills are almost entirely absent. A unique example of the usage of these skills as tools for completing tasks and following the flow of work through a system is found at the New Hampshire Technical Institute's (Laconia) program for incarcerated adult men and women. The Management with Computers course employs an information management simulation in which students complete increasingly difficult projects such as composing memos, designing publicity materials, creating and merging customer database records, and designing spreadsheets and related graphs to project sales. The excitement in this classroom was palpable, as adults who had previously experienced school failure were able to gain computer application skills in a work-related simulation. Administrators report that students simultaneously improve in foundation academic skills, and that completers of this and other courses have significantly lower recidivism and higher average pay rates compared to similar groups that have been returned to their communities. [II-25]
These examples illustrate that the integration of common technical skills can be incorporated into academic and occupational courses with positive effect, and that when generic technical skills are used to complete interesting, real-life projects, they foster positive outcomes for students and for institutions.