Since 1999, UC College Prep has developed and distributed 18 courses to meet UC and California State University admissions requirements. UC College Prep licenses courses to California schools and freely posts its course content at www.ucoa.org for learners to use worldwide. This year UC College Prep is producing new ground-breaking courses with UC colleagues and expert course developers:
• AP Computer Science A (with UC Berkeley)
• AP Statistics (with UCLA and UC Berkeley)
• Statistics (with UCLA and UC Berkeley)
• Pre-Algebra (with Words & Numbers)
• Algebra 2 (with Words & Numbers)
• Pre-Calculus (with Words & Numbers)
To build this next generation of courses, the UCCP production team will apply the latest technologies while leveraging UC faculty and program resources for K-12 use. The goal is to make courses that students want to use by aligning content to student lifestyles, learning styles and commonly used devices. UCCP's new wave of courses will be finished, tested and ready for use by California high schools in 2010.
UC College Prep is working with UC Berkeley to bring faculty research in computer science education to the high school computer science curriculum. UC Berkeley's Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS) group will develop AP Computer Science A, replicating Berkeley's lab-centric approach in a two-semester high school course.
In a similar way, faculty from Berkeley and Los Angeles will help in the development of AP Statistics, a project led by UCLA's Center for Digital Innovation (CDI). A unique aspect of this project is the integration of an open textbook, Collaborative Statistics, created by Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, faculty from Foothill-De Anza Community College District, and made available through the Maxfield Foundation and Connexions, a project of Rice University in Houston.
With math achievement a major goal in California, UCCP has engaged Baltimore's Words & Numbers and its partners, LearningMate and Math Resources, to build three critical mathematics courses to fill out UCCP's math sequence. Web 2.0 and mobile technology will be integrated to support students' learning in the new courses. By fall 2009, students will have access -- by school licensing and the Web -- to pre-algebra through AP Calculus BC, including Calculus and Algebra in Spanish, thanks to partners in Mexico -- the University of Guadalajara and La Corporación Universitaria para el Desarrollo de Internet 2 (CUDI).
UC College Prep is developing other new resources to complement and enhance its online course content. Course ideas under review include career-tech geometry, a project-based course with construction tasks in virtual space. Another idea is to merge the text and selected images from UC's AP Biology to produce an open textbook available for free download or purchase at a nominal fee.
All UC College Prep's course development serves the college eligibility needs of California students. Thousands of students in underserved schools have completed UCCP's AP and other "a-g" courses, achieved success on AP exams, and advanced toward college eligibility. In previous years, 76.2 percent of UC College Prep participants overall and 68 percent of underrepresented students in the cohorts enrolled in a two- or four-year college the year following high school graduation.
For more information or to license UC courses, contact Curt Anderson at curt@uccp.org or (831) 460-3086. To add your organization's name to the distribution list for announcements about upcoming requests for proposals for course development, write to lee@uccp.org.