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OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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What is OSU required to do for Common Course Numbering?
OSU will recommend faculty to participate on the faculty course alignment subcommittees for the identified courses each year. These subcommittees are tasked with the following:
Please refer to Common Course Numbering to learn about course selection, CCN Course List at OSU to understand impacts to our affiliated courses, and review the process for Adding CCN Courses to CIM.
How are the courses selected for CCN?
A list created by registrars from Oregon public institutions reflects the top 80 transferred courses and the number of times that a course transferred into public universities from an Oregon Community college over a period of three years. For more information on how the list was created, please see "Course List Creation" in the Transfer Council report to the Oregon Legislature.
Using the process identified by the Transfer Council, HECC staff created a draft list of courses for each deadline. This list, along with a faculty feedback form, was sent to Provosts, Chief Academic Officers, and Dual Credit Coordinators for distribution to relevant faculty. Faculty were asked to comment on course clustering (e.g., if any courses are not included that should be, which courses are already significantly aligned) and were also provided an opportunity to provide open-ended feedback.
How does CCN impact courses at OSU?
Please refer to Common Course Numbering to understand how these changes will impact courses and programs at OSU. To learn how OSU will implement newly aligned courses, please view Adding CCN courses to CIM.
What happened to the existing statewide efforts to improve transfer?
Common Course Numbering is an additional way to support students who transition from one Oregon public institution to another. Another tool to help students successfully navigate this process is the Oregon Transfer Compass - specifically the Core Transfer Map, Major Transfer Map(s), and other statewide associate transfer degrees.
SB 233 provided legislation that reduces the number of Major Transfer Maps required to be developed annually from three to one. A Major Transfer Map is a course plan for a major that, when completed, will allow students to transfer credits from any Oregon community college to any Oregon public university, and count all those credits toward a bachelor's degree in a specific major.
Currently Major Transfer Maps have been developed in: Biology, Business, Computer Science, Elementary Education, and English Literature. Three additional MTMs are in progress: Sociology, Psychology, and Human Development & Family Studies.
My subject/course has been identified for future CCN work. How can I participate?
After Transfer Council approves the next set of courses to be aligned, a request for faculty nominations will be sent out to Chief Academic Officers (CAOs), Provosts, faculty associations, and other relevant unions. You may also self-nominate to serve on a Faculty Course Alignment Subcommittee for two-years.
Bios (including self-nominations) are reviewed by CAOs/Provosts, sent to HECC Staff for further review, then forwarded to Transfer Council. Transfer Council will considers nominations and appoints subcommittee members by vote.
Can OSU modify any of the CCN information?
In 2022, the Systems and Operations subcommittee developed a framework to support faculty subcommittee work in aligning course numbers, titles, prefixes, and course descriptions and course learning outcomes for CCN. While there are institutional guidelines that may impact stylistic nuances for course title, description, and subject code, these should match the baseline decisions within each of the faculty subject groups.
For course learning outcomes and course descriptions, courses must be 100% aligned with the agreed upon outcomes and descriptions. Variations in the aligned outcomes and descriptions are only allowed to account for stylistic nuance requirements of individual institutions with the intent remaining the same.
An institution may choose to add course outcomes beyond the adopted statewide outcomes as long as these additions do not change the agreed upon statewide course learning outcomes. In addition, the statewide course learning outcomes must make up at least 75% of all course learning outcomes at each institution. For example, if the CCN subcommittee created 3 outcomes for a course, the institution may add up to 1 additional outcome that does not negate the 3 outcomes.
Similarly, institutions may add content to the course description, as long as it doesn't negate the existing description or comprise more than 25% of the content.
What happens when a CCN course is a course prerequisite?
The Curriculum Management team will update all courses in CIM that have CCN courses as prerequisites to reflect the CCN course number.
What happens when a CCN course is required by a program?
The Curriculum Management team will update CIM for every major that requires a CCN course so the major requirements reflect the CCN course number, title, and number of credits. The team will contact the unit head before making any changes.
What happens when a CCN course has more credits than the existing course?
Occasionally a CCN course will have more credits than the existing OSU course. A program that requires one of these CCN courses will need to adjust its credit requirements to incorporate the additional credit(s) either by adjusting the number of credits for electives or increasing the program credits. Curriculum Management will contact the programs affected by an increase in course credits. In addition, Curriculum Management will submit an administrative proposal reflecting each program’s credit decision. If the number of program credits increases, OSU will notify NWCCU.
What do I need to do if a CCN course is required by my program, or is a prerequisite for a course?
Fear not, OSU's Curriculum Management team will initiate many of these processes your behalf! Please refer to Adding CCN Courses to CIM to learn more about the implementation process at OSU.
How do I search for CCN courses at OSU?
Searching for the newly aligned CCN courses in the Schedule of Classes requires that you add a Z or an * to the search. The * serves as a ‘wildcard’ in the search functionality and will serve up results inclusive of any course with your search language. For example, you may search for WR121Z or WR121*.
Both COMM 100Z and WR 122Z are part of the state of Oregon’s new common course numbering project but are not courses that OSU offers.
What happens if I need to repeat a course that is now listed as a CCN course?
Course numbers that maintained the same level (i.e. lower division/upper division) and were changed via Common Course Numbering (Z) and (HZ for Honors courses) are equivalent to their predecessor numbers, even if their credits have changed. For example, WR 121Z is equivalent to WR 121 and follows repeat logic as if they are the same number. COMM 111H is equivalent to COMM 111HZ even though the credits have changed.
Courses that change course levels (ex: WR 327 to WR 227Z) are not equivalent due to a change in level but are mutually exclusive, meaning students cannot register for WR 227Z if they have previously passed WR 327. If students were to take mutually exclusive courses, the grades from both courses would apply to their GPA. We have a new mutual exclusion webpage with more information.
Why is OSU not offering WR 122Z? What happens if I take this course at a community college?
OSU has not offered WR 122Z for at least 30 years. In 2022 the HECC/Writing CCN workgroup approved WR 122Z as the Common Course Number across Oregon's public higher education institutions.
As work on the writing courses for CCN occurred, so did the approval of OSU's new general education program, Core Education, set to launch summer 2025. Core Education intentionally embeds the Core Transfer Map into our Foundational requirements (WR 121Z, Math, Arts and Letters, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences). OSU no longer has a writing 2 requirement, since the Core Transfer Map similarly has no such requirement. For additional details and context, please refer to the WR 122Z memo.