Start a B2B Program

Adopting CCSF's B2B Program

The CCSF team will give considerable assistance to help you start your program.  The Bi-Annual Synergy Conferences have allowed our team to envision ways of taking City College of San Francisco’s experience running B2B, with its unique set of conditions, and extracting the universal elements of the program to allow easier adaptation and customization to other colleges sharing similar goals of increasing retention, completion and persistence of underprepared students into biotechnology.

Phase 1: Identify Your Program Needs

In January to March, new potential adopters are identified.  Adopters must complete a Needs Assessment Survey, schedule a phone conversation with the CCSF team, and complete a follow-up survey in January.  (Major tasks for adopters are written in italics).

Phase 2: Develop Your Program with Access to the B2B Curriculum and Program Toolkit

Once selected, the adopters have access to the course materials and lesson plans for the three core Bridge classes: math, science and language. For this first cohort, we do not include aspects of the program that relate to the internship program.

Since simple possession of the B2B curriculum has historically not always yielded successful adoptation or program development, adopters also have access to the "Program Toolkit".  This was created to emphasize important program practices not outlined in the curriculum. The Toolkit describes and illustrates the essential elements of the program, such as contextualized learning, faculty teams, learning communities, and student cohorts. 

From April to May, adopters are asked to collect data on gatekeeper courses, develop and present program goals, and participate in joint webinars with other adopters.

Phase 3:  Meet Your B2B Community and Learn Best Practices

On June 4th-8th at Bio-Link’s Summer Fellows Forum in Berkeley, CA., the B2B team (faculty and program staff) from each adopting college is invited to participate in an intensive seminar.

Past seminars have included:

• tutorials on incorporating contextualized teaching to an existing or new curriculum,
• tutorials on creating learning communities,
• presentations on other essential elements of the Toolkit
• support to develop a program plan tailored to the college’s needs and limitations
• discussions with CCSF B2B instructors on curriculum content
• discussions with other Bridge adopters in the cohort
• training on online tools used for sharing  information with the B2B network
• a panel discussion with B2B alumni currently employed in the biotech industry

Phase 4: Build Your Network Capacity

In the fourth phase adopters begin working with each other, using online tools, webinars and conference calls to exchange best practices and challenges among members of the B2B adopters network. Our team also follows each college's progress in developing and then launching their Bridge.  Throughout this process, the Bio-Link team collects information on best practices and challenges faced so we can integrate the lessons learned back into Bio-Link’s scale-up process.

Currently, our goal is to strengthen Bio-Link’s network of B2B adopters by selecting and mentoring Cohort II, and to continue to create a community of practice where experienced B2B adopters provide advice to new adopters, discuss challenges and best practices, and document their experience using online collaborative tools.

Impacts

 The scale-up of the B2B intends to have several long-term impacts for ATE centers and students, including:

• Increasing number of biotech & STEM graduates into the workforce in regions with B2B programs
• Increasing access to the biotechnology field for underprepared, underrepresented and economically disadvantaged adults
• Spreading contextualized, integrated teaching and student-led components as a model for other STEM programs
• Developing a feedback loop to improve existing B2B models, including the CCSF B2B
• Using data collected from the B2B scale-up experience for ATE Centers to drive scale up of successful programs