RSS

My thoughts on the Budget: ESL, Basic Skills and Adult Ed

28 Jan

The way I see it, there really is a larger plan embedded in Jerry Brown’s budget.  Yes, it would take some funds away from richer K-12 districts and reapportion it equally to all school districts.  Education would be perceived as a social necessity, an area in which equity is the best course of action.  How can we not see it that way?

As more and more research shows that, for basic skills, the first few years of life – and school – are the most important, it only makes sense that young children are afford an equal chance.  Naturally, this is considered a sort of egregious, politically-motivated “socialism” by parents in more affluent school districts:

Ventura County People React to Brown’s School Budget

I went to one of the “poorer” school districts (Santa Paula), and although we knew we didn’t have the resources that Buena or Nordhoff had, the disparities were perhaps not as great back then.  I remember getting to university and being disgusted, really, that I had never seen any sort of computer (other students had been taught binary codes and how to punch those cards and do simple calculations, including Buena students).  Today, it’s my impression that college bound students in Fillmore, Santa Paula, El Rio and parts of Oxnard do not receive the support that they should.

Neither do the “basic skills” students.  When schools have to teach such a wide range of ability (and language) levels, they need more resources.  That’s what Jerry wants to address in the earlier grades.  But there’s a cost.

The idea that we’d spend more educational resources for K-12 means that, if a student hasn’t learned the basics by the end of 13 years, there are a couple of options.  Schools have “fifth” and “sixth” year high school programs, where 18-20 years are segregated, for fairly obvious reasons, from the 13-14 year olds.  I haven’t heard anything about that changing.  But, if a person has dropped out of high school, or failed to attain the skills for a GED (the requirements of which every community college instructor should be familiar), Adult Ed has been their option.  Adult Ed provides more than basic skills, it also provides some career training.  Apparently about half the counties in California have already shifted this task to their community colleges, and the spokespeople imply that those districts are doing better with the project.  I want to reiterate that community college instructors are not teaching adult ed, but instead, a different union (usually CTA) and a different pay scale applies, different minimum qualifications of course.  I also want to make it clear that these proposals of Gov. Brown’s are in no way enacted into law at this point.

But, it’s an interesting question:  what would these kinds of changes mean for the current system that we have at Oxnard College?  I don’t know.  It makes sense that the “can’t go two years below college level” rubric that the Board created last year was in anticipation of just these sort of changes.  I don’t see anything specific in the new budget that would force changes regarding Adult Ed, at least not right away.

At any rate, the way in which the State Chancellor’s Office eventually interprets any Budget Bill and its requirements is, as usual, not easy to predict.

In our county’s Adult Ed, the typical registration fee for, say, an ESL or basic skills class is $10 for a year of classes.  Classes are open enrollment, a student can join anytime (and come and go from class as required by their work).  The State is setting aside some $300,000,000 (in addition, I believe, to already existing funds) to move this system to the community colleges, hire a new sort of teacher, and allow the adult ed learners to be in an adult environment, with college libraries, and, if possible, college classes alongside their ESL or basic skills classes, as they learn.  I hope you can all see that this may be a fundamental challenge to the way we do ESL and basic skills.  Further, Ventura County Adult Ed already has some quite popular automated ESL classes, taught by computer.  

That’s Jerry’s second pronged approach to adults who, after up to 14 years of attempts to teach basic skills and ESL, still need more education.  An online support system.  It’s not clear how this will work, but his spokespeople keep saying they in no way intend to compete with existing college level distance ed.  So it should be no surprise that San José State University has been asked to develop on all-online university for basic skills students, call Udacity.  50% of their students come in “underprepared” (which is about the same at most CSU’s).  Can they learn these basic skills in an online, low cost environment, served out by one giant state-run server, with top notch support for the classes?  The pilot project on that has begun, with several different consultants employed (not just from SJSU of course) to assess its results.  Universities like Harvard and Stanford have been involved in creating these courses, after years of work on determining what works best.  Such courses are already being used in Sri Lanka, in India, and in other places around the world to teach English and “prerequisites” to college courses.  Such courses are, as we know at Oxnard, in high demand.  Below are some links on the pilot project, which is expected to move to a larger project for the 2013-14 school year – in other words, very soon!

First, let me say that these are not MOOCs!  (Massive Open Online Courses).  State Academic Senate and  Educational Officers have been firm in their opposition to MOOCs.  

One of the aspects under discussion, therefore, is the “unbundling” of certain parts of college education.  That refers to the fact students are already choosing to get various resources from various places.  They will be given the option to attend low cost online remedial classes, often with no textbook cost, at their own time and place – but not from the institution they are currently attending:

Udacity offers unbundling

As the author above notes, some fear this is the “unraveling” of higher ed.  That’s why it’s a pilot study right now.  Earlier pilots show that these classes work, especially for young adults who are computer savvy, for stay-at-home moms, for military personnel and for many others.

Udacity is basically another version of Coursera (if you’re familiar with that).  Udacity has announced plans to build career and job placement into its framework.  In other words, employers who are looking for employees who need those basic skills could put in requests through Udacity’s career and job placement center (all initially online).  The power of something like this to attract students cannot be easily dismissed.  

There are, of course, private competitors.  What the above analysis (the one I just linked to) shows is that the State-run Udacity will have to follow FERPA, so employers won’t actually be able to “see” inside the classroom.  Students will be given privacy.

Not MOOCs but the author thinks that’s the general term to which this belongs…

This second author misunderstands a little of the project, but is still providing up-to-date analysis of something that is only about two weeks old, as I write, in conception.  While the author gets the MOOCs part wrong, it is true that these courses will probably be free or nearly free.  They probably won’t be entirely open access – a student will have to enroll in a community college or CSU to obtain these services, because the goal of Udacity is to get students college ready.  Note that many professors are in favor of these courses, and have some experience in evaluating them.  I checked some of the evaluative literature and it is true:  non-credit, online courses that are virtually free can do a very good job of teaching basic skills to motivated students (for whom they are being created).  As the last author (above) states, the idea of Udacity is enrichment or help to students already enrolled in some kind of degree program.  The above article also notes that in some pilot studies, success rates are actually higher for Udacity-like courses than for their real world counterparts.  That’s one of the main things they will be studying this semester in preparation for implementing Udacity statewide next year.

Why are they not MOOCs?  Well, in addition to be attached to a real college, they also have teachers.  MOOCs, by definition, rely on peer-tutoring and peer-help to attain the course goals.  Udacity will have professors or some sort of teacher available.

When Gov. Brown rolled out the pilot project in December, he had with him several national experts on online education.  They are, of course, to some degree already invested in online education, but here is a white paper from one of them:

White Paper on Online Education (used as part of the argument for Udacity)

High schools are already using methods of this sort for summer school, especially in the absence of funding for summer school.  Here’s an article on the success of such methods:

How online learning is saving rural high schools

Some of these articles ask universities to reassess their own assessment measures; employers are wanting to have a better look at SLO’s, seeking to have students learn what is needed in future workplaces (as opposed to what academia might dictate).  This is especially true for basic skills.

Lastly, for a really basic summary of what the new pilot (and next year’s $118M allotment to furthering this project might mean), here’s another link

Udacity partnership announced by Brown

I can say that, as we move into the preparation of our VCCCD Educational Master Plan, questions about the impact of all of this were at the forefront of some people’s minds.  Whether or not this all comes to pass, we need to be ready for innovations that are legislated from the top, and which could affect our local practices a great deal.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on January 28, 2013 in Background & Viewpoint, PBC and Planning

 

Associate in Arts for Transfer: Random thoughts and some predictions

17 Dec

We have two new kinds of degrees in California:  AA-T’s and AS-T’s.  I am not the most knowledgeable historian of the AA-T pattern, but I have learned a lot and will share what I think I know (comments welcome).

Summary:  There are now 22 majors that can guarantee a student with a 2.0 grade average a seat in the CSU ahead of other applicants for transfer.  

The plan, at first, was to identify the top 20 most popular majors and to streamline them so that students intending to transfer could get to transfer sooner and more cheaply.  The goal was to have each major be around 60 units.  Provisions were soon made for “high unit majors” as well, since some majors simply can’t be done and the GE pattern accomplished in 60 units.  But the goal is 60 units.

(For simplicity’s sake, I’m referring to them as AA-T’s from now on).

An AA-T fulfills the IGETC OR the CSU Breadth patterns that we all know and love.  Yes, it’s a little confusing to students, too.  We need to get better – in the classroom – at reaching out to students and advising them about transfer.  The counselors do a remarkable job at staying current on all of this, but all of us need to know the basics, so we can help students.

A course from the major can also be counted toward the IGETC or CSU Breadth pattern.  So, if the major fulfills, say, Social Science Breadth with its 18 or so units, the student can spend the rest of their 60 units on whatever they want (more social science if they like it; other subjects if they like those).  The more diverse a major pattern is, the more flexibility the student has in choosing electives.

So what’s going to happen to our old General Studies Pattern III majors?  Apparently, they still fulfill the transfer requirement, but they are not on schedule to be a preferred way to transfer; students with AA-T’s get preference.  Since our local CSU must allow the AA-T students in first, that means unless our students have an AA-T they are unlikely to get in.  Only 10% of CSUCI’s students are currently from Ventura County.  There is an increasingly “backlog” of AA-T students waiting to get into a transfer school of their choice.

One question that will almost certain be upon is, therefore, is whether we continue to offer that General Studies Pattern III A.A. degree.  Students are already confused enough about how to transfer and what gives them priority.  My personal view (and to be frank, this is the view of nearly everyone I’ve talked to so far – so if your view differs PLEASE make it known sometime soon, we want a robust dialogue about this):  we need to end the GS degrees.  They promise something they may never be able to deliver, as students from around California with AA-T’s compete for slots in the CSU.

Further, I believe strongly that the UC’s will soon follow suit and there will be one and only one way of transferring from a community college to a public university:  The AA-T’s (also called Transfer Model Curriculum or TMC process).

Will it become the case that only AA’T's are accepted?  That’s a trickier question, but after hearing the president of CSUCI speak to the Board of Trustees this month (December 2012), I realized it’s something of a moot point.  The AA-T’s get preference – and right now, that’s enough to lock out students without AA-T’s.

On a happy side note, at the Fall Plenary Session, the State Academic Senate agreed and authorized its Exec Board to continue investigation into a resolution involving automatic degrees and certificates.  Right now, a student who meets all the qualifications for a degree or certificate has to go one extra step and file a petition to graduate.  Even with Degreeworks, students are not always aware which degree they either already have finished or are about to finish.  Naturally, that will be changing.  Students will become more savvy about figuring out which degrees they are about to receive (right now, as I understand it Degreeworks only calculates the student’s pathway to local A.A.’s not the AA-T’s – if I’m wrong about this, someone please correct me).  But, the State Senate is proposing that colleges be allowed to go ahead and award degrees to any student who has completed the pattern.  This would, by the way, up completion rates at community colleges since students do in fact transfer without bothering to collect their degree (and we are told that completion rates are tied to our financial future and to the administration of Prop 92 funds – which is our primary funding; how this going to take place is anyone’s guess).

So, within a few years, it is possible that

1) only AA-T’s will allow students to transfer (either by CSU choice or de facto)

2) that degrees will be awarded automatically (which may also up transfer – we hope so)

3) that baseline data collected today will reveal much about the most popular pathways to transfer in ways we are not accustomed to seeing

All of this is reshaping what we do.  Eventually, the State TMC process widened to include 22 completed majors.  Not all of them are completely worked out.  Each major developed a statewide task force, with invitations sent to every full time faculty person in the disciplines involved.  Academic Senate Presidents were advised of which groups were underway (Philosophy finally finished on December 10, 2012).  

Schools took different views on how to proceed with establishing AA-T’s.  Some of us wanted to wait until the TMC was finalized to submit our AA-T’s to our curriculum committees and Boards.  Other schools went ahead and did some guesswork, knowing that they could still tweak their curriculum further if needed, but also knowing that if the state curriculum was close to final, they would get a jumpstart on other schools.  At any rate, there are 22 available TMC patterns as of today, with two more nearing completion (Chemistry and Spanish) and three currently under construction.  The link just above will show you all that information.  There’s also a link on that page where you can sign up for your discipline to receive future updates.  

80% of Oxnard College students come to us stating that they want a B.A., only about 18% actually transfer.  In the end, all of this is about changing that.  Notice that there’s no distinction between CTE and Transfer any more.  CTE and STEM disciplines receive AS-Ts, that’s the only difference.  Four of the existing 22 TMC patterns are CTE; more are on the horizon.  If you’re curious as to whether your own discipline will eventually be included (if it’s not already), use the listserv sign-up link on the page I linked to above to see a drop-down menu of the disciplines who have organized at the State level.

Who organizes these groups?  The State Chancellor’s Office in conjunction with the State Academic Senates (Community College and CSU Senates – and soon, the UC’s).  In other words, we do.  

For more information about how the C-ID and TMC process might affect you, see my other post on the C-ID process.

From a local perspective, our own program review processes are incorporating TMC issues into program review.  We want to up transfers, so having an AA-T or AS-T is a good thing.  It’s something we need to support.  It may eventually be the case that a student cannot transfer without an AA-T/AS-T, so we need to plan for the future.  

There are compliance issues, as well.  New legislation requires that we construct TMC degrees for any disciplines where we already have degrees.  From my perspective, there is now a two-tiered system of transfer coursework:

1)  Coursework that is part of a specific TMC pattern

2)  All other GE Breadth Coursework

Since, once you combine all the 22 majors together, it’s entirely possible for a student to get a degree and meet their breadth/GE requirements, those disciplines that do not have any degree at all and are simply doing GE may end up looking redundant – in the future, a future that may be 4-5 years away.  Money for the community colleges is not going to go up; indeed, I suspect that despite efforts by the State Academic Senate to hold on to the mission statement of the community colleges that other missions, such as Pres. Obama’s Completion Agenda, are going to take root, redirect grant funding (already happening) and reshape our mission.  But even if not, transfer is still part of our mission, and it is huge reason that students come to our college.  Every dollar, every unit is going to count, going to be budgeted.

The underlying reason is pretty simple.  The entire planet is on austerity measures because we’re reaching our limits of expansion.  Even technological expansion cannot continue without large numbers of highly educated people working in teams, within a corporate structure (unless someone devises another economic system).  We are needed to rise to this crucial demand:  creating an educated citizenry.

While OC is only required to build 14 TMC patterns (by my quick calculation), I believe we should look at trying for more.  I also think that if your discipline is on that TMC list and you aren’t complying with the new rules (it’s actually law) by putting your TMC in place, it’s going to be a real problem at program review time.  Fortunately, nearly everyone is done!  The pioneers in the field (Amy Edwards, Marie Butler, Linda Chaparro, Robert Cabral and the business faculty in general) are of great assistance, but I can tell you that if you’re really confused the go-to people are Shannon Davis and Krista Mendelsohn.  

If you’ve read this post and the one on C-ID’s and can improve upon the information I’ve given, please email me at lkamaila@vcccd.edu ASAP.  

I still have questions, but I think I know the answers.  While recent legislation requires 100% compliance with providing AA-T’s where ever we have AA’s, I think it goes without saying that those must AA-T’s must actually work for transfer (which means that the curriculum must be C-ID and must have gone through the State approval process, which is getting a little slow).  As long as it’s in the pipeline at the State, I believe we’re compliant, but we aren’t really meeting the spirit of the law until the TMC’s at OC are fully operational, and we should all be working together to get that done.  

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on December 17, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , ,

What the heck is C-ID?

17 Dec

What’s all this Course Descriptor/Course Identification business and why should I care?

Prediction:  Eventually every course that’s on a TMC will have C-ID numbering and descriptors

Summary:  Your courses have to be approved at the State level, in terms of meeting the C-ID descriptors, before your TMC can be used for transfer.

Well, if you aren’t part of the TMC (Transfer Model Curriculum) process you probably don’t care and even if you are, you might not care.  It was a mystery to me until I started working on the Anthro AA-T.

Simply put, the C-ID system is a set of common course “descriptors” that are supposed to guarantee that a student taking a particular class (given a common course identification number in the C-ID system) is getting the same basic curriculum everywhere in the state.  It’s the new CAAN system, but it has way more buy-in from the CSU’s and it’s here to stay.

Within our own district (which is not really a microcosm of the whole but is in some ways it’s own insular world), we have long pondered common course numbering.  The system that the new TMC process is using is called C-ID and it assigns 100- and 200-level numbers to lower division coursework, just as we do at OC.  Yay, OC.  But, other colleges throughout the state (and within our district) use the number 1 as the starting point for lower division courses – or even, oddly, sometimes the numbers 300 get in there (for lower division work!)  I can certainly understand why some committee, somewhere, decided to set forth a standard set of numbers, and that’s part of what the C-ID system is (it’s also much more).

The C-ID “descriptors” are actually statements about what should be in the course, its description, and its actual outline.  Learning outcomes are specified within the C-ID system.  Put in the most blunt manner possible, you can call your course “Intro to Whatever” but when it goes to articulate at the state level so that students can use it to transfer, it better look remarkably similar to the courses already in the C-ID system.

Yep, I mostly just used the C-ID descriptors and added to them for the Anthropology outlines and they seem to be doing fine.  I’ve done this since I came to the community college system, and it’s always worked.  No matter what you think you want to emphasize in a class, if you stick closely to what the C-ID descriptors say and use virtually the same language, your course will articulate.  You can add more content, but don’t take away content – cover all the described material.

Also, don’t bury the required content in a lot of other content or your course will look like a different course and won’t articulate.

Most of the time, most courses at OC articulate because we are all studying the C-ID rubrics and following them.  The courses also articulate because Shannon Davis does the same thing for us.  Curriculum Committee tries to be very helpful in this area too, but when you look at the sheer number of courses and how complex the system is, there’s no way that even the Curriculum Committee can be expert in your field.  You should really know the descriptors in your field.

Now, this is the dicey part.  Before a course can be part of a TMC, it must already be approved at the State level for its match with the descriptors.  Ouch.  When I learned this in August, I immediately went to work on the four courses in Anthropology that have descriptors.  If a course doesn’t have descriptors, you don’t have to submit it for approval to the State/CSU team, but if it has descriptors – as all of the core TMC courses do – you have to submit it for approval.

So, while my AA-T is done, it will only be when the State/CSU team of anthropologists reviews my descriptors for the four courses that my AA-T can be useful to a student.  Depending on the discipline, it’s taking 1-3 months for this to happen (and if my observations are correct, it’s taking longer and longer as the reviewers get more and more swamped with 116 community colleges submitting so much curriculum).

Upshot:  even if your TMC wasn’t approved yet, you should have heeded the announcement in August and gotten your courses updated.  Most of you did that or are doing it right now and hopefully that’s complete.  We’ll certainly be looking at such issues at PEPC and perhaps issuing advisories or something.  We have to do something to make sure we meet the TMC pattern goals.

In perusing what’s gotten approved at the State level, I can’t help but give a shout-out to Chris Horrock for being one of only two colleges in the system to get that Symbolic Logic class approved for Philosophy (so far).  Talk about a fast response!  If you’re not knowledgeable about symbolic logic, you should know that there are a lot of students who love, love this subject despite its grueling nature.  There are people who think that it’s as important as math in transfer, and it certainly leads to jobs in the computer field (I run into former students all the time who say that symbolic logic was the key to their current job success – although many of them ended up taking the course elsewhere, as OC hasn’t always had the right arguments to get Symbolic Logic into the schedule; the TMC process will change that).

I hope this tiny example helps you see how the TMC/C-ID process affects us.  And here’s a challenge to the historians:  take a look at what your discipline is up to, statewide.  History has 6 courses with descriptors – but only one course where I see finalized descriptors (the website is always a little behind reality – so let’s take that into account).  This struck me as interesting because philosophers have been busily making sure their courses articulate (even though their TMC was approved only 6 days ago).  The History TMC has been around for awhile.  What’s up with that, historians??

So, let’s issue a challenge to those disciplines who are behind in the C-ID process:  submit your curriculum and get it up to date!  Anthropology was so late in developing its descriptors that comparative data is not yet available (but should be in January or February, so we can play tag).  If your discipline was an early adopter, you’re already ahead of the game, so please, please take advantage of that (as Chris has done) and get your curriculum ready to go!

P.S.  I’m guessing that our historians are already busily at work getting this done, but from my side, I see the state approvals when they post – and I see what the Board approves.  I absolutely love hearing about your progress in this area (and there’s now a box on the Program Review form for you to say more – because every discipline has a slightly different story here).

 
2 Comments

Posted by on December 17, 2012 in 10 + 1, Curriculum, Program Evaluation, Transfer Model Curriculum

 

Tags: , ,

Geo Challenge Results!

20 Nov

WHO, I ask, does not love geography?

Our students certainly do (and our students are, of course, The Students of the World):

Image

Or, in this competition, the students of 15 local high schools who competed in Oxnard College’s Geo Bowl, organized by Prof. Chris Mainzer.

Please see the Star Free Press article for great pictures and more details.  I’m going to spoil it a little.  Here are the winners:

The final results:
WRITTEN COMPETITION
1ST PLACE:  Jake Perl                                      Newbury Park High received $400.00 cash certificate*
2ND PLACE:  Alexander Paul                            Camarillo High received $300.00 cash certificate
3RD PLACE:  Brendon Miles                             St. Bonaventure High received $200.00 cash certificate
4TH PLACE:  Scott Anderson                           Rio Mesa High received $100.00 cash certificate 
*Cash certificates were donated by “maps.com” for purchase of geography supplies for each winning high school
TEAM COMPETITION
1ST PLACE:  NEWBURY PARK HIGH (Team 1)
2ND PLACE:  ST. BONAVENTURE HIGH (Team 1)
3RD PLACE:  VENTURA HIGH (Team 2)
4TH PLACE:  CAMARILLO HIGH (Team 1)
5TH PLACE:  RIO MESA HIGH (Team 1)
GO RIO MESA!  I mean, isn’t it great that Ventura High – one of our county’s oldest high schools placed third?  And is it really any surprise that Saint Bonny (as we affectionately call it) and Newbury Park High were neck-in-neck?  (Well, yes, it is something of a surprise and that’s why it’s so much fun).
Thanks to all who participated and made this annual and enduring event so much fun.
 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 20, 2012 in Our Students!, Outstanding!

 

What’s up ahead? Some things to read…

17 Nov

Trying to predict what the California legislature is going to do next is not easy, but it’s not impossible, either.  Someone will probably be right about what they’re up to.

One thing is certain:  this legislature (and the one before it) has certainly gotten into the habit of proposing and discussing myriad laws that attempt to manage (even micro-manage) many aspects of education, K-12 and college included.   One author has compared it to the use of a remote control:  the legislature thinks that if it writes a bill, the CLICK! the situation changes.  The article in its entirety can be found through your portal account (I’m assuming you have a VCCCD account) by clicking on library resources and then JSTOR.  Here’s a quote from that article by Mr. Cuban about legislative school reform:

“It’s become a garbage can in which to toss every bright idea and private bias that non-educators have about school reform.”

I like that he mentions how the bright ideas get tossed in the “garbage can.”  That’s because bright ideas, even though they’re bright, need to take shape in a different place that in Sacramento.  Sacramento is showing, though, that if we don’t implement our own bright ideas, they are more than willing to legislate them for us, thereby often denaturing the idea and dimming it by many lumens.

On our State Academic Senate side, it is with pride that I can cite a series of papers that should be of interest to Oxnard College Faculty:  Practices that Promote Equity and Diversity is one example.  The State Senate has taken a strong view on collecting data to ensure that our state resources are spent equitably, with a view to aiding students in certain demographic categories.  While this paper mentions “ethnicity,” at the most recent plenary session, a resolution was adopted to emphasize socioeconomic status instead, because, guess what?  Rich kids do much better than poor kids, regardless of ethnicity.  This move away from focus on ethnicity (and what some people still call race – that word is still in some of our laws) and onto a key demographic variable (socioeconomic status) is a good move.  This paper, even if you only read the first few pages, gives you a lot of sometimes needed intellectual ammunition to promote Basic Skills and related programs.

From our statewide group of mathematicians comes this beautiful paper on what is expected of entering college students, in terms of math.  It is probably not what you would have expected to see:  it provides a groundwork for innovative math pathways and many schools are changing their approach to math (not because of this paper, necessarily, but because math teachers work hard at understanding how to teach math).  At OC, this is resulting in many changes (all born of very hard work from our math faculty), and there are more to come.

Finally (although I’d love to list a lot more papers!), here’s a crucially important paper on enrollment management.  It’s from ASCCC.  It advises local Senates to develop enrollment management philosophies and to address issues in their districts/colleges.  There is no more important issue at this particular point in time.  The paper leaves it open as to what kinds of policies local Senates should adopt, but this difficult topic should be broached – and in our Senate, I’m thinking sooner rather than later.  Now that we get a reprieve from talking strictly about money, the question of enrollment management (and how it relates to priority registration, class offerings, class caps, support services, mix of courses and so much more) needs to be addressed.  Please try and glance at this one!

Going forward, all of this homework will help us construct a wise Educational Master Plan.

 

 

 

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 17, 2012 in ASCCC, Background & Viewpoint, Educational Master Plan

 

Registration Priorities – AP 5055

17 Nov

When registration priorities were last discussed, Oxnard College was in the midst of the program discontinuance/budget crisis of 2011.  We didn’t spend a lot of time on this document.

In the meantime, the State of California has passed a new bill of its own, signed into law, the intent of which is to address some of the same issues (students with too many units drop in priority).

However, several things about AP 5055 need to be discussed.  There are three places on our Campus that should be having conversation about this policy:

Senate

PBC

Student Success.

In investigating how other districts and colleges handle registration priorities, I’ve learned a lot.  One issue that is of concern to an increasing number of districts and colleges is that local students receive priority registration, so that classes do not fill up with students from other areas.  Why is this important?

First, in our county, we are actually operated by law as an entity created by the citizens of Ventura County who, by Measure S, are supporting our wonderful campus improvements.  They are paying that Bond back.  They, and their children, deserve education.  As more and more colleges become impacted, and classes close early, giving some priority to students within certain zipcodes is a good alternative.

As Oxnard College’s FTES/workload cap is reduced, so that we can only serve a fraction of the students we used to, we need to accept and understand that our students do indeed go to Ventura and sometimes, Moorpark, and we should try and make sure that they get their classes at those two places as well.  Our students need to be able to get classes, that’s the bottom line.

So, I’ll be running around with copies of  AP 5055 and suggesting a couple of changes:

a zip code priority (to be combined with the unit priority)

AND

moving high school students in our zip codes into a higher priority.

 

The current policy places high school students last (we have an exemption, apparently, for our middle college – which may be enough; but I think we should discuss it).

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 17, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

The Fall Plenary Session

12 Nov

Dear Colleagues:

I did my homework and so the Plenary Session made lots of sense to me.  There’s a lot in this post, and most of you will want to skim it until an item catches your eye – everyone is affected by the changes of the last year – and the upcoming changes.  I am in no way expert on the resolutions or work of our State Academic Senate, but I did get to:

1.  (briefly) meet our new State Chancellor, Dr. Brice Harris, and listen to him speak.

Impressions:  He’s very open and definitely knows how to work with faculty.  His mission (as it should be with all Chancellors) is to empower the community colleges.  He is one of our main voices vis-á-vis the state legislature; it is through our resolutions that we advise him of our positions.

2.  Attend a mini-version of the Leadership Conference, which was very helpful.

3.  Meet our State Exec Board and confer with Wheeler North (our state expert on procedure) on our recent issue involving a 6-2 vote in our Senate, and whether that passed the motion or not (it did – I’ll be reporting at Senate and perhaps blogging about that; my initial intuition was correct but Wheeler lacked my hesitancy because he really knows his stuff about procedure).

4.  Meet most of the rest of the Exec Board and many of our State level Senators (what amazing people they are).

5.  Meet people from all around the State and have many conversations about so many things, all of which was extremely helpful;  Moorpark and Ventura are the two other colleges I know best, but they are not (by any means) the only two other colleges in this great state!

6.  Go to break-outs on various issues (Minimum quals, Program discontinuance, Accreditation and much more) and vote on resolutions regarding our future.  In particular, there were three resolutions regarding Math and its role in blocking/impeding the pathway of California Community College students, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic (or, viewed from another perspective:  those of lower socioeconomic status).  While there was absolutely no solution to the problem offered, the problem is clearly looming large and so many factors enter into it.  English is in a much better situation (not so much of a bottleneck).

In the process, I learned a lot about how to use our local Senate to meet our needs, to protect and improve programs (good Program Evaluation processes are key), and how to avoid some major pitfalls that would certainly result in warnings or worse from WASC.

Indeed, our new PEPR form (under revision by PEPC) adds an absolutely essential ingredient, one that the accrediting commission will certainly be looking for in the next round:  some sort of evaluation of programs/faculty in terms of compliance with SLO’s.

Did you know that in some districts and colleges, Boards of Trustees and Chancellors are advocating that compliance with SLO rules be added to a faculty’s formal evaluation process?  Further, did you know that in some colleges and districts, having bad evaluations can be a cause for termination?  Neither is true in our District (we have a GREAT union; thank you, local AFT 1828).  I learned that in many areas, the union and the Senate overlap and must work together, and it is way better to do that amongst ourselves than to allow Chancellors and/or Boards to impose conditions upon us.  We are fortunate to have both a Board and a Chancellor (right now) that wants us to do just that (work things out among ourselves).  I’d say that about half the colleges I know about are in the same happy boat with us, and about half are in the unhappy boat.

Both the ASCCC and the AAUP stand firmly against any such interference from administration in our academic affairs, in our classrooms.  At the same time, the law is clear:  we must give proof of results (learning outcomes).  As standardized tests become more and more the route to external evaluation, we can resist this trend only by inventing meaningful local processes of evaluation.

Evaluating a program as to its collection of data about SLO’s and its general improvement of standards is quite different than evaluating an individual faculty person.  We hope that the second thing will never come to pass (how long we can hold off on that is anyone’s guess, it’s certainly something that many members of the general public want to see happen).  This year, you will be expected to provide a lot more detail about your program’s SLO’s (made easy, we hope, by eLumens – if you’ve stayed on track in eLumens it will be very easy indeed).  Naturally, you’ll want to complain about the extra analysis and narrative (if you are a lead faculty person – the rest of you can relax), but keep in mind that the alternative (having it added to that evaluation form during our next contract negotiations) is not at all a better solution.  It is the worst solution.

I also learned that there are a host of other areas where faculty are going to be expected to implement change:

7.  Professional Development has new issues that we need to address, including issues regarding protection of Sabbaticals (oddly, release time for Senate is not under scrutiny in the same way; right now it’s general Professional Development and Sabbaticals that are under scrutiny).

8.  Every campus is pondering its ratio of CTE to Transfer to Basic Skills courses and every campus has difficulties in this area.  There are no clear guidelines or precedents, it really is up to the local colleges, their planning bodies, and their administration.  In the absence of clear guidelines from PBC, we can continue to expect our administrators to solve our local planning on their own.  We need to make PBC a strong planning group and give it a way of airing these issues among faculty.  Yes, there’s a possibility for contention (that’s not a bad thing, by the way), but it should not be “management vs. faculty” over these issues.  It should not be CTE Dean vs. Liberal Studies Dean.  It should be faculty, amongst themselves, making recommendations (and where needed, giving minority reports, as clearly, a purely democratic process or majority rule will not resolve the intellectual and value problems that are currently in front of us).

On this same topic, I learned about a lot more variables than I had ever thought about before.  That’s what happens when you stick 50 involved faculty in one room, with leaders who are well prepped, and then have a long, fairly well moderated conversation.  Most of us sat silently and let people who had done research or a lot of thought have the floor.  It was overwhelming to be packed with 16 hours or so of such knowledge but I am getting used to it.  For an anthropologist, there’s a lot to notice.  But at the Senate, there’s no difference betwen CTE and non-CTE, Counselors or Instructors, Basic Skills and Transfer, etc.

9.  Every State mandate is underfunded, but unless a campus can show dire fiscal emergency (which can in turn jeopardize accreditation, as we are learning from the San Francisco City College situation) the campus still has to comply.  The question of what is an Ed Plan and who can sign off on one is hotly debated.  There were no resolutions regarding this question.  Here are the various personnel currently signing off on Ed Plans (which come in two flavors:  regular and comprehensive, only a regular ed plan is mandated by the Student Success Act):

Counselors (all varieties)

Counseling assistants (classified personnel)

Instructional Faculty (lots and lots of instructional faculty advisement, to the point that some instructional faculty want their union contracts to reflect this as a new category of work).  In our case, if instructional faculty are advising (and they are, particularly about AA-T’s in their own fields), we would have to decide firstly whether this was an ordinary office hour activity (which it appears to be), and whether our office hours will be sufficient in the future for this task as the TMC rolls out; and secondly, whether excess hours in advisement count toward our 87.5 or whatever that number is of extra hours per semester).

10.  Transfer Model Curriculum, its impact, etc.  Obviously, not everyone is going to have TMC.  What does this mean for everyone else?  As new legislation goes forward, enumerating (for example) that “the 50 most popular courses in the State shall do X” or “the 20 most popular majors shall do Y”, we need to realize that whether we like it or not, the State is mandating divisions on campus.  Traditional, non-AA granting CTE programs are well advised to have certificates, and low unit certificates are in our future.  We did pass a resolution regarding the advisability of low unit certificates, but with no numbers regarding what constitutes a low unit certificate.  Whether these can actually be transcripted is another issue, one that the State Chancellor’s Office will now be asked to weigh in upon.  Certainly, you can’t expect to have a 3 unit certificate!  Some colleges/districts are so far ahead of us on this one, it’s obvious that their Scorecards (we all have Scorecards now) will give them higher grades than OC will get.  New certificates at OC need to be budget neutral (we’re not talking new classes, necessarily, but if so, certainly that means an older class will have to be less frequent in rotation).  Keep in mind that if your certificate is CTE, it has to follow the program review and other requirements for CTE – regardless of host discipline.  Not all certificates are CTE (Peace Studies, Non-Violence Studies are not, to my knowledge, whereas Conflict Resolution studies is a CTE certificate that enables a person to begin a career pathway as a mediator).

It seems very likely that the UC system will soon look at TMC the same way the CSU’s do.  There is a strong movement to get rid of the “preference for local students” at the CSU and UC levels (coming from community college instructors).  We passed a resolution asking the State AS to investigate the impact of changing this incredibly important aspect of our current transfer model.  Only one person spoke to the issue of “many students can’t afford any college but their local one” but I am certain that issue will be brought up again if this resolution is brought back in a stronger form (and I believe it will be).  This would have enormous impact on Oxnard College students (if they no longer got preference at CSUCI, for example).  In the meantime, we need to remember that while it is likely that CSUCI and CSUN will not disallow our regular AA degrees for transfer, they may certainly decide to give preference to those possessing an AA-T or AS-T.  If we combine these various matriculation requirements in a bundle, we can foresee a future in which CSUCI might retain a preference for OC students (using our AA-T’s and AS-T’s that they’ve agreed to) but only if we lobby for it and actually produce enough AA-T’s and AS-T’s.  The State Senate affirmed the right of every local college to continue to award AA’s and AS’s of its own choosing, including maintaining dual degrees (both an A.A. and an A.A.-T in the same subject).  This is in light of many colleges (often under pressure from administration) to end their local AA’s as soon as the AA-T is in place.  Sometimes, though, it is faculty themselves who decide to end the AA in a discipline as soon as the AA-T is in place (for the obvious reason that with many subjects, if you’re not clearly planning to transfer, you might as well choose another major or for the reason that it is overall cheaper and faster for a student and therefore more likely for a student to succeed if they do the AA-T or AS-T).  We will be deciding this for OC, so stay tuned.

Why keep an AA, you might ask?  Well, those students take Health Education and Physical Education (that’s the main difference) and may also take more electives.  They are spending their financial aid money (if they’re on financial aid) at a faster rate than the current financial aid model allows, so should we encourage that?  Please keep in mind that 30-35% of OC’s students are not on the kinds of financial aid that limit units so severely – so we need to serve them too.  What if a student wants the old style degree (for whatever reason)?  Both degrees transfer (but one may give a student a leg up in an increasingly crowded transfer situation – and that’s the AA-T or AS-T).  Moorpark has, I believe, elected to remove the AA once the AA-T is in place.  It makes for a cleaner catalog and a clear path to transfer.  It also makes disciplines “look” different – only 20 disciplines will have AA-T’s.  I think we need to wait until students understand the changes more thoroughly – and, as a second result from attending plenary, I believe that we have a central and all-encompassing agenda item to consider:

How do we keep students aware of and abreast of all these changes?  

Remember how the principal used to come on the intercom in high school and announce all kinds of things?  The portal is supposedly doing that now (I think it is a weak substitute for the human voice).  Many faculty are claiming that they don’t have in-classroom time (or the knowledge) to teach their students about articulation, transfer pathways, financial aid and so much more.  I think there are many, many solutions to this (and that with just a tiny amount of creativity – such as moving one quiz online or using clickers for roll call or whatever else you can think of, you all can find the time to teach your students about transfer and career pathways, or to have someone else come into your classroom to help you teach them).  Naturally, we also need student workshops, tutorials in the library, posters (most colleges have so many more posters up than we do!), portal announcements, widgets on D2L homepages, better use of webpage – on and on.  We need better connections to the ASG.  We need to put some things at the top of our syllabi that perhaps we have not thought to prioritize before (and go over them on the first day of class).  We need to encourage students to use our office hours to learn more about transfer and career pathways.  

Well, that’s it for now from the plenary.  Most everyone I talked to found the plenary to be exhausting (we were working on a Saturday on a holiday weekend, of course); most people who are new are working 7 days a week and long hours (it was good to know I’m not the only person who has devote an excessive amount of time to learning the ropes).  It’s Sunday and I’m thinking maybe I’ll relax a bit before the Accreditation team arrives bright and early Tuesday morning…maybe play some ping pong.

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on November 12, 2012 in 10 + 1, ASCCC, Ed Plans, Laws & Code, PGM Committees, Plenary Sessions, Program Evaluation, Transfer Model Curriculum

 

Tags:

← Older posts
 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.