Recently the Academic Senate forwarded to local senates the draft recommendations from the Student Success Task Force. They are also available at http://www.cccco.edu/ChancellorsOffice/TaskForceonStudent-Success/tabid…
Do you speak ASCCC? Involvement in senate activities at the state level seems to alter one’s speech and thinking. I never realized how strange we can sound until I saw a man’s face as he watched me on the phone while I was having my oil changed. I was probably saying something along the lines of “Are we ready for the DIG? Have you contacted the members of the FDRG? When is that ICC meeting?” Acronyms once were the norm; now numbers seem to be. “Did you read AB 515? Can you believe what happened to SB 292?” And, today, the numbers are most commonly are confronted with are 1143 and 1440.
Fall Session's theme, Managing Conflict by Balancing Principle and Pragmatism, was addressed by three keynote speakers. The first, AAUP staffer marcus harvey, chose to concentrate on the second word in this theme, conflict in and around academia. He questioned what conflict needs to be managed?
Our strength often increases in proportion to the obstacles imposed upon it.
-Paul de Rapin
There is much debate as to the use of the Internet by college counselors to provide counseling services through e-mail, chat rooms, and/or audio and video teleconferencing. Many reports have shown that this debate is prompted by the lack of regulations and professional standards for online counseling. The major concerns continue to be security, confidentiality, financial and computer support, and ethical standards. These issues continue to be debated on both campuses with online counseling and those currently not offering the service.
Well, the votes are in and the winner is...Wait a minute! there were no candidates on the state ballot, so there were no winners--or were there? We will leave that to the political pundits and such.
Much of the political and legislative energy this last year has been focused on the November special election.
While certainly not a victim of noncredit-phobia, I am undoubtedly securely attached to the credit aspect of our mission and slight leery of the unknown (aka "stranger anxiety"). Yet when the noncredit voice is ever-present at sacc (the system advisory committee on curriculum), when I hear one CIO asking another about combining credit and noncredit students in one classroom, and I watch my college refine its approval process for noncredit courses, the need to become truly knowledgeable about the role, function, and purpose of noncredit becomes apparent.
In preparing to revise the 1997 paper Good Practice for the Implementation of Prerequisites, some important questions emerged. What are good practices for the implementation of prerequisites? Do the detailed and specific guidelines provided in the paper about what community colleges need to do to validate requisites lead to the academically sound use of prerequisites? The need for this information screamed "conduct a survey!"-but where to begin? What did we really want to know-and what do we think is happening?
Raise your hand if at some time in your tenure as a faculty member you learned about a new college policy, process, or form from one of your students.
There seems to be a form for everything these days, and these processes seemingly change every day. at our campus there is a petition to add, a petition to drop, a petition to modify a major, a petition to graduate, a petition to be reinstated, a petition to get assistance in a multitude of areas, and a petition to, well-you get the idea-petitions abound. and these are just for the students.
The Basic Skills Committee this year envisions two breakouts sessions: the first, which took place at the Academic Senate Fall 2005 Plenary Session in Pasadena, focused on some of the attitudes that may stand in the way of meaningful progress toward meeting the needs of Basic Skills students. The second, planned for the Spring 2006 Plenary Session in San Francisco, will build on the discussion that took place in Pasadena to provide emerging best practices that can guide us throughout the state. What follows are some thoughts that framed the Pasadena discussion.