SantiagoCanyonCollege
Technology Committee
Minutes
April 5th, 2005
2:35 p.m.
Room A 106
Present: Odette Borrey, Cari Cannon, Curt Childress (non-voting), Mary Halverson Alice Ho, Eric Hovanitz; Al Huerta, Regina Lamourelle and ScottJames.
Cari called meeting to order at 2:35 p.m.
Minutes of the March 1, 2005was approved.
Public Comments
Regina announced that the California Virtual Campus is offering a million-dollar technology grant for the colleges to update their technology. Mary said the purpose of the grant is to set up a regional center that will need commitment from District and maybe the Board’s approval.
Information
New web presence for SCC –
Cari announced that new SCC website has been moved to the new server and it will go live on April 6. The content owners need to review their pages and report to John Birk about the problem.
The new SCC website looks better, more professional. However some customization may be lostsuch as the banner for SLO Committee due to the new format. Scott commented that the big improvement of the new site is that everything is indexed and searchable. It’s easier for the students to find information. He will check the accessibility of the web pages later.
Audience response systems-
Cari distributed an article about Audience Response Systems. It’s a technology that allows audience to give feedback to the presenters during a presentation. At the flex workshop, the presenters used InterWrite school board to interact with audience. The active board from Promethean also has the feature. Members agreed this is something neat to have.
Interactive Whiteboard-
Al reported that during the active board trial week, Odette and some teachers as well as librarians have reviewed the product. Curt is working on a grid comparing active board and e-beam. He said each product has its unique features and will fit different needs. Scott noted that e-beam is good for teaching programming and is small and portable. Odette preferred the active board to e-beam because it’s easy to use and has a library of all the tools including graphics. The drawback is that the boardis heavy and need two people to move.
Mary discussed the possibilities ofpurchasing two boards as pilot. She also encouraged us to put the request in our DDP.
Future of distance education at SCC –
Cari has discussed distance education issue at Senate and at previous Tech Committee meeting and theneed to pre-assess the student’s ability before allowing them to take online course. Another problem is attendance. How can we make sure they go online as they should? We need to set up some standard and policy;college needs to have a vision for the distance education.
Mary agreed that we need to dialogue on how faculty see the future of SCC in Distance Education. As a young college, it would be foolish not to have a plan for distance education because it will not be easy to grow 3% each year.
Mary suggested us to forma subcommittee to look into this issue. The discussion should involve Bonnie Slager since she is the distance education coordinator.There is a possibility that we hire someone as online course designer/webmaster to design the online courses, set up policy and train the faculty.Mary asked us to do some research on this position. Do we need to hire a faculty for this position? Does he or she need classified support?
Cari said many colleges handle this function with an administrator to oversee a Distance Education Division.
Santa Ana has someone in charge of the distance education too. If we can start planning for this position and present to Senate, CPAC next year, we might be able to hire someone in charge of distance educationby the year of 2007-08.
Meeting adjourned at 4:05 pm.