Academic Senate for California Community Colleges
By Dan Crump
The ASCCC Fall Plenary Session was held at the Irvine Marriott from November 1-3.
In addition to a wide variety of breakout topics, the Session delegates also vote on resolutions which guide the work of the ASCCC and provide guidance to the ASCCC leadership in their work with CCC partners (e.g. Board of Governors, Chancellor’s Office, CEOs, CIOs, CSSOs, CBOs, Student Senate). Resolutions discussed, debated, and voted upon by the delegates included such issues as the new Funding Formula, the California Online Community College, AB 705, and Guided Pathways. The text of the resolutions can be found on the ASCCC website (asccc.org) under Events/Plenary Sessions/Fall 2018/Resolutions. I want to give a special shout out to Chisato Uyeki, a librarian from Mt San Antonio College and a Session attendee. She authored an amendment to a resolution (13.01)---Provide Sufficient Resources and Adequate Support for AB 705---which called for the inclusion of libraries as one of the “academic, concurrent, and student support services…to ensure that all students have the support they need to be successful after AB 705 implementation.” Bravo!
The ASCCC will formally launch its comprehensive statewide Open Educational Resources Initiative, OERI, in the spring 2019 term. Presently, efforts are underway to increase OER awareness, gather data related to OER use at our colleges, and to identify OER use and needs for specific disciplines. OERI is in the process of identifying contacts at each of our colleges to provide us with data related to OER use and we will soon be distributing discipline-based surveys to pilot a discipline-based approach to OER needs assessment. In order to increase OER awareness more generally, a series of weekly webinars has been scheduled.
The Academic Senate tracks important pieces of legislation that fall within academic and professional matters as well as bills that may be of interest to faculty. Of the bills that were still viable, September 30 was the last day for the governor to sign or veto them. Several bills that the ASCCC supported were vetoed by the governor or failed to pass the legislature, including AB310 (Medina) on Part Time Office Hours, AB1935 (Irwin) and SB1009 (Wilk) on Student Tutoring, and SB968 (Pan) on Mental Health Counselors. The governor did sign bills to expand credit for prior learning (AB1786 , Cervantes and SB1071, Roth) and extending the pilot baccalaureate program (SB1406, Hill), as well as requiring colleges to publish and evaluate their placement policies (AB1805 Irwin). Detailed information about the content and status of bills may be accessed at the California Legislative Information website. Also, information on advocacy as well as tools to track legislation may be found on the Faculty Association for California Community Colleges (FACCC) website. Additional ASCCC legislative updates and additional information may be found on the Legislative Update page as well as the Legislative and Advocacy Committee webpage. The new legislative cycle will begin officially in the new year.