MINUTES

High Tech Center Training Unit Advisory Committee Meeting

High Tech Center Training Unit – De Anza Community College

Friday, October 3, 2003

COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Carl Brown HTCTU, De Anza HTCTU Director present

Myra Lerch Butte College Region 1 present

Thad Selmants Sierra College Region 2 present

Judy Lariviere Skyline College Region 3 present

Kathleen Allen Chabot College Region 4 present

Laura Ingram Merced College Region 5 present

Laurie Vasquez Santa Barbara City College Region 6 present

Lyn Clemons El Camino College Region 7 not present

Vacant Vacant Region 8

Brian Brautigam Victor Valley College Region 9 present

Carl Fielden Grossmont College Region 10 present

STAFF/PRESENTERS

Peggy Tate Chancellor’s Office not present

Bob Martinengo ATPC present

New Business

Election for a new chairperson took place. Carl Fielden was nominated and accepted the position. Carl Brown then reviewed with Fielden the responsibilities of the HTCTU advisory committee chairperson which include: reviewing proposed agendas, identifying issues that need to be brought to the HTCTU committee’s attention as well as the Chancellor’s Office and, on rare occasions, making an appearance at the regional coordinator’s meeting in Sacramento.

Staff Reports

Carl Brown reported forward momentum with regard to development of new trainings and implementation of new software. A handout was provided showing the number of trainings and participants during the last quarter.

Carl also reported to the committee about the State of the System presentation he attended in Sacramento. There was great concern expressed by college presidents and chancellors about finance and budget for the year 2004-2005 and what’s going to happen for the balance of this year’s budget. As already predicted, 2004-2005 will be the most difficult year in the entire history of the California Community Colleges. There was a 60% fee increase in the colleges which discouraged a significant number of students/enrollees. The number of courses that were being offered from the community colleges was drastically reduced. Ongoing students are taking enrolling in all available courses leading very little for students who just graduated from high school. In an effort to improve the political constituency of students in California community colleges, San Francisco community college has developed a drop-in module that goes into online registration that allows students to register to vote. The information is then shipped directly to the registrar of voters. See transcript of presentation

http://www.cccco.edu/executive/chancellor/speeches/sos_03.pdf

Alternate Media Overview

Gaeir Dietrich reported to the committee that all of the BrailleNotes from the BrailleNote Loan program have been loaned for the next year consisting of 12 standard and 3 with GPS. In addition, the Fremont School for the Blind has a BrailleNote training in CD format that is planned for inclusion in future BrailleNote packages. Gaeir reported that the Folsom video captioning project has produced 87 captioned video tapes. Unfortunately, only 9 campuses are participating in this program.

Gaeir is also currently working with a new company called Automatic Sync. The company is able to produce a time coded script from an MP3 recording of a videos audio track and a transcript. The process appears to being efficient and highly economical and will work with the captioning equipment currently used by California community colleges.

New trainings include Advance Duxbury and Alternate Media Resources. Gaeir will co-teach the Alternate Media Resources training with Bob Martinengo of ATPC. Dots Plus will also be offered next quarter.

Sean Keegan, Sam Ogami and Gaeir Dietrich will be attending the CAPED conference in Los Angeles and the Accessing Higher Ground Conference in Boulder, Colorado.

Web Accessibility Overview

Sean Keegan introduced the newly launched HTCTU website, www.htctu.net. He is currently developing a back-in database for all HTCTU locations/sites and individuals. All information is currently in the process of being updating. Sean is also working on improving the level of accessibility of the listserve. The HTCTU intends to license the Web accessibility training from WebAim. These resources will be hosted as online trainings available through the two remaining CVC sites as well as @One. These resources will be available to all California community college faculty and staff. Sean hopes to have these resources operational by early January, 2004. Sean will be attending the CSUN conference and will also be giving a presentation on PDF accessibility at Boulder, Colorado. Sean will also be delivering several online trainings through Horizon live regarding web accessibility in the weeks after CAPED.

Assistive Technology Overview

Sam Ogami talked about his ongoing work with the Daisy Creation Tools and is hoping the tools will be released by winter depending upon the final cycle of product testing. He is also testing a new service called Generator Tool that allows the user to submit e-text electronically and receive Daisy formatted text electronically in return. The ACT section in the new HTCTU website is also being updated by providing a technical support pages for specialist’s having questions or inquiries on ACT software and its links. Sam also reported to the committee his meeting with the Apple people, and software accessibility to the new MacOS.

ATPC Status Report

Bob Martinengo, ATPC Supervisor, updated the committee on their program review made last May. He also identified their new ATPC director, Kay Faulconer-Boger.

Bob confirmed to the committee the ATPC’s success rate with the publisher which is 60% and 70% with the big publishers. Carl Brown reviewed with Bob some suggestions discussed during the last Regional Coordinator’s meeting in Sacramento regarding colleges receiving damaged books at no cost from their local bookstore and developing a relationship with Amazon.com, an online book retailer, as a first step in creating a form of book scholarship fund.

There was a discussion regarding the number of books scanned from campuses using the high speed scanner and how this is contributing to the AMX database. Carl Brown made it clear that if the student owns the book and demonstrate proofs of ownership, alternate use of the book is covered by the Chaffey amendment. There was also a proposed strategy that the ATPC is exploring called tracking the media. Based on a student identifier using a database to track information from student’s past requests, and with the addition of extra features, it would be a useful and more convenient service than writing their own new database. Carl raised a question on the length of time the request process would require. Bob assured it would take less than 24 hours via web delivery using a third party provider software.

Learning Disability Research Study

Carl gave a progress report since the last advisory committee. The six colleges participating in the study met with members of the research team at the HTCTU for a day discussion and training about the study. Each college participated in the PDFaloud training developed by Stacey Kayden, and were given the software and guidelines for collecting student data. All data have been collected are with Rose Asera, the principal researcher. There were minor questions about a particular segment of the study, the Nelson Denny reading scores which could be presented in several different formats. Rose developed a standardized format for those colleges who reported this particular data. Results for students using PDFaloud appear positive although some colleges will still require additional training in the production on appropriate PDF documents. Some tried reading Adobe E-book and PDF image files but failed. They were then taught to create an embedded text document which is standard PDF.

The data analysis on the baseline data should begin within the next few weeks and should provide a preliminary analysis of possible correlation between the learning disability scores and how they scored in social science courses. The demographics survey forms have been sent. These forms include questions about gender, age, goals for community colleges and some questions on how they use the software. The whole study has a one year lifel and was launched in July, 2003.

Carl also introduced to the group the Abbey Fine Reader version 7, an industrial strength product more powerful than Omnipage.

Campus Issues

Laurie gave an update on DETAC, Distance Education Technical Advisory Committee. They are working on a summary of the online needs assessment survey that was sent out to all distance education coordinators last semester. All data are being compiled and reviewed with issues regarding accessibility. A handout with accessibility results based on the survey was provided. There was a issue discussion regarding the amount of energy spent on making e-packs accessible for online courses. E-packs are publisher courses that are neatly packaged to sell to faculty who are teaching online.

Laurie also talked about academic freedom and accessibility. Laurie clarified that as district employees, faculty are responsible for complying with all laws and regulations including access. She suggested reviewing college policies on academic freedom for the any language that would naturally include a nod to access.

Training faculty on accessibility. Laurie commented that there are several places to put training information on accessibility. College web standards on the college web page, creating a web policy that speaks to procedural implications for creating accessibility within faculty developed pages, training new faculty, plus adjuncts and retraining faculty who are long employees.

Proctoring online tests, and how faculty address the issue. Laurie discussed a brief survey she conducted with Distance Education coordinators re: what instructors do when it comes to online proctoring. The questions were:

Do instructors proctor the exams themselves?

Is there a place on campus that is designated for online proctoring?

Who proctors?

How do instructors proctor online test for students outside the community?

Do you have a proctoring policy or procedure? We should be sure

The results have implications for faculty who are accommodating students with disabilities and how they handle designing tests to be taken online.

Laurie also informed the committee about her meeting with the people from Aleks Software Company who create a self-paced math assessment program for students. This is being used in math instructional labs. She also shared with the group her campuses’ Access Technology Work Plan. From this work plan, there were discussions about tools campuses use to check for accessibility. How should the access specialist advise the campus in considering what is standard??

Bobby was ruled out, as well as Cynthia Says. Sean recommended the HI software technology called ACC monitor which monitors the entire site and provides feedback on errors and violations. Sean is trying to get HI software which is based in New York, to do trainings or shoot a video for product demonstration at the HTCTU. Buying the software with the site license for the college was also a possibility. There is also LIFT online for site monitoring that checks multiple pages as well as InFocus, a desktop tool that also corrects accessibility errors.

There was a discussion about CCC Apply, a grant project. This is a universal college application form for students. Project accessibility remains uncertain. The HTCTU will continue to participate as a project resource.

Handouts Provided

Minutes, June 6, 2003

HTCTU fall trainings 2003

Automatic Sync handout

Accessibility Results From the CVC needs assessment report)

Next Meeting: February 6, 2004