SACRAMENTO, CA - Six community college project teams and individual staff were recognized by the California Community Colleges Technology Award Program, sponsored by the California Community Colleges System’s Office and the Foundation for California Community Colleges.
This recognition took place earlier this week during the Board of Governors (BOG) meeting, and highlighted exemplary technology initiatives and leadership.

There are two distinct awards, the “Excellence in Technology Leadership Award” and the “Technology Focus Award.” The Excellence in Technology Leadership Award recognizes individuals within the educational technology community that resolve common institutional and instructional management challenges with ingenuity and resourcefulness. The California Community Colleges System Office wishes to acknowledge the contributions of individual leaders and to spotlight projects and initiatives that may serve as models for others. The Technology Focus Award recognizes excellence that evolves out of a comprehensive planning process closely linked to the institution’s mission and vision for the future. The award commends strategic, integrated, uses of technology that empower faculty and/or students through sources within reach of all campus constituents – and often the wider community.
The following individuals received the “2006 Excellence in Technology Leadership Awards:”

Dr. Allan MacDougall, South Orange CCD. Dr. MacDougall has been a professional educator for 38 years and has devoted 33 of those years to the California Community College system. From 1977 to 1984 he was the Dean of Research and Information Systems at Southwestern College and has served the South Orange County Community College District (SOCCCD) since 1984. He is currently the Interim Vice Chancellor of Technology and Learning Services, and under his leadership the South Orange County CCD has made significant progress in delivering cutting edge technology to students, faculty and staff. Dr. MacDougall has served a number of state and national organizations that further the goals of higher education technology. He has served as regional representative, program chair, vice-president, and president (two years) of CISOA. He represented the community college system for two years on the state Chancellor’s Consultation Council and was an appointed member of the Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Committee (TTAC). He was also president of the Southern California Institutional Researchers Association.

Dr. Ian Walton, Mission College. Dr. Walton has devoted nearly 30 years to California’s Community Colleges. He has been a mathematics instructor at Mission College since 1978, where he has been a ceaseless advocate of technology-mediated learning. Dr. Walton has a bachelor's degree in Pure Mathematics from the University of St. Andrews. He came to California as a Fulbright scholar and has a Ph.D. in Differential Equations from University of California at Santa Cruz. He has taught mathematics classes, including technology mediated and online algebra, at Mission College for nearly three decades and has received numerous teaching awards. Dr. Walton serves as a technology advocate through his role as President of the CCC Academic Senate and assisted in authoring technology and education focused papers adopted statewide by the Academic Senate. Dr. Walton served as a member of the statewide Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Committee (TTAC) for six years, and was also the inaugural faculty member of the Systemwide Architecture Committee (SAC) serving two years and advising TTAC and the CCC System Office on technology issues and evaluations of systemwide technology projects.

The project team recipients of the “2006 Technology Focus Awards” are:

Long Beach City College’s DARE to Care: Disability Accommodations tRaining Environment project is an interactive, Web-based, multimedia training program in which faculty learn to identify and handle disabled student issues in their on-campus and distance learning classes. The DARE project is available free to any faculty around the U.S. and the world. The program can be used by individual faculty for self-training, or by any educational institution that wishes to offer the program to its faculty population. As of April 2006, in addition to LBCC faculty users, over 200 users from 96 educational institutions nationwide have already used “DARE to Care” at their institutions. For more information about the Long Beach City College and its DARE to Care project see: www.lbcc.edu and www.dare.lbcc.edu

Foothill College’s Curriculum Management System (CMS) project is a database and curriculum management system developed by Foothill College to house the college's official course listings, course descriptions and related schedule and catalog information. The system offers deans and faculty a paperless process for updating their schedule and catalog listings, and a new place to house course outlines. In addition, a more powerful online schedule was offered to students, and the system offered the instruction office a sophisticated editing tool for managing changes to course information submitted by deans and faculty. For more information about Foothill College and its CMS project see: www.foothill.edu and www.foothill.edu/cms/

Riverside College’s Digital Open Media project consists of three parts: an Online Technology Quarterly, a Digital Academy, and an Online Limitation on Enrollment tutorial. All three parts share the goals of
(a) digitizing resources to increase access, and (b) the “open source” sharing and distribution of these resources throughout the California Community College system. The Online Technology Quarterly is offered to all California Community Colleges for rebranding at their institutions. The Digital Academy materials to date have distributed two DVDs worth of training to over 30 institutions. And the Open Campus’s online limitation on enrollment, which consists of a series of Internet-based tutorials that all prospective new online students must complete prior to registering for online classes, is being shared with other institutions as well. For more information about Riverside College and its Digital Open Media project see: www.rcc.edu and www.opencampus.com.

Santa Barbara City College’s Health Information Technology project actually begins back in 1997 when Santa Barbara City College led a regional consortium of eight colleges to develop a distance education Health Information Technology Program which provided access to training for careers in expanding health information fields. The concept and capability of this program has come a long way since then. Today, an expanded Health Information Technology/Cancer Information Management Program offers 5 degrees and certificates for over 700 registered students. Certification success rates exceed the national standards. In 2004, 100% of graduates passed the national RHIT Exam and 100% of clinical site supervisors expressed satisfaction with the competency of SBCC HIT students placed in their organizations.
For more information about Santa Barbara City College see: www.sbcc.edu

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office provides guidance for the 72 districts and 110 colleges that constitute the California community colleges system. The largest system of higher education in the nation, the California community colleges provided educational, vocational and transfer programs to more than 2.5 million students during academic year 2005-2006. More information about the system can be found at archive.cccco.edu.