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Professional Development College (PDC)

Welcome to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Professional Development College (PDC). The Academic Senate (ASCCC) initiated the PDC in 2014 to serve as a comprehensive professional development resource for all faculty, staff, and administrators in the California community colleges. Faculty experts under the direction of the ASCCC design each PDC course to provide timely training that participants can complete at their own convenience. The courses all include expected outcomes and assessments to test the participants’ knowledge after completion of the course. 

The ASCCC Professional Development College continues to add new complete courses and openly licensed Canvas modules for incorporation into your local professional development opportunities. In addition, college credit is available for some courses. Please send us your suggestions for additional PDC topics and questions about the PDC.

IMPORTANT: All courses are offered via Canvas and set so that you can “self-enroll”. Please be sure that you are logged into your home instance of Canvas before attempting to access any PDC course. If this does not work – or you are not faculty – please contact us for assistance.

Currently Available Courses

Curriculum

Curriculum Development – The PDC is pleased to offer a five-course series that provides an overview of various aspects of curriculum development. Participants who complete all five courses may be eligible to earn ASCCC’s Curriculum Development Certificate of Completion. In order to earn a Certificate, all components of the five-course series must be successfully completed. Each course consists of multiple units. There is a quiz associated with each unit and a final exam for each course. Successful completion requires earning 100% on all quizzes and at least 80% on the final exam for each course. All assessments are multiple-choice. While quizzes may be taken more than once, the final exam for each course can only be taken once. Individuals who are interested in having their work formally recognized should contact Krystinne Mica for more information. The completion of the series should take approximately eight hours.

Important: All courses are offered via Canvas and set so that you can “self-enroll”. Please be sure that you are logged into your home instance of Canvas before attempting to access any PDC course. If this does not work – or you are not faculty – please contact us for assistance.

I. Curriculum 101: Introduction and Types of Courses

II. Programs and Awards

III. The Course Outline of Record (COR)

IV. Program and Degree Proposals

V. Focus on Career Technical Education (CTE)

Governance

Important: All courses are offered via Canvas and set so that you can “self-enroll”. Please be sure that you are logged into your home instance of Canvas before attempting to access any PDC course. If this does not work – or you are not faculty – please contact us for assistance.

ASCCC Participatory Governance

Orienting New Faculty and Teaching

Important: All courses are offered via Canvas and set so that you can “self-enroll”. Please be sure that you are logged into your home instance of Canvas before attempting to access any PDC course. If this does not work – or you are not faculty – please contact us for assistance.

New Faculty Orientation

Teaching Incarcerated Students

Open Educational Resources and Accessibility

The ASCCC OERI has developed two self-paced courses to prepare faculty who are planning to develop/curate OER. Please note that Accessibility Basics provides an overview of accessibility intended for all faculty – it is not limited to accessibility in the context of OER.

Important: All courses are offered via Canvas and set so that you can “self-enroll”. Please be sure that you are logged into your home instance of Canvas before attempting to access any PDC course. If this does not work – or you are not faculty – please contact us for assistance.

Register for ASCCC OERI – OER Basics

OER Basics serves as an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) providing faculty with new options for selecting textbooks and other resources so they can make the best decisions for their students. At the end of this self-paced course successful participants will be able to:

  • Properly identify the creative commons (CC) license on a resource and describe how this resource can and cannot be used.
  • Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of open resources using current research in the field as evidence.
  • Research, analyze and review repositories of open resources.
  • Effectively search for open resources and post reviews in an OER repository.
  • Create an open resource by remixing multiple existing resources and designate a license to this new resource based on the licenses of multiple resources use.

Register for ASCCC OERI – Accessibility Basics

This course was designed with two compatible goals. It is intended to:

  • introduce all faculty to the basics of developing accessible content and
  • provide faculty who will be developing and/or curating open educational resources (OER) with an understanding of accessibility basics.

The ASCCC OERI has integrated accessibility training into much of its work as today’s faculty member is certain to be interacting with students in a digital environment. As we hope to interact with all faculty in the California Community Colleges, we believe it is important to do what we can to ensure that no faculty member is creating accessibility barriers for students. Accessibility is a complicated topic. Our goal is to ensure that you understand the basics of accessibility. Many courses and OER projects will require more extensive training. Our focus here is on the creation of accessible online content, regardless of the platform you are working in.

ASCCC Canvas Resources

As Canvas is the course management system used by the California Community Colleges, the PDC courses are all offered in Canvas – providing faculty with not only professional development appropriate content, but an opportunity to experience being an online student. In addition to providing modules and courses for instruction, Canvas shells can be used to share resources.

ASCCC OERI

While the ASCCC OERI website is intended to be the public-facing communications for the OERI, its Canvas space allows for less formal faculty-to-faculty sharing. The site is available without a log-in, but enrollment is required to receive messages and participation in discussions.

ASCCC Guided Pathways Handbook

This Canvas space contains a repository of resources related to Guided Pathways. These mainly faculty-developed resources combine the preservation of prior work, advisory material, and research and data. This site also is meant to serve as a collegial environment for networking and engagement on Guided Pathways.

This page last updated January 30, 2023.