Meeting & Agendas

A number of departments were affected by an apparent change in the handling of ACC-generated Google student email accounts for (a) students who had not claimed their accounts, and (b) applicants who had not yet been moved to student status. The college is awaiting an official decision as to whether to reverse the decision and return to the process, or whether to change the administrative rule regarding student emails and allow students to use their personal email accounts. At the CORE meeting, some of the key departments affected by the change were not present, but OIEA was represented and indicated that disclosure emails to prospective students need to go to official ACC email accounts.

ACC has terminated its contract with Experian QAS. Once the student admissions applications were transitioned from the in-house web application to CRM Recruit, QAS Pro Web was no longer needed. Experian was never able to live up to their promises to make QAS Batch and QAS Pro integration with Colleague/Unidata possible. The burden fell on IT and an assessment of the resources needed to make valuable use of QAS products, in conjunction with the constantly changing nature of Colleague, led to the decision to terminate the contract.

CE has presented 3 spreadsheets designed to show how CE will be incorporating the Area of Study concept into Colleague. Don articulated the plan and the CORE Committee agreed to contribute to the implementation. The CE plan is consistent with the Credit Courses concept, but due to the complicated nature of the associations between Areas of Study, Academic Programs, and Departments, it is hard to gauge how long it will take to complete.

The most recent departmental name change request involved a change from 'Instructional Services' (which actually does not exist in Colleague and the web app databases) to 'Teaching & Learning Excellence'. In the request the 6 offices that make up the Teaching and Learning Excellence Division were listed. The question before the CORE Committee is whether to treat the Teaching & Learning Excellence division as a department, or whether to treat the six offices as six separate departments? Since this an administrative, rather than an academic, department it seemed like HR should make the call as this primarily affects how to associate employees with the department in which they work. The decision was in favor of creating just the one department. In Colleague there is no field for Office in terms of showing an association with a department. Similarly, there is no field for an 'umbrella' department or division that is associated with multiple departments. The new department, with the code TLED, is expected to be created in Colleague on August 11, 2017.

The President's Cabinet has asked IT to begin looking at transitioning from Unidata to MS SQL Server. Of immediate interest are the cost of converting and the time it would take to convert. IT is researching this. Data Cleanup is a big part of the time needed to transition successfully. The CORE Committee will be helping in the assessment. Currently we are looking at the PERSON file, with its high number of data errors linked to the PERSON.USER2 field. IT will begin to take a deeper look and try to determine what process is continuing to update this data element, and whether this field is still of value. IT will also resurrect the Data Cleanup subcommittee ... not sure where the spare time is going to be found to do this, but it is a good idea.

The CORE Committee was intrigued by the fact that the CROA Ellucian Consultant was using the TERM.REG.START.DATE field successfully with other institutions. The Committee is interested in beginning to use it, as long as sufficient testing and review time is allowed to ensure that population of this field will not disrupt any existing processes.

There were several complaints about the slow performance of UI5, in comparison with its predecessor UI4. The complaints seemed to be related to data entry tasks.