Glendale Community College
Home MenuDecember 2020 • glendale.edu/StayingConnected
The Campaign for College Opportunity honors GCC
The Campaign for College Opportunity has once again honored GCC for being a Champion of Higher Education and ensuring that more students can reach their transfer goals. The college was named one of the leading California Community Colleges in awarding students Associate Degrees for Transfer. Only 11 out of 114 colleges earned this distinction.
Adelante GCC: Advancing Glendale College toward HSI Excellence
GCC has been awarded a new $3 million Title V grant ($600,000/year for 5 years.) The purpose of the Adelante GCC: Advancing Glendale College toward HSI Excellence grant is to improve student learning and completion outcomes for GCC’s Hispanic and other disproportionately impacted students by furthering Guided Pathways efforts currently underway. Among the stated aims for the Adelante GCC grant:
- expand opportunities for developing personal financial literacy, for exploring careers, and for work-based learning that meaningfully connect students’ academic experiences to career aspirations
- support professional development efforts to increase diversity among the faculty, cultural competency among faculty and staff, and the institutional practice of equity-mindedness
- bolster GCC’s identity and reputation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution through community outreach and involvement
- Adelante GCC is committed to working with colleagues throughout the campus to help Glendale Community College become each year a more fully student-centered institution.
For more information about Adelante GCC, please contact: Michael Davis, Activity Director, mdavis@glendale.edu, Ext. 5864 or Cathy Durham, Project Director, cdurham@glendale.edu, Ext. 5397.
External security: Watch for the [EXTERNAL] tag
Reminder: Be extra cautious before opening emails that are tagged [EXTERNAL] especially if they appear as if they are from the college. Due to a number of phishing attacks, ITS has now implemented a new feature that makes it easier to recognize potentially harmful external emails. Legitimate emails from within the college will not contain an [EXTERNAL] tag. External emails are not inherently bad, but the new tag serves as a reminder to be on guard.
Updates from Guided Pathways
In the month of November, a Learning & Professional Pathways workshop series was held in collaboration with ASGCC, Guided Pathways, counseling faculty, and instructional faculty. The workshops provided a platform where students learned directly from counselors and professors on how to make informed choices on careers and majors in their particular LPP. This was the first in what should become a yearly event for the campus. Recordings of the sessions will be available on the LPP draft webpage in case you missed it! We look forward to launching a public version of the site by early next year containing a comprehensive overview of LPPs, informational videos, industry pathways within LPPs, degrees and certificates, and program maps.
Thank you to all involved in the various pieces of the LPP project as well as our other Guided Pathways initiatives. And as always, if you would like to join any of the workgroups or meetings, please visit us at glendale.edu/gp.
War of the Worlds Production
When GCC quickly transitioned to a remote learning environment in March, we initially focused on maintaining a safe environment and ensuring our students obtained a high-quality education. Now that the pandemic has extended remote learning through the entire 2020-2021 academic year, many of our colleagues are demonstrating how to progress from surviving to thriving.
For example, GCC’s Theatre Arts Department re-imagined the student experience when it recently staged an impressive virtual retelling of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” Student-actors, through no-contact delivery, were provided “kits” that included costumes, lighting instruments and cameras. Using GCC-produced how-to videos, the students transformed their bedrooms into mini studios for a visually exciting performance that recreated the look and feel of the 1930s. The remote learning environment gave our student-actors an opportunity to expand their experience beyond performance to include stage design and lighting and broadcast streaming. Look for other creative productions in the near future.
Astronomy Lab Goes To Mt. Wilson
Jennifer Krestow, GCC astronomy and physics professor, astronomy department head and director of the college planetarium, treated her students to a remote astronomy observing lab from Mt. Wilson Observatory in November.
Jennifer has been collaborating with the astronomers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, as well as the staff at the Mt. Wilson Observatory and had the first live test session November 12 for her astronomy laboratory class. She ran the zoom class from the 60" telescope dome which has wireless network, with a video capture from a special camera designed to fit where an eyepiece usually goes to broadcast the images captured by the telescope. Viewed were Jupiter, and three of the Galilean moons, Saturn and a few of its moons, the Blue Snowball planetary Nebula, Epsilon Lyrae, and the central region of the spiral galaxy, NGC 7331. All of Jennifer’s lab students participated, as did some of her lecture students and a couple of colleagues.
Of future lab experiences from Mt. Wilson, Jennifer says, “the plan now is to iron out the bugs using OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) to have multiple feeds when we start to stream live via YouTube in January. Every weekly session I'll be on hand as the astronomy expert, Chris (my husband and Carnegie astrophysicist) will operate the telescope and Tom Meneghini, the Executive Director of Mt. Wilson Observatory, will be there too to make sure things go smoothly. A small band of avid explorers!
So, while it's taken longer than I'd hoped to get this program off the ground, I'm confident that it will offer our present and future GCC students a fantastic opportunity.”
Please share your “Remote and Thriving” experience at GCC to inspire your colleagues and show prospective students that GCC is “Ready and Able” to help them achieve their educational goals. Send your story to the Office of Communications at comms@glendale.edu.
Retiree Streaming Event
GCC will say farewell to 73 colleagues who have either retired or are about to retire during a streaming event to be held on Friday, December 11 at 3:30 p.m.
If you would like to watch, you can find it at www.glendale.edu/retirement2020.