Distance Education Advisory Group (DEAG)
The committee
The Distance Education Advisory Group is a college-wide advisory body at Ventura College. It was an Academic Senate body when I joined in Spring 2025, and under the revised Participatory Governance Handbook it now reports to the College Planning Committee. It provides research-informed guidance and recommendations on distance education and educational technology across the campus.
Year four
The committee's course
The committee's own materials lived in Teams threads, where an agenda from two meetings ago is hard to find and a new member starts with nothing. I proposed a Canvas course to hold them instead. The May 14, 2026 minutes record that the group supported it; Matthew Moore created the initial shell, and I took on its structure and development. Since then:
- Gathered the committee's past agendas and minutes into it, so the record is in one place.
- Reorganized the materials over the summer and fixed most of the accessibility problems an audit of its pages turned up, then reported to Matthew Moore what I had found and changed.
- Wrote a fourteen-chapter module at the request of district distance-education staff, who saw how I work with AI tools during a screen-share in July and asked to see more.
- Enrolled the committee. At the first meeting of fall 2026 the group agreed, without objection, to enroll all of its members, and I took on keeping the course current by posting each meeting's agenda and minutes after it meets.
Canvas exposes an API, and I did the reorganization through it with Claude, reading the existing structure, generating the new one, and applying changes in bulk. That made it practical to audit every page for accessibility and rebuild the module layout.
The course has five modules:
| Module | Holds |
|---|---|
| 1 · Start Here | The committee's charge, member roster, goals, and governance structure |
| 2 · Meetings | Agendas and minutes, grouped by academic year |
| 3 · Standing Items | The recurring topics: the DE strategic plan, AI and academic integrity, testing and proctoring, accessibility |
| 4 · Resource Library | Shared documents and a hub of external links |
| AI-Use Showcase | The fourteen-chapter module described above |
When Matthew Moore, one of the group's tri-chairs, opened it to the committee, he described it as "the course that Howard created for us … a repository of important resources for the committee," and invited members to use it as a second source in that week's strategic planning session.
The first year
I began attending in Spring 2025 as a new participant from Science/Chemistry and have continued since. My Spring 2025 service report lists DEAG meetings at 5 hours.
I still use three things from that year.
Accessibility, Title 5 and ACMM. The ACMM baseline reports, district and campus, set out where the college stands on accessible templates, media captioning, procurement, and monitoring, and the group pushed for a local taskforce to turn those findings into faculty-facing practice. I have carried this into my own work and into the committee's course.
Tooling and support. The group worked through multi-factor authentication interrupting students during quizzes, and a Respondus pilot where a practical constraint surfaced: LockDown Browser is its own browser, so MFA has to be completed inside it, and WebAssign had no compatible plugin for Respondus Monitor. It also worked on Canvas-to-Banner grade sync and on training and video resources, including DE Summit videos captioned by student editors.
The reporting chain. Senate to DEAG to DEETAC is a working communication chain, and that semester I watched a pilot move along it into a policy recommendation.