BILL ANALYSIS Ó
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Kevin de León, Chair
SB 520 (Steinberg) - California Online Student Access Platform
Amended: April 25, 2013 Policy Vote: Education 8-0
Urgency: No Mandate: Yes
Hearing Date: May 23, 2013 Consultant: Jacqueline
Wong-Hernandez
SUSPENSE FILE. AS PROPOSED TO BE AMENDED.
Bill Summary: SB 520 creates an incentive grant program to
assist faculty and individual campuses of the University of
California (UC), the California State University (CSU), and the
California Community Colleges (CCC), to provide increased
opportunities for students to take online courses, as specified.
Fiscal Impact:
Unknown, potentially substantial ongoing costs, depending
on the amount of the incentive grants and the extent of
their use.
Background: Existing law requires the CCC, the UC, and the CSU,
with appropriate consultation with the Academic Senates of the
respective segments, to jointly develop, maintain, and
disseminate a common core curriculum in general education
courses for the purposes of transfer. Existing law further
provides that any person who has successfully completed the
transfer core curriculum is deemed to have completed all lower
division general education requirements for the UC and the CSU.
This transfer core curriculum is commonly referred to as "IGETC"
- the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum.
(Education Code § 66721)
Existing law establishes the CVC, until January 1, 2014, and
outlines the purposes that it may pursue. Among other things,
the CVC issues grants and recipients may use the grants to lead
efforts to make online courses available to students across the
state.
(EC § 78910.10)
Proposed Law: SB 520 establishes the Platform and provides that
it be developed and administered jointly by the segments. This
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bill further provides that the Platform:
a) Facilitate appropriate partnerships, including but not
necessarily limited to
intersegmental and intrasegmental partnerships and
partnerships between online
course providers and faculty members of the segments to
develop and deploy
high-quality online options for strategically selected
lower division courses.
b) Provide statewide facilitation of intersegmental and
intrasegmental partnerships
developed pursuant to the provisions of SB 547 (Block)
and appropriate
partnerships between UC, CSU, and CCC faculty and online
course technology
providers, to offer transferable courses for credit.
c) Create a pool of up to 50 approved and transferable
online credit courses.
d) Provide a state-level faculty-led process that
places the highest priority on educational quality through
which online courses can be subjected to high-quality
standards and review.
In order to accomplish those objectives, this bill requires the
President of the UC, the Chancellor of the CSU, and the
Chancellor of the CCC, jointly with each of their academic
senates to:
a) Develop a list of the 50 most impacted lower division
courses at each of the segments that are deemed necessary
for program completion, for meeting general education
requirements, or in areas defined as high-demand
transferable lower division courses under IGETC.
b) For any courses that meet the criteria in (a),
facilitate partnerships including, but not necessarily
limited to, intersegmental and intrasegmental partnerships
developed pursuant to the provisions of SB 547 (Block) and
partnerships between online course technology providers and
UC, CSU, and CCC faculty with the goal of significantly
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increasing online course options for students for fall term
of the 2014-15 academic year.
c) Create and administer a standardized review and approval
process for online courses developed, as specified.
This bill further specifies that the courses developed are for
matriculated students at the UC, CSU, CCC, or for California
high school students, and:
a) Prohibits the approval of any course for this purpose
unless it is associated with a faculty sponsor who is a
member of the faculty at the UC, CSU, or CCC, and is
approved by the academic senate of the appropriate segment.
b) Provides that a course developed pursuant to these
processes be deemed to meet the lower division transfer and
degree requirements for the segments.
c) Requires the regular solicitation and consideration of
advice and guidance on implementation of the Platform from
the statewide student associations.
d) Requires the collection, review and public availability
of data and information related to student success
including enrollment, retention and completion.
Requires the placement of approved courses in the CVC, and
extends the sunset on the CVC until January 1, 2017.
This bill also requires that funding for implementation of these
provisions be provided in the Annual Budget Act, and declares
the Legislature's intent that receipt of funding for
implementing these provisions by the UC is contingent upon its
compliance with the bill's requirements.
This bill prohibits the use of public funds to fund any private
aspect of a partnership developed pursuant to the bill's
provisions between UC, CSU, or CCC faculty and an online course
technology provider. It also requires that the state retain all
appropriate rights to intellectual property it creates or
develops in the implementation of the bill's provisions.
Related Legislation: SB 547 (Block) requires the academic
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senates of the UC, CSU, and CCC to jointly develop and identify
online courses available for enrollment by matriculated students
at each of the three segments by fall of 2014, as specified, and
requires that the Board of Governors of the CCC create a portal
for enrolling in these courses through the CVC. This bill is
currently on the Suspense File in this Committee.
Staff Comments: This bill would provide public funding to
faculty and the administration at the UC, CSU, and CCC and
require the use of that funding to develop and administer the
Platform to facilitate the development of partnerships,
including those developed under the provisions of SB 547
(Block), to develop up to 50 courses that would be offered to
matriculated students at the public segments and to California
high school students through the CVC by the fall of 2014 for
purposes of meeting lower division general education degree and
transfer requirements.
The upfront costs of this bill are unclear, because the
implementation path is unclear. This bill places the governance
and administration jointly with both the academic senates and
the heads of each segment. It also specifies that up to 50
courses be developed, and that a course can only be developed if
it has a faculty sponsor at one of the segments, is approved by
the academic senate of the appropriate segment, and is deemed to
meet the lower division transfer and degree requirements for
each segment.
While the bill clearly requires substantial upfront
collaboration work on the part of the segments, the costs could
vary widely based upon how successful they are in producing
results that meet the various tests for allowing courses to move
forward. Considering the segments' resistance to the bill
expressed in public testimony during the Senate Education
Committee and recent letters to this Committee, it is unclear
that consensus will be reached sufficient to develop courses
that meet the tests. To the extent that courses are created,
they will require significant staff time from each segment to
develop and approve them. The CCC estimates that its faculty
costs will range from $50,000 to $100,000 per course; CSU and UC
are likely to have higher costs because their faculty members
are typically paid more. Ongoing administration of the Platform
will result in annual costs to each of the segments of hundreds
of thousands to millions of dollars, depending on a segment's
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level of involvement, the scope of the project, and the number
of courses created and evaluated.
This bill also requires that the Platform provide students with
services such as instructional support, faculty interaction,
student assessment, and adaptive learning technology. This level
of service will require the use of an LMS. The cost for a common
LMS for the CCC is about $13 million for the first year and
around $7.2 million in subsequent years; across three segments,
the cost is likely to double (accounting for both expansion and
the efficiencies of building just one LMS).
This bill places course delivery in the CVC; the
CCC-administered CVC would be the portal through which students
access the courses. This bill would expand the CVC's purposes,
and extends the sunset on the CVC until January 1, 2017. The CCC
has indicated that the cost of the expansion would $1.4 million
in the first year, and $1 million annually for each subsequent
year. This bill only extends the sunset of the CVC to 2017, but
it is likely that if this program is developed there will be
cost pressure to continue it.
AS PROPOSED TO BE AMENDED: Amend per author to remove
requirements on the segments and to create an incentive grant
program to further online course creation and utilization, as
specified.