24 Mt. Hood Community College
Heather White
Oregon
Type of Institution: Community college
Impetus: Oregon House Bill 2871
Student Information System: Jenzabar (JICS user portal; CX staff interface)
Markings Used: No Cost: $0 and Low Cost: Under $50
Unique Features: Creation of a course section reporting form for instructors
Introduction
Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) is a small institution of under 8,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) students, run on a quarter system. MHCC is located 30 minutes outside of Portland, Oregon, in the city of Gresham. In July 2015, the Oregon legislature passed House Bill (HB) 2871, which established a statewide mandate for all publicly funded universities and community colleges to “prominently designate courses whose course materials exclusively consist of open or free textbooks or other low-cost or no-cost course materials” at the point of course registration. The legislators allowed each institution the flexibility to determine their own implementation strategy. This case study outlines how MHCC came into compliance by Fall 2017, how our work evolved over the first two years of implementation, and how we navigated the complexities of implementing new policies and procedures in a large organization with multiple stakeholders.
In 2015, few schools in Oregon had a student information system (SIS) with existing functionality to enable the course markings required by this new law. Five schools used a Jenzabar SIS: Klamath Community College, Southwestern Oregon Community College, Tillamook Bay Community College, Treasure Valley Community College, and MHCC. All five schools used Jenzabar JICS as their student and instructor portal; our colleagues used Jenzabar JX for their staff interface, while MHCC used the slightly more archaic CX. These three Jenzabar software programs—JX, CX, and JICS—lacked the necessary functionality to manifest the HB 2871 mandated course markings, much less make them searchable by users.
Amy Hofer, Oregon’s Coordinator of Statewide Open Education Library Services at Open Oregon Educational Resources, was integral in helping our institutions reach compliance. In Fall 2016, she gathered all the Jenzabar schools for a group brainstorming session. We quickly realized that without software enhancement we would be unable to comply with HB 2871. Under Open Oregon’s leadership, key representatives from each institution met with Jenzabar representatives and explained our needs. Acting separately, each of us would have faced our own software enhancement fee—a considerable expense—but negotiating as a collective under a state legislative mandate, we were able to work with Jenzabar to arrive at a rather good deal: one software enhancement fee of $15,000, split across all five institutions in exchange for building out the necessary course marking and search functionality for each of us. Open Oregon proposed a model in which each school paid proportionally according to FTE. As the largest school by FTE, MHCC g