College.Technology was a comprehensive website to centralize and provide easy access to state-provided resources, discounts, and technology plans for California Community Colleges, benefiting students, faculty, and staff.
Update: April 2021 - The website at http://ca.college.technology has been discontinued and removed to prevent confusion among faculty and students due to outdated information.
Site History
In 2018, as part of my final project for the California Community College CISOA (Chief Information Systems Officers’ Association) Certification, I delved into researching state-provided solutions for instructional technologists. I discovered numerous resources that were freely available to our colleges, many of which I had been unaware of. Following my presentation, I was inspired to expand this project into a website to benefit a wider audience.
Overview of the Old Website
The previous website featured several key sections:
- Search All 114 Community Colleges: A consolidated Google search engine that returned results exclusively from the 114 California community college websites.
- Accessibility: A compilation of state-provided accessibility tools and websites.
- .EDU Email Perks: A list of discounts available to students, faculty, and staff with .edu email addresses.
- Instructional Technology: A collection of technology resources focused on teaching and learning.
- State-Created Services: Innovative solutions developed by the State Chancellor’s Office in response to specific initiatives or unique challenges.
- State Discounted Tools: Solutions vetted by the State Chancellor’s Office, providing discounts to California Community Colleges based on state-negotiated pricing.
- State Licensed Software: Software purchased by the state, available to colleges for free or at a subsidized rate.
- Support Resources: Documentation, training, and communities for higher education solutions.
- News: Aggregated feeds from TechEdge and the Chancellor’s Office newsletters.
- College Technology Plans: An index of technology plans from all 114 California Community Colleges (where available). Each plan was indexed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) APIs, enabling automatic and intelligent parsing of text into categorized groups. This feature extracted names, organizations, products, etc., into individual "entities," which could then be linked to Google's knowledge graph for quick access to descriptions and trends. This allowed users to quickly identify which colleges had updated tech plans, the overlapping themes, and the technologies in use at each institution.
