Classified Senate approved new AI guidelines for SOCCCD

Classified Senate members take part in the meeting. Christian Roberts | Lariat

The Saddleback College Classified Senate voted to approve AI guidelines and discussed Banner during a workshop meeting in the Administration & Governance building in room 106 on Feb. 11.

The meeting was hosted by Georgiana Martinez, the vice president for equity & inclusion for the Classified Senate. Senate members attended in person and online via Zoom. 

“So because Saddleback College is a shared governance institution, they want to make sure that classified professionals voices are heard,” said Martinez. “This is sort of where we collect that, and then we can share it with administration and anyone else who needs it.”

The Classified Senate represent the classified employees of Saddleback in regards to governance and decision making on campus.

The meeting discussed a new AI use guideline for SOCCCD district employees which Mike Sauter, the alternate media specialist for DSPS, presented to the senate.

“It is important to understand the environmental impacts of our use, you know, technology use. For this document, for the purpose of this, the best we were able to come up with is this third bullet point under the dew that is considered ethical implications.”

Some of the regulations included upholding responsibility with human use of AI with consistent educational goals and institutional values and familiarizing with it while considering any recommendations for its use. 

The third point which Sauter said was considering ethical implications of AI in educational contexts such as data privacy.

Restrictions included using AI to insert confidential information into the software which can violate state or federal privacy laws and also assuming the AI tools would protect your data.

Sauter also spoke about how AI as an educational tool is vital for students and made sure that they had access to those tools. He also said that California is ensuring that every college student has an educational subscription to AI.

“I think students are going to see more integration of these tools in the learning process,” said Sauter. “And as instructors become more familiar with how to utilize them for the learning process, students are going to be able to take more advantage of the capabilities.”

The discussion ended with a motion to approve the guidelines and it passed with 50% majority vote among the senate.

Additionally, Zoom also had AI chatbots and transcripts present during the workshop for additional assistance, which recorded and summarized the meeting as a whole.

Also discussed was the Banner implementation project. Chris McDonald, the vice chancellor of educational and technology services of SOCCCD, discussed the updates on the project’s schedule and future plans moving forward. 

He admitted that the process has been difficult since starting the project in November 2022 from communication to absorbing the new system. Despite that, he assured the senate that they will be sticking with their schedule and that the project is necessary to modernize the infrastructure of the district.

“We’ve always known we needed a commercial ERP product, right? Having a homegrown system as wonderful as it was to be able to customize, create significant challenges, technology moves forward,” said McDonald, who is also a mathematics professor. 

He empathized that a homegrown system like Banner is the only solution to move to a cloud-based ERP system even with significant risks involved but was the only option at the time.

Senate members voiced their thoughts about the Banner integration while one member was concerned about the new software. “Why did we decide to go with the Banner SasS and be a guinea pig for other schools,” said Farbia Dai, an international student program specialist. ”We could have just stayed with MySite until we knew that Ellucian has it all together, and then we could have gone with them.”

McDonald responded that even though Banner is hard to adapt to, at some point you have to pull the trigger and Banner is the only product to move forward over Ellusion and other programs as a solution since its homegrown.

“Its not that people might not catch up. It’s not that someone else might catch up. It’s the only product,” McDonald said.

He mentioned that Riverside City College took a risk and went with Banner’s competitor Anthology 

But Anthology went bankrupt after not going live for five years and left Riverside behind. Anthology would later be bought up by Ellucian, which, ironically, is Banner’s parent company. 

“So they try to get away from Banner and they’re not gonna have to go back to Banner,” McDonald says. 

Another system that was recommended by people was Workday which was used to manage HR information and finance but had no student registration or transcripts. Workday tried to develop a student component with Saddlebacks assistance since they had a homegrown system, but it never worked out.

“Years went by and they still didn’t have a viable product,” McDonald says.

Some districts from Texas were also trying to build that same component with Banner and contacted Saddleback for guidance, but Saddleback doesn’t have Workday and therefore it didn’t pan out.

It’s one of those things that puts the classified senate in a ridiculously difficult position he admits.

“Not saying the faculty haven’t had annoyances, but for the most part outside of counseling, the classified have a tougher role than the faculty in terms of their day to day work processes,” McDonald says. “Theres no choice.”

McDonald ensured that Banner is the only solution to keep the college moving forward with its infrastructure to help students apply to Saddleback. He guaranteed that in the next six to 12 months of the implementation, the senate will have a reasonable system to adapt to.

McDonald also talked about the integration of Element 451 which is a 24 hour student support system which is a package that uses AI to offer services for students. “It’s a chatbot that once you’re authenticated in the system, you can ask it, let’s call it 90% of the questions that students would normally want to know, and it can provide information for them,” McDonald said.

The chatbot would help students know their GPA, the room their class is in or any other question they would like to know. McDonald said that the chatbot would be online around fall 2026.

The senate meeting concluded by covering updates for events such as Classified Professional Development Day which is scheduled for March 17th which had information about the college logos rebranding and the approval of a bachelor’s degree in medical lab technology.

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