January 2026 CVC Exchange Release Notes

There are no release notes for January 2026.

If you missed our previous release notes, read them here. Questions? Email support@cvc.edu

There are no release notes for July 2025. If you missed our previous release notes, read them here. Questions? Email support@cvc.edu.

Spring 2025 marks a major milestone for CVC in our support for student support!

The California Virtual Campus (CVC) is excited to announce the release of its centralized Financial Aid (FA) Dashboard, now available to all participating colleges. This update streamlines the federal financial aid process for students cross-enrolled via the CVC Exchange and automates several, formerly manual, processes for FA offices. This milestone reflects the CVC’s commitment to creating systemwide infrastructure that reduces friction for colleges and improves outcomes for students. Our collaboration with key leaders and stakeholders allowed us to take a major step forward for cross-enrollment support across California’s community colleges—and underscores what’s possible when innovation meets collaboration.

The FA release marks CVC’s commitment to combining a technical process with the human element. After initial feedback from various constituent groups, the CVC formed a FA workgroup consisting of directors from colleges across the system, as well as IT and admissions professionals. The workgroup provided thoughtful feedback and the CVC in turn made several product updates. Initial feedback from presentations during the Chief Information System Officers Association (CISOA) Technology Summit and the CCC Student Financial Aid Administrators Association (CCCSFAAA) conferences this spring was overwhelmingly positive and continues to be so after releasing the updates to production.

The new workflow improves communication to students by first clearly emphasizing the eligibility requirements needed for requesting financial aid. Once the student consents to requesting aid, the request will be reviewed by a counselor at the college/district. The designated counselor will be alerted to determine course eligibility towards the student’s educational plan. After course evaluation is complete, the financial aid designee will receive a notification to determine financial aid eligibility.

According to the Federal Financial Aid Consortium Agreement, “Per federal regulations, a student may receive federal financial aid from only one school during any given semester. The Consortium Agreement allows the degree-granting institution (Home College) to count courses being taken at the host school (Teaching College) in the aid calculation.” Students may therefore request Federal Financial Aid from their Home College FA office for classes they cross-enroll into via the CVC Exchange.

Previously, students requested aid through their Exchange dashboard and FA received an email notification with Teaching College information. FA offices were responsible for determining student and course eligibility and notifying students of their award status through email. While functional, this created informal college workflows that were outside of their typical business processes, and colleges tracked their own data around these rewards.

With the release of a centralized CVC Financial Aid dashboard (available for all colleges) in spring 2025, counselors and financial aid offices can now collaboratively determine course and student eligibility. This new dashboard improves communication and visibility to both college FA offices as well as to students. Rather than waiting for a manual email from the FA office, students will now receive an automated email with the status of their award upon final determination. Additionally, the dashboard streamlines the review process for counselors and FA offices so they are able to quickly locate relevant transfer information between the Home and Teaching Colleges, the number of units, and census dates. This second phase of the rollout will have an integrated workflow to streamline the recording of units to the Home College ERP/SIS directly for all PeopleSoft and Banner Direct colleges from the dashboard (an integration for Banner and Colleague Ethos colleges is still pending, and dependent on Ellucian development prioritization).

An announcement was shared on the CSSO-ALL listserv on March 24, providing a form to CSSOs, and asking them to submit names of staff and counselors for dashboard training to enable the new workflow.

There are no release notes for February 2025. If you missed our previous release notes, read them here. Questions? Email support@cvc.edu.

There are no release notes for January 2025. If you missed our previous release notes, read them here. Questions? Email support@cvc.edu.

There are no release notes for December 2024. If you missed our previous release notes, read them here. Questions? Email support@cvc.edu.

The CVC is excited to announce a few new enhancements this quarter:

In order to reduce the number of registration errors, we are introducing improvements to the available seat count to consider active waitlists.
- Colleague Teaching Colleges: There are two section API's that will need to be extended. With the fields, we will update the seat count logic to close the section if the waitlist is enabled.
- Banner/Banner-Ethos Teaching Colleges: Our team will provide a new script to consider the waitlist or ask that you update your seat count extension to factor in waitlists
All Ethos Teaching Colleges: To ease the querying for the e-transcript sending process, we will now be writing the student's Home College FICE code as an AlternateCredential or Alternate ID type.
CVC TouchNet uPay Clients: If your college/district utilizes the CVC TouchNet uPay instance, we will be providing you with DKIM keys so that TouchNet can email payment receipts to students with your district's email domain.

Our team will be reaching out to colleges in the next few weeks to discuss these updates in greater detail. Please contact us at support@cvc.edu if you have any questions.

CVC Exchange release notes will begin publishing in November 2023.

*Peralta Community College District, Alameda County CA*

Building equity into learning as it relates to students’ fields of study and potential careers

Many students may not see themselves in the imagery and representation in their prospective disciplines or careers. Part of Peralta Community College District’s grant project was to encourage faculty to build more diverse representation into their curriculum for Career Technical Education (CTE) courses and support them in drawing connections among the course content, students’ lives, and their futures. This blog post will focus on the E7 criterion of the Peralta Online Equity Rubric, specifically:

What is the “Content Meaning” criterion of the rubric?
What research supports these criteria?
What are some practical strategies for how to apply this to different CTE disciplines?

What is Content Meaning?

The "Content Meaning" criterion of the equity rubric asks us to look at our course content and determine ways to make it personally relevant to students. More specifically, the criterion asks that this relevance is based upon students' sociocultural background in connection with others. Sociocultural contexts consider the societal forces that impact our values, beliefs, and attitudes about learning and life in general. Making connections between course content and these value sets can make a tremendous positive impact on students' ability to connect to the course material. For a course to be aligned with this category: “Communications and activities draw connections among course content, students’ lives, and students’ futures.” For a course to achieve exemplary in this category, “Students connect course content to their identities, backgrounds, and cultures, and/or the identities, backgrounds, and cultures of others.”

What does the research say?

Within Bloom’s taxonomy, three learning domains are identified: cognitive, psychomotor and affective (Pierre & Oughton, 2007). Within most curriculum design, the focus remains upon creating content that meets learning occurring in the cognitive domain, which often bypasses areas making content personally relevant for students. Reaching students at the affective domain helps with intrinsic motivation. The RSA Animate video below provides a rationale for why intrinsic motivation is important. Though the speaker focuses on the workplace, replacing "work" with "learning" makes the idea applicable to course design.

Overview Video of RSA Animate

This 10-minute video offers a powerful analogy for how an educator might consider designing content that moves away from the carrot-and-stick approach to learning. This approach follows a “learn-to-earn model” of design. Whereas we are suggesting within this module a “learn-to-learn model” of design that makes explicit the value and applicability of academic content to students’ ability to thrive. It’s no secret that students often struggle to engage with content that they feel does not impact their “real lives” or only satisfies a requirement. To increase engagement, create content that is relevant to students in the following ways:

Personally Relevant: In an article on relevant teaching, InformED editor Sara Biggs cites several research sources highlighting key attributes of relevant instruction, including building relatedness and offering student-directed assignments.
Culturally Relevant: Building content that clearly honors diverse voices and perspectives is paramount. This design should be explicitly stated within the syllabus and assignments.
Community Relevant: Incorporating some form of community involvement is another means of making instruction relevant (yes, even in an online course!). One way to incorporate community connected projects is through service-learning. On college campuses nationwide a tension exists between the idea that service-learning could be part of the curriculum that helps accomplish the cognitive goals of a course, as it’s often more associated with affective domain learning. Though the tension does exist, there is a significant body of research suggesting that reaching students in the affective domain is an effective means of teaching cognitive content. Some would even argue that both the affective and cognitive domains of learning exist on a continuum. Following this logic, affective domain learning is not the opposite of cognitive domain learning, rather the two interact to make content stick. Service-learning is a type of active learning that connects in-class work to students’ communities. Research shows that service-learning is one means of reaching students in the affective domain (Keazer & Roads, 2002).

Instructor Spotlights

Watch the videos below to see how three instructors from Peralta aligned their CTE courses with the Peralta Equity Rubric. In these spotlights, they will discuss how specifically, they have met the criteria for E7, providing content that is directly relevant to students’ lives. Click on the images to launch the videos!

Business

Business Instructor, Alta Erdenebaatar, has a Google Maps-based discussion called your Favorite Entrepreneur, in which students are asked to identify entrepreneurs who have made an impact on their lives or communities. Watch her talk more about it in this 3-minute video.

Construction Management

In this 3:45 video, Construction Management Instructor, Melissa McElvane, discusses her final project in which students role-play three stakeholder roles in the construction industry to develop hands-on skills.

English for Speakers of Other Languages

Suzan Tiemroth-Zavala discusses how every activity in her Job Search course is meant to prepare students for skills they need to successfully get the job they desire. Check out this 4-minute video as she explains how she curates meaningful curriculum.

References

Brown University. (n.d.). Culturally Responsive Teaching. Retrieved from https://www.brown.edu/academics/education-alliance/teaching-diverse-learners/strategies-0/culturally-responsive-teaching-0
Keazer, A & Roads R. (2001). The Dynamic Tensions of Service Learning in Higher Education: A Philosophical Perspective. The Journal of Higher Education. 72(2), 148-171. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2649320?seq=1
Pierre, E. & Oughton, J. (2007). The Affective Domain: Undiscovered Country. College Quarterly, 10(4), 1-7. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ813766

Authors:
Chelsea Cohen
CTE Pathways Grant Coordinator

Inger Stark
Peralta Professional Development Coordinator

Adrienne Oliver
Peralta Online Equity Initiative Trainer

Kevin Kelly
Higher Education Consultant

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.