The Associated Students of Delta College is the student governing body and serves as an advocate for the students on campus.
ASDC, which has shifted its focus from live programming on campus to virtual events, has worked to change multiple aspects of how it deals with the pandemic conditions.
Security is one of its top priorities since an August “Zoom bombing” at a Town Hall event held by the organization. A serious change had to be made regarding security.
“ASDC is committed to ensuring student safety online and is finding new solutions to try and prevent any incidents like that again,” said Fitzgarld.
“We’ve already implemented some of the Zoom security features,” said Colm Fitzgerald ASDC President. “Waiting rooms, passwords, but we’ve also been working with IT for our big events in webinar mode. Which will be an extremely secure function of Zoom.”
ASDC has had to change the way it would gather student opinion and participation . Zoom isn’t enough which is why the ASDC is committed to expanding themselves to give students more access.
“The ASDC has been exploring digital communication platforms, we even started a digital communications project called ‘Discord Project’… If not we have a lot of options, we are developing a “Canvas Shell” and that could go a long way to bridge the communication gap,” said Fitzgerald. “We are starting a YouTube channel ..”
The goal, overall, is to engage students through information.
“It will be available in a lot of places it wasn’t before,” said Fitzgerald.
However the ASDC has faced some “systemic problems” as well, which the ASDC president says that have been there before COVID have now been amplified.
One example of these systemic problems have to do with ASDC autonomy.
“… So every single student that is a member of the ASDC gets to participate in the election gets to run if they want, and has a voice. The problem is how the advisor role and the student government interact and how the district government interacts…It creates an inherent conflict with administrative and student interest.” says Fitzgerald.