 I want to welcome you to tonight's virtual open house. I'm really happy to have you here. Our agenda is a brief one, but there's a lot to share. First of all, an introduction to the iSchool and the program, an overview of the program itself, a little bit about what it's like to be an online student. And I can tell you that, from my own personal experience, my doctor was all online. So I also was an online student. So I know what works and what doesn't. Not that I'm always as successful as you would like me to be, but I have an idea of what I don't like as a student online. And then we'll have a little Q&A. So we have some big news here. I'm the one at the top, Dr. Pat French. Just call me Pat. And I am a professor, but also the Mara program coordinator. Below me is Dr. Sandra Hirsch. And I'm staying here. She's our outgoing director. She just on the right hand side, I guess, of the screen you see, has been promoted to associate dean for academics in the College of Professional and Global Education. That's the college we're in. So Dr. Hirsch is going to be doing her job as associate dean as well as trying to help us through the transition when we identify a new director for our program. And Dr. Linda Main, right below her, is the interim director. But she was our and is still our associate director. She's been here through two directors now. And she does not want to apply herself, but she wants to help with the transition. So she's going to make sure that we have a terrific search committee going and finding the best possible replacement for Dr. Hirsch that we can. And then at the bottom, Sheila Gertrude, she is just phenomenal. She's our high school office. And she is the administrative advisor. So from your program, if you're in the Mara program, I would be your academic advisor, help you with course selection. Sheila would be your administrative advisor, being able to answer questions about, well, what if I want to take an elective? How can I get a permission number? Those types of things. And then our primary faculty, unfortunately, they can't be with us up at the right hand side or I guess the left hand side at the top there. Dr. Lisa Dalby teaches a number of courses in our program. And you will love her when you get to meet her. She's fantastic. And her real loves are information governance, information assurance, privacy, all of those types of things. She's in Canada. And she can't be with us tonight because, as I mentioned earlier, to someone, her parents are doing self-quarantine. And she's over there getting them supplies this evening so they could be set up to survive for that period of time. So she's in Toronto. Jason Kalzenbacher teaches one course each fall and spring for us. And there are basic courses. He's another fantastic person who is also program coordinator for a new informatics program that we have. And then Joshua Zimmerman is the person who teaches our research methods course. And he also teaches a shorter course for archives on professionalism. And he is a working archivist. So he is employed full-time elsewhere. As is Lisa, as a matter of fact. Kenna is a student that should have been here today. But she very just recently sent me a note, not being able to explain much as saying, sorry, I can't be there. So you will miss out on her tonight. But she's fantastic. And if you have questions about what it's like to be a student in the program and don't want me to see the reply, you send an email right to Kenna. And she will get right back to you. She loves to talk about the program. She's our student assistant. She handles the blog. She handles the Facebook page. She does a lot of interviews with alumni and with current students. So she really has a handle on the Mara program from a different perspective. And you see a little note from her there about the assistance that she believes that she's received during the program. And she's going to be graduating soon. And I'm going to be sorry to see her go. But not sorry for her. I think she'll be with us until December. So this, I am not Lisa. I'm Pat, but Lisa can't be here. So I'm going to talk to you about the Master of Archives and Records Administration program and explain how it was put together. First of all, the MLIS program is different. You're going to want to compare the two. The MLIS program does have an archives and records management pathway they call it. And you would have an MLIS degree. That is ALA accredited, American Library Association accredited, all right? The Mara program is not because we don't want it to be because to be accredited by ALA, you need library courses. That's a library association. This grew out of that other program where there were students who said, but I really want more time to spend on archives, records management and related courses. So this is our new, fairly new program. 2008, it was launched. And in order to create it, we looked at the arm of core competencies for records managers. What do you need to know and be able to do? We looked at the site of American Archivists and what they suggest for the graduate programs in archival education. And so that takes care of the archival course work and the core competencies. And then we looked at the certified exams for records managers, the Institute of Certified Records Managers, ICRM, has a six-part exam and they have competencies that they believe professionals should master. So we reviewed that. We also reviewed the exam from the Academy of Certified Archivists. And you will see that, and also I should mention below that, we added later, so that wasn't at the beginning, but the material for the Information Governance Professional. So all three certifications are different, looking at records, looking at archives, and then looking at an overarching Information Governance Program. And you will see the alphabet soup at the end of my name. I have all three of those certifications. The other people who teach for us have at least one or two of those certifications as well. So the CRA, CRM certification, all of our MARA students, when they graduate, receive a letter from me saying that they are eligible to receive credit for parts one through five of the six-part ICRM exam, just by graduating from the program. That means you've mastered the core competencies. The sixth part is a case study. That's different, so they won't give you credit for that. But if you want to become a certified records analyst, you usually only need parts two, three, and four for that, they will grant you that certification immediately. If you want to be a certified records manager, you have to sign up to take part six, that case a study part, and then once you pass that, you could become a certified records manager. You can even become the CRA first, and then take as much time as you want to move up through in order to be the CRM. They keep track of the parts of the exams that they give you credit for, so you can take as long as you want to move through that. So we're really excited about this partnership. We've had a number of students take advantage of it, and if you're interested in the records management piece, this could be a good thing to be able to do very easily. The ACA, in order to become a certified archivist, it's just a hundred word, I'm sorry, a hundred question, a net word exam, and that exam, they will not give you credit for. However, you do have to have certain coursework even to be eligible to sit for that exam, and they have pre-approved all of our MAR courses that are required courses for this exam, so you would be able immediately to apply, and they would just look and see you graduate of the MAR program, and know that you're eligible as far as coursework to sit for that exam. We have a number of students who've taken the exam and been successful. I remember last summer, one of our students posted on our Facebook page, I'm going to take this CA exam, that was right after she graduated, and then a few weeks later, she posted, I passed, so we're very confident that the information we provide about archives is also exactly what you need to be a certified archivist. Now, the core competencies, I've been mentioning competencies for the profession, what we did was come up with 10 competencies, we believe all of our graduates need to know, need to master when they graduate from our program, so they're listed here for you, I won't read through all of them, but here are things like understanding the evolution of information record keeping systems in response to technological change, and we all, I hope, are keeping up with that, and it's something as simple now as electronic records management, but something more complex, like blockchain and artificial intelligence, so we look at all of the new technology and how it impacts the program, and we make sure we cover that within the program, and then you have assignments in class that support these competencies so that you have evidence that you have mastered them. The courses for fall, this is new for fall, so if you had looked at our website before, and maybe part of it is still being updated now, you would have seen 33 required credits, but it's now 30, but you still have 42 credits, you have to complete. 30 are required MARA courses, those courses are listed for you here, that last course where you see MARA 289, Advanced Topics in Archives and Records Administration, you do an e-portfolio instead of a thesis, we don't have a master's thesis option in MARA, so what you would do is complete an e-portfolio showing us how you've mastered those 10 core competencies I just showed you, and you do that by explaining what it means to you, and then providing evidence that you have completed coursework that supports each one of those competencies, and your evidence would be your assignments, your PowerPoint presentations, your discussions, students begin saving those right in the very first class, just putting them in their own, oh, either their own online accounts or save them to the computer or whatever, so that they're available there for when you're ready to graduate. So you can see here, you must take all these courses, but new for fall, what's new for fall is that you now have one extra elective before we had added on here the internship or organizational consulting project course. So one was an internship course, but if you wanted to do something at your place of work and you had a supervisor that said, we have a project we'd like you to work on, that wasn't part of your regular duties, then you could say, okay, I'll do that, that will be my organizational consulting project. So those were the two options you had for that experience, but we've been allowing substitution. If, for example, your employer says, no, sorry, we have no job for you here at work and we don't want you working for someone else in an internship, we've been giving students permission to take a fourth elective, and the number of requests that have been coming through now for permission to do that have been so many that we've decided it would be just easier to allow the fourth elective, and if you want to do the internship or organizational consulting project, that can be your fourth elective, but if not, you can take another course either from the MLIS or from the MARA program. So that's why we're now new for fall down to 30 credits of specific courses that you have to take out of the 42. Now I mentioned at the bottom of that list of the courses you must complete is ePortfolio. This is an example of one student's ePortfolio. She did a terrific job and she's got it online for us, and if you're ever interested in seeing student portfolios, you could look for the MARA program performance page. We have links to them there, but basically this is what she put together. You see competencies, A, B, C, they would go down through J, and then each one would explain the competency and then provide links to her homework to show that she's mastered that. So this is a course rotation, and you'll see the numbers are for those courses that I said you must take, the 30 credits that are required courses, all MARA courses. So if you were starting in the fall, you'd start out, if you wanted to take two, with MARA 200 and 204, there are basic courses. One is taught by Lisa that I mentioned, the other is taught by Jason. You've also seen his picture. In the spring, you would follow that up with two other courses, MARA 210 by Jason, and a 283 by me. That one's hands-on with SharePoint and also a Digital Repository Preserveika. But you can see the rest of the courses, the IA for 284, the IG are the Information Assurance, Information Governance courses, very popular, also required. But where you see MLAS MARA, MLAS MARA, those are the electives. And now, as I said, you would have four. And if you take the internship or organizational consulting project, you would be able to do that. The internship, people at ICRM look at that and would give you for a half-year internship credit for one year of work in the field, which you would also need to take that ICRM exam, right, in order to become the CRM. So consider that, I'll be your advisor, I'll be reminding you of these things as we go along. These are the electives, though. This is just a partial list. We have quite a few. It says updated in 2019 because we haven't identified new ones that we feel should be listed here. These are all three credits. What we have been doing a lot lately, the MLAS and the MARA program is adding one and two credit courses. And those, we don't go by their listing here. They're almost all pre-approved. You just ask me about them and I'll let you know if, yes, that makes sense for you to take. And those move so quickly. We change those so quickly because they're on topics that are really new and interesting that we'd spend all our time trying to redo the list. Two examples. This summer, I'll be teaching a two-credit blockchain for Archivists and Records Manager's course. That'll be new, that'll be taught this summer. I don't know if it'll be repeated again, but it's something that people have had an interest in. So I've developed it, it was approved. We'll be offering it this summer. In the fall, one of our graduates is going to be offering a virtual reality course. Some of us have been interested in how would you move to virtual reality for education? And so she's devised a one-credit VR course. We'll offer that in the fall. We again don't know if it'll be offered again, but it sounds like a fun option. And in the fall, we also have a two-credit digital forensics course for Archivists, which is fascinating. And that one, we weren't sure it would be popular, but we're offering it now for the third time, third fall. And students really are enjoying it, so we'll keep offering them until they're no longer of interest, and we have new ones that we want to put in. So you can take any of these, a few others that we have listed, or any combination of one and two-credit MARA or MLS courses. So there's something else that when you graduate through the MARA program, you not only have credit for those five parts of a six-part ICRM exam, but you also can elect to have an advanced certificate in Strategic Management of Digital Assets and Services. That's a mouthful, but there are three pathways. You can only have one of these. And the one that makes most for us, you could have a certificate that is in Information Governance, Assurance, and Security. And that's the one that makes sense because two of those courses are MARA-required courses, Information Governance and Information Assurance. And then what you would add is a cybersecurity three-credit course from the MLS program, and you wouldn't be able to once graduate request a certificate for those three courses. So that's kind of a popular option. This is the easiest, as I said, to get. These are the courses that would make up that pathway for Digital Assets Certificate. And there are two others, as I mentioned, if you're interested in Digital Assets Management and a number of our students are now, then you could follow that or data analytics and data-driven decision-making. That's another popular area. And you can use those four three-credit courses 12 units of elective credit in order to put together any electives in any area of interest that we're not covering in our required courses. So courses for fall, admits. I'll just quickly go over this. Dr. Lisa Dalby teaches this 220 course as all the others are, it's ACA pre-approved. But it's also our writing course and it's a course in which you're introduced to the APH style of writing that's required for all of the programs in the iSchool. And it's also the course in which you are offered a one-year paid membership in ASIS, Nagara, or SAA. ARMA is not on the list because ARMA has not been able to reach an agreement with us. They believe students should be taking nine credits in order to qualify for student membership and we disagree because you're part-time students. And for us, we're really excited when you get through a three-credit course, a six credits this whole four one semester, most first three. So for now, these are the three options that make the most sense. We're gonna take two courses. Taking one, you take Lisa's. That's the foundation. But if you're taking two, you add MARA 204, Jason's course. And this one is really great management and leadership course. Everybody is really going to leave our program feeling that they can take over a program. It's not that you're going to go in and maybe you will at entry level. It all depends on what you apply for and what you accept. But you would feel very comfortable going in and being able to take over a program or being able to start a new program. So this management course is just fundamental to the program and you'll enjoy working with Jason. He's fantastic. And then as I mentioned, Josh teaches a research methods course. If you wanted three courses, because you're trying to try to get done in two years, that's the fastest I've seen anybody get done. But if you are, you would add his course because our MARA courses are only offered once a year, either fall or spring. We don't offer them twice a year because we have a small program. So if you're doubling up, you better double up on your MARA courses and not worry about those electives until you can sit them in wherever you feel comfortable with them. Electives are always available in the summer as well. If you ever want to go to school in summer, that's when I would suggest looking for those electives. So, and you'll be surprised at how relevant a research methods course is when Josh introduces it as something for records management and archival science is very practical. It's not as theoretical as you would imagine. So, this is a copy of my course. It knows what a course would look like. We use a learning management system, Canvas, in there we put together a modules, most of us by week. My week starts Monday morning and ends Sunday night. All student work for that week has to be in by 11.50, 9 p.m. on Sunday night. Most of us follow that one week pattern, although somebody may start Sunday, somebody may start Tuesday. Sorry about that. You'll just have to make a very complicated calendar for yourself because that's the way we do it. But if you take a look at this, you will see that, for example, where it says overview of enterprise content management. That's a lecture, all right? And I may have a link to a video in there or to a recording. And then the next one is enterprise content management to content services platform. That's something that's happening. So, oh my, what about this? Why is this happening? It's another lecture. And then we have a discussion about the features of both. And then we get into a little lecture here on SharePoint because this course is where I introduce you to Office 365 and SharePoint. And we use a book for that. So, there's readings on SharePoint and then SharePoint features. And then we actually have assignments within SharePoint where you have into SharePoint you're going to have an account there. It's not your own. You don't download anything. You're working in the cloud and something that I am administrator for. You would create a site in there. You're going to learn how to declare records. You're going to learn how to do so much more. So, but that's what the thing looks like. You've got discussions. You've got assignments. You've got lectures. And when there's an assignment it says 10 points, 10 points. You do that somewhere else maybe but you come back into Canvas always and either say I've got it done or upload a paper there if the assignment were a paper or whatever may it be. So, everything is contained like this. And then we have one for every module. So, I have 15 modules like this for each semester. In the summer I would have fewer. So, this is where Canada would have started. These are all the things Canada is in charge of except for this. We have an iSchool Curriculum Center blog and this one you want to pay attention to. It has more generic information. The top one is by Dr. Linda Main who talks about the courses. That's where courses that maybe are dropped for low enrollment are listed. Our courses are never dropped. Never worry about that. But electives maybe. And then the student blog we often have highlights about students or graduates whatever. This one here is a tour that students took of a corporate archives. And so, Havala who has been the editor for that iSchool blog wrote about that. She's also done some work on our MARA program and interviews with our students as well. This is the iSchool MARA blog. This is one Canada takes control of. And you'll see on the side of your screen, the right side. One interview that Canada had conducted was of a MARA student who was appointed to the Archives Space Board. And so, it was a little congratulatory kind of thing. Let's highlight him on our blog. Down below is a picture of a number of us. We were at ARMA Infocon in November. We are virtual so we often don't meet in person. But if we ever have a conference and we're there, I will invite you to breakfast usually the second day of the conference. So we can do a quick meetup before sessions on that second day. So at least those of us who are there can get to meet each other. And so that's always fun. And if you're just floating around somewhere and I happen to be in town for a conference, so let me know when we might be able to meet up that way too. One of our students realized I was going to be in DC for a conference in January. She was not attending, she was working at MARA. But she sent me a note and said, I'll be in Union Station at five o'clock, changing trains you wanna meet. So I ran over and we actually had dinner there together and then she hopped on a later train to go home. We try to make arrangements to meet up whenever we can. All right, and this is the closeup of that picture there. And I'm hiding in the back here, but you'll see a number of us there. And this was just a quick breakfast. These weren't all students. Dave Lowery is the New York State Archives representative and he's president of New York State Army Chapter and Ray over here on the left, you'll see Ray Lynn Holiday's name. She's our contact for ICRM. So if anybody has questions, she gets answers immediately. All right, this, it says upcoming webinar, but it's not in his past. Junia is one of our graduates and she graduated in 2017 and she's fantastic. She is now the director of the caption archives, which she's responsible for a number of locations. I think it's something like four states. She spoke to us in February and if anybody's interested in this type of archive, send me a note and I will give you a link directly to the YouTube of her presentation. She did a super job. And then we always keep webinars on demand as I mentioned with Junia's presentation. Helen did a presentation for us last fall and it was not implementing an ECM solution. So some of them are about experiences in archives, others are about experiences in the records, management field, information governance field. This is something strange. I still like second life. And so a number of us get together once in a while to have some fun activities. This was a smackdown where two protagonists were antagonists again, were trying to explain why they prefer virtual reality over virtual worlds and the other one was virtual worlds over virtual reality. And in between, when the referee was asking questions of the one, the other one would go off stage and become a huge giant. You could see on the right hand side in the back and just tried to distract the other one. It was so much fun that they were invited to present at another conference. And we are seriously looking at virtual reality. We're meeting not only in our second life world as our base, our hub, but we also meet in Kitely which is kind of a intermediary virtual worlds and virtual reality. And then we are researching right now virtual worlds. Marie who's going to teach that virtual reality course in the fall is working on this actually for HP Labs. So she's got that practical experience as well. And we all have our headsets now and our gloves. And we're trying to find the right kind of place to move into if students want to have that type of experience as well. So, but those are fun meetings. So we don't require courses in that at all. You don't have to do that. All right, salaries for women, IG. This is just something that I found. It was a 2020 report and they're all of the board you would expect, but the median looks fairly decent. And it all depends on the experience that you have that you bring to the position. And you will be very competitive compared to people who graduate from other programs. It really will be, I think you'll be surprised at how comfortable you are once you complete the program and being able to go in and sell your attributes. And after doing that e-portfolio, reflecting everything you've done in the program, you're really pretty well set up to go out for any interview or in-house to ask for a raise. And you'll be able to explain everything you know you can bring to the program or another position when you're done based on the reflection in that e-portfolio. So, Wymar, well, first of all, YSJSU, it's a fantastic university. And as some of you have pointed out, the iSchool is amazing. We have such technology, such support for students and for faculty that if you have issues that need to be resolved with technology, for example, we have a team that takes care of that. Faculty feel very comfortable teaching because we receive support. We have to go through training just as you do. And if a person who wants to teach for us can't handle the training, they can't teach for us. And that has happened to a couple of people that I know of that were really excited and wanted to teach, but they just didn't get the hang of being able to put courses together and be as committed and involved as you need to be when you teach online. But so, students, when they have an exit survey, usually say what they like best about the Mark program is faculty, the program, the technology, but most of all the other students, they learn from one another. And it won't matter if you have any background in records management, archives, information governance, when you start, you're going to find that you have something to bring to the table. And those people who have experience, I am finding that they're just amazing and they're also adding to that experience and going beyond. So everybody seems to be able to move up a notch from where they are, or many notches from where they are. It doesn't matter where you start. We assume that you're going to start without the experience, but really it's about 50-50. I'll start from our experts in the field and everybody who speaks for us does it through Zoom like this informal setting, offers their email, willing to and happy to collaborate with you outside of school if you're interested in maybe belonging to an association, or we just had two speakers talk about their podcast. And what they're doing is going around actually and interviewing archivists so that they can explain all the different roles that archivists fill. And so I have a few ideas for students who should be interviewed as well. And then the cost. The cost has not changed since I've started, since the program started in 2008, $474 a unit, so $19.908 for the entire master's program. There is a technology course. It's not a one credit, it's the equivalent of one credit. It's a free course. It's self-paced, but I'm in there with you, so that's where you get to become comfortable with all the technology that you're going to use. You take that right before your first semester. When you register for classes, if you register for three credits, that's all you pay for. So you pay for $474 times three. If you register for six credits, you pay for the six credits. So you're not asked to pay for the entire program upfront. You're not paying monthly for the program. What you're doing is saying, these are the number of courses that I'm going to take this semester. This is what my bill is going to be for the semester. If you take one course over the summer or whatever, then that's fine as well. You can take, and I don't know that I mentioned that here, but you can take one semester off without even requesting permission to do that after you've completed a semester. So say you have your fall semester done, and you find out that in the spring, you've got a new responsibility at work. It's going to be a lot of work, and you just can't handle it, and still do well in your classes. You may say, I'm going to take this semester off in order to become acclimated with my new job. You don't need any or anything for that. You just, and then what you do is when we start enrolling again for fall classes in the spring, you would just go ahead and register. Then I'll help you, I'm your advisor, but if you need to take off two semesters after you complete one semester, if you need to take off two, there is paperwork that you would need to complete for that. So you'd have to do some justifying, explaining why. So the application process, you do need a 3.0 GPA minimum. If you don't have one, you could take classes at another school and build up their last six credits. You've completed on the bachelor's level and beyond. And then once you get to the 3.0, you can apply. So once you apply now, they'll look for that 3.0 overall. If they don't see that, then they'll look at your last 60 units of credit. If that's a 3.0, you'll be accepted. If that's not, then what they'll do is say you're not accepted, but you should know that you can go back to school and then bring that average back up and then reapply. And then we have some application period for fall here. It's open now. Be sure to apply as soon as you can just because it takes a while. Sometimes it even takes about six weeks or something. So you'll want to be able to make your plans. If you're a student who is still in a bachelor's degree and you're not going to graduate until May or June, that's okay too. You can still apply. You will be accepted provisionally. And then once you get that transcript available to you, you'll be able to submit it. Even if for some reason classes start in August and you're still waiting on that transcript, that's okay. They would allow you to take classes. It's just that you would be barred from registering again for the spring if that transcript never materialized. So that's about it. So you can apply online. And then we do have some scholarships for new students, but you've got to apply for those very quickly. You can see down here at the bottom on the right, people who applied early were able to start applying for a scholarship January 6th, but it's open until May 1st. And this is just for $1,422, which is good, it gets you a course, right? So that would be something that you want to be sure you try to apply for. We have some scholarships, but most of them are after you complete a semester and demonstrate that you're doing acceptable work, then you're eligible to apply. And they're not for a lot and they're not ongoing. So you can't expect that you would be able to have your program pay for through scholarships from the school. You won't be able to, most of our students either have loans or they're self-funding. In some cases, their employer is funding their program. So for more information, you can visit the Mara website and you could contact me.