 Welcome and hello everyone. My name is Ivy Love. I'm a policy analyst with the Center on Education and Skills here at New America and I first just want to thank you all for being here with us today. We're really grateful to have you here for this discussion on how best to support our students and institutions particularly in the healthcare programs in this really strange and difficult time that we're living through. So just a couple of things before we get started. As Narmada just mentioned, if you have a question at any point over the course of the webinar, please feel free to submit that along with your affiliation using the chat function of Zoom. Our events team will collect your questions and then my colleague Iris Palmer will moderate a discussion of as many questions as we can get to during the last portion of the webinar. I do want to let you all know that we will be making this webinar recording available as well as the slide deck after the webinar has concluded. That will be located on the event page for this webinar on New America's website. And then finally I want to invite all of you to share your thoughts and to connect with us and with each other on Twitter during and after the webinar. We'll be using the hashtag CC online that you can see there down in the footer of the slides. So we have a great lineup of panelists today for you. And many of our presenters were connected in some way to a large federal investment in community colleges that was made in response to the Great Recession around a decade ago. As you can see, we'll be covering three tax grants. That's CHEO, H2P, and MoHealth Wins. And hear more about what they learned from their experiences that can inform our practice and community college health care programs today. We're also very fortunate to have Donna Meyer from the Organization for Associate Degree Nursing who could share a bit about what Odin is doing for their members and for community college nursing programs across the country. Before we move into our presentations, I do just want to share a bit about that recession era federal investment in community colleges that I mentioned, the TACT program, which our team has been researching at New America for the last couple of years, particularly how it highlighted the potential of community colleges to form part of recovery efforts and what that may mean for us right now. So as the economy worsened in the Great Recession, many people turned to community colleges to get the training that they needed to either get a different job, get a better job, or get some more security in their current work. So TACT funded single community colleges and consortia of community colleges like the three that we'll be highlighting today to do a number of things ranging from building new programs, redesigning existing programs, enhancing student services, and creating openly licensed curricula in addition to some other options. With such a large investment of nearly $2 billion, there was this looming question after TACT concluded whether or not it achieved its aims of helping folks complete programs and move into the workforce. And we found that it did. Thanks to some generous support from Lumina Foundation, we and our partners at Bragg and Associates were able to conduct a meta analysis, a causal study looking at the impact of TACT. We found that folks who participated in TACT programs were around twice as likely to complete those programs and around 30% more likely to either get a job or a wage gain after completing their program. We also conducted some qualitative analysis looking at two common implementation strategies that colleges use to support students, including prior learning assessment, how that was expanded and enhanced in an effort to accelerate students progress through their programs and navigators, a role that was common among TACT grantees that stemmed from coaching them through their programs and in their transition to the workforce and providing holistic support to them. So we've connected folks who worked in TACT and work in community college settings and around community college settings for this webinar today because we feel that while this current situation is different in many ways from the great recession, community colleges today are still an important part of the recovery effort in keeping our healthcare workforce strong and in keeping communities strong in this really trying time. So what folks learned then we feel can help inform our practice right now and that's really what we want to share with you all today. So I'm going to hand it over to our presenters now who will just share a bit about what helped them build and sustain strong healthcare programs, many of whom did not connect all the time with students face to face in their TACT work and what that may mean for us now. So with that, I want to pass it on to our first presenters for the day, Heather McKay and Maria Feet. Thank you, Ivy. I appreciate it. You can advance the slide. This is Maria Feet and I stood as the project director for this particular project. The CHEOS project was designed to increase access to sustainable healthcare programming that would build the workforce pipeline. We built programs in nursing, EMS, radiology, med tech and some others. It was a round two TACT initiative out of Pueblo Community College in Colorado. We partnered with several other Colorado colleges as well as colleges in Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, and Alaska, so broad span and these are very remote states in many ways. We also partnered with witchy, the western interstate commission for higher ed and the Colorado Community College system who provided this nice backdrop of support as did the Rutgers evaluation team whom you'll hear from in a few minutes. The skills commons, creative commons, transformative change initiative, thanks Deb and CAS team. Tons of partnerships outside of those as well. It takes a lot of folks to make something like this come off well. Each college had its own team which included a project lead and those folks saw the effort at their local level. They also had instructional designers, career coaches, data specialists and fiscal and grant management support and each of those subgroups across the consortium met online monthly to problem solve and to celebrate. We had to do a lot of work around strong communication, being able to effectively work together online. Tons of learning for all of us during that time but it's come in handy now that we're in this scenario that we're in. These project teams created 21 new revised program. We served around 6,000 unique participants, exceeded wage target by almost 200% and built six articulation agreements which led to better options for students for sure but maybe more importantly open the doors for further partnering. In order to better engage students in their own learning who were living in these remote states we used innovative approaches like web-based labs, somewhat of an anomaly and a breakthrough in some ways for the world of science instruction and Heather's going to share more about that in just a moment. Schools also incorporated mobile ambulance labs which were fully stocked ambulances that went to students home areas and that allowed commute time to be cut back significantly for students. Instructional designers introduced and supported methodology like flip classrooms and incorporating open educational resources OER and for many faculty at that time it was that was just a completely foreign idea of adopting large-scale free or reduced priced curriculum. So there was a lot of work to do around just helping people understand what did it look like. We worked closely with our third party which was the Rutgers team led by Heather McKay and we did that to better understand the impacts of what was happening with those innovations and strategies. I'm going to turn it over to Heather and she's going to talk a little bit more about how we deployed those strategies. Thank you Maria. I think it's a really great opportunity to be able to talk about CHEO in the context of what's happening today with the COVID crisis and the new reality that we're all in sitting at home listening to this webinar and working from home and our students are all learning from home and CHEO provides a really nice example of how technology can be used as a tool for learning and teaching in healthcare. The CHEO grant as Maria talked about was a way to help develop capacity for rural colleges and many of these colleges were very rural. There were colleges in Alaska one of them was on an island in Kodiak, colleges in Montana and Colorado and these schools were in places where students came from many many different surrounding towns and many many miles away and in some cases as in the case of the college in Alaska students were all over the country because they were participating in training there but also a part of the military so they would be connecting from lots of different places. So I think the way that CHEO was set up is a nice example for us to think about and how to teach science and healthcare classes remotely. The grant used a variety of different kinds of innovations like that Maria talked about and I'm going to talk a little bit more closely about some of those and during CHEO making these changes was for some colleges difficult to do as Maria talked about. There was pushback from faculty in some cases and it was a change from business as usual which was for some hard to swallow and hard to understand how learning could happen in a different way in an online setting or in a remote setting but now none of us have it has a choice right we're all doing this and we have to be doing this for some time at least for the rest of the semester probably and maybe at some point into the fall or next spring this could happen again so I think it's a time to think about innovating and it's a time for those who might have been resistant at one time to begin to think about how they can do this and how they can make this delivery work for them and how they can help their students to learn so I think CHEO provides some really good examples I'm going to talk about a few of those now. One was the online science labs that Maria talked about these online science labs were a network of remote science labs the acronym for this group was called Nanslow there was a lab in Canada there was one in Colorado and there was one in Montana the two of these labs still exist the one in Montana and the one in Canada still exist and these labs provided remote experiences for students students could conduct experiments from a computer by manipulating robotics equipment in a remote lab they could see what was happening on their computer screen see the robot moving different things see the robot doing different chemistry experiments physics experiments etc students were accompanied by a lab technician online during those experiments who could help them with the experiment could fix equipment if it needed to be fixed and could help them think through the learning outcomes as they went along to make sure that they were getting what they needed out of the lab during CHEO there was some resistance to this idea many thought that labs really couldn't be done remotely or they couldn't be done as well remotely others wondered why would we do this when when we've got labs on campus what's what's the point of this so in some ways Nanslow was before its time but I think it was really unique and it's it's a tool that could be incredibly useful in today's atmosphere we did a study on Nanslow and and that's available on skills commons like Maria talked about and I think there'll be a link at the end of the webinar to get to that but what we found was that there was no difference in the learning outcomes between the Nanslow lab results and other home lab options like mail kits so students were really learning from Nanslow we also heard from students we talked to a lot of students who did these remote labs and they loved them they thought it was a really fabulous experience they felt like they learned a lot and so it was a good way to continue to do hands on learning in science in a remote way and so I think Nanslow presents a really great story and opportunity another mobile option that was used during Chio was this idea of a mobile learning lab and this was also used in in all three of the tax grants in Colorado so it was used in healthcare for Chio but it was also used in the later grant champ for manufacturing and these labs were really mobile classrooms they were ways for students to experience hands on learning and healthcare in a remote setting and one could imagine that these kinds of classrooms or labs could be really useful tools in the COVID crisis you could set up a remote classroom to help retrain health workers to do testing for COVID to conduct those drive-through tests that we see everywhere to train healthcare workers to do different kinds of COVID treatments when space is busy in hospitals and clinics and there's just not space for workforce training available or you know going to rural areas or going to areas where there might be folks trained in home healthcare that could be useful in the COVID crisis and thinking about retraining so the mobile lab idea I think has some legs here and could be very useful moving forward. Another thing that Maria mentioned were these new technologies and techniques and I think many of you who might be out there teaching now are learning these things as you go and moving forward but the folks in the Chio project have some really nice lessons learned about the kinds of things that they learned how to do during Chio in terms of teaching healthcare and science online and how they use different technologies and tools so folks did broadcasting of different lectures and they made them interactive people also used robots and other ways to to demonstrate different techniques and teach them remotely for students and really work to engage students so I think a lot of the lessons from Chio there can be really helpful. Another thing that I think Chio did really well was the employer partnerships and that will resonate really well now I think too working closely with with employers Chio created some really successful partnerships they created a sector partnership in Colorado and they worked with educators and employers around the table creating a dialogue about what Chio could do and how the colleges could respond to the needs of the community and once again that's going to be a really important thing to think about during the COVID crisis colleges need to make sure that they're training people that are needed in the field with their creating coursework that responds to the changing of the pandemic and fill in the workforce gaps and by working with employers colleges can plan and serve their communities in an effective way. Finally stackable credentials was a was another theme in Chio that I think resonates very well today and is really important. Creating educational and healthcare pathways is an important thing for students always but it's particularly important when we need to get people out in the field and healthcare quickly so colleges in Chio thought about how credentials could be stacked and lattice that also occurred in the later tact grants in Colorado where work was done on credit for prior learning and creating a better credit for prior learning process and policy and one could imagine during this crisis that there might be ways to begin to train people quickly in areas needed for COVID like the testing creating short-term certificates that could be stacked and lattice later into into other credentials or degrees so I think there's a lot of opportunity here to think about how stackable credentials could be helpful for students and and allow them to move forward and use any training that they're getting now to respond to the pandemic later. It's also possibly a good way to get students out into the workforce quickly if that's needed so something to think about there. Finally the Chio grant used career coaching and navigation as a tool this was really important under the Chio grant and they did a lot of this work remotely so coaches would work with these rural students and help them through their education and career pathways in a remote manner and students need the same from us all now right they're facing financial struggles they're learning to go to school online maybe for the first time they're trying to make decisions about their own educational and career pathways in light of a very very different world advising is going to be essential for these students and and figuring out how to do that remotely is going to be really important I think Chio has some good lessons for us there next slide Ivy so I think one of the things to think about here is that while crises are hard they're difficult to go through they're difficult to slog through and it's it's challenging to see the effects of this pandemic and and of the recession on our communities moments like this and moments like the tax grant in the 2008 recession can serve as an opportunity to make change happen and and to to make change sustainable so I implore you all to use this as an opportunity where possible to think about making change and making technology at the forefront of that change pursuing this institutional change will certainly help students now and in the future but I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned from tact about how to scale and how to sustain change so I would I would recommend that folks look at these tax grants and consider how sustainability can be something that that is a goal for you now as you begin to develop these changes and innovations both this semester and in the future as as you respond to the COVID crisis healthcare and science education can be taught online is another finding from Chio um we saw even the biggest of skeptics get convinced that students can learn well online and students can do some hands-on learning remotely um Chio has some nice examples of how that happened and and again I think our evaluation reports and and the work that Maria did and others in the grant can be great resources to you as you move forward with this um and finally moving using strategies to move students through career pathways is something that that Chio did really well and and I think could be very helpful as we all think about moving forward training students quickly creating these pathways and and also figuring out ways to keep students enrolled keep them engaged in higher education are going to be really important so flexibility is crucial these are really difficult times we need to think about ways to help students get through them credit for prior learning policies are one way to do that as our reforms and developmental education for healthcare pathways um and developing and promoting and advising students through educational and career pathways so I'll move on to you Maria thanks Heather and she's right science and other disciplinaries can be taught online successfully and we learned that through um some trial and error for sure but there are definite successes that can happen pretty quickly it takes a lot of support for faculty and for senior staff and we used project management tools to make sure that those stakeholders stayed informed but more importantly I think um and the instructional designers who are incredibly talented by the way were key in providing this ground level support system for instructors and they in some cases would hand walk instructors through how to do these new kinds of methods and techniques and help them redesign um their delivery of instruction methodology they learned how to flip classes along with a number of other things and all intended to increase student engagement and provide better access those practices led to increased confidence levels of students but also increased confidence levels and instructors and ownership of these of this new way of thinking about teaching which gave colleges an upscaled faculty pool we also learned that program acceleration was really key to boosting that healthcare workforce pipeline and I think that's a consistent lesson that we saw across tech projects regardless of the sector we know people have to get in the workplace and um in order to better support themselves and their families and these programs were all designed to do exactly that um as heather emphasized a few minutes ago employer partnerships are more important now than they ever have been and with the help of the colorado workforce development council we launched a healthcare sector partnership in colorado the first of its kind in southern colorado and um this group continues to meet uh and and their their main objective is to identify and then help meet the needs of employers in the area so if your region or your institution hasn't tapped into the benefits of supporting uh any sector partnership work you might consider taking a look at that you can learn more about that at nextgenerationsectorpartnerships.com or you can reach out to me directly and I can point you in that direction and we'll get you my um contact information here in just a bit okay next slide thank you ivy I appreciate that lastly we've got a little goodie bag for you uh when she always nearing its close I went to work with a skills commenting to support the next tech project and for those not aware of skills commons it was built out of materials developed by the tech colleges all 700 of them and it's now considered to be the world's largest repository of free yep free and open workforce development training materials you don't need an account you don't need a login you don't need a password you can go in and download whatever it is you like and change it how you want it's hosted out of cal state university and um it holds complete courses simulations which as you know are very cool approaches to teaching hands-on in healthcare it's one of the most effective ways of doing that assessment supplementals support for career coaches recruitment and lots lots more there are about 200 000 downloads that are occurring each quarter so that tells us that users really are continuing to find that material relevant and useful um so skills commons and its sister project merlot which is a giant enormous clearinghouse of academic oriented courses and materials a lot of those are open and free as well and they built a timely response to COVID-19 it provided this free collection of resources including tips and tricks for those who may be new to online teaching and learning full courses in hygiene safety infectious materials etc and all these courses were built by institutions out of Colorado Georgia Ohio Pennsylvania New Jersey California the h2 project that you're going to hear about in a few minutes and and lots of others the skills commons and merlot team is offering to build your organization a similar COVID site for free and they it's just the idea that how are we going to better support each other during this time and this is something that skills commons and merlot are offering for folks you can access more information about and all the other projects that you're going to hear today including the evaluation reports and links to the OER collections and the skills common project showcase and as I understand it I was going to share a link to that a little bit later all the materials free to download change it as you wish wrap it with your institution's brand and put put it to work more quickly than it would if you were starting from scratch more quickly and more cost effectively critical now as it as it has ever been my contact information is going to be included on the speaker slide feel free to reach out I'm happy to assist with that Ivy I will hand it back to you thank you so much thank you Heather and Maria we'd love to pass it on to our next presenters Mary Ann chrismer and Deb Bragg thank you Ivy I'm Deb Bragg I'm was the third party evaluator and led a team that that I work with then at the office of community college research and leadership at the university of Illinois where I also co-directed the transformative change initiative that Maria referred to it's another site where you can get a lot of materials go ahead and change the slide Ivy I'm really thrilled to have this opportunity today to present some information about the H2P consortium with my good colleague Mary Ann chrismer who was the director of the consortium H2P was in the first round of tech and involved nine community and technical colleges across five states as you see there these colleges range from quite small an example Ashland community and technical college in Ashland Kentucky to Malcolm X college here where I live in the city of Chicago part of the large city colleges of Chicago system and everything in between the colleges all came together partly because they had already begun to re-envision what healthcare could look like and they all had invested in some innovations that they wanted to share with one another but also grow a national network as well as a national movement and when this group of people came together which they often did at least once a year during the four years of the grant there was a lot of conversation about how they could really ignite transformative change in the healthcare education environment in community and technical colleges nationwide and that vision has really materialized because of their efforts and Mary Ann will tell you a lot about that looking at fundamentally what this consortium was about one of the most important features was the belief that there is a core set of competencies that anyone working in the healthcare industry needs to know and they work very hard together to identify that set of competencies that is then foundational to all healthcare education that's taught at these colleges and colleges that adopt so what I'm telling you is there's a core set of competencies that is a certified nursing assistant would learn as well as a registered nurse but also someone who's a rad tech or respiratory therapist or an EMT or a paramedic these core sets of competencies would in themselves create an industry recognized credential that's fundamental and I can't imagine that there is a more important innovation that could serve us right now in COVID-19 than knowing that these individuals have been trained with this core set of competencies so that I think is really important I don't know if any of you were on the webinar yesterday but Jan Pomeroy who's with the Enoka Ramsey Community College in Minnesota was one of our speakers and she talked about the holistic support strategy that was fundamental to the H2P consortium so I'd urge you given time to to list to grab that webinar from yesterday from the New America website and hear what Jan and others had to say I'd also point out the partnerships are absolutely fundamental and I know Mary Ann's going to talk about them in total this consortium served about 6,500 students through various strategies 5,000 of those students enrolled in and 48 programs of study and health care and almost 70% of those students earned a credential and the results were that demonstrate a positive impact of these students and their educational outcomes and compared to a match comparison so there's strong impact data to support this work as well with that I'm going to turn it over to my good colleague Mary Ann well welcome everyone it's it is so exciting for an extrovert such as me to be in a room with 120 or 134 virtual people so I'm just envisioning all of you and all of us working together and work that is important to us all already is Maria and Heather and also certainly Deb has his address is that the work of the tech grants really was very very visionary and supportive of just the type of work that we need to be doing here and many of us are doing it's just a matter of you know picking it up and picking up some best practices and moving on to be able to provide the best possible educational pathway for our students into the much needed health care careers in reflecting my role prior to being consortium director as I was a dean of health and public safety the very large health program we had over 4,000 students and now subsequently I'm working actually as a consultant with the state of Ohio that is working on health care pathways and partnerships with our local and and statewide health care workforce to identify pathways to get high school students through to college and into careers so it continues to where I continue to pull upon these strategies one of the particular reasons that we came together and Deb alluded to the fact it was really a very very dynamic group of individuals each of us had different strengths and the strength of El Central Community College out of Dallas was that they had been working over 15 years on a core curriculum for health care and it actually implemented it for all of their programs including nursing and so we basically used this as our benchmark template and and grew it to a actual health care core curriculum that was crosswalked and validated with the national science curriculum that's the high school curriculum and also with the curriculum or with the the basic health care competencies model that was developed by the Department of Labor and actually our group then worked with that particular group and HRSA and also the health professions network to update it in 2015 so we have now a curriculum and what is interesting about that it's all it's all available it's free there are seven modules we hired a company to put together great video great content all ready to download all available to you on skills commons but in addition to that that particular work is now being offered through the Minnesota system and the health force Minnesota and that is available as a curriculum that kind of a train the trainer curriculum that can be offered to your staff or to people within your community and this content can be provided in a variety of ways from high school to college to within the health care environment itself to community-based and we're doing that in the greater Cincinnati area and also I know that they're doing that in Minnesota to actually bring health care workforce together to be responsible to some extent for the pathway and to the teaching the learning the instructing by providing this very very strong foundation along with that another course that was developed with funds and it came out of Cincinnati we had a very very innovative biology faculty member who put together listen to what we were saying about health care and put together a course called integrated biology and skills for success in science it's actually a six-hour pre-course that can be offered as a pre anatomy and physiology pre-program course or can be even offered in high school or as a boot camp and this course which was piloted during this period of 2011 to 2015 actually now has been utilized by literally thousands of students with extremely positive outcome and success in those barrier courses such as anatomy and physiology so basically when we looked at the strategies and there were eight strategies we looked at was very holistic and everything that has been said prior we integrated into our strategies but what is important to create a system or systematic change that is impactful is that really not one particular strategy whether it be distance learning or core curriculum or partnerships or student support can survive on its own it's very important that the system be thought of as a system an integrated system that involves all stakeholders starts at the local level regional level state level and goes all the way to the national level and in our grant we did just that for example we had all had our workforce investment boards working directly with us and our employers working directly with us also most of us had community-based agencies working with us as well as of course the community college and the system school systems within that particular region we also connected with the national alliance of business which is the group that actually coordinates and provides resources for 1200 local boards around the country so we were able to get before them to meet with them and have them help us with some of our strategies this in addition with many other national organizations that we continue to work with such as NN2 and HPN and other healthcare organizations as well as our accrediting groups so it is important you know although the work really does have to begin at the local level that there are those national connections to be able to help you navigate through this and I would say that when it comes to recruitment and we have to really always be cognizant in our communities as to what we need to do clearly when we came together we were in a national crisis it was just coming out of a great recession we had many of our skilled workers who had lost their jobs due to overseas employment or changing the jobs to overseas and that was starting to mitigate but we still had a situation when the workforce was trying to recover and at the same time healthcare jobs were in great need we're not that different now than we were then and we have the same challenges so we're going to have to get well trained healthcare workers into the workforce that also keep in mind we want equity and diversity needs being met and we don't want to lose sight of this especially now with that in mind what we did with the grant that I felt really helped and as I said Dallas was the kingpin so to say with the core curriculum in the case of Cincinnati we had a very very robust collaborative that was had been established in 2003 and continues to work effectively in our community called the Greater Cincinnati Health Careers Collaborative that is now even expanded throughout northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana and we do work all over the state actually now the key is is that this was an employer-led partnership with education and the community also being very much center stage so we work collaboratively leave our egos at the door and really work to meet the workforce needs and the diversity needs improving poverty in the region collectively under our united way which hosted the the group which was funded by various funding methods so this particular group became very helpful and we established different types of similar collaboratives in Louisville that continues to work and also in Dallas Chicago had some has used some of the techniques and the in our our learning and developing there so and Minnesota also so we were able to then get greater engagement between the workforce investment boards employers and the community colleges to make sure we were meeting those particular needs this continues to be extremely important now and we have many many positive examples to demonstrate from this including right now we're working on apprenticeship program could I have the next slide please hello next okay very good so that we have actually created um various types of pathways that reduce time to completion we've reached out to employer community partner networks that are there some of some of these um actual training are within our community partner agency some are actually on site with employers and um many of them are embedded in high schools and in the community colleges but the concept is it's pathway work that is it ensures employability so in reducing the time to completion in providing opportunity and making sure that our students have the critical skills that they need to be successful and healthcare we're actually pushing this down whenever possible into the high school or early into the community college experience getting students employed as quickly as possible developing internships apprenticeships and really right now what's huge in our area is the pre-apprenticeships for all the high school students so they graduate with a viable high school credential that is a health care apprenticeship and direct entry into health care programs with credit being also earned so it decreases that time to completion they have a job it really has been supportive of our more at promise students that earlier would have dropped out early because they didn't have the skill set or the necessary income they needed to mitigate their particular challenges so it's really showing or demonstrating some success and we continue to work on those particular pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs especially in medical assisting sterile processing looking into ones for respiratory care and nursing so this continues again a lot of barriers we still we have a lot of things to do but we're making some progress always in every single case and Deb was super super helpful with this is we use data to improve we do use data to move forward and to make our case and this is extremely important when we're working with workforce investment boards and with our employers so I guess in closing for me as I would say right now act now while the the iron's hot I mean you've got reasons to implement some of those innovations and to get your community partners mobilized do it now while the iron's hot and sometimes you're going to make some mistakes we can mitigate those in the future but the the innovation and the opportunity often occurs when there is the most challenge Deb did you have something else you wanted to say I think we I didn't Mary Ann thank you so much that was wonderful thank you yeah thank you both really appreciate it I would like to pass it on now to our folks for mo health wins I apologize for my dog backing barking in the background John and Maggie Cosgrove and Kenny Wilson thank you so much this this is Maggie Cosgrove and John and I served as the researchers on mo health wins and that was such a humbling experience to work with such passionate educators and it really still resonates so thank you for including us in this webinar it's important to colleges as they work frontline in this COVID period so first I just have to say that our research really echoes the information of each of the previous speakers having said that John and I have identified four overarching themes from our research that we believe applicable as colleges respond to the COVID-19 crisis in new and innovative ways so as you can see from this slide mo health wins was around one tech grant and it included all of the two-year colleges in Missouri the second bullet point sort of shows that it was a complex endeavor there were a ton of strategies or innovations and it the slide also shows that we saw success with both completion and employment as well as many other areas but one key lesson that the colleges learned was that student support innovations should be connected to or integrated into the classroom experience supports that seemed extra or required students to take some action to get the service were just less likely to be used second we we know that although the faculty member is the point of the spear for innovation to work it requires more than just the faculty colleges came to learn that each innovation supported the other innovations and since these innovations overlapped colleges needed to make sure that organizational functions interacted and overlapped too for example financial aid and advising that showed up time and time again the importance of that third we saw that successful innovative instruction required a team of faculty and staff who were passionate about the innovation committed to students and flexible for example colleges learned that to get adjunct instructors competent in technology they had to work together and become a team with their it department to ensure access for remote learners and finally because mo health wins was complex colleges learned the importance of keeping track of what they were doing and what they were learning for example the importance of a process to systematically gather feedback from instructors was really helpful so as colleges develop strategies to address coven 19 mo health provides all of them with a set of successful evidence-based innovations connected to adult and high-risk student populations mo health was groundbreaking and so it transformed how Missouri and its community colleges use employer engagement stackable credentials accelerated learning proactive student supports and technology enhancements to create post-secondary education programs and awards so having said all that I now get to turn it over to Kenny Wilson who has been a leader in his college and across the state in both implementing and learning from these. Thanks Maggie and you read that what I what I said about myself very well I appreciate that just kidding we had the opportunity to work across community colleges and across areas in our state building bridges in areas that honestly weren't there before Missouri is a decentralized system we have our own little fiefdoms in each part of the state that you know build a build their programs within a silo mo health wins really gave us the opportunity to look across these programs to be able to see where we had similarities where we had areas of collaboration and be able to build on those for us at Jefferson College which is a small community college about 45 minutes south of st. Louis we were able to bring on board some programs some technologies some activities that honestly we would not have had the opportunity to do as everyone knows in challenging financial times having the financial flexibility to be able to take risks becomes even more challenging so tax really gave us the opportunity to take some risks that have really paid dividends for us in the long run so technology enhanced content we'll get into that a little bit more later but technology was a key avenue to be able to connect us to students connect us to areas that we didn't necessarily connect before enhanced advising navigation is a great word that we that we'll talk about a little bit on the next slide but being able to navigate students through the rough waters of onboarding is is really challenging you know employer engagement employers were involved through multiple avenues through both program development students core competency development obviously giving clinical opportunities as well as hiring our students afterwards and then almost as importantly for us to be able to provide us the feedback afterwards to be able to tell us what was good what needed to be changed and what what we could have improved on the course contextualization is is an interesting concept we had our two programs and mo health wins were a development of a rad tech program that was chunked and modularized and we'll talk about that in a second but the other was a CIS program that was specifically dedicated to developing it representatives within the healthcare field not so much the HIT realm but more along the the physical individuals that were doing the systems setups within larger hospital communities as well as you know smaller hospital areas and to develop for example a customer service class that was specifically dedicated for those students in the CIS realm to be able to learn how to interact with you know a physician or a nurse or the or the nurse manager at a on a particular floor when there was computer related issues and how the IT support would be able to work with those individuals so these were some of the strategies and the areas in which we worked at the college if you wouldn't mind changing the slide I'd appreciate it so for me I had four take home points that I really that jumped out to me the first was the connection to students I think has been said multiple times a lot of these students at Jefferson College I think we have something like 60 percent first generation students we have 70 percent that are Pell eligible so these are students that don't have a lot of experience in education so they're coming to us seeking a career opportunity so our job as educators in higher education is to be able to navigate them through those challenging waters we all know when you when you break down the admission process for a student to get into an associate degree program it's daunting for someone who has the support network at home to be able to help them do that imagine if you're a you know you're a single mom or a you know a father who's never stepped foot in a higher education institution you have kids at home you're now trying to get a new career because your your previous job has gone away and this is your first time crossing that that barrier into higher education institution so those those onboarding processes anytime that we could simplify them the better the second point check my notes make sure I said anything I believe I did dare to innovate as we moved in COVID-19 by far the easiest program of study for me to transition or for me to assist my program directors to transition was the rad tech program the rad tech program was a mo health wins program it's developed an eight week course offerings it's very very focused in its technology use the faculty members did not skip a beat and we've we've challenged with some proctoring of online tests and things such as that these two faculty members have been like oh it works great these were some challenges but but we can we can work through them so by far the easiest program to transition the the interesting thing as an institution with the ITT closure a few years ago we as an institution were one of the only or one of the first I'll say that nursing programs to be able to onboard those students and get them through to completion within a year of the ITT's doors closing so we had students in st. Louis we had a group of 12 students in st. Louis that were within eight weeks of graduating from ITT when they closed their doors so it took us six months to to get them through the process to get them to graduation and of those of those 12 students we were able to graduate eight of them and seven of them passed their wards on the first time which we were pretty excited about but the the point was we were able to work across both career and tech education which is you know used to being a little more flexible and a little more used to changes and arts and science which didn't have that opportunity necessarily to to to have these innovative programs so it was it was an it was an interesting opportunity for us to work across the institution to be able to bring not only career training through the nursing program but also the general education curriculum to be able to do credit for prior learning and other opportunities to be able to shorten that pathway to completion so the the focus on core competencies that we worked through with mow health wins was a really key learning opportunity for us so daring to innovate means focusing on those core competencies that students need to be successful in the field the next point I wanted to talk about was collaboration Marianne spoke of that collaboration at the national level at the local level for us you know we could talk about H2P and and going down to Orlando to work with Deb's group and that was an amazing experience and I've made I've made friendships and made working collaboration across the country with people I would have never had the opportunity to meet were not for mow health wins which has given us the opportunity to take advantage of some resources that are just amazing skills common Merlot all of these all of these resources are amazing but when you look at the state level the ability to work with John and Maggie who are fantastic by the way working with John and Maggie and the other community colleges that we never would have had the opportunity to work with and and develop relationships and one of the relationships that came out of that was we developed a a memorandum of understanding with st. Charles community college which is about an hour and a half away where we provide in district tuition to their students that are coming to Jefferson college for rad tech training and that persists today where we have a certain number of students that come from the st. Charles area to go back and work in their community st. Charles as you as you guys know rad tech is an expensive program to run and st. Charles now has the benefit of using our rad tech program to help educate students from their area to be able to return to work in their area without the community college expense the next thing with respect to collaboration is the non-credit-to-credit at Jefferson college specifically we had some pretty well-defined silos of what's non-credit and what's credit and the discussion and collaboration across that didn't really happen prior to mo health wins now we have whenever we have new programs coming on board or we're talking about the non-credit or credit programs that we're looking at adding the first thing we do is we bring in the non-credit and credit side of the house and we say okay how can we build a pathway to connect what someone's doing on the non-credit side to help shorten their pathway on the credit side and how do we link these two things together the last point I wanted to make was with with respect to just outworking the barriers Maggie said we have to be flexible in higher education and you know she's just talking silly talk we don't do that sort of thing in higher education do we but I think the the flexibility and the work necessary to outwork these challenges requires a certain level of flexibility and a certain level of innovation and collaboration you know we're if we if we look at our students as individuals we're asking them to work through some pretty significant barriers I think we can challenge ourselves as well to work through these barriers to be able to allow our students to be successful in moving on to their careers so that's all that I had to say so IVM believe I'm sending it back to you thank you Kenny Don and Maggie it was great to learn more about MoHealth wins I want to pass things on now to Donna Meyer from Odin good afternoon everyone and welcome to this webinar first of all I do want to thank all the other presenters it's been so interesting as a past dean at a college I'm extremely familiar with all of the TAC programs and you've just presented some amazing work so thank you so much for that yes I'm Donna Meyer I'm the CEO for the Organization for Associate Degree Nursing we are an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges and we represent the Community College Associate Degree Nursing programs throughout the country specifically we our membership is the programs and the faculty included just as a word of advice you know word we also do have a student arm because we do have an honor society for the nursing students so I do like to mention that at all times next slide please I'm not going to go through this but just so that you all have a little bit of understanding some of you might not be familiar with Odin and this just kind of talks a little bit our vision and our strategic priorities that we really focus on the education for our students our faculty advocating at the national level especially when it comes to HRSA funding working on leadership for both our faculty our deans and directors being very inclusive of course diversity is extremely important and then collaboration not only at the local regional state but also at the national level which I will address during the presentation next slide so obviously just like all of you you were confronted very quickly with COVID and you know for Odin being representing the nursing programs it was very stressful for the faculty for the students you know what can we do the very first one of the first things that we did um I just wanted to mention is we did put out a call to action because we were so extremely concerned about the PPE equipment and so some of your schools might have been involved in this initiative because we wanted to try to collect as much PPE equipment get it to our local community whether it be a healthcare setting or schools or other places that needed this equipment long-term care facility excuse me long-term care facilities so we really worked on that so then we were confronted our faculty they were very concerned what can we do how quickly can we move all of this so first of all simulation we've always done simulation in our programs but it does present some challenges first of all according to each state there's a nurse practice act and the nursing programs do have to follow the rules and regs and those nurse practice acts um additionally accreditation plays a role in simulation so that was the first thing that Odin started working on was getting that information out on our website about different um you know opportunities for simulation and we also made sure that you know people understood what they needed to do they needed to you know make sure they checked with their nurse practice act make sure they worked with their accrediting body according to the national council of state boards of nursing you can do up to 50 simulation in your programs and have the same outcomes so a lot of our programs had to work with their local boards of their state boards of nursing to say you know what can we do many boards of nursing across the country have actually changed that you can do more simulation so that was one area so you know changing to the online digital classroom of course became very important also and you know a lot of the faculty because it was nursing had not done a lot of online so helping faculty move to that online um venue was very important and needed a lot of help too some of the faculty needed a lot of help as well as the students um the next thing was we have done a lot of webinars ourselves we've been partnering with webinars um there's been webinars provided for virtual simulation and distant learning resources just to try to help our faculty and our students with this work um our next webinar is going to be very interesting I think on April 28th because it's going to be about crucial conversations with faculty and students you can imagine that those students that are still going to clinical in some areas of the country and faculty they do have certain questions what can you know concerns about their own health and so we've been trying to help them with those and so our next webinar for Odin is actually going to be about some of these crucial conversations additionally we have been collaborating with many many people and organizations whether it be you know different educational companies you know and this is all on our landing resource page um those of you that you know I would encourage you to go to Odin www um odin.org because we have a whole landing page on different resources that are available so if you haven't been able to look at that I would encourage you to do that one of the major collaborations that did occur and it has to do also with a policy brief which is the next bullet point is that we worked with um the national council of state boards of nursing they took the lead and with 10 other national nursing organizations a brief came out called US nursing leadership supports practice academic partnerships to assist the nursing workforce during the COVID-19 crisis so one of the big concerns of course has been getting students back into clinical many of the hospitals felt it was just you know challenging to have more people coming into the hospital they didn't want the students there they could use the help so what could we do so this particular policy brief it was really interesting we worked on it very hard under the leadership of NCSBN and within 48 hours developed this policy brief and basically um what it says is the proposal is that students in the pre art the nursing programs rpn our vocational nursing programs and that they are enrolled in an approved program by the state board of nursing could actually become employees um and that those employ as an employee then they could also gain um clinical academic credit so this was rather a new initiative that we're trying to get those students back in clinical but also as an employee then they have some benefits and having a faculty member with them to oversee some of this so it's rather a unique opportunity that has not been done in the past that could be very beneficial um also working with the media whether it be social media or working you know there's been some um we were interviewed by new york times one of our um dean deans at marin college in california talking about all of this and then again one of our big roles is advocacy making sure that we're included in these conversations so that the associate degree programs across this country um can continue to move forward next slide please so lessons that have been learned some of the things that you know i think we're really starting to see is that that simulation might be able to be um continually bumped up you know that and you know what what can you do yes the study shows 50 percent but some of the states or have only been allowing anywhere from 10 to 25 percent so you know this what we're going to learn i think is that simulation is a wonderful opportunity and a possibility for nursing students to have more of this in their um academic setting clinical placements you know can we be more creative of course we have to start getting out into the community but could we do things you know like the policy brief that students are somewhat employed and also getting academic correct um credit curriculum i think you're going to see a big change um with more integration in our curriculums about population health disaster planning you know things like um you know reacting to this covid crisis how do you do this um the next thing i think that's going to become extremely important and odin is already starting to work on this is what i would call health compliance one of our major partners is castle branch and some of you might be familiar with castle branch because of background checks and things like that but they are working and have really worked diligently for like the last four weeks and have come up with a software program to help screen students so that they can go back into clinical to show that they don't have temperatures to make sure that they actually understand proper um hygiene techniques and that so this is hopefully will help students get into back into clinical much quicker as well as the and this also goes into the quality and safety one of the initiatives that odin always has worked on is quality and safety and nursing education um you might be familiar with it called cusin but we are really going to focus on quality and safety to make sure that the graduates from these programs are working in that vein and you know finally i really want to mention the nursing workforce as you all and probably know nursing the profession is the largest healthcare profession in the country but we have to continue to have this nursing workforce and i think at any you know this really shows how strong the associate degree programs are in this country how important they are to the healthcare of our country you know we have many many rural states and you know where there might be only you know one university and seven community colleges we always have served a very important role in healthcare and i think this crisis is only showing that how important we are for the nursing workforce and we have to continue to work to get these students out i can tell you one of the big initiatives with the deans and directors in the programs right now is to make sure that those graduates for may are going to be able to get out into the working workforce as soon as possible some of the states have also you know changed some of the policies as far as how quickly they can get that nursing license because we know we need that workforce so so much is being done yes we have had some many challenges but i think the way we're looking at it is these challenges are now providing opportunities opportunities to show what different ways you can do do things in education especially in nursing when it comes you know to the fact that it is hands-on but you can also do other things and to make sure that we get that nursing workforce you know out there and that the associate degree really plays a very important role and that we must collaborate with our other healthcare professions from some of the programs like the tax grant so very important so i want to thank you for letting me share a little bit about what Odin's doing and i do encourage you to go to our website for resources and i'm happy to help in any way i can if you have specific questions about nursing thank you Donna thank you so so much for sharing all that great information we were really grateful for you and for your participation i want to pass it over to my colleague iris right now we've got about 15 more minutes before we need to wrap up and so iris has a couple of questions that folks have been asking that she'll direct to the panelists thank you ivy and thank you all the panelists my name is iris palmer i'm a senior advisor here at new america and i think we can go ahead and get right to the questions um the first one was sent in by someone who's actually a medical assisting faculty member um and this is something that donna you've been addressing but i think we could get a little bit deeper into it um how do how have you all thought about addressing the requirements for from external accrediting body bodies requiring hands-on hours for clinical courses and allied health problem programs such as vital signs laboratory classes lobotomy patient care etc and then we've talked about this a little bit already but i'd love to give um a little bit of time for maybe heather maria um donna to talk a little bit more in depth about these type how how we can make these um these types of experiences virtual given the requirements uh of accrediting and licensure well this is maria i'll i'll get started i guess this is an issue for sure and trying to navigate and and make sure that you are um within the requirements of those accrediting organizations is it can be difficult but um with tools like the nanzo lab that we talked about um and being able to um use simulations some which are built online and some of those simulations are available um through these projects and on skills commons um it's possible to uh be able to build those hours toward the requirements um i'll be quiet for a few minutes and let's let marianne or heather chip in appreciate that maria this is iris and i just want to say we will be gathering a bunch of resources that maria and others in the on the panelists recommend um to share with the people who have participated in this webinar looks like marianne you have some comment yes um i was just on a conference call yesterday with hpn and the person from medical representative medical assisting and i said that maria been another one of the organizations were relaxing that requirement so you might want to check into that to see what it was i know that it like the the the out the um unpaid our requirement was going to be able to be met in other ways considering the crisis and then as i said this could be an opportunity for some flexibility also in the future and or heather did you have anything to add on that one don this is dana i was just going to say one of the things and again i'm speaking specifically to nursing um you know the talking to your creditor and really talking to the you know the board of nursing is the best solution i have found that they are very you know they understand the crisis and they're trying to adapt and you know look at things so that you know people can get through their programs and meet the the outcomes um so i think the best advice you know odin is saying is have those conversations and see what you can do but you know um with your creditor and your particular state board of nursing thank you don't and i um heather did you have something to add no i was just going to say i think uh it's been covered thank you great and like i said we'll be providing additional resources after the end of this of this particular webinar um so we have kind of a technical question for h2p um the medical assistant program that you listed in your in your uh in your project was it an admin m a or a clinical cma program it was um both i mean was it it was a mere um one-year program for double a with double a m a and and cma accreditation at the end that's really helpful marianne thank you um and actually uh there was also some requests for additional links from you with some of the things that you talked about and so um once again we'll be providing additional resources at the end of this webinar cooler um so my our next question actually is for kenny um you mentioned an uh an integrative biology class um is there additional information that you can provide about that or is that something that we would also provide as a reference at the end of this webinar so i believe the integrative biology class was marianne that discussed that um when we talked about biology from the itt perspective it was more along the lines of using certain internal and external uh assessment tools to be able to provide credit for prior learning for individuals in the ap uh arena so marianne i believe you guys talked about the um integrative biology or was i mistaken there yes um you are correct it is an integrative biology course this course was actually developed in response to the faculty at since natty states concerned that so many students especially um are more academically stressed students were failing out of the the anatomy and physiology sequence over 50 which is unacceptable so what we developed is this course that actually um it does not increase time to completion in fact it decreased time to completion because as a result of the challenges with the anatomy and physiology there was a biology prerequisite a chemistry prerequisite and the math prerequisite that were actually integrated into this one six credit hour course which included also in addition to the basic skills they needed to be successful and amp also workforce uh types of employability skills um scientific research methodology in a in a entry level way so using scientific method in your decision making critical thinking etc and um we tested it over a three-year period and there was uh we went from about a 50% to an 80% pass rate in that course um and the letter grades increased by one whole letter grade for those who took this course versus those who took the traditional sequence of course so that's the kind of you know work we were doing with the grant and this course has continued to be offered and as I said it's been um offered to many other community colleges and I can get I can give you that information actually how to access information more information about the course itself but the rudiments of it are on the merlot site or the um the skills common site yes yeah well we'll like I said be sending the specific links to things like that we'll be bringing them together and putting them on the on the page and the initial date I think this hasn't been updated but the data we had through 2016 um we do have updated data now is on that great sounds like a wonderful project so I think what's going to be our last question is for Donna Donna how are schools providing exams during the shutdown um exams did you say yes exams yeah most of them are doing um you know online exams and they're using some type of security system um to be able to you know um have the exams to continue most of them are doing you know something like yeah that's what they're doing just to add on that a little bit more um Kenny I know you have been um doing something that was uh very interesting around making sure that students had the technology to take proctored exams did you want to share that uh are you talking about my shuttling services yes I am we uh for art for our uh bi-level nursing program we have uh uh we really didn't have an institution wide proctoring service that we were able to turn to so we had to develop this on the fly so we are using and I'm not you know any any particular product but we're using the Respondus monitor program we'd already used Respondus lockdown so it was an easy move for us to go to Respondus monitor but what we needed to do was ensure that the individual student had the technology services that they that they need so we uh at our first group meeting to prepare for this webinar I actually was on the road delivering laptops to students with my mask and gloves on to ensure that we our nursing students had the technology necessary to be able to take their course exams and be able to prepare for graduation I would I would add one point on the on the previous question with respect to um the the the one size fits all there there is no one size fits all um approach to bringing these programs back online um Mary Ann mentioned early in in two um I received an email yesterday from a colleague in in two about how we were bringing our programs back online and the the point was each accrediting body is providing different guidance they're all being very flexible but they're all providing different guidance so there is no one size fits all so with respect to our testing and our assessment processes each program has had to look at their situation the alterations that were made by their accrediting body to be able to develop a solution that worked for them so so yes as associate dean I get to uh cut masks out uh for sewing and I get to deliver laptops so it um it's it's a it's a lot of fun it is it is a testament to how much you care about your student success um Mary Ann did you want to add anything from that yes um just to actually piggyback on what Kenny said is that for any of you that are listening um that are in community colleges um working with health care programs whether nursing or allied health or whatever that the NN2 organization is a great organization to belong to and to network with to be able to um give you guidance when it comes to some of these critical questions and if nothing else to have someone else to cry on their shoulder with as we go through this difficult time because sometimes it can be lonely especially when you're in a leadership position so I just want to give that little plug really appreciate that well that was our last um our last question um Ivy if you'd like to go to the next slide here is the contact information for all of our panelists and for Ivy and I we hope that you will make use of these and contact us if you have any questions um like I said we will be uh putting um both the recording of this webinar the um PowerPoint deck so we'll have the links in it and additional resources on our webpage um so those will be there soon um and I want to just thank you all for your time and attention and I want to thank all of our panelists for sharing their wisdom with us um please keep in touch with New America here are some ways to do that both um through our newsletter on Twitter on LinkedIn and on YouTube so thank you all so much for your time and we really appreciate it