 Welcome everyone to today's virtual open house. We're very excited that you're here to listen to some of the information we have about our Master of Archives and Records Administration program. It's a unique program, one we're very proud of. We're going to talk to you about the iSchool and the program itself. We'll give you an overview of the degree, what is comprised of. We'll tell you what it's like to be an online student from the instructor's perspective, and then should Katie be joining us soon, she will be able to fill you in on the student's perspective, and then we have time for questions and answers. So I wanted to explain to you our administration. I'm at the top, not because I'm the top person, but because I'm talking to you right now, but I'm Dr. Pat Franks. I'm a professor in the program, and I'm also the MARA program coordinator, and I serve as the MARA advisor. So I'm the one who we talk to you about the courses you're taking, if you have questions on electives, that type of thing. Dr. Kersch right below me is really the head of the School of Information. She's also a professor, she's a fantastic person, very forward-looking, and so we're very proud of the things that are happening in the iSchool. Dr. Linda Mayn is our associate director, and she's the coordinator, as you can see there, of admissions and graduate advising. She's the one that I go to if I don't know all the answers to the questions that I receive, and in addition to her, I often turn to Sheila. You'll probably be in touch with Sheila quite a bit if you can join us. She is what's called an online student advisor, so I'm the academic advisor about courses you should take. Sheila makes sure you figure out how to take them if you need permissions, if seats are open in certain courses, if you need to fill out anything for graduation, that type of thing. So these are people that are more in the administrative roles, and then our primary faculty, Dr. Dalby, is with us tonight, and you'll be hearing from her soon. Jason Kaltenbacher is not, but he is one of our lecturers. He teaches a course each fall and spring, and if you join us in the fall, you would be taking one course from him. Joshua Zimmerman is one of our other lecturers, and Josh teaches the research methods for archivists and records managers, and he teaches that in the fall, and he also, many spring semesters, not this one, offers a one-credit course in archivist persona. I'm just saying that briefly as a title, it's quite a long title, but it talks about where the idea of the archivist as a professional came from and how it evolved over time. It's quite interesting. And then this is Katie, and Katie is our student assistant, and Katie's been with us for, there she is, Katie's on, so hi Katie. Katie's been with us for almost two years, this year and a half now, and she's going to be graduating in the spring, and I'm going to be so sad because she really handles a lot for us. So I am going to let Katie describe some of the online resources we have, and she'll talk to you about what she does, and she's a good person to ask about the student perspective on classes later on. So let me move over to the first slide, and Katie, why don't you take it away? Okay. Our university, the iSchool and the MARA program have posted a great deal of information online, and what we're going to show you are a lot of the sites and how we use them and stuff. Next slide. So this is our university and iSchool website, our webpage. It's a great place to go and get general information, and this is actually our brand new site that we've updated it, and you have access to our blogs and information about course rotations and where to, what you'll be studying and things like that. Okay. So we have curriculum, the classes that you can be taking that are electives, as well as what you will be taking in the MARA program, and then you also have access to the iStudent blog, which is a blog for the whole program, and it does a lot of blog posts about things like books that are coming out by some of our professors, or we'll be doing a few MARA things on it, and MLS, MLIS was there recently, so there's a lot of information that you can gain from it, and just a lot of knowledge. Next slide. Social media, this is part where I'm probably the most familiar with. We have Facebook and Twitter, and we do a lot of outreach through it. This semester, the spring semester, we're focusing on scholarships, and last year we focused on what kind of social media do our alumni and our current students like to get information from us. So our Facebook, you can get posts about news articles and scholarship information and job opportunities. It's a great place to interact with other students. And our Twitter, we definitely retweet and follow other archives and people and museums, and especially during archivist day in October. There's a hashtag ask an archivist, follow it, and we find all the information and retweet that and stuff. So, next slide. Okay, so the MARA blog, I work on a lot of, or most of it, all of it, and in this blog we have what we call the spotlight series where a student and an alumni come in and write about something that they have gone through, like Sharon went to an ARMA chapter meeting, and if you were interested in going to an ARMA chapter meeting, she tells you what her experience was like. We have people who talk about the CRM exam and what they've done in, or the program has meant to them. We have professors that talk about a program that they're trying to advertise. It's a great place to get some information about the MARA program itself. Next slide. Okay, here's our Facebook page. As you can see in the picture, we have a scholarship opportunity. We're posting about a paper proposal soon. So, it's just a great place to get information. Next slide. The VACARA blog, the VACARA is a virtual center, I can help me, for Archives and Records Administration? Yes. Okay, so VACARA is in Second Life, and this is where you're able to meet up with alumni and students who want to be in the setting of Second Life. You get to do, let's see, we did a Dickens Christmas project where some of our alumni read a Dickens Christmas story and they did, oh, I'm trying to think of the word. They had props and they had noises that coincided with the story. It was a really great place and it was a great Dickens Christmas project. So, it's a great opportunity to meet people. Next slide. I think this is mine. Thank you, Kaden. All right, so now I'll talk to you a little bit about the program. When it was developed, it came out of the idea that the MLIS program did have a career pathway with Archives and Records in it, but not enough information about those topics, and so the school decided that they would create a separate second degree program, so we're similar to the MLIS and that we're an independent degree program, however, we have no library science in it. So, when you hear somebody say an ALA accredited school, ALA is American Library Association, well it's not the school that's accredited, it really would be the program, and the program would be the MLIS Master of Library and Information Science because it's a library program, you know, so that's what ALA does, but the MARA program really is geared to Archives, Records Administration, and Information Governance, and therefore there's no one association that would certify this type of program, our whole institution is certified, so we're fine there, but I'm talking about a professional certification, so in this case, our students must become certified on their own once they enter the professional realm, and that means that they really know what they're doing, so we looked at ARMA core competencies for ARMA International, the Records Management Association, and we looked at the site of American Archivist Guidelines for their graduate programs, what were they looking for, but then we also looked at the certification examinations for the professionals, so if you want to be a Certified Records Manager, what do you need to know, and that came from the Institute of Certified Records Managers, we also looked at if you want to be a Certified Archivist, what do you need to know, and that too came from the Academy of Certified Archivists, and so we put all of that together and created curriculum with courses that should deliver all of this to you, and we're very proud and I'll explain to you in a minute why we believe we have been quite successful, but along the way something else popped up and it was the Information Governance Professional Certification that also came from the Records Management field from ARMA, but this time it was looking at beyond just the archives or the records at a whole variety of skills that one would need if they were going to look at all information that was not just managed and preserved but actually used, analyzed, utilized within the organization, and so we created two courses that in fact one of them started right at the same time the very first exam went out for the Information Governance Professional and it is the Information Governance Course that Lisa Dr. Dolly teaches, and then she has a second course that complements it, it's Information Assurance. Those two are excellent courses that prepare you to look beyond the traditional, so this also is incorporated into our program, and now I had said I could show you why we're pretty confident that we've done it right and that we're maintaining it well. The ICRM, the Institute for Certified Records Managers has an agreement with us that once our students finish the MARA program they will receive credit for parts one through five of six-part examination. Normally you pay $100 each section, so you'd pay like $500 for these first five exams, but they certify that with the content of our courses, should you graduate from the program, you will get credit for it, and then if you wanted to become a certified records analyst you could immediately request that, once the graduation has been certified through our university, and if you have one year of work experience or if you take our internship or our organizational consulting project course, either one of those will qualify for that one year of experience, so it's really I think a very good indication that the ICRM is very pleased with this program and the content that we have that would prepare you for working in the records management field, but we also at the same time had the academy of certified archivists take a look at our courses and evaluate them to see how well we were satisfying their requirements for skills that archivists would need, and of our 11 required courses, 10 were approved by them and are actually posted on their website. The one that was not is the internship organizational consulting project only because that's never the same for anybody, it's always different, and so they couldn't look at content that they could say, oh yes, this satisfied this skill, it might satisfy different skills for everybody, so we are very proud of this. What this means here is that when you attempt to take the exam to be a certified archivist, you have to prove that you've had education that satisfies their requirements to sit for that exam as a student and our courses qualify for that, and there are two electives I'll talk about a little later that also have been approved, those are the two info courses that are also on the ACA website and those are also pre approved for anyone who's wishing to sit for the ACA exam. Now the reason we don't get credit for that exam is they only have one part of it, it's the 100 question exam, and so they do want to see that you take that, but at least you qualify for it, so we're really pleased that we believe this program will instill the qualities and the qualifications in you that you need in order to satisfy needs for records management or archival positions, and more and more we're seeing information governance positions coming along and you are certainly qualified for those as well when you graduate. So this is a what we call our program learning outcomes, they're the core competencies that every graduate must satisfy. What that means is through the courses that we've put together we know that if you take a passage course, do the required assignments, the readings, and so on, you will be able to do these things A through J and for example in B, recognizing social, cultural, and economic dimensions of records, keeping your record used, and that really explains why we look at records for business for example or government because we have a lot of issues with the economic dimensions, that's where you're keeping things for finance, right, for tax purposes, for contracts, accounts receivable and payable for customers, but also at the same time we're looking at society and through the government what kind of records have to be kept for society, and certainly your identification so that at some point you collect social security, I mean those are the kind of records that are really important there, and cultural, just think about our national archives and the declaration of independence that's there, so these are all the kinds of records that we're talking about when we talk about the goals of the archivist and the records manager to preserve those records. So you'll see a number of other competencies here on the list, what happens is each student will prepare an e-portfolio that will demonstrate how they have mastered this through assignments that you do, and you have to keep track of those assignments, I'll explain that a little bit later too. So what are the required courses? Well I said that 11 courses are required, but actually you need 42 credits, so there are three more courses that are electives, but these are the required courses, and you'll see that when we talk about record keeping professions, that's archivists and records managers as well, and information governance, and you see in the next course management of records and archival institutions, that's intertwined, and when we look at records creation and appraisal, we're actually talking about appraisal too, from the archival point of view as well as from the records management point of view, so there's a course I teach there that I really am having fun with enterprise content, digital preservation, you would actually be working in Office 365 and SharePoint online for half of the course, and then you'd be working in Preservico, which is a terrific commercial environment for digital preservation, so you'd be getting hands-on experience through that course. Now this, I mentioned a portfolio that you would have to create, this is the beginning of Rachel's e-portfolio, and at the top you see Home, Competencies, Conclusion, and Affirmation. Well the competencies would be those listed A, B, C, D all the way through J, and in addition to the intro that Rachel has here explaining what this e-portfolio is about, she under that competency tab would explain what the competency means, the kind of evidence she has to support it, she would have links to her work that shows that she's done that, and she would explain how that will be useful to her in her current or future career. This is a course rotation schedule they wanted to show you at the bottom, and you're at the last two rows. Oh, I'm going to let Lisa take over. I see that I should be doing that, so Lisa, if you have your mic off, can you just pick up where I left off? I just want to say hello everyone and welcome to the Mara Open House. I'm very excited to be speaking with you today. I'm speaking to you actually from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where I live, and I have been teaching in the Mara program since 2009, which means I've had the pleasure to work with all Mara students. I teach a number of courses in the Mara program. Again, welcome, and I'm going to be speaking to you right now about the course rotation and other aspects of the online experience, but any questions during the session, if you have, or you know, just ping me, or if you have any questions later, please feel free to send me an email, and both Dr. Franks and I will put our emails in the discussion area, the chat area in a few minutes. But this important slide is one sample of the actual course rotation. So if you are a student entering in the fall 2009, this would be your schedule. This is just one sample. I like to call it the happy path that the school has created for you. This is the sample of a course selection program that will come into the program in three years. And I think it's just a helpful tool, but it is by no way required. We've had students go through this program in a two-year program, two-year program, as well as, you know, five or six years. And so absolutely, this is just one sample. But what students really like about this program, according to our exit survey, is that it's the flexibility of the program. They can finish in two years, or they can finish in six, seven years, and they can, you know, take a term off. We all have family issues. You know, people have given birth and had family issues. And so that's what's really awesome about this program is that, although this is the, you know, the prescribed program, you can take courses in and on when it's convenient for you. And obviously, you are not alone when you are picking your courses because you have your faculty advisor, which would be Dr. Franks, who would help you all along the way in picking your courses. In order to allow students the opportunity to really customize the program based on their own interests, students select three additional electives from the MLIS or info program during the course of the program. And as you can see from this extensive listing, there are some awesome courses, including like digital creation and information privacy, project management, web 2.0. I often say to everyone that I really wish I was a student so that I could, you know, I had the opportunity to take these courses myself because they are really cutting edge and relevant to the industry. So this listing was really, was reviewed and approved by the MARA advisory committee. And we haven't spoke about that, but we have a committee of experts that advise us on our curriculum. And so these courses were really selected by them and made up of this, the committee is made up of industry experts in the field. And so when you take these electives, you can ensure that the electives provide you with the real skills you need to succeed in the profession. I think that the electives really are like just an awesome, excellent educational compliment to the really important courses that we're providing in the MARA program. Next slide. Again, within the MARA program, students can choose to take advanced certifications to compliment their enhanced their degree. Here's the selection of just three. I can easily be, these can easily be accomplished by selecting the right electives, and I'll talk about that in the next slide. But we have three pathways, a digital asset management, information governance assurance, and security and digital analytics and data driven decision making. And these are really like hot topics within the field. But next slide, and I can provide a little bit more information on that. So what is important from the previous slides, what is important to remember that when you are selecting, say electives to do your, to do that carefully, because if you do it right, you can select the right courses and then qualify to get these like awesome certifications. So for example, you're already required to take MARA 284 and MARA Information Governance and Information Secure Information Assurance. So if you added this one extra course as an elective, which was called Cyber Security, you are qualified to have one of these additional certifications, which awesome looks awesome on your resume. And so it's just like an added benefit of, you know, coming to the program because we have these amazing certifications. And I think I'll take you through what a MARA course really looks like. If you join in the program, one of the first courses you will take is called MARA 200. And I teach that and it's probably my favorite course. And it's called record keeping and record keeping in the record professional in society and history. It is a fundamental course which all other courses will later build upon. The course really begins by exploring the relationship between archives and the professional associations and the publications we produce and our code of ethics and our code of conduct. And then the course really looks at the relationship between our professional associations, so our professions and our professions between archives and our information security, information privacy, our library colleagues, all of the other professions that are really in this space. And we really look at, you know, our relationship between our professions. We then move to more of the, you know, the professional functions of an archivist. We talked about arrangement and description, preservation, outreach. The course is really a great balance between practical application of the profession and the theoretical constructs we need to understand as records management. And then at the end of the course, we really get into some really great stuff when this is what the students like the most according to our surveys is that they really like to understand the concept of records and trust and collective memory and records, how it's power and its relationship to human rights. And really we close the course with analysis of records and archives and the transformational change that is happening in our profession due to electronic records and data management. So this is just a really awesome screenshot because this is really what a typical course looks like. And I just want to say that the content is available 24-7 in Canvas, which is our learning management system. And typically a course, it looks like this on our main page and it's divided into 15 units. And each unit will have a lecture, a pre-recorded lecture from your instructor. And it's always our lectures and our content is always associated for people with learning disabilities as an aside. So when you're in every single lecture, you will be assigned readings, you will be assigned discussions for every single week, and then you will have assignments, typically it's three assignments a semester, and you will work on that throughout the semester. And also this is just a learning management system, but most instructions will add on to this learning management system. You'll be getting Zoom lectures like you're getting tonight or Skype or WebEx and other social media and blogs. So we use social media in our course content beyond just what the learning management system, what you're seeing right now. I think I might be back to you Patty. That is, yes. Yes, and I was going to say when we use a platform like Zoom, we don't require attendance. Normally you'll see that those are used for supplement to the course or students using for group projects, for example. Our programs are asynchronous, so you can be very successful in them by working through the courses as Lisa had mentioned that are open 24-7. You just have to make sure that you do your assignments when they're due, which is usually at the end of a week, but can be a couple of weeks or a couple of months if it's a major project. Excuse me, this program performance page, if you're wondering about the program itself, the quality of the program, this is where we report out. The university requires all programs to have a page like this, so our program performance page will have a lot of information you may be interested in. One of them would be external inputs to the curriculum, and that's where Katie has created a job survey the last two years, and that's the most recent one is posted there. She went through probably two months of job descriptions for archivist records managers, information governance professionals, gathered that data, analyzed it, and put the information out there for you. What we do is track that to see what we need in the curriculum to make sure that we are still continuing to prepare students for the most recent requests out there in the job market, but there is much more information there for you as well. You might be wondering why would you take Mara and SJSU? These are comments from the students that have graduated as they're leaving. There's an exit survey, and they always mention the quality of faculty, program, the technology, but most of all the other students that they learned from, we have such a collaborative approach in our classes where we expect everybody to work together so that everyone can succeed, that students really learn from one another. There's a diverse student body with different types of experiences that all come together in order to understand the needs for records, record keeping across the spectrum. Now you would also though have an opportunity to learn from experts. I didn't mention guest lectures that we have, our Second Life Student Archives program, also puts on guest lectures that are available if you don't want to go into Second Life to listen to through Zoom. We had one not too long ago on artificial intelligence where the robot actually did part of the presentation. And then of course the cost. It's $4.74 a unit. You have 42 required units. That's 14 courses. And so the entire program is $19,908. You only pay for what you take. So if you take one course semester, that's what you're paying for. And the application process right now what we're doing is recruiting for fall. Students are going to be beginning the spring semester very soon. And the next opportunity to join us is in August. And the information is online now. You can see that for the fall our document deadline is a little later in May, but you've got to apply by May 1st if you want to come. We don't have a cap, an upper cap, what we do is look at your bachelor's GPA. If it's 3.0 or above, then you will get in. If it's not, there is no way that you can get in until you raise that because we don't take letters of recommendation. We don't look at work experience. We're not allowed to. All we can do is have our university look at those transcripts for that 3.0. Now what they do though is if the 3.0 isn't there at the end, the complete final grade, they will look at your last 60 units of credit and to see what was that a 3.0. If that was, then you would still be accepted. If that was not, then what we recommend is you take a course or two somewhere else, raise that GPA and then come back and apply again and a number of people have done that. I also wanted to mention that we have scholarships available for new students. You can never count on the scholarships paying your way here. It's not like for bachelor's degree and we are a public university so we don't have the kind of money that a private university was, but newly admitted students can apply for one of five different scholarships in the regular session or a special session. You are in special session if you're a Mars student. The regular session only means that you might live near campus and get a different fee, which is almost similar to what you're paying if you're a special session student anyway. So in Mars though, what I've told you as far as the cost is exactly what it is. So you can always check out this page to see what else might be available. It's always nice to get one of these, but you probably if you don't have your own funding would be looking at financial aid for this. So I'm going to stop right now and ask if you have any questions and I'm also going to stop the screen sharing for the slide. So if you want to quickly jot down the email address, you can do that, but in a minute we'll also put our email addresses in the chat area for you. So right now let me go back to the session itself and I'm back and if any of you would now would like to turn off your or turn on your mics, I should say unmute yourselves if you have questions. I'll put on your videos if you'd like to be seen, please do that. And anyone have a question for us? You can raise your hand or just go ahead and say ask your question. Who is Aha? And and Millen, did you see how your name pops up? If you laugh or you cough, your name is there and if you have your video. That's what it does. It's very sensitive. Any questions at all from those of you on the? I have a question. Introduce yourself and then ask. All right, I'm Sabina Erickson and I have a question about the discussions. Are they conducted in say like a manner that we're doing now or is it simply something done online through say just a typed in discussion comments or is it something more that requires you to be at the same place at the same time as everyone else in the class? No, we're asynchronous. So my classes will open on a Monday and there will be lectures, there will be readings and there will be discussions and you would click on the discussion and you have for me, we're all a little different, but for me you would have to answer the questions by Thursday evening so that other people have the rest of the week in order to read your answers and respond if they would like to. So when I open the class on a Monday, I expect all discussions to be done by the following Sunday night and then the following Monday a new one will open. It's always in the learning management system along with the lectures and the other materials. Links to outside readings, whatever it may be. Okay, thank you. And my course is exactly the same way. Good, the two of us agree. And there are a few that might start on a different day, might say that I thought I said somebody doing like Friday through Thursday. I don't know why, unless it fit better with their schedule and they didn't want to have to work on the weekend. When we allow you to go until Sunday night, that means we're usually there on Saturday and Sunday making sure that you don't have any issues that you can't deal with on your own. So it might be that. And I'm going to look at the chat area, see if we have any questions here. And I'm hearing, are these certifications only for Mara or also MLIS? Just Mara, because the MLIS, if you're taking a look at the Archives and Records career pathway in there, you're electing electives. And so not all programs are the same for every student, although there is guidance for a career pathway. But there is no guarantee that everybody is going to do what is needed in order to be approved by ICRM. So it's just for Mara. And the certified Academy of Certified Archivists, students who take those courses can apply, but it just means that they're going to have to be looked at individually. They'll have to show their transcripts. Mara students don't. Mara students take pass, graduate, and so everybody knows what they take in the MLIS. We don't know that. It can always be different. So it is different. What is Second Life? Well, many, many years ago there was excitement about avatars in other worlds, virtual worlds, and that's what Second Life is. So it started here on our campus in 2007. And when I came, I think I started with a student at the time, a virtual Center for Archives and Records in 2009. We're celebrating our 10th year. We're going to have our 10th annual conference this coming spring. It's a way for a small group of students who happen to really like that virtual environment to get together to plan things. So there are different activities that we do as time for everyone. And I often hear people say, well, the game is not a game. There are sites in there where people do simulations like fighting fires. There are health simulations in there. That's not what we do. What we usually do is look for our interests. Do we want to have speakers on topics, like I said, on artificial intelligence robotics? Are we looking at library services? Are we looking at something else like museums, for example? We're going to be touring a more museum in spring. So everything that's created is in a virtual world. We use Linden's. Everybody is excited about cryptocurrency now. But actually, we've been turning our dollars into Linden's for years and buying objects and buildings and clothing and things like that as well. So if you're interested in that, you can always ask me about it. And I could have one of the people who works in it show you. Even if you decide not to come to us, we'd be welcome to give you an orientation. We'd like to show that off a little. We even had a book based on it and several of our students wrote chapters for that book. So they're now published authors as well. And two students, I know I'm thinking one student and I just put in a paper for a conference on computer technology that's going to be held in Portugal in May and it was accepted. And so she will be representing us there in Portugal. Yes. And Katie is explaining because Katie is our representative to the student associations for Vakara and she said beautifully it's where users can create, connect and chat with others from around the world. Are there security certifications available for the MLAS? The MLAS is different. I recommend that you go to one of their open houses. I don't know of any agreements they have for any type of certification like that, but that's something definitely that you should bring up at the open house. It may be something that they can negotiate because they do have a cybersecurity course and they have some other courses like that. It would be, I think, really interesting to pose that question and see if you could perhaps first some interest in following that up. Any other questions? If you'd like to just grab the mic, please do that. Hi there. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Cool. Hi, my name is Ellis Martin. Thank you all so much for being here. It's been super informative. I just have a question. My background is in small academic museums and small queer archives and I have a lot of experience with kind of cobbling together with open source software and I was just wondering what's the relationship to working with like those hard kind of tech skills. Do you do any, is there like kind of back of house? Is that folded into the program at all for asset management? Yeah. Well, you know, we have, I mentioned the course that I teach where we use Preservica for digital preservation students actually follow the OAS model and create submission packages, bring them in, migrate, that type of thing, and then make them available through WordPress for universal access. Other instructors in the MLAS program offer courses that if you're interested in that, we recommend you take as your three electives. One of the instructors does digital curation that was mentioned, preservation where they use content VM. We do have digital asset management course as well that you could look into for an elective. I don't know exactly what goes on in there, but I do know that a number of our instructors do include different type of software. We have one that we offer through our MARA program. It's a two credit elective each fall. It's on digital forensics. And that also is a hands-on. Software is introduced there. And I think they're using big curator in there. And in fact, they'll be meeting with that instructor this week and with the cybersecurity instructor to see what more we can do with that. So I'm not sure that I answered your question, but it depends. We have only, I believe, one or two museum-related courses. If that's really what you are looking at, other universities have programs in it. We do not. But if you wanted a strictly museum-related course, you'd have to look at the MOA Selectives. And you could take that if you were in the MARA program. Sure. Thank you so much. Okay. Many others. Okay. I'm going to stop right here then. And thank you all for being here. Really appreciated. And if you have any questions, Dr. Dalby and Katie and I will put our email addresses in the chat area for you so that you can contact us. And we'll be glad to answer them for you.