 Dr. Carolyn Zachary, the director of adult education at CDE. Good afternoon and welcome to my remote outside workspace. It's a lovely day here in Northern California so I opted to move my workspace outside when battling a little bit of the pollen but it's nice to be outside. So next slide please. I think you're ready as we move into this era of remote testing. A couple of the areas we want you to make sure that you understand is that we are following all of the NRS guidelines that they have laid out as it relates to testing as well as Octa's guidelines and their requirements. If you do decide to move into remote testing this year you're going to a need to amend your local assessment policy and that's going to need to include the use of a remote testing agreement form that you will identify the tests and the co-apps that you're going to administer remotely. This would also include an assurance that you will follow all of the remote testing requirements and that all staff are trained to administer remote assessments. A template will be available for agencies to use by the end of next week. Now we do know that many of you may not be able to do some of this remote testing and so we will in TE you'll see that there is a area that can be checked called unable to test. Don't check that yet. This is going to be used probably at the end of this grant year and we'll be developing a policy as to how that is going to be used for all of our agencies. We know that Octa is very interested in this data and we'll be including that those numbers within our annual report narrative that is sent to Octa so that they can see where how the impact was on California. Next slide please. All right payment points I know everyone's interested in payment points so the first thing I want you to do is breathe take a deep breath and relax. We know at CDE that this is a big concern. We don't have the right answer just yet because we haven't looked at the data or know the true impact of what COVID-19 is having on our adult agencies in California. We will have a better idea of that in the early fall once you have submitted your data to COSIS and it's been certified we'll be able to sit down as an office and look at the data we'll look at past data from every agency we'll look at trends and then we will make a decision. Our goal is to not have COVID-19 negatively impact any agency because you weren't able to have students be tested. However as we move into this idea of remote testing for those of you that are in that go down this road with us I really want you to focus on your students and how they're succeeding in this new learning environment and use the co-app remote co-apps and the sit test and then on Monday we'll learn more about pre and post testing use that to help your students see their growth and so the teachers can also see the growths that they know that their students are learning in this new remote environment. Next slide please. I do want to remind you that on Monday we do have two webinars similar today similar to today that will be focusing on COSIS pre and post testing and also I do know that in our remote areas doing online school in a distance learning format is challenging and so Penny is going to be putting into the chat information on Rachel devices that can help with connectivity and you can use these with the co-apps we're not sure yet about pre and post testing but this could be a way for those of you in a remote area to be able to have students complete their co-apps so look for that information in the chat and certainly send me questions that you might have I'll be helping to monitor the Q&A section as well and now I'd like to turn it over to Pat Rickard president of COSIS. Thank you Pat. Thank you Caroline we want to thank you all for joining us this afternoon and to learn more about remote testing we're very excited to share with you what we have learned what we are doing and what we will continue to do to support you in the implementation of remote testing. We do have more to learn as we go down this pathway to remote testing we learn new things every day and we're learning a lot from you. We really want to thank those of you who very willingly agreed to pilot test and provide feedback for us and Linda will tell you more about pilot testing additional pilot testing if you're willing to do it. I do want to say that this effort is not just for COVID-19 and that will all go back to in quote normal in the new year. I think that the remote learning remote instruction along with remote assessment is the new normal. I think that what we're doing right now is we're building capacity for now but also in the future. We will have the capacity then to serve more students serve those that may not be able to come to our programs so this effort during the last quarter of this year is not just an effort between now and June 30th. If you really think about it it's an opportunity to build capacity at the agency level the program level and with staff to be able to provide instruction remotely and also to test remotely so I really wanted to emphasize the capacity building opportunity that we have. With that I'll turn it over to Linda and Linda's going to give you more detail for ELSIVX both with the co-apps and the SIT. Over to you Linda. Okay thank you Pat. Hello everyone. It's nice to have this opportunity to share with you what we're doing with remote testing at CASA's today. Let's go to the next slide. So this is an agenda that shows what we're going to cover. Today we're going to focus on ELSIVX, the co-apps and SIT. Monday we're going to get into the pre and post testing at ELSIVX. So that is how we've divided it up and just I know you all are very eager to hear about the pre and post testing so I hope you can be patient on that and there may be other things that we need to cover on Monday as well that come up in the chat box today so we can see. But today we're focusing on co-apps and SIT. We'll have a chance to answer your questions. We'll try to keep up with the Q&A box but as sometimes the questions can come fast and furious we don't know if we'll get to all of them but we assure you that we will review all of the questions that came in and whatever we get we will create a document where we compile them all and answer them, both the ones we've answered and the ones that we haven't. So please be patient with us if we can't get to everyone today we're over 200 people on the call already. So first we're going to do an overview and I want to back out a little bit to get a national view of this situation and I think the most important thing to understand about all of this is that in a way we're all in this together including the U.S. Department of Ed Office of Career, Technical and Adult Ed, that's Octay, they realize that this is an unusual situation and they have very openly and clearly stated that they're allowing testing flexibility to the state so they know that you're not going to be able to test every single student by any means and so that that is something they made clear in a memo on April 17th where they said that states may allow programs to exempt students from pre-post testing and that's what Carolyn was talking about earlier and that there would be a specified timeframe for that so this is happening as you well know it's all over the country and they're aware that you're not able to do what you normally do. They also made some provisions and some recommendations for everyone to be aware, this was on their March 27th memo, that if remote testing is to occur with the NRS approved tests they of course are standardized and must be respected as such so there are areas that it's very important for those who choose to do the pre-post testing once that's available to make sure that you do follow the protocols for the student ID, identifying and authenticating the student ID, anything related to test security and that takes a lot of forms with this but we'll be covering some of them and then training because doing testing in a remote mode does require additional know-how and that's something that is required for even though practice may already be certified in our eTest or whether it's in co-apps whatever they may be certified for they are not yet certified in how to do this remotely and so we need to provide them additional training and support. So more of this will be covered on Monday but just wanted to give you this sense of the feeling really of the national picture and if we can go to the next slide. On April 9th, Octay met with all of the test publishers and briefed all of us about what they had in mind which is some of what I just shared with you and then following that not very long after about a week and a half later CASAS met just CASAS met with Octay and during that time we were able to frame and develop a plan to provide remote testing and when we presented that to Octay they gave us permission to roll it out and actually they were quite impressed with our plan and our timeline so we were pleased about that and I would say there's been a considerable amount of work that we've done it's been a lot to learn in a short period of time and it's an opportunity to I think do something that we've all wanted to do but we we felt that it would be too challenging but now we're put in a position where we really want to make it available and we're trying to balance how we can do it quickly and yet keeping the precautions that are necessary to protect the security of our tests. On April 20th, we pulled together the state directors from all the 30 states actually where they use CASAS and we briefed them on our plan and it is in phases and we you know we're able to explain to them and we have now I would say about 15 states or so that have been involved already in piloting so they are eager and we're very excited that there's so much responsiveness to this. Let's go to the next slide. So what are the benefits of remote testing and here we're going to hone in more on EL civics and some of these points were already mentioned by Dr. Zachary and by Pat but I'll just go over some of them in a little bit more detail and it's basically good for students and good for teachers because when they're doing distance learning they still want to be able to see their progress and check the progress of learners. So to get started with remote testing is an opportunity to assess students who recently completed a significant chunk of learning. It gives them feedback both students and teachers get feedback and keep students engaged. They know they can know that at the end of their 30-hour block of co-app instruction that they're going to be tested and you know I think often they're very motivated to demonstrate that. So as Pat mentioned we really hope that you can very productively use this time to build capacity at the local level by establishing procedures for remote testing, by training staff, just thinking through how it can be done. I'm sure as you get into it you'll come up with really great ideas about how to do it and eventually even get more and more efficient at it. So now is the time to explore and just as you've I'm sure learned a lot from distance learning and grown about that in the last eight weeks or so. This is now a time to put attention on how to assess and I also imagine that many of you have been putting your toes in the water of assessment already informally with distance learning whether with the materials you're using or just teachers figuring out ways to to monitor progress informally. So I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of great ideas already about remote testing. So this is a time to get prepared for the future and to really in a way redefine our programs as blended and doing as much distance learning as we can as a regular part of the program's offerings. We've been very pleased that we've had a lot of interest from agencies that want to pilot and so that's really helped us to develop and frame the guidelines that we had been creating and just you know to say that I don't think this is going away. Remote testing is the wave of the future for distance learning and any learning has always been a basic causes principle that it takes curriculum assessment and instruction all together to make it work. So we are we now have an opportunity to build in the assessment part of that triangle. So what are some of the challenges of remote testing? I think we've all come to realize more acutely even than before as Carolyn was saying that equity concerns are there and our students many of them don't have access to technology or very limited that relates to what devices they have or what kind of bandwidth and now with lockdown all over the country in any home environment it could be that there are many people competing for that limited bandwidth whether it's people working from home or kids doing distance learning as part of their schoolwork so our students are also competing for that and if they have to set up a time to do an assessment then that's a time when they're going to hopefully want to have the as much bandwidth as they can get a hold of so you might need to work with them on when that's the best time. Their home environment is definitely going to be a challenge for some they may not have privacy it may be very busy and full of distractions so that's something we'll learn more and more about again you've probably learned something about that from their distance learning efforts but this is where you know for testing they're going to want to be able to focus in and we need them to not have things available to to help so that's something we're going to have to be keenly aware of and and probably again come up with some creative solutions. With remote testing we have these new procedures for training our assessors as Carolyn mentioned we are working on a remote test agency agreement where we'll ask you to have read the guidelines and agree to protect the security of the tests and the privacy of our students and other things this will be an agreement that's for all of the different tests that we're going to be making available for remote testing and then this is something that we don't normally have to do because we normally have the students face-to-face with us but in this new environment where they're at a distance we will need to ask them to agree not to share test items not to share the assessment information and that's something that we are planning to ask them to do orally as as part of the assessment upfront. Then test security is of course so important you can imagine it's important for us but it's of course important to you as well because you've done so much work to develop these co-apps and you don't want them compromised so you know especially for the SIT I would say though because it's a standardized test there are only two forms and so we need to be really very cognizant of the kind of test security that we are requiring and making sure that it's adequate to meet the needs. So how did we go about this we talked to CDE of course we talked to consortium leaders we talked to agencies we interviewed practitioners who are familiar with the co-apps with SIT and with distance learning we made we weighed multiple factors some of which I just talked about but really a few additional ones one is how easy will it be for you to adapt especially the co-apps for remote testing that is the the assessment delivery part of the co-apps the test security concerns how easy will it be to implement we know you don't have much time to the end of the year and so there there are questions about how easy it will be also in terms of the devices etc and the processes we know there's some urgency to start up quickly so we are being as responsive as we possibly can to get these guidelines and supports out to you quickly and of course there's also the the question of access to technology as as one of the things as to how we can frame the guidelines test security measures in a way not in a way we really have always relied on local agencies to be responsible for test security when you agree to do any kind of testing you are also agreeing to keep all the test materials secure and to make sure that the testing is proctored appropriately so with remote testing it's no different in fact it's really heightened because there are additional concerns and there are additional challenges so we do rely on you we're counting on you to be responsible about this and to take all appropriate measures to ensure test security these remote testing agreements the the agency one is just one per agency and that will cover all of the different assessments as I said there will be for the SIT a special a separate one for test administrators to sign that has some specific agreements about test security and privacy with remote testing also for the co-apps and then for students as I mentioned we'll be asking them to agree to some things at the time of testing so how will this be delivered and what's the process basically we are going to ask you if if you want to participate now this is an optional thing this remote testing is is not something that's required but it's available as something you can explore and try out and I want to just say about co-apps that we are not going to ask you to revise your plan the P of co-apps is for plan as you all know so that is not part of this process the plan will stay intact but what we are going to ask you to look at and adapt if needed is the assessment procedures or the assessment delivery in those additional assessments so you need to look at the ones that you had said you were going to do this year decide which ones are those that are actively being used where the students are getting or likely to get 30 hours they need decide how practical feasible it may be for each one of them and then decide which ones you think you might tackle one or more to do remote testing and then decide about the technology that you think would be appropriate for those and the good thing and the reason we're able to even this quickly roll out the co-apps and sit in a is that they can be delivered in low tech format so that's something that that is actually quite fortunate and that enables us to go forward right now so and we will want you to be using your existing assessors but you'll need as we said to give them additional training in this remote mode now again a little more about the test environment you're going to want to the best of your ability to ensure that the students alone and not getting help and you know I'm sure that you all do explain clearly to your students what is the purpose of the assessment and if they do understand that I think most of our students are not that likely to want to cheat they know that they're trying to show what they can do and that they you know there's not really much benefit in it for them but I think we do have to take these precautions but I again I think if as always you explain the purpose of testing they're not very likely to go astray what certainly for the sit and we'd ask you also for the co-apps whenever possible depending on the technology you're using you might ask the student to sweep the room with the video camera which would probably be their smartphone before and after the test session to see if there are any other people there or any items that shouldn't be there related to this testing so that's the recommended precaution to take for a short test security and then accommodations will those that have been in place will remain but in addition we are thinking that there may be some new ones that emerge as students are in their home environment there may be some additional kinds of accommodations that come up and so you can you know if you have questions about what's allowable you can always talk to your program specialist and get some guidance but that's something that we'll be seeing as as this unfolds so what about cost we don't think this is going to be a heavy lift for you we think it'll be a minimal cost for local program staff to review your co-apps that is I'm going to refer to co-apps but I'm actually talking about the assessment delivery part of them and to decide which ones you can deliver remotely and adapt them and see if you can reasonably train your co-app assessors as far as the sit goes we think again it'll be minimal cost you'll need to use your certified sit test administrators so those the existing ones that you already have in your program but then you'll need to make sure they read the guidelines and set them up for remote testing and I'm going to get into a lot more about that in the second part of this webinar so this is a description of the different phases that we are working in it's simple they're just two but just to be clear that right now we're in phase one and that's where we're doing clinical tryouts and pilots of these remote co-apps and with the sit so we have involved about 15 agencies or so so far it's been extremely helpful to get their feedback we're incorporating their comments as we learn from them so that and also now during this time frame we are figuring out what this remote test center agreement should look like and finalizing that so I just want to be clear that that agency test remote test center testing agreement is not available yet we will make every effort to get that out to you as soon as we can but it probably won't be till late next week until it's all finalized and ready to go it needs to apply to all the different modes of testing remotely so please be patient for that but as soon as it's available we will let you know and then that will enable you to signal your intention to do remote testing we are planning on May 11th to roll out or to allow you to roll out remote testing both for co-apps and the sit and so before that we're working our as fast as we can to get these support materials ready including training which I'll be talking about in a minute so that is the projected timeline so in terms of that agency remote testing agreement one per agency we would ask you to submit it to your program specialist and to your CDE regional consultant it would cover all of the different tests that are going to be available for remote testing and then it includes all these agreements for test security and privacy and it'll be something that you would just keep on file along with your local assessment policy in that we'll also ask you to give us what is your estimated start date to do this all right so now we're going to delve into co-apps in particular so the first thing to say and hopefully this comes as good news is that we think that most of your agency's assessment deliveries of your in your co-apps is going to be possible to use possibly as is or modified slightly for remote testing and that would be with your with computers with smartphones or even lower tech than that so we we think that it's going to be something that's quite doable the thing that is very important is that you should be able to interact in real time that is live with the student or students and I will say that with co-apps you may be able to to assess more than one student at a time we are going to ask you to start one on one and get good at it and then move into what would be a little more challenging to proctor more than one student but some of the assessment modes particularly if it's if it's a written response you may be able to be able to to effectively monitor more than one at a time but I would say in general you should not have the expectation with remote testing that you're going to do a whole class at a time that is just not possible because you do need to be able to observe the student and so there are limitations to the number of students you can do work with at a time and of course these co-app assessments are applied performance their their performance assessment and so that's the beauty of them that's how they're so relevant to what you're teaching and it is then required for you to be able to observe and really see them demonstrate their skills now this is perhaps a little overwhelming but I'm going to walk you through this chart across the top we're looking at what are the types of technology that is which devices and which platforms can be used for co-apps and so you can see we tried to order this from low to high tech not extremely high but at least in terms of our student population so the lowest would be a phone or just a phone so that is possible I think we would prefer a smartphone because then there can be the video interaction so hopefully that is what you can manage to have the student have as a smartphone where you can see them but a phone is possible with some of the oral only you see on the left hand side you can see the different modalities so if the assessment delivery of a co-app is just oral then you may be able to simply have a phone conversation and again preferably a phone smartphone where you can see the person if it's a written assessment delivery then paper and email again we want the camera because we want to be able to see the student writing but making sure that they didn't get it passed to them by somebody else or you know that they're writing in real time but that's certainly something you could observe and that they could share with you so a text or email as well that could be even more real time where they're they're actually using WhatsApp and texting the answers as you asked them or any any we're going to talk about the the platforms in a minute a smartphone with a camera that where you can see them with camera and zoom would be another level up if they have an iPad tablet Chromebook or computer okay great with zoom and then you know a higher level would be a windows 10 but not needed at all for these so them and then the modalities could be you know a combination of oral and written role play is something you can do with them remotely then portfolios we feel you can do them you'll need to be you know very particular and careful about how they submit what they do and and and where but that is potentially something you can work out the details for and pull it off and of course listening and written is another possibility so we don't we don't think this list is exhaustive you may come up with other permutations and combination combinations of these devices and platforms but we just wanted to give you an idea of how it all fits together with the co-apps and we gave some sample co-app assessment deliveries there where you can see how they might play out with these different modes of technology so this is just to let you know that there is a document that's called remote testing guidelines for co-apps it's still in the works but it's quite far along so we really do hope to get it out to you next week next slide now here i know most of you are probably familiar with going live with etes which is our onboarding process for etes this is the comparable process for going remote with the co-apps so we've tried to lay out some of the steps that and some of them we've kind of introduced already but i want to go into a little more detail here so first of all and this is when you roll out you'll want to consider which of the assessment deliveries of co-apps you want to select for remote testing and if necessary adapt them so you'll need to very carefully review the co-app guidelines for remote testing and see according to those guidelines what's possible doable then you'll get into revising the co-app assessment delivery as needed again not the plan but the assessment delivery decide what technology might be required and that could perhaps eliminate some or or make you modify how you deliver it determine how you're going to verify student identity if in some cases i imagine it's not the teacher who's the assessor if that's the case then you need to have a process for that and we are going to basically leave it to your local agencies process that you normally use to verify student identity and it does vary across the state so whatever you're using now you'll need to figure out how to adapt that process for the remote context then there may be also some things you need to consider about documenting the results if you've used paper in the past and file folders you'll have to think about that there's some kind of an electronic document that now has to be sent somewhere and stored somewhere so those are things that you're going to have to decide on and then make it very clear to all the assessors then we'll ask you as we've already mentioned to submit the agency remote testing agreement to both your program specialist and your regional consultant there will ask you to specifically list the ones that you're planning to deliver remotely and describe how you're going to revise if you are the assessment delivery for each of them then it's time for training and looking into rolling out so we'll be asking you to train the assessors in the remote testing procedures we're going to be providing you with support for that the program specialists are working on training webinars to guide you and give suggestions for that so that's in the works as well right now we would ask you to do trial runs just between assessors so before you launch it with students try with just assessors role playing work out any kinks and then again not don't go full scale until you've done a pilot with one or maybe two classes just a limited number of students to just see take it for a test drive and see if you still need to make any other adjustments and then when everything's ready roll it out now I mean these steps you could do them very quickly and I know many of you are eager to get going but we would encourage you to do all these steps and not rush ahead without them oh I see I'm sorry there's a comment here which I will reinforce if not everybody has seen it that the teacher is not supposed to be the assessor whenever possible so yes please then you will need to be looking into the identification of student verification of student identity you know it may be as simple as just having the student hold up their ID or whatever however you do verify their identity so that that can be authenticated we will ask you to have all assessors that are going to be doing remote testing with co-apps sign the simple form that you should keep on file that will assure that they have agreed to all the privacy security all of these remote testing guidelines so that is something just as a another measure to ensure that the test security guidelines are being followed next slide please and we're not going to leave you high and dry we're going to give you the guidelines which we hope will be as robust as as they can be to give you initial guidance the program specialist or as we speak working on webinars to guide you and again I'm not sure exactly when we'll be able to release those but possibly late next week or it's definitely by the May 11th and then we are already compiling FAQs about remote testing and I'm sure that those are going to be a very dynamic and living document where we'll be adding as we gather more questions next slide please so here are some tips just to kind of put a little bit of of a of example some examples to this and make it a little bit more concrete in terms of if you have co-app assessment deliveries that are written responses that could be done on paper as we were saying while the assessor is watching then the student could hold up the paper they've written on with their response and show it to the assessor the assessor could take a photo of it or just just read it and confirm there are some considerations and you may have already experienced some of these constraints when you're having if a student is using something as small as a smartphone that there's not a lot of screen real estate so and it may be necessary for them to use line paper or to use something darker than a pencil so you might have to advise them to use a medium tip dark pen or in other words something that'll be darker and easier for you to read so if the student has a computer and a cell phone then they could even be texting in real time while you observe that happening or you're going to be getting the texts another tip is that first things like forms which perhaps a census form or in the area of health there are a number of forms you can make sure that the form has clear numbering of the lines and that will help you to guide the student to a specific location on that document and then the student can use those reference numbers in their answers so we can go to the next slide and there's an example of that so on the left you can see this document that's adapted for the census questions and then on the right is a fake student who has dutifully answered all these listed all the the line numbers and then well puts put their answers so this is just an idea of one way of going about it with co-app 54 in terms of oral responses again it may be possible to use the assessment delivery in your current oral assessments using the same rubrics you know you'll have to see depending on how you have written them in your program that it may be possible just to be one on one with the student or one to more than one if that's how you've set it up and recording the responses using your rubrics so that's something you'll have to see we again would really like you to be able to view the student if that's possible with the devices and the technology that they are able to get access to and you can use any kind of video app what's app isn't there but that's another one that's not even listed so FaceTime Skype Zoom any of them just as long as both the student and the assessor have access to the same platform if you're using illustrations or pictures as a prompt this could be for oral it could also be for written or other kinds of prompts you need to make sure that they're going to display clearly on a phone if that's the medium that you're going to be using you we all know that those phone screens are quite small and so if you have an assessment delivery in a co-app that has multiple illustrations that might not work you might have to break it up into just one at a time that's not too detailed so all of these things you'll need to and this is this is sort of thing that when you do your one on one with assessors you'll be able to detect whether it's visible and you know when you do those trials together you'll want to use the technology that your students have and make sure that what you're planning is going to work another consideration is font size so again although the screen is small you still need to make sure that the fonts are visible and so you'll need to experiment with that and make sure that they're readable on the devices that you'll be using here's an example of some enlarged font size so you can see I'm sure you can have ways of working that out all right next slide please so just to summarize about co-apps um you know this is new for all of us uh we know we're going to learn a lot together as we look into this uh you know the co-app uh these additional assessments are already so uh creative and innovative I know you uh are many of you very proud of what you've developed at your programs and I think now is an opportunity to find some additional innovative ways to tweak them and sometimes it may be just uh you know by adding one more sentence to the instructions about hold it up to the camera so that the assessor can see that sort of thing so um you know you'll be able to hopefully without too much effort make these work and we really would like you to be sharing your experiences your program specialists are going to be quite involved and we'll be pulling you together to um share anything we uh can share with you also to learn from each other and and share statewide as well so um if you would like to be part of this pilot between now and basically the next week and a half or so uh please uh let your program specialists know and then if you do decide to do that we definitely appreciate the help you're going to be giving us Linda it's Janice there was uh looking agencies are asking questions about brainstorming ways using google forms or answering one of the questions came up about recording is there any requirement for recording the students responses whether it's audio or video uh class does not have a requirement to record and the reason um actually we initially explored that um but we backed off of it because we found that it was really challenging to figure out what to do with those recordings and we also got a little bit concerned because we realized that um although recording would document what happened it also uh can be challenging we think to uh safeguard the recordings and we might be opening up the um assessments to uh more danger than uh they might otherwise be so that's basically we we thought about it and we actually decided against it and so uh for those reasons um you really maybe ought to think twice before if you uh you know think that uh you want to do it so it's I don't know that um and I mean Pat you might want to weigh in here but I don't know that we're necessarily prohibiting it but we would really caution you strongly about some of the dangers of it well this is Pat and I agree with you Linda um I think as agencies look at their co-apps and look at um what might be possible um they may decide that they want to record the first few so that um they can comply with the requirement that at least one pass and one fail um is stored so that when CDE does their FPM and comes out to their agency um they can they can actually see the full assessment of what has passed and and what has failed but I I think it is um a logistical problem of to record all of them thank you any other questions I just want to mention um that we will be also when we meet on Monday and talk about the pre-post testing we'll also be addressing uh recording and just as a little preview uh we have decided against recording for the pre-post as well so that is a change from what we had originally thought but um as I mentioned it's a steep learning curve and we are um you know considering uh new angles all the time so uh although we had originally thought about asking the pre-post test to be recorded we have backed off of that and so now we're we are not wanting them to be recorded so now we'll move into the sit um I don't know if all of you are familiar with the sit the citizenship interview test uh it is a very different kind of test than co-apps because it is a secure standardized test that um there are two forms um 973 and 974 it's a one-on-one oral interview that simulates the USCIS naturalization test um it's not a pre-post test it's a past fail test that is given at the end of a citizenship prep instruction to determine if a student is ready to uh pass the uh the USCIS interview portion not not the knowledge part of the 100 questions but whether they're able to um handle the uh oral part of that uh interview so um and and it's after the 30 hours they can try if you think they're ready and they can retry and take the alternate form uh if they don't pass so I I just want to be very clear that um the things we're going to talk about for the sit uh are much more stringent the requirements and um they're we're talking about them today because they are um uh specific to EL civics but um they are very different uh there are different requirements for the sit than the co-apps next slide please so for the sit um as I said we think it's quite doable uh the two possibilities are a phone with a video cam or a computer or tablet with the webcam and audio now you will see that only a phone even a smartphone um well sorry just just a phone without a smartphone is not an option for the sit so a smartphone with a video camera can be uh that is allowable but um a phone that does not have any video capability is not possible to use with the sit so um if you if there are students that want to take it maybe they can borrow a phone or somehow work it out that or you can perhaps provide them with the technology to do this but uh we cannot allow the sit to be given without some uh real-time video observation the platforms that are possible are open actually but must be video platforms so could be zoom whatsapp google duo skype or facetime or any other platform that um both the student and the sit administrator have in common so that's something for you to determine but the the platforms are more open but the possible devices are there are restrictions next slide please so here's the going remote process for the sit we are piloting right now I just want to give a shout out to Jennifer Galliardi thank you so much for your help in this first phase um we've met twice with Jennifer and she's been as you can well imagine incredibly helpful in helping us think of things we hadn't thought of before and she's been piloting with um already so thank you so much um so all right the the first part is to look at these new class of sit guidelines for remote testing I will explain that these are guidelines that are in addition to the sit test administration directions so um those of you who are certified sit administrators are masters of the sit test administration directions but now you will need to carefully study these sit guidelines for remote testing and be be um you know very very familiar with them um one of the interesting aspects of rolling out the sit remotely is that um there's a matter of the the paper test booklet which has always been paper it's something that's consumable and the test administrator for every student fills it out it goes through the test asking questions and marking down the score according to the rubric 01 or 2 so um I don't know some of you who are sit administrators may have left your school with copies of the uh 973 and 974 in which case maybe you're all set but we imagine there are a lot of sit administrators who didn't do that and so we have created and are still fine tuning but we have created a fillable pdf uh version of these um form 973 and 974 test booklets so just as you would use the paper it would be an electronic form that uh the the sit administrator would have on their computer and would be uh as you were asking the questions you'll be marking the score as you go and uh then saving it and we'll have to give you we will be giving you guidelines for how to save it what to put in the file name and then um in this third bullet you know how do you enter that score in te how do you send it along you know what do you do with that fillable pdf how do you store it so this is things that the agency will have to figure out in terms of procedures for remote testing of the sit to make sure that all of this is uh secure and very orderly and clear uh i know some some system test administrators may have access to te and can go in on their own and figure out um uh how to enter the score or if perhaps the student has already taken one form and failed it and needs to take the alternate form you know you need to check that and know which form to give so you'll need to have press procedures for all of that if the sit administrator doesn't have their own access to te and then of course the technology we've talked about that so in terms of certification the good news is that just for this year under the circumstances uh cdhe cdhe has agreed to extend the deadline for the annual sit recertification from april 30th today until the end of may so please don't procrastinate get to it if you haven't done it already um you i believe know how to do that it's uh contacting selenir flag c flag at casus.org uh to go through that process uh we do insist that any uh sit remote testing be done by uh certified sit administrators so they need to be either existing sit administrators who then get trained in remote testing procedures uh it could be people who have just completed their initial certification or who have been doing it for some time and have their recertification but that recertification needs to be up to date um and uh some of you may wonder um there may be i know that not very many but there are some folks out there who are still uh you know we're in the process of doing the initial certification or if as an agency you want to have additional uh people go through that certification um we are uh working out how to help those who have uh got stuck in the middle of that process how to complete it remotely and if you have people that you'd like to um send to do that uh we can work with you on that so um we can figure out how to do it remotely so but it it is really the the most uh essential requirement that they have to be certified to do it again we have this agency remote testing agreement uh that you'll submit and that would be on file and then the similar steps as for co-apps um we uh on kasa staff will uh be offering uh some webinars to train existing sit administrators in remote testing procedures we'll be letting you know about those um again we would want you to try it out between assessors before you do it with students again we don't want you to do it like with lots of students to begin with just start it out with a limited number and then um then go uh to extend it to more uh next slide please this is the document that is um in development but we're making great progress and we'll have it ready by the end of next week next slide uh and uh as for the co-apps we'd ask you to have all sit administrators complete a form that you'll have on file locally that will attest to their compliance with the uh requirements of the remote testing guidelines for sit next slide as for the co-apps we'll have some uh training tools that are specific to the sit that's the guidelines document we'll have these webinars I just mentioned and we will um we already have started FAQs we'll keep going with those and make sure we keep them up to date okay so anything let's go back anything on the sit I see a question about synchronicity of these assessments yes they have to be live I see there's a question about the fillable version of the test booklet um we once we complete and finalize these um resources uh and test forms we will definitely uh let you know we we know who all the um certified sit administrators are uh we will ask you as an you know when an agency submits the form to say that you're uh interested in doing remote testing of the sit or others then that will also alert us to the fact that we need to share all these resources with you and how to get them so just to let you know that um this webinar has been recorded uh and uh the power point as Melinda showed is already out there but uh we will be compiling the chat responses the chat box questions and responses and we'll make them available as soon as we can um these resources will be on the O-10 website and um net is going to show you that in just a minute and also on the COSSIS website um in the California Adult Ad Accountability and Assessment section at that link um again if you're interested in pilot testing please contact your program specialist and uh that would be in the next week and a half um and then from then on we'll be working with you providing support in as many ways as we possibly can uh just want to say we we know you're going to be creative we know you're going to be careful and uh we're counting on you to do that okay um over to Neda thank you and uh thank you Dr. Zachary and COSSIS team I wanted to walk through the O-10 website and show everyone on the line um where they're going to be able to find the pdf um slides for today so I'm going to stop sharing the slides and I'm going to share the website so if we go to the O-10 homepage which is www.otan.us and the top story will always have your upcoming O-10 activities that support adult educators and it will list all of the offerings for the week so you can see this was our co-app and citizenship in a remote environment and some other upcoming um webinars but I also wanted to kind of take you to the COVID-19 field support page and on this page you'll be able to find the resource guide how to access the training calendar and register for these upcoming webinars including the one that's coming up on Monday on pre and post testing but the handout for today will be the last one on the list for 430 co-app and citizenship in a remote environment and you will see the pdf document right here the video recording will be posted on this chart as well along with if we compile um some of the q and a as you might also find it in this table as well you can locate uh resources from calpro additional resources from cossus more resources from cde the adult education office and if you're looking for specific resources for students and some more additional resources here