 OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Thank you for joining us, everybody, everybody here. So what we're gonna do is talk about our pilot program and some of the success stories and what some of you guys did during the program and how you were successful and what you did differently. We've also got some student success stories as well. So what we'll do is we'll start with Rachel, who's with us at New Readers Press. So she's gonna do a quick overview of what we're talking about with New Readers Press Online and what it is. And then we'll go to Dr. Baller and then we'll go to Dr. Gonzalez. And then we're gonna kind of make it like a free-form discussion. So we've got some questions up. And then if anybody here or if online has questions and Kaby, where are you from? I am one of your friends from Mount Diablo Adult Education. We're in Concord, California. Mount Diablo, yes. Yeah, hi. We love Mount Diablo. Oh, I know where that is. You guys have snow? Yes. Of course you do. Oh my gosh. Yes, it's gorgeous. Yeah. Do you guys have sun? It's super sunny here today. It's a good day today. Yeah, it's beautiful here today. The sun is shining. It's pretty cold, but beautiful views. Everywhere around you look and you see just a little bit of snow. So it's a nice change. Yeah, we've got some beautiful snow-capped mountains here today. So, okay, cool. We've got some more people joining and as we go, we'll just keep it blowing. So I'll turn it over to Rachel. You can share your screen. As people join, we'll just keep going. All right, can you see my screen okay? Yep. Yes. Great. So this is New Readers Press Online Learning. I'm just going to very quickly show you what we have to offer currently and what this program entails. So at the top here, I'm going to do a quick dropdown to show you that we have GED courses in all four subjects, high-set courses in all four subjects, pre-HSC courses in all four subjects, as well as TABE courses now in levels EMD and A for reading, language, and math. So lots and lots of content available. I'm just going to jump into the platform because when you get into the platform, what you'll notice is that it's the same for every course. It has the same format. So it's really easy to use one or the other depending on what you have able to share with you because she's using many of these courses, how easy it is to navigate once you kind of know how to navigate it the first time, how easy it is to navigate the other courses. This is what the course itself looks like. So for our adult ed learners, it's very user-friendly. They can set up a course calendar that allows them to sort of make their own personal plan where they can follow their knowledgeable points and their progress at the top. There's a full introduction in the course that allows them to learn how to use the platform first and then they have a full structured plan that starts with the introduction and a pretest. You could take that pretest and design a specific curriculum for the student or you can let them work through the full structured plan. So as you can see, students work through each unit, has lessons, each lesson is incorporated typically with three components, a lesson, vocabulary flashcards, and then practice questions. At the end of each unit, there's a unit review. So this is very, very similar to many of the New Readers Press print products that you might be using. If you use our pre-HSE course skills books or our Highset or GED skills books, those are also very similar. There's a unit review test. And within each of the lessons, there's built-in tools. I'll just kind of show you a little bit of content here as an example. There are some videos built into the content. There's a toolbox in our mathematics courses that includes calculator, formula, periodic table, formula sheet. All of this is built right into the platform to make it very easy for students to use. If you're working on those college and career readiness skills, there's a highlighter. There's bookmarking and there's a note section where they can type in their own notes so they can take notes as they're learning. You may notice there's a little audio component here in our lower-level courses that allows you to have the program read aloud. Rounding numbers. The round means to change a number to a certain place value so that it is easier to work. You'll also notice we can switch that to gradual. I hear Eva chuckling. With. Click the image to watch a video about what a round number is, why round numbers are used and how we use place values to round numbers. Hope everyone can hear that okay where you are. The other big component within online learning is that we had this confidence level rating. Now this is great if you're using it really explicitly because the student is self-evaluating using that metacognition and saying, how do I feel about the content I just learned as they mark confidence levels that information is tracked and it's available for them to see for themselves so they can identify where they have low confidence levels but it's also available on the teacher's side so you can actually identify the lowest confidence levels with certain things in your class or with an individual. The flashcards are super simple. They've got just like what you make at home except that they're technologically advanced. Yes, no or kind of as your answers, students can review as they respond. That's also tracked. And so each question that they respond to it's going to keep track of their responses. You can even create your own. That's absolutely cool. Within this, so if you do reading circles and you want to include your own vocabulary words for that text that you're using, you can actually build your own sets in here. There are even community sets that are available. So if you decide to share something you might find a community set in one of our courses as well that someone else has built that you can use. I made one with Klingon, which was fun. The practice questions are much like small quizzes. So you're quickly able to see how the student is performing on those units and individual lessons. You can quickly see their scores throughout the entire program. And then tests are the same way where you can get pretty detailed information. We're working on really improving our reporting dashboard. I'm excited for the upcoming changes that will be happening, but you can keep track of how a student is performing on each individual test. And it shows a way for you to review not just how they're performing and what they have right or wrong, but also where that falls so that you can remediate and put them back into the units and lessons that they might need to review. The other favorite feature I live in here is a search feature. So if I wanted to look for something specific, like ratios, if I'm teaching and I know that's my subject matter, I can search for something and quickly find a lesson and a unit that coordinates with my own curriculum and class. So just to share overview, quick overview, hope that helps. That's great, thank you. You're welcome. Any questions so far for Rachel? Or we move to the next? Cassie? I have a question. Yes. Rachel, when you're looking at this screen, is this the student screen or the instructor screen? This is all the student screen, but every instructor has access to a study dashboard, which is the student screen. So it's kind of like having a teacher edition of the student courses. So you can even build lesson plans in which I personally have done that for myself. I've gone in and when I was teaching, I would literally go into this lesson and I would use this note section to say, hey, number one, we're gonna do this activity. And then number two, this is the PDF that I'm including for this or I might link to a video or a website that I want to go through with my students so they can have some interactive online work. And so that's totally, you can use this in a different way for yourself, but this is exactly what it looks like for the students as well. Okay, thank you. Sure, great message. Okay, let's move over to Dr. Baller. You wanna share your screen or if you wanna... Well, let me talk a little bit first maybe. So we're in adult school, I think probably pretty typical in the sense that we have students, at least for the purpose of this conversation, who come in with the goal of finishing high school. And they usually come in and say, I wanna take the GED that is kind of the default. And then it's on us to counsel them around if that's actually a likely goal within the next 20 years or so, or are they better off for us to look at their transcript that they already have from high school, identify the gaps in credits that they have. And we are actually still teaching real classes. So we're, we have teachers in classrooms that teach US history one or that teach algebra. And so the first reason why I actually got involved with this was we had the core skills booklets when booklets made sense. And then the pandemic came around and having paper materials made no more sense. And that kind of coincided either with you guys developing this or me becoming aware of it. But that's when I realized that all these materials actually exist online and that was stunning. And then we've kind of bought into this hook line and sinker in the sense that the same long list that Rachel just showed you, we basically shelling out for all of these courses as well. We don't have the GED, I just realized that. But the point is that I have such flexibility with this material to serve a huge range of students and their learning needs. People who coming in with really, really low skills, I mean, true ABE, adult basic education level, they are served with the tape, the early tape materials. Students that come with kind of medium level end of ABE beginning of high school do really well with the PhSE materials until they move into true high school materials which are represented to us with either the upper tapes or then the high set and the GED materials. So that's a stunning range. And what Rachel was saying earlier is once they learn the system, all these pages are built the same way. So I've actually decided early on that I don't know about your students, but when there's something called, let me just click on it, when there's something called an introduction to the course, right, students will skip that unless you make them actually go through it. So course outline, what is flashcards? No students, no self-respecting student would do this unless you make them. And so we filled slide decks to go with this where we're forcing students to engage with these pages. So that was our initial reaction to students basically just going to the practice questions right from the start, not even reading and not taking advantage of all the built-in materials that Rachel was just showing off. So we made these accompanying slide decks where we're forcing students to react and we're also building in some other materials just for more practice. We kind of have moved away from that as the site got more advanced, I feel. So we're not doing that as much anymore but it was really, really helpful in the beginning. And to force students, I love my students so this sounds worse than it is, but to force students to try out the highlighter function, to comment back, did I use this? How do I use my flashcards and have guided practice around the study skills? That is a really rich material to guide that conversation. And for my adult learners, that is a very necessary thing to do. And I'll compare it with other, I don't know if you've heard of I Excel or other things that are con, that are, they go straight to the content. There's not a lot of conversation around how do I access content? How do I learn? How do I study? How do I remember something? And my adult learners don't come with those skills. I don't know about other people but that is executive functioning and study skills is not a strong suit of most people that come in. So the other way we're using this now, so there's two, I would say two basic ways we're using it as a standalone material and as a component of courses that we're writing. And it serves both purposes. So it's a very well done self-contained material like Rachel was just walking people through and it's leveled in the sense that if somebody did pre-HSE math and now they're ready, they showed us with the post test, they're ready, now they can go into the, let's say the high set math so they can go into the tape D. It's also really cool, I have to say as a building block material and I thought I was gonna focus on that more. So we're using Canvas as an LMS at our school and I've built many a course with the materials out of New Readers Press. I was gonna show you a range in the sense that our local community college is Berkeley City College and we've developed both a math and an English course that is the transition course to the community college. So we did an articulation pilot with them and we're back designed our ultimate courses in English and math to be curriculally aligned with the first course that our students are typically placed in. And it just so happens that in math, that's a statistics course that our students get placed in because that's kind of the beginning math course at BCC. And so we built a course that that includes all the statistics, data representation, probability components from the New Readers Press materials. And it's, I probably find it very cool but I'm a curriculum instruction geek so that's better to everybody else. But I'll just show you and I'm not gonna click on it on the shelf. I just want to show you how we did this. So we take advantage of, so this starts early, early, early, right? So let me see if I can get my annotation going on here. So this is the lowest ABE level you can think of but the way California writes its framework there's statistics and probability in the kindergarten level, right? So you can find second grade materials or the equivalent to second grade materials that have measurement and data in them, for example. So we assign the tape E2 entire data unit. That's one of the units. So I don't assign the whole tape E2 in this case because I'm focusing on one specific strand within. So that's my really, really low people. They're already doing work here. I should probably delete my little markers. Then similarly, they're moving up the levels then I'm assigning the M2, the tape M2 and pull out those two units. And we're always deepening the practice opportunities with we have a license for my Excel where there's just a hundred more ways to practice with line plots if someone needs it after they've gone through the unit on new readers press. So this is a mix and match. Then we're moving up to D2. It's gonna get more serious. There's a statistics unit in the D2. Then we've made it to algebra level. So now we're deep into actually credit bearing high school level work. And then probably my favorite is that there are summative assessments already built in that are standard aligned because the tape is standard aligned and that are true to life summative assessments for these components. So that's the use that we do for the math course and for my English capstone course, we're doing a similar model. So the community college tells us that writing an argumentative essay is the English skill that our students need to have when they come. And we're using different materials but there's a good chunk in the new readers press that is really, really useful for this. So I meant to scroll without making you dizzy. So unit one starts with really simple you know, writing, topping sentences and all of that. And then I can literally pull assignments that make sense to deepen that work and to give them the beautiful sequence of guided practice and independent practice that is built into each of these units. And then I'm gonna make you dizzy a little bit. So this goes on for a while. Close your eyes and try to make it to the end. So here are the now they're writing full essays and there's a lovely, I'm all fresh and I call it grammar. Grammar mechanics that just provides them not just with practice but with explanations which is really nice. And then there are in the high sets reading and writing is actually a full high set essay that you can assign that has scoring in it and some comparisons. So that is a beautiful, beautiful thing. This is for our upper end students. This is right before they graduate and go on to college. But I wanted to just show you, I don't know how much time I have but I'll just show you one more course. No, I'll show you two more courses because I can. One is our lowest, really our incoming students that really have a hard time adding three numbers together. And so there's two ABE courses that we build around using NRP as one of our building blocks. And again, I have such a variety of things to choose from here. And we're really using the assessment opportunities here. So we're getting a baseline by giving them the lowest pre-test there is and then we're building the course on top of that. So in this case, they go through the entire course and then they do some extra practice if they needed out of I Excel, we can have a conversation during our panel discussion later why we're doing the I Excel piece. And then at the end, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. There's a lot. We end up using the assessments. So if somebody does really, really well on the pre-test and on the units and the practice questions within NRP I might not even publish the I Excel pieces. I can also be very, very intentional if they struggle with a certain skill I can give them additional practice on a different site. And then there's the post-test and then I have actual quantitative data that says they are finished with this part and I can move them up to the next one. So there's post-test for the tape E1 separate, the E2 separate and then there is a cumulative test that is truly a summative assessment for that level. So that's really, really nice. And then I want to show you one more thing and then I'll let somebody else talk. We've built a bunch of science courses here and that's truly kind of a Frankenstein type of course. This is Earth and Space Science just for kicks. And here I'm pulling together an actual textbook where I've done the old fashioned scan in the textbook and do the activities. There are some I Excel materials and then I'm gonna scroll just because the bottom is more interesting for you here. There are NRP practices very specific to certain topics and that where the search function comes in nicely that Rachel was searching. So I was looking for something specifically about pollution sustainability, renewable energy and conservation. And there's a pretty nice chunk. It's a series of probably five pages within the science course that you can pull out specifically. It's really a building block opportunity and then same for the solar system. So just to, oh, one more thing I wanted to show you because we have students, like I said, who are going the HSE route. So their ultimate goal is to take a high school equivalence intense test, but we also have students that are just filling in holes on their transcripts. And there's a pretty nifty way you can use, I think it's nifty, you can use the new readers press material for that in that the tests are both cumulative for the whole subject. So I picked pre-HSE reading and writing. It doesn't really matter. But there are also individual units that have review tests. So let's say, let's say I'm using, let's say the social studies, right? So our students, if they have a high school transcript, most often have their world history under their belts because they still were there as freshmen. They often have maybe one semester of US history under their belt because when they dropped out of school was junior year. And so our job is to give them the most direct line to those missing credits and not overexpose them to stuff. So they don't need to take the whole high set social studies piece. What they need are specific content materials. So that student I just talked about can seriously skip over unit one. They don't need the credit in world history. They do however need the credit, let's say in history or maybe they need the American government credit. Most of our students don't have American government or economics because they dropped out before senior year. And so then I can do one or two things which Rachel I think alluded to. I can give them that test specifically to that unit. So my student who needs five American government credits can take the review test for unit three. And if they sail through that get 100% life is good. I give them five credits, they move on. I can also then analyze if they don't get a high score which lessons they should review. Maybe they know the branches of government but they don't remember, I don't know the role of the president or something. So I can really tailor to the students need what they need to do because all of our students are on the clock. They wanna get out of here as quickly as possible. And I want to be justified in giving them credit because we've accredited in the same California. So I can just say you're a nice person, usually American government credit but if they can pass the high set section on American government, they're good to go. And we, because we know how important writing is always then build an essay at the end in where they do some sort of a research paper on government in that case. So they don't get their credits just by taking a test but it's such a good clean standard aligned way of knowing if they know what they need to know to be considered a high school graduate in that area. That's it. That's it, wow. That's so pretty, wow. I have a question for you regarding Canvas because K-12 has been doing Canvas for a long time and now it's really coming on strong. How have you guys migrated Canvas? How is that like, can you talk about that a little bit? Well, you should ask, Rachel. So initially we pulled it in as an external URL. Each page in New Readers Press has a standalone web address and so you can drop that into Canvas as the assignment, right? I don't know how much people know about building Canvas but that's an easy way to do it. It's like you just drop the web address and they click on it, they go there. Rachel and our instructional technologist and your guys as coders are actually currently working on a more direct integration where New Readers Press will be one of the clickable things of outside, what is that called? Outside platforms that are integrated. Yeah, so it's fully integrated so that you'll be able to actually have the New Readers Press content within Canvas and just quickly select what you want to put it into your module as opposed to copying a URL and bringing it into Canvas and putting it into Canvas as a specific hyperlink. So it's just going to be a much easier way to navigate Canvas and NRP together. Right, so the integrations in Canvas if people have built Canvas courses, if it's integrated, you can literally just click and pick the skill off of the site and it just makes magic and then somehow it appears right there. The advantage of that is that the links are stable because what we first discovered is that as New Readers Press is developing their materials, the links change. And so a student would click on the link that used to go to adding fractions with unlike denominators and it took them to the beginning of the math course or something. Yeah, we had added some audio pieces to the course and it made some small changes that we weren't anticipating. And so now this should be a much more seamless approach and thank you Eva for being the pilot program for us to work out the TI integration because I think it's going to be so beneficial to so many programs. Yeah, and I have to say it's been a pleasure to work with the team because literally they're real life people. I mean, it's really Randy and Rachel. So if you're a user and you run into something, I mean, Rachel is there and they actually do something about it. I feel like, yeah, I texted her this morning. It's not just, oh yeah, we'll give it to our coders. Maybe something will happen. She actually jumped in and she's working with my instructional technologist on fixing this. And that's, I have not experienced with any other program that we have licenses to. So that's pretty awesome. That's cool, thank you for that. Other questions from anyone here or online before we turn it over? Okay, we'll turn it over to Dr. Gonzalez over at Santa Ana College. And I just learned something about them that their department is one of the fastest or is the fastest growing department in the school, which is pretty, so they're doing a lot of them. We get to hear from her and what they've done in their programs. I'll let you share what you've got, Dr. Gonzalez, tell us your stories. I'm going to be formalized. Finishing up that last chapter of my dissertation. I'm at the tail end of this, you guys. Thank you so much. That motivates me, Randy. And I will start off with where Eva, thank you Eva. That was such a great learning experience with your presentation. I will start off with where she left off and that's that you guys are humans. I mean, honestly, like we have also dealt with just robotic answers and just, you know, looking and looking for support. You guys are a phone call away, an email away, and you guys are answering our concerns, supporting our teachers all the way through. So thank you, thank you for that. And so that leads me to, you know, just being grateful for being part of this pilot. Santa Ana College, we are the non-credit side of the college. We have 20,000 students just on the non-credit side. Alone with our high set program, which is the fastest growing program in the entire college, we have 2,300 students. We grew about 44% during the pandemic. And when everybody was just, you know, trying to just figure out how to get people through the door, let it be just the blessing, you know, the silver lining of the entire situation, but we were having the opposite. Alexis Alevia, who's my co-partner in this, the coordinator of the program, and I just couldn't find enough days in the week or hours in the day just to keep afloat with the workflow and registering students and all the amazing things that come with an increasing program. But with that said, one of the biggest blessings that our department had, and again, our program is just the high set GED. I also oversee the ABE component of it. So what happens with our students is that if, you know, we do offer the high set and GED in English and in Spanish. So we offer both components of the exam. And with our English students, many of them come through the ABE pathway, just like Eva was describing. And our Spanish will come in through the Spanish ABE. We do have a Spanish pathway that leads our students right into our high set GED courses. So to that extent, when, you know, when speaking just the high set GED component of what we do is we have seen a growing, and again, it may be the region, but our growing numbers have primarily been in the Spanish arena. Our English is great. However, you know, we have seen an increase and about 80% of our students are taking the high set in Spanish and our classes are geared in the language that they're taking it. We do have a team of about 20 teachers and we do offer our classes on Canvas. We offer them in-person labs as well. So when it comes to the usage of the software, our students are using it at home as homework or they're using it with the teachers to review materials together as a team. So one of the primary ways that we are using it is in the classroom, the teacher will have access to using these questions as practice questions. So they're reviewing them together and what's something really fun that we all do as a team here is we will project the question on the screen on our Canvas page or even in the classroom on our Elmo and we'll have the students, if they're on Canvas or on Zoom, they'll chat into the discussion, like what their answer is, okay? So we'll say, okay, and the question number one that's read it together, ABCD and then they will type into the chat what their answer is. We have one of our teachers, Mr. Ortiz, who's super tech savvy. He presets his material ahead of time and then he just has the students answer on their Zoom through a quiz. But we do this jointly with the software, something that the students love to do. So especially as we finish a unit, like let's say US government under the social studies exam, we will go on and use specifically those questions because as you guys described, they're very easy to find, they're very easy to access and again, they're formulated, very similar to the exam. So our students love the exercises, they love the interaction, they love the practice and the fact that they're structured so well and so similar to the actual exam. So that's one aspect of how we've been using it. The other aspect is that we do give our students access with their passwords and login and they work from home, okay? So then from home, we will assign homework. We'll say we just finished such section or this is the homework for tonight, go home and work on such unit or such lesson. And of course, our teachers are then checking their progress. So all in all, there was a lapse of time and our students were so disappointed, our teachers were so disappointed. Where's the software we needed? Because there was one teacher who specifically used the software in her classes and she had to go back to using the books which was not her preference. But now we are back on board and everybody is happy. I do have something that I'd like to share. The program is, and you may wonder, how are you using this with your Spanish students? Well, the program is written in English. However, we use the Google extension translator and we can vary easily. And look at the magic of this. I mean, we so easily change the language like in a click of a second. Thank you, I was ready to show that but you're so much faster than I am. And you don't even have to just... I apologize, I thought I would jump in and just show how easy it is. Oh, please Rachel, I appreciate any language. Again, if your students are of any other language, background, they can do this and they can do this so easily. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Persian. I mean, you name it. This is such a beauty. All right, Latin, can you do Latin for me? Just for cakes. I think the high set in Latin would be funny. Wouldn't that be phenomenal? And it's just such a gift, you guys. Like, yes, we do use the New Readers Press high set GED series and they're wonderful. We love them. They're such great books. However, especially in the pandemic, this was such a great, you know, saving grace. I did my math, I'm not a math person, but we did graduate 33% more students the year that we were using this. And so again, we're back on the bandwagon. We're using it again and we're just, we couldn't be more excited. I do have a testimonial of like three, two minutes. It's Sochi Rodriguez. She's one of our Spanish students. It is in Spanish. You know, I'm happy to present it to you guys. However, I can simply summarize what she says and that is that she loved using the software. She used it in preparation of her math exam. She passed that math exam with the help of the software and using it both home and with her teachers. And she was getting ready to take her reading test. And I am so happy to report to you guys that she took it yesterday. She came back to me today, she goes, maestra. She goes, I felt so comfortable taking my reading test yesterday. Cross your fingers that I passed it. I should hear, you know, quick, you know, soon from it. This is a lady who has struggled with the reading test. She, this is her third time taking it. First time using the software. So she just felt a world of a difference. So I'm happy. And I just had that conversation with her this morning. I'm happy to present her testimonial. But, and it's in Spanish, but I'm also just happy to summarize what she had to share. That's awesome. Quick question, Dr. Valdes. You said that you had a 33% higher graduation rate and this was during the pandemic. Yes, ma'am. That is just incredible. Just, it's awesome. You know, my, my very own sister-in-law is Dean of a nearby college, not naming, you know, names. And she was just like, how in the world are you doing this? You know, and she's struggling just to get numbers for just general classes and you're doing this for the high set. How did we do this? Social media, word of mouth. I came out on, on, on local radio stations announcing our programs and, and just reaching out to the community is what made all the world of a difference. And, and we were just, we had students as North, as San Francisco and as South, as San Diego. And again, our school can service anybody over the age of 18, so long as they're California resident with an address, with an address in California, which is I'm sure the case for also, you know, Berkeley and other community colleges. But yes, you know, it was a real surprise to us. And, and we were just like amazed by the, by the results, but we couldn't have done it without the software, honestly. Dr. Gonzalez, I would strongly recommend that, you know, they're, and, and Randy, you guys can do this too, but having some kind of white paper or write up on this. I didn't, I didn't tell her to say that. Honestly, because the California Department of Education needs to understand the value of this and help the agencies in me and the courage agencies to understand the value of using these online tools, because it does make such a difference. And I'm, you know, you, what you've done is just incredible within the situation that we've been dealing with, with the pandemic. It's just amazing. And I really want you to get the recognition for what you have done and what New Media's Press has provided and the support that they've provided because nobody else is getting this done. So you're going to be pretty famous, you know. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yes, no, you know, again, it's, it's, it's a team effort, you know, and, and I just feel like in a weird way, all the pieces kind of came together and at the point where we were most distressed. And, and, you know, it just, you know, we see the numbers and we're like, wow, like honestly, like, you know, it's, it's hard to beat just because it was at a point in time where so many colleges were just struggling, including our own college was struggling in other areas. But, but again, you know, it was just, I guess it just, you know, it was a, it just all came together at the end. And honestly, working from home, students had access to yet another skill, another, another, another, what is it, another tool at their disposal. So, you know, I think it speaks volumes. Right. Eva, did you? Yeah, I just had a question. Are your numbers steady now, or did they go back down? You know, it's a, it's a really good question. You know, once they reopened everything on, you know, most of our students had to go back to work. That's the experience we had too. We had, we actually had an influx in student, in certain students too. Our ESL program had a big influx and our ABE student program had a big influx, but those are in central workers. And when they had to go back to work, all of a sudden we lost them again. We had the latest data point that we just pulled, which is we're in the middle of a self study for, for re-accreditation. So we had to play around with all this data. And what we found was that women who checked Arabic as their dominant language, the increase in enrollment participation and persistence during the lockdown and online mostly instruction was through the roof for this subgroup. And it dropped like off a cliff once we went back in person. And we're right now struggling to come up with programmatic changes to get these, to get that group a meaningful experience of education. They will not come to school for a million different reasons, but they're clearly interested in working towards, you know, attaining higher educational levels. So anybody, any ideas? But basically that was the most astounding of all data points that we saw. So specific to the gender and so specific to the home language and remote learning was the answer. I'll tell you Eva, our community, mainly being machista, machismo, I had so many women open up to me during the pandemic and say, thank God, Maestra, for the online classes. Because when my husband, and with all due respect to my own culture, when my husband closes that door to go to work, I open my computer and I log into my classes. So let me go to school and I would never be able to do what I'm doing now if it weren't because the classes are being offered online and you guys have these softwares that I can work from home. Exactly. And they're doing this conversation when the husband's out to soccer practice and they're having this conversation with me when the husband's not home. Yeah. Exactly. And that I'm documenting in my dissertation because it is a true catastrophe that these women, because of ethnic rigors, let it be one ethnic group or another, do find themselves in these situations, unfortunately. But fortunately to them, there's now these additional tools that they can use, prepare from home, even from their own phone, and be okay and get ahead, something that they've always wanted to do. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that, it just breaks my heart, but it's the reality. We've got, let me stop it for a minute. 10 minutes. Oh, you're too late. No, it's too long. Oh, okay. Okay, good. I know you've got some of your success stories and before we do that though, I do wanna say, this wouldn't be, we wouldn't be having this right now without OTAN, setting the stage for all this because they led the way to put this all together. And now we're peeling back the onion after the fact. So this is, it's like you said, Adriana, like this was a team effort with everybody coming together, so. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, we would have never had the funding to even embark on such a discovery had it not been because of the pilot opportunity. Right. And just to reiterate, it's very difficult to find materials that are low level academic and don't look like they're made for second graders. Yes. And they're insulting to adult learners. And we have, like I said, we have licenses for all kinds of different stuff. All of our students say, finally this looks like it's made for me. This is not a little cartoon character running around adding fractions together. This doesn't look, even the video you were showing, it has a grown up talking, right? So if you're looking for materials and they're really hard to come by that are made for low skilled adults, this is a real good place to go. It's respectful, I would say, respectful of the adult learner. And that's really hard to come by. Right. And it's hard to find stuff that's solid to things that the students need to know for the exam. For example, the scientific process, are you kidding me? I've done, I've looked everywhere and the new readers press has such an amazing coverage step by step with practice questions that I just direct my students to that and I say, you need to know this because everything in the science will be scientific experiments. They take that test, they take out those modules or those lessons and they're like, I get it now, teacher. Yeah. We actually built a science course, a two and a half credit science course based on that unit. It's beautiful. So there's one in pre-HSV and one in high set and if you combine them and then you can adjust and supplement with other things but it makes for a very solid pre-science course because like you said, it makes no sense to delve into physics with someone who's still learning about the scientific method and scientific thinking and it's not done like you're six years old and you need to learn this. It's made for people who are adults and have to get the background. So it's, I can't reiterate how important that respect level is. It's really, really, really good. I completely agree with you. Do you wanna play those stories? Oh, sure. Yeah, I'd love to. You guys will meet Sochi. You guys will meet Sochi here. Yeah, I just saw her this morning and she was ecstatic. She's like, I'm like, oh my gosh, Mihai, you got this, you got this. You got this. All right, so let's meet Sochi. And granted, I'm happy to then also answer questions after. If, you know, I, let's go. Sound. Did you turn on sound? And she's gonna. Is that better? Yeah. Is that better? Okay, I'll start it again. Yeah. All right. Muchas gracias, Sochi, por estar por nosotros el día de hoy. Sochi Rodriguez is one of our, one of her high six students. She's obtaining her high set in Spanish. We're gonna conduct the interview in Spanish and we're, and she's gonna cover a little bit about her experience with the program and also how, how the software has helped her, the new readers press software. Así que gracias, Sochi. Nos puede decir un poquito por qué estás con nosotros en el programa que está sacando tu high set. Primero porque me gusta estudiar y se me hizo muy interesante el high set. Nunca había oído de este programa cuando me empecé a involucrar me gustó y me gustó más que nada porque obtenemos un certificado y es como una meta que nos, bueno que me forso, me forso yo para, para sacar el certificado más que nada. Exactamente, muy bien. Y tú fuiste es una de nuestras muchas estudiantes que usaste ser software, ¿verdad? Nos puedes dar un poquito sobre tus impresiones de the new readers press software y ¿Cómo es que te ayudo? This is what she talks about how about software. Nos comentaron en una clase, creo que fue en de matemáticas, que usáramos ese, nos dieron ese privilegio de mandarnos el software y me gustó mucho porque te da la idea de las preguntas para el examen. Este, y vas identificando paso a paso y si te ayuda mucho el, el estar participando en ese programa y pues mucho lo hacemos, no nada más yo hay varias personas que lo hacen, pero sí me ayuda mucho y ahorita estoy en eso de volverlo a intentar con el de lectura porque me ayudó en matemáticas para el examen y voy a volverlo a intentar con el de lectura. Perfecto. ¿Y cuáles son tus futuros planes con tu high-set? Ya que lo hayas obtenido. Mi, esa es una buena pregunta mi, mis planes va a ser continuar y continuar con lo que yo estudió anteriormente. Este me va a dar como una, un soporte para continuar estudiando y querer estudiar psicología o sociología. En el colegio. Bien la universidad. Primeramente Dios. Excelente pues muchas gracias Sochi. And that is my interview with Sochi. In the interview she shares how the software helped her pass her math test as mentioned, how she's now using it to retake her reading exam which she just took yesterday ironically enough it's just all happening again with the timing and how she and other students in her classroom benefited tremendously and she just calls it such she calls it a gift un regalo like how she was able to receive a password and a username from her instructor to be able to do this from home and her dream is to become a psychologist or sociology major in the near future at the college. So there you have it you guys. Thank you for allowing me. It's such a, it's such an honor to share a little bit about our students who we endlessly and just worked so hard for. I appreciate the opportunity to share her story with you all. Thank you. We love this. Thank you, yeah. This is why we're at UPS and it comes with you guys and everybody here that makes this happen. So thank you and if there's questions we'll kind of knock it up with some questions. Anybody here or online have some questions before we we call it, any questions? I need the wheel so I can spin the wheel to ask. Okay, Kathy, you're on. It's you, no, I'm kidding. Oh, look, she turned her camera on right when I said that. But I just want to thank everybody unless you do have a question, Kathy. I didn't need it, you know. No, I just want to say thank you so much everybody for presenting because you really are kind of giving me a different framework. We've just been talking about pulling in that the pre-HSE core content into ours. We use the high set materials and really, really like them. So it's nice to hear how other programs are successful in implementing. Yeah, so we've collected a little bit of data on how long it takes people to get through the high set material and it's becoming very clear. And I think I didn't say that earlier that it's easier to convince a student that they have to start at a lower level than they think. They all want to just get the high set done if you have the level below. So if you have the pre-HSE material that they look the same and they're clearly leading up. If I put the two side by side, it's very clear that one is the earlier version of the later. If the buy-in from the students is much greater and the time it takes them to actually get the high set level completed is shorter. It's a little counterintuitive, but it's true. By going through the pre-HSE materials that are intentionally structured a certain way and have these built-in assessments, it actually prepares them so much better for the high set material that they have less, fewer experiences of frustration and failure and having to do it over and over again. It's much smoother and they pass at a higher rate with less having to repeat. It's pretty astounding actually. Well, I'm not, it's not. We know as educators why this is happening. But to students, it's so much cleaner if the material teaches them the foundational levels than us looking at them struggling with a high set lesson and then having to do all the backtracking ourselves. Does that make sense? So it's psychologically it's better for them. And from just an efficiency standpoint, the data are showing, at least in all case, that they get through faster and with a higher success rate. I'd love to see that data, Ava. If you wouldn't mind sharing with me at some point, I would love to. Okay, truth be told, the sample size is at this point so small that I'm not gonna share this. Okay, okay, fair enough. Both students, no. Just let it, CCAE, you guys will present your data for the next conference, so. There you go. Yeah. So more than that. All right, well, thank you everybody. Thanks our speakers. We appreciate you and to OTAN and to Trula Vista Adult School. So we're signing. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to you guys. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.