 Good afternoon. I am so glad that you're all able to attend today. We have some exciting things to share with you today. By way of introduction my name is Delayna Tonks. I'm the director of the Open High School of Utah and I'll tell you a little bit more about my school in just a minute. I want to first introduce you to what makes our school work regardless of the curriculum that we use or any of the tech tools that we have. Without the heart and soul of our school, which is my teachers, we would not function. So Emily, Jess, and Jill stand up and give a wave. Round of applause for everybody. I wanted to point them out so that afterwards if you have questions, these are the ladies who can help you with any questions that you might have. I don't know why I did this. I put a picture of me up here. It's not like you don't know what I look like because I'm kind of standing right here. So my background is actually in French and Spanish education. I taught in a work support for a decade and then I switched over to an online school in Ohio, moved back to Utah after 13 years in the beautiful state of Ohio and landed a position with the Open High School of Utah by being Malvy with a legislator. So I don't know how that works in job descriptions, but it worked for me. So I know there are some legislators in here. I thought you would appreciate that. Okay, I'd like to get a sense for who we have here in the audience. It's helpful for me so I can tailor my presentation to your needs. If you work with grades K through 8, will you raise your hand? Ooh, a couple, okay. And I know you all. Excellent. Grades 9 through 12. Oh, fabulous. Yes, you three, 9 through 12. Okay, we're good. How many of you work with college students? Okay, fantastic. Do any of you do adult type stuff? Okay, I didn't want to leave you out. And anybody else who's other or not applicable? Tell me what you do. Okay. All right, fantastic. Who else did we have in here? Who's other? Yes. You're Frank, right? Ha, I recognized you from your picture. Okay. No, I'm not a stalker. Yeah. Okay, how many of you are teachers? How many of you are administrators? Policy makers? Okay, researchers? And any other? Oh, lots of others. Okay. Tech people? What do you do? I manage a citizen science project and be a lot of professional development teachers. Okay, fantastic. Well, regardless of your title and who you work with, I'm happy that you're here today. Let me tell you a little bit about the Open High School of Utah. The mission is first and foremost, and we try and filter all of the decisions that we make through our mission. It's our guiding or our organizing principle. The Open High School of Utah was founded in 2007 by Dr. David Wiley, who is putting on this conference. You're very familiar with him. We opened in 2009 with 125 ninth graders. We've expanded this year. We have 359th through 12th graders who are full time students. And then we also have 50 part time students who take a course or two online due to some great legislation that was passed this year in Utah that allows students to take one to two credits online, even if they attend their as they attend their district school. So it's of the piece of legislation that we have passed. I want to be clear that we are a fully online charter school. We provide laptops to our students. That's our infrastructure. And we see them in person at activities. We do have prom and dances and all of the touchy-peely fuzzy stuff that those of you that are in higher ed pretty much don't have to deal with on a regular basis. And we serve students across the entire state of Utah. Our mission is to facilitate lifelong success by meeting the needs of the 21st century learner through individualized student centered instruction, innovative technology, service learning and personal responsibility. Another component that I'd like to share with you is our open educational resources. One of the reasons we're all here today unique to open high school of Utah is our commitment to share the curriculum we have developed as an open educational resource usable by anyone at any time. This is what our curriculum feedback loop looks like that in order to understand what this means because it's just circles and lines and words right now. I need to tell you a little bit about the process that we go through to hire the heart and soul of our school, which is the teachers. We audition them. I get probably 300 resumes per position. And as much as I love reading resumes, we figured out a tricky system to cull through those quickly and efficiently. So we send everybody an email that says congratulations. You've made it through to the next round of the interview process. Well, here's a list of resources, open educational resource sites. Here's a list of tech tools. And if you'd really like to continue the interview process, then send us an email and we'll give you access to our learning management system. Guess how many people do that out of the 300? Just for kicks and giggles. Ten percent. Ten percent. Anybody else? Twenty twenty five. Twenty twenty five. I get ten. Nine, ten people. Not percent people. So they ask for the uh they ask for the password. We let them in. We look at what they build and we look for certain things. We're looking for people who are teachers who are persistent. They don't get that email and go I don't really want to do that. They're like, okay, this is something that I want to do. We want to make sure that they're tech savvy. So we look at how much time it takes them to build the content. If it takes them five days to put together a ten minute lesson, maybe their tech skills aren't right where we need them to be to be able to build curriculum for the for the Open High School of Utah. And we also look for screen presence. You've got to have a captivating personality to reach out and engage 14 year old boys. Really? I mean, you've got to be able to reach through that computer screen and get them to engage and interact. And so those are the types of things that we look for. We hire the the best of the best. We interview the top three that we find through that process. And this is one of the most important components to what we do at the Open High School of Utah and why the results that we have are effective because we could have our open educational resource curriculum. We could have our high tech 21st century tools, but without the personal connection and the level of communication that we have from our teachers to our students, it doesn't net the same results. So what this looks like, the curriculum, we hire our teachers to build curriculum the year before it's actually taught. So from January to June they're building. I hire a curriculum director who is phenomenal. We always say she could power a small city if we could figure out how to get her plugged in. She just goes and goes and goes. She touches every piece of curriculum before the students ever see it. She's looking for uniformity. We have guidelines. You know, everything's aligned to standards. And we want to make sure that the formatting is the same for the students. So if a student wants into Emily's English class, they know what quizzes and the assignments are. They know what the icons mean. It's all the same if they log into Jill's math class or Jess's science class. They know where to find a piece. So they don't have to spend time going, I don't know how Mrs. Mordecai does stuff in her class. So we've had good results doing that. The other thing I wanted to share with you, and I'll come back to this feedback loop a little bit later, is that our teachers are full time. They work, I could say eight hours a day, but I know that oftentimes it's more than eight hours a day. They hold four hours of office hours every day where they're available to the students. And this is a critical component to the success of our students and also to the effectiveness of our curriculum and our school. So students get what they need when they need it. They open up their laptops. They start working through a class. They have a question. They find the teacher that day during their office hours and they get their question answered so that they can move on. They can work at their own pace and they're not relegated to 75 minutes of instruction whether they need 25 more or more. The other four hours that they're not connecting with students, they're grading and then they're tweaking their curriculum. And we make that a part of their job description and a continual improvement process on the curriculum because we look at the outcomes. There's a lot, I've heard a lot in the sessions today about peer review and upfront review of curriculum pieces and quality and how do you know it's good curriculum? We look at the back end of that. Is it doing the job that we hired it to do? Is it teaching the students what they need to know? And I'll talk more about that later. So what this gives us the ability to do is to tailor make our curriculum. If you don't like a chapter of your textbook you can't rip it out and throw it away. I guess you could but you can do that you know it's not very effective to do that. And so with OER curriculum that's exactly what we do. If something's not working, we target that, we pinpoint it, we go back and we fix it, we enhance it, and we make sure that it's doing the job that it's supposed to be doing. Teachers tinker, it's what we do. If something's not working, whether in a bricks and mortar or brick and click or a fully online setting, you change things right? You fill in the gaps with teacher created materials. What that looks like for open high school is as the teachers are building the curriculum, they look at existing resources, and if they can't find something that fits the standards that we're aligning everything to, then they make it themselves. So the data. We have lots and lots and lots of data. I've had teachers tell me that I've ruined them, that they are unable to go back to a bricks and mortar setting that doesn't have an online component or a learning management component because they don't have the access to the level of data that they have in the online environment. So with the teachers, they tinker, they look at their curriculum. We also like to loop the students in. So we teach for a couple of weeks, and then the teachers will start putting up polls. What was your feedback lesson? What was the most effective piece of content that you interacted with? Simple questions to designed to figure out what best meets the needs of the students in that particular class. That changes every year. So next year when we teach English 10 through for the third time Emily will put polls in her classroom and see what learning needs there are for that particular group of students and she can adjust things and tweak things and that's built into the teacher's job description. It gets us down to a granular level to meet student needs. One of the most powerful things that we can do as a teacher is to target where the curriculum is working and where it's not. And one of the first places teachers look is at the assessments. You can see on here you can see that there are a lot of A's. What does that mean? How do we interpret that data again to best meet the needs of the students? We associate grades with concept mastery. The tests in this case not only gauge student mastery, concept mastery, but also how well our tool is that we're using to be able to judge the curriculum. And so if A's students are getting questions wrong we can go through and look at that question and say maybe it's a bad question. Maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's the curriculum, maybe it's the content that was taught that brought that question about. We have the ability to go back and change that the content as well as the question. Teachers are able to get down to the nitty-gritty and examine immediate feedback and they can tell how successful their tests are and their assessments. They can look at how different populations score. So do the highest score, is that typically the A's students? Are there B's students that are scoring really low on four or five different questions? Let's take a look at that and you can do a data striation to figure out what's working and what isn't. Then another interesting thing that we're able to do is to gauge the overall student use of course resources. This is fascinating. You'll get kids that are on their tests and they'll come to the teachers and say I need help, I don't understand the material. We look back and see how much time they spent. They didn't watch any of the videos, they opened up one worksheet and looked at it for 30 seconds and closed it down. Well it doesn't take a statistician to figure out what the problem is right? They didn't spend enough time on the resources. So this is a great way to figure out where the students are spending their time and then it helps the teachers give good individualized feedback. Go back and watch the videos. Go back and do this worksheet and then you can come and talk to me, I'll be happy to help you. So it also creates an efficient use of teacher time. Then we can go down and track individual group use of course activities and assignments. That lets us know which ones are engaging and effective to the students and which ones may not be. And again that's part of the continual curriculum improvement process that they can go back and maybe put some more clickable content or an engaging activity in. And then we can look at it on an individual student level. Where are they spending the most time across their classes? It gives us good data to be able to help them out and be successful at Open High School of Utah. We recently released 20 semesters of curriculum. All of our 10th grade courses that have been taught through and refined. Last year we released 10 semesters of curriculum. So we have a grand total of 30 semesters of open course curriculum. That's available right here at ocw.openhyschool.org. You're welcome to take a look at that. They're great for taking. We do not include our assessments for accreditation purposes. But we're happy to give you a list of resources that we use to design our assessments and you're welcome to create your own. The other thing that we do is we release, we'll be releasing version 2.0. So last year we released our 9th and 10th grade curriculum on version 1.0. We've tinkered with it, we've updated it, we've adjusted it, we've added stuff in. That will be released in January or February so that you'll be able to get the most updated version of our courses. So what? We do all this work with the curriculum. All this work with our teachers. What does it translate to? This is a really great, we call it DNA of ocw.openhyschool and why they actually did this for us. The blues are the A's and you can see how successful the students are. The students go across this way. So you can see that there are some straight A students and they're all blue. And then some of them have all A's and in one class they have a C. We've been able to extrapolate this data and get some fascinating comparisons for what's working and what's not working for different subsets of students. We were able to have a completion rate, a passing rate. Students passing their courses of 76.3 percent our first year that passed our courses which is big in an online environment. I know that some of the other online schools even in our own state have very low completion rates and very low passing rates and I firmly believe it's because of our high-touch teaching model with our teachers who are engaged with our students. We actually increased our passing rate last year to 80 percent and then most states have criterion reference tests and way to measure yourself against all the other students in the state. All of our scores have been above average in apples comparisons meaning grades nine through twelve and how they scored on English science and math. David pulled some data for us a couple weeks ago from our CRT scores this year and we're actually ranked six in the state for our science program compared to all high schools across the state not online not charter all district schools high schools across the state. Again that's a tribute to our our teachers and their diligence in keeping that curriculum effective for the for the students. Okay this has been one of the most satisfying rewarding career choices I have ever made. If you told me three years ago five years ago you told me five years ago that I would be involved with something that connected me to people across the globe I would say well of course I'm a French and Spanish teacher I take students to Europe that's it's what I do and if you would explain further no no no this is what it's going to look like I don't think I would have believed you. We have shared courses and swapped curriculum we play go fish with our curriculum I have a world-sib course you have a US history course we'll trade it's a lot of fun Montana digital doing great things in the state of Montana we trade courses with them Whittier Union High School District in California is doing good things the director of that program has actually taken steps to start an open high school in California to open in the fall of 2012 which is is very exciting as well. We have courses and have gotten feedback from South America we have people who are translating all of our courses into Portuguese and Spanish Africa China Montana California New Zealand and then a whole bunch that we don't know about. We went back and forth when we released our courses on whether or not we were going to make people sign in and tell us who they were. We decided against that because it goes against the whole open philosophy right here's our stuff use it just give us lots of information in return. We determined that it would be better to make it freely accessible and not have to log in. So we have Google Analytics telling us where people are coming from but we don't know specifically where it's going unless they contact us which oftentimes they do. I received a note from I was I was in my office in August and a man came in unexpectedly hadn't made an appointment or anything and said I need to talk to the director I have to talk to her I'm here from Ethiopia and I came out and was like okay how can I help you and he said I want you to know how much your courses mean to my students we've been using your courses since you released them and it's making a huge difference for for the students at the school that he was in charge of in Ethiopia and I sent a note to my student to my teachers that just said I hope you can sleep well knowing that you're not only providing quality educational experiences for open high students but also for countless spaces of many colors worldwide how powerful is that and the open educational resource movement is rippling across the globe I it took about a year for me to be an OER evangelist like David likes to say I wasn't I'm like really you're just going to give stuff away for free and how does that work really this is why it works okay I shared the story about Ethiopia we also were contacted by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand after the earthquake in Christchurch last February they didn't have enough physical space to contain all of the students and so what they did is they sent them to school half a day and then they sent them home and they used part of our OER curriculum to be able to keep the educational flow going for those students whose lives were so severely disrupted in the earthquake I would like to issue a call to action this is the best place to do it probably preaching to the choir a little bit but dare to share it's been the greatest journey I've been privileged to be a part of this movement for the past three years and I look forward to great things to come and I will take questions down one thing that I think about OER is that in many cases it hasn't in general it hasn't challenged pedagogical models so I think most sort of like OER production is for kind of a full frontal lecture mode and we replace whatever we are materials and so to me our sort of national conversation around the flip crowd classroom is sort of the first thing to me that gets me thinking like oh now we're thinking about how having all this stuff actually like let's not just think about making free stuff let's think about having it change the way we teach you know to what extent to what extent do you think in your teachers experience in the open high school sort of contributes to that conversation about how OER doesn't just make free stuff available but gives us opportunities to really rethink the way we create student learning experiences um you guys want to take that one Emily um I think because I am not I I mean yes OER that's how we built it but I have the ability to talk to my students one-on-one and that is why I went to teaching I didn't go into teach to set up a classroom seven times a day and teach the same thing I want to impact lives and so I I think if you ask anyone of us here that is one of the things that I enjoyed most I get to actually teach and so I get to work know what's wrong know what a kid starts struggling with and actually work with them specifically on that and so I think in that sense yes I would like to add to that too that being able to have all these OER resources that are fingertips that help people we have you know a kid who could be in an honors class in a regular bricks and mortar school in the same class you have a special education student they need to totally different things having all these resources available helps me much easier diversify and different differentiate my instruction to reach my kids you said your pass rates eighty percent can you tell us about the other twenty percent they're the ones who typically do not open the computer I in addition to the tech savvy teachers that I hire they have to have a professional stocker license and they chase the students down and if we can get the kids to open the computers then we can work with them and help them there is a segment of the population who just is not interested in engaging and they just want a computer if you look to be on it why they don't know the computer is it socioeconomic grouping is it family dysfunction is it just a very rebellious kid what kind of all of you have so so you can do you feel that you beforehand you can already tell okay this kid most likely will be a risk kid we you know do you have any scenes like that as you start out with a new class it takes what two three weeks to target those kids and we we have a program we call it the shepherding program where the teachers are assigned to track their sheep their students and to make sure that they know what's going on with them they contact them once a week by whatever means necessary to make a connection with them and they're not supposed to talk about schoolwork it's not a hey you're not doing your work I'm calling you to get you're in trouble type of a communication it's how are things going how can we help you be successful and a lot of the students respond really well to that some of them aren't interested they we use Google chat and once they see if we see a student that's green-lighted and we go after them and they shut down and they you know they close their computer they're not interested in that so I we do what we can to engage those students any other questions this seems to be a self-select group that's going to go to an online school right so I would expect that again most of them would be successful or that I really expected the parents would be right on top of them more so than the college school if you could see my teacher's faces you would know that that sounds good but it's what's your feedback to this teacher I mean do the parents what's the link with the parents we copy them on yes they see everything that we talk to the kids we call the parents as much as we call the college students and we have just like in a working order we have a vast gamut of parents who are right there engaged and parents say throw their hands up in the air and say I don't know what student so it runs the gamut so to your question we have a broad cross section of students we have the the high population the high achievers that don't want to sit in the classroom and be talked to the middle but we also have a very diverse lower echelon population the IEP students and 504 students those needs are met because they can get the individualized attention that they need and they are more successful in this setting than they are in other settings and they've started gravitating towards us our special ed population has increased I think we have nine students for the past couple of years and we've got 48 this year and so they know that they can get their needs met and the doors are open how about the feedback not from your parents but from the general public or from public school I think it's the best kept secret of Utah right now unfortunately unfortunately there's there's been resistance because we are disrupting the status quo uh we're offering an option and the education establishment sometimes sees that as taking dollars away from them but it's really not taxpayer dollars to pay to educate students and we're doing that as well as the district schools so probably the full-time virtuals do you have an Arizona the big boys the k-12 connections we have k-12 and connections open high school uh are the three fully online schools in Utah and then there's the state one that's electronic high school okay where do the teachers buy resources do you give them the list of my recommended content providers and also is there any training related to developing curriculums oh yeah hands from takedown sure when i first got hired i was given a list of places i can go to gather information i've also found someone of my own and as the school has grown and had gotten new teachers who also go out and seek out other options than the list that they were originally given our list just keeps growing and growing it's really collaborative on that in terms of training for when you're hired to build stuff our curriculum director is great she gives everybody a training and then it's always available for additional questions as are the teachers who have been there a little bit longer are informal training okay and we have our blue shirt guy standing up the back which i think means he wants me to stop i'm happy to answer questions my teachers are happy to answer questions thank you for coming