 So hello and welcome everyone. My name is Ivy Love and I'm a policy analyst with the Center on Education and Skills here at New America and first I just want to thank all of you for being here today. We're really grateful to have you all here for this discussion about how best to support our students during this really strange and difficult time that we're living in. So just a couple of things before we get started. As Narmada mentioned at any point in the webinar, if a question comes up for you please feel free to submit that along with your affiliation using the chat function. And secondly, I want to invite all of you to share your thoughts and to connect with one another on Twitter as well. We will be using the hashtag CC online that you see there at the bottom of the screen throughout the webinar. So I want to invite you to participate in that way as well. So we have a great panel of speakers set up for today who will be able to share some lessons from their past experiences and from their current practices to inform how we respond to the COVID-19 crisis. All of our presenters are connected in some form or fashion to a large federal investment in community colleges during the Great Recession. Now that investment was the TACT program which our team here at New America has been researching for the past few years. So as we move on today I'll just share a bit of that work that we've done on the TACT program and how we feel that that relates to the current crisis and can inform our response. As the economy worsened in the Great Recession, many people turned to community colleges to get training to either get into a new occupation, to gain some more security in their current work, to get themselves some economic stability. And so TACT was designed to support students' progress through and completion of workforce-oriented programs and to facilitate their entry or reentry into the labor market. TACT funded both single institutions and consortia of institutions to do a number of things depending on what their institutions needed, including building new programs, redesigning existing programs, enhancing student services, creating openly licensed curricula and some more items as well. And with such a large investment of nearly two billion dollars, there was this looming question as TACT came to a close whether or not it achieved its aims and we found that it did. So thanks to some generous support from Lumina Foundation, we along with our partners at Bragg & Associates last year were able to conduct a meta-analysis causal impact study looking at TACT and in that study we found that students who participated in TACT were around twice as likely to complete their programs compared to students in a matched comparison group. In addition to that, they were almost 30% more likely to either get a job if they didn't have one already or to get a wage gain based on their completion of TACT programs. So these are some really promising findings. And in addition to our impact study, we conducted some analysis on really common strategies that grantees institutions use to support their students, the first of which is expanding or enhancing prior learning assessments with the aim of accelerating students' progress through their programs and the second being enhanced coaching or advising services, often encapsulated in the navigator role or someone who would support students from beginning to end of their program and through their transition into the labor market. So we've convened folks today for this webinar who are connected to TACT because while this current situation that we're in is different from the Great Recession in many ways, we still feel that community colleges are central to the recovery from the COVID crisis and community well-being and what folks learned then can inform our practice now. So that's really what we want to share with you all today. So as I hand it over to our presenters in a moment, we'll just hear some words of wisdom and helpful strategies from them that will help us all engage with and support students during this time when we can't connect with them face-to-face. So thank you all again for coming. Thank you to our presenters for sharing their time and thoughts. And I will pass it along to our first presenter, Renee Edwards. Renee, you might need to unmute yourself there. I'll see you, right? Are you there, Ivy? Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Ivy? Yes, I can hear you. You're doing great, Renee. So I'm a senior researcher at the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University and I was involved in an evaluation and some research during the TACT grant. We did some evaluations with the Consortium for Healthcare Education Online or the CHEO program at the time. And I think in addition to what I've done with TACT, a lot of our recent research at the Education and Employment Research Center has really played into this really well. So in addition to some of those valuable lessons that we've learned in TACT, other recent research has really been showing how important institutional supports are to student decision-making about education and career pathways. So as we've had to sort of shift during this crisis and move instruction to online, how do we think about ensuring that these supports are still available to students? So next slide, Ivy. So part of what we do at the Education and Employment Research Center is we really work in that intersection between higher education and workforce organizations. So organizations, programs, policies, and systems that are really designed to help people achieve and maintain work. The research and evaluation that we do predominantly serves community college students as well as technical students and mostly these students are working adult students. There are also students who often have care responsibilities in addition to school, work responsibilities in addition to school, and very often they're rural. Next slide. Please. Thank you. So I think some of the featured strategies that I came up with were really a focus on identifying those institutional supports that are usually done in person and really find a way to provide those online. This was something that was done a lot in TACT. It's also something that we see in a lot of other research. Online advising is often done well if students have an appointment and they can connect with an advisor. But also we need to consider that population of students who would be those walk-in students, those express enrollment students, those students that might just show up at an advisor's office and have questions for them and really find a way for them to access faculty and advisors in this sort of ad hoc, unplanned way. And also another consideration is consider if students have an outlet for career advising. During TACT, we really saw navigators or career coaches spend a considerable amount of time preparing students for jobs. They did a lot of career exploration with students. They worked on job searches, how to do job searches with them, helped them work on resumes and interview preparation. And so I think a key takeaway is to really make available this online space and time to do this and find a way to reach students to sort of do this ad hoc advising. The second is to really consider different learning styles. There's a huge body of research that points to different students having different types of learning styles. And this has really come out in terms of online modality and instructors trying to decide how to present their online classes to students. If I'm an instructor, am I going to do that in an asynchronous way, a synchronous way? Am I going to post videos? Am I going to post links? Am I going to have PDFs? Am I going to have e-textbooks? What's the best way to reach students considering different learning styles? So some of the promising practices that I've seen are instructors pulling their classes to understand their students' learning preferences. Other instructors have incorporated both asynchronous and synchronous content. So maybe they do an asynchronous lecture or reading assignments, but then they have synchronous exam reviews and things like that. And also posting videos as well as detailed documents. So you're sort of reaching a more range, a wider range of learning styles. And it's also, it's really about understanding those student learning preferences that are in your classes and offering a variety. And the third is really create communities and collaboration. We have heard from many instructors that creating communities and collaborative learning environments for students learning online really helps them be more engaged. But one thing that came out of tact is that navigators or career coaches, they created their own communities and they collaborated. So it wasn't just about the students, but also thinking of collaboration and communities, not just in terms of students, but in terms of advisors, coaches, and instructors. So in tact, coaches shared these challenges and promising practices. They shared ideas. They did so with regular conference calls on base camp groups. Individual coaches reached out and called each other and instructors and advisors were also emailing each other and calling each other for ideas and support. Next one. So I think words of advice that I might have is really, you know, consider your audience. Different populations of students are really experiencing this crisis differently. In recent interviews that I've had, university students, which are often traditional age students, have said that they're actually enjoying the switch to the online modality. But then community college and technical students that I've talked to who are kind of more generally non-traditional students have said, you know, point length that they're struggling with it. And another thing is really English second language students, which I think sometimes as educators we don't necessarily think about. But they have said that online classes can be difficult for them because they have to read the course instructions in English, translate it to their language in their head, think of the answer, translate it back to English and then write it out or do it. So I think the takeaway there is just, you know, consider who your students are and what ways you can help alleviate any frustration or stress they might be having. The next is really connection I think is very important. So coaches, advisors, instructors have all said that connecting with students and connecting students to each other is vitally important in engaging them. And we know that research shows that students who report self-satisfaction with a course also feel engaged and connected. And so right now it's also important I think to help students find those resources that they need. And lastly I think a great takeaway is just have fun. It's important to incorporate fun projects into online modality because especially, you know, those students who wouldn't normally self-select for an online modality may be finding it more tedious and more stressful. So research tells us that students who are having fun in their classes or activities have better achievement outcomes. So really tapping into that and trying to incorporate some fun projects. So I think the biggest takeaway overall is really just understanding who our students are, finding ways to connect with them and other instructors, and make sure that those supports are there and accessible for them. Thanks so much. Renee, Dave, we're on to you. Excellent. Thank you, Ivy. Thank you, Renee. You can go ahead and jump to the next slide. Just give a quick overview for those who aren't familiar with Inside Track. We're a non-profit organization that's focused on student success. A lot of our work involves direct coaching of students. We coach a few hundred thousand students each year but we also do a lot of work in capacity building, helping institutions and system build out their student support functions. Our connection to TACT is that we did a lot of TACT grant-funded work with community colleges over the four-year period that that program was running but the insights I'm going to share today are from across the spectrum, all the institutions and students that we're working with. The first thing I'll say before I dive into the specific strategies is that as I look across the the institutions we're working with everybody's in a different stage right now. We have some that are very much focused in the moment and we're working with them on strategic plans week to week and then we have some that are already deep into their planning for fall and everywhere in between. So I'll just start by saying that no matter where you are right now you've got plenty of company. Nobody is behind or ahead. We all came into this crisis with different levels of preparedness. Our communities have been hit in different ways. So where you are is the right place to be. Second quick caveat I will make is that there's a big difference between the kind of emergency remote teaching that everyone has been thrust into recently and true online learning. So I guess just be mindful of the fact that online learning done well is much better than a lot of what we're experiencing right now and there's you know as we think about summer programming or the fall there's there's time to put the right supports in place. A lot of our work over the last several weeks has been focused on supporting our partners and getting their frontline staff ready to support students in the moment and as we all know pretty much every student facing function is a student support function. It's not just student affairs or academic advising. It's professors. It's financial aid. It's registrar or whatever it might be. Everybody needs to be on deck supporting students right now but often they those groups haven't worked together and haven't been trained in a common methodology and so we looked at this as an opportunity to start making some of those connections happen and breaking down some of those silos and one of the things we advised our partner institutions to do is provide a single place where there are training materials supporting materials tools on important topics that everyone needs to know right now and I've listed a few examples here and I understand that the new American folks are going to be sharing the deck so those are actually clickable links you can go to to look at examples but three of the topics that came up right away were students in crisis so students who are dealing with housing or food insecurity mental health issues whether that was happening before or was triggered by the covid epidemic. We're definitely seeing more of that now. Second were students considering stopping or dropping out and the third were students forced online and how that is different from supporting online students generally so we started out focused in in those three areas and created a set of materials it's short recordings longer length webinars cheat sheets handy tools whatever it might be have them all in one place and then continuously update that for your teams so that they know that's the one place they go to to get updates as the crisis unfolds and they have a one-stop shop and they can absorb the material at their pace. The second strategy was helping institutions connect with their peers we found early in the crisis there were a lot of institutions that were trying to do everything on their own using just the expertise they had in house and didn't really think to tap into the their neighbors the fact is we we all have neighbors who've been doing the remote work thing and the remote remote learning thing for years if not decades and so tapping into that into your colleagues at neighboring institutions who may have robust online programs or have had teams that have been working remotely for years and leveraging their expertise always a great idea and then finally arming the team with some simple templates and tools examples are a simple multiple choice check-in text message so as you think about how you're going to engage students maybe start with just a text message that allows them to reply with a simple one two or three and let you know whether they whether they are looking to engage with you and need assistance or they're doing well. I've also included links to a couple of other tools here one is a what we call a focus wheel it's a prompting mechanism for assessing how students are doing not just academically but in the rest of their lives as well what's going on with finances what's going on with their health what's going on with work and family and things like that and also what we call a clear framework this is a framework for engaging students who are upset this is particularly useful for students who are considering stopping or dropping out because of the abrupt transition from a modality they wanted to a modality they were forced into and it just gives you a step-by-step process for guiding what can often be tough discussions so those are just a few of the tools some words of advice first is normalizing the experience everyone's struggling right now and so it's important to make sure if you're talking to a student or a staff member just to acknowledge the fact that they are struggling let them know that others are struggling too and emphasize a growth mindset while you may not be the you know best remote worker or the best person at supporting students remotely now you can get there second is to be proactive I think there was a lot of hesitancy early on with reaching out to students we're going to be bothering them they're busy trying to deal with their families and things that are going on at home they may have lost a job but what we're finding is that students actually want to know that their institutions still care about them and are there to support them and also be aware that they are there's a high likelihood they are not checking their student emails right now so reach out via multiple channels text messaging mobile apps whatever you have available to try and get in front of folks another important one is to always engage through a trauma informed lens particularly in this moment we have normally community colleges have a lot of students that are dealing with basic needs issues housing and food insecurity or mental health issues but that's even more true now and even as we're thinking about returning to whatever the new normal is going to be students are going to have been impacted by this episode in different ways and we should always make sure that they are in the right mental state to be talking about school and that may mean clearing some of the other issues out of the way first focusing on attitudes and beliefs over knowledge and skills I think there's been a tremendous level of concern amongst a lot of student support professionals about not knowing exactly how to use all the online tools and maybe not being great at crafting text messages whatever it might be that's fine it's really about believing that you can do it and having the attitude that you want to be there for your students and support them really if you're just trying to make it as easy as possible for your students to engage and ask for help and positively assessing for issues and being prepared for the emotional response that that may happen that's all anyone can ask for in this moment so focus on that and if your execution isn't perfect that's okay and then my final piece of advice would be to ask for help there are lots of organization ours included your neighboring institutions others out there that are freely sharing their expertise making it available so just don't be afraid to reach out I know there's a tendency sometimes in crisis to cut off communication with the outside world now is the time to open yourself up a little bit and while we you know practice physical distancing practice social connection and trying to stay engaged with others and working through this together so I'll leave it there thank you so much Dave we're really really grateful for your thoughts and and your wisdom you had to share um Jan we'd love to hear from you now hello and thank you for everyone ahead of me I'd like to say that I serve as an ocaranzis going on and turn the slide Ivy I serve as an ocaranzis post-traditional student advisor I serve students that are 24 and over when they're I'm housed within student services previously I was the grant manager and navigator for an h2p health professions pathways tech grant so I brought many of those services and ideas and strategies to what I'm doing now today with our adult students our coom rapids campus is is located in a suburb of Minneapolis while our Cambridge campus is located in a rural area north of the cities when I serve as a post-traditional student advisor my caseload is just over 300 students and it's growing daily due to a high-level laid-off workers the students I serve may be single parents new to college returning after a period of time they may need to change careers they're unemployed or they're building a skill set or they could be just seeking personal enrichment since they've got time on their hands right now as I mentioned I you took much of the navigator tools with me and I'm responsible for welcoming the new students to the college I help them get into the college help them with any application I collaborate with the admissions office I assist with the orientation and provide guidance through the registration progress process I share resources to help eliminate barriers both on and off campus these could be housing transportation health care food assistance all of these create financial challenges and can even derail students from achieving their academic goals I advise students on academic plans transfer options and I'm a point of contact for credit for prior learning options at the college I serve as a point of contact a friendly face I offer a personal connection and support I ongoingly I welcome students to reach out at any time or just make that connection I want to offer exit x assistance with career exploration and reaching their life goals so it's from the beginning ongoing retention and then actually helping them on to the next stage in their life as I mentioned an ochre Ramsey Community College has two campuses our head count is like 7200 7200 students and 29.9% of that student body is over 24 we're primarily white black african-american Asian and Hispanic but we're finding today even more today students regularly demonstrate they need support for mental health academic planning technical assistance and emotional support together we need to be knowledgeable and resourceful next we offer we offer online advising when it's convenient for the student there but many times they're balancing homeschooling their little ones classes are strictly in an online delivery method and there's unknown stresses that they may have so we need to provide a tool that they can reach out to us and set up that appointment whenever it's convenient for them we communicate via emails and as we all know many times those emails are numerous and all time of the day and week but we need to reach them when where they're at previously we've offered five minutes or quicks less five minutes or less quick stops in the office now we're able to offer that in an online chat session to answer those quick questions that's slowly taking off but it's it's coming together I mean students are starting to use that but zoom appointments are made through book it either by the student directly or they can call our main number for appointments these zoom appointments not only are just an appointment but there's the follow-up email of what we talked about what might be the next steps for the students and links to resources or forms and we also note all of this in Oracle so that somebody else can follow up with them so our zoom appointments which were half an hour planned for half an hour seem to be taking a lot more time but we're making that connection and helping to follow through with the student we are just starting to make personal calls for those students who have not registered for fall classes we're just checking in seeing if there is something we can help them with collaboratively we need to be that active listener and think innovative where are they saying when we talk to them walk when they talk to us what can we respond with and what support can we offer system and college-wide we are looking at course placement system wide and college-wide we are looking at course placement with meeting prerequisites and correct placements to help students be successful in their classes online orientation has moved to online only and a sign connection is made with their advisor to complete registration grading is now allowing students to change their grade even for spring semester to a pass-fail option and the pass grades are now transferable and accepted within Minnesota state system communication that's key to this whole process communication from administration has been through many emails to students with updates and resources during this COVID-19 crisis what what is open during the call at the college what can they use the technology we need to communicate to them and let them know that we are working on this situation and we're helping there them be successful and we are there to support them our website now has a COVID-19 page and a basic needs page for resources on and off campus to help eliminate those barriers that students may be experiencing our OIT has extended Wi-Fi and expanded it to our parking lots many of our Cambridge students who are live in a rural area do not have Wi-Fi in their home so they connect to the Wi-Fi in the parking lot to complete their coursework requirements OIT is also designed a laptop loaner program and students are accessing that for their laptop needs for their classes all spring and summer semester classes were moved online recently and we're providing ongoing education and communication for all staff and faculty so they are informed and engaged so they can help students when the need arises as I mentioned earlier communication is key as we all know everyone is stressed so a better communication plan eliminates some of those stresses words of advice be that active listener read between the lines have a solution or response to what they are saying students want and need to know they are not alone be that positive supportive friendly and encouraging adult that will listen and offer suggestions which supports them when they need it most collaboratively we are still there to support through this unique situation more importantly the students need to know that their academic goals are still attainable thank you thank you Jan we really really appreciate you and your contribution and now we'll move on to Renee sharing thank you Ivy I am just going kind of go over some basics I am Renee shewing I am from the Salt Lake Community College the School of Applied Technology my current position is a CBE success coach however I have in the past been the academic advisor for some programs so my responsibility really is to help students navigate the CBE courses which is a competency based education program through Salt Lake Community College School of Applied Technology they have done several programs through this that range their technical support ones the demographics of the students I've worked with they've range from high school students that are currently in high school working on their high school diploma but also want to come out with a certificate from once a complete high school all the way to students that have lost their jobs and looking for a new job or they are looking and knowing that they can do better and want to change their job so I do four programs of three programs with several individual certificates in there I do the HVAC ones the heating and air conditioning program that has about 30 students in it currently I do the business office programs and that has four different programs in it and they have about 60 students in those four different programs and then also the computer technology which has about also about 60 students in those and they have six different certifications within that one so with that I get approximately about 150 students that I do the success coaching with before most of my things that I was navigating and helping the students with it was really kind of understanding how the competency based education worked through Salt Lake Community College letting them understand when the teachers were giving them like their percentage of progress and everything what that really meant and how they could kind of navigate to make sure that they were on targets for all of their dates now I'm really talking to them more about their life situations and the fact that they're they're doing kids with school they're trying to some of my students are essential um employees they're out working um their fears all the different things that they're kind of navigating right now and helping them to understand they're not in it alone and what the college can offer them go ahead and do the next slide so some of the strategies I have done is I've had to make sure I've done a weekly check-in email that weekly check-in email has been really kind of my time to kind of normal normalize the abnormal so um as one of the previous people has said I'm opening up a little bit more of what's going on in my life so that they can understand that we're all in it together um I found that that within the emails has really helped to get the students to respond back to those emails versus just saying hey how's things going and and giving that I'm really kind of saying hey look here's what I'm doing here's where I'm personally struggling with and I'm sure you are too so maybe we can strategize things together I'm getting there I'm getting a lot of students that are coming to me and saying hey I don't even have a computer yet alone I have these two guys or kids I have to teach and and that type of stuff so I'm getting some of those open up or yeah I'm you know I'm scared to go out and get food and I don't know how to get that stuff so I've been doing that quite regularly um so I make sure the email has if there's more information that is coming from the college that they need to know I'm reaching those and putting those out more often the other thing I did is um I can answer my phone and everything through my computer however um I was here and having students having a hard time actually understanding the voice ones through when you called them and everything it was breaking up so I set up a google account um for myself my personal cell phone so that that way I could forward my work number to the google account and then um it allowed me to be able to get the calls in and actually have a clearer conversation with the students I used also that to text students and say hey haven't heard from you for a while just checking in just send me a quick I'm okay or something like that and been getting a lot of contact back through that the other thing because I'm so integrated with the certain programs and everything I've been in constant contact with the instructors letting them know hey this person's reached out to me here's where they're struggling is there something that you can do with the class um you know what's going on here what's going on there and they're emailing me or texting me or anything like that and say hey we haven't seen the student in for a while or the student reported this for me so it's been a constant collaboration with my faculty and myself to do it and if they're instruct the faculty is talking to me about what's going on with the student I'm following up with the student through email text and or phone call and sometimes it's all three of those just so that I can get to that student and um be someone to help them through that crisis though next slide so my words of advice is you know tell the students that we're all in it together um how we're learning is new to everybody um some know how to use the information through canvas but others don't um and they really like that interaction of face-to-face with the faculty so it's different now that they can't ask the faculty directly the questions and so I kind of really let them know that hey we we're all in it together and let's find out the answers and really try and help open up that communication with the faculty and the student um and help them get a little bit more clarity um sometimes it's just interpretation of what's the information the other thing um is open up more of what's going on with your life I mean there is one week in mind that I was trying to get my kids to do online schooling I was personally just down my kids were down and I just opened up and said hey you know here's what we're struggling with and you know so I know we're all in this together it helps to normalize with the student what's going on and everything and then provide information that the of how the college can help um computer labs at our school are still open they're just maintaining the social distance our library now has a bunch of computers that students can check out our mental health and um is still doing um our services for the students they're still having um counseling sessions and different things with them so giving those students where they can reach out how to reach out to their faculty um making sure that they have the classrooms um web address we use WebEx at our college so making sure they understand how to get into WebEx some of those things have all been things that I've done and I think that have helped those students through this time thank you thank you so much Renee we really appreciate you um Richard we'll hand it over to you yes hello everyone my name is Richard Stevenson I am the coordinator for the academic success center at jeffson college I'm also responsible for peer tutoring program our peer tutoring program jeffson college is a community college that's located about 25 miles south of st louis Missouri and my job at the academic success center which is a tutoring center some people call them learning centers is to make sure that we have proper staffing uh because it is a walk-in tutoring situation students can walk in and get tutoring they can also make appointments during this uh period I want to well it's part of my job I assure that processes run smoothly I'm also a tutor myself I am a registered respiratory therapist that's my background so students that are involved in the health occupation programs will come down to see me when they need help with anatomy physiology so I tutor I also train our tutors as well that work in our uh crl a accredited peer tutoring program and at the end of every semester I conduct surveys to make sure uh to get feedback to see how we're doing and how our services are impacting our students jeffson college is course open enrollment and we serve uh traditional and non-traditional students we have students who come from st louis Missouri the metro east that we call it Illinois uh we have students from suburban Missouri and from rural areas and many of our students in the rural areas don't have internet access or if they have it at all it's very weak uh having adequate bandwidth and they may not even have a computer at all so the college has been very gracious about loaning out hot spots and laptops to both students and some teachers who don't have a computer at home or internet access or it's not strong enough internet access next slide please so as I guess it was about the second week of march I think we would all agree we began to realize we were going to have to change and change quick so I started thinking about how the academic success center could still serve our students so it was important to begin to prepare so we decided on a platform we use google meat because it it's uh we felt it was a lot safer than zoom and google meat allows for interactive uh for screen sharing the student can share their screen with the teacher and the teacher can do presentations on their screen their computer screen so we begin preparing by doing dry runs I begin to work with our instructors to make sure they knew how to work the google meat platform and know know how to use it uh interactively so we did dry runs I had posters made not to hang up uh not to print and hang up but to blast out via email in our social media platforms letting students know that we are open we will be not open physically but open online and still available to help and meet their need and also stress to our instructors and peer tutors the importance of quick response to our students when they ask for help as we know it is a threshold for many students to seek help and so it's important that when they do ask for help that we respond very very quickly to it so that's how we prepare for this uh pandemic next slide please so in my mind what was most important was continuity because we are going from face to face walk-in tutoring to online tutoring so it was important to me that we have continuity that students knew that we were still available we could help them just the same as well online as we did face to face so to do this we created a web page on our academic on our jeffson college web page we created an academic success center web page devoted just to online resources so all the student has to do is go to the web page click the topic that they need help with a list of instructors pops up i gave all the instructors their own google meet link so if a student needs help in math they click on the topic math all the professors are instructors at working academic success center are on the on the pdf with their link so the student can click that link when that instructor is on duty and it's like walking right into a room and they could meet with the instructors so the instructors know to be prepared at their normal times that they would work physically in the academic success center we want to make sure all of our instructors had access to the online resources that they had computers that they had hot spots that they had good internet service in their homes um and that our students also had these same resources we've done of course outreach to our campus community via email and social media also i i have a since we have our students log into the academic success center their names populate on an excel spreadsheet so i can see the topics that students come in needing help for which we help with science um math any kind of math reading writing computer information and we also help students prepare to take the acuplacer math and reading exam we have a lab just for that so i can pick uh i can look at the excel spreadsheet and target students that use our lab this uh our academic success center this spring so far say students that did anatomy physiology and sent out a mass email to all of them letting them know we are still open online they can still get the same help they were getting as if we were open physically open on campus we also have access we have an anatomized table which is a 3d has 3d cadavers of anatomized company was able to provide that online so i can still tutor students online using an anatomized table we can do dissections and bone identification organ identification we use a resource called go board because it's important to have some interactivity with the students go board.com is excellent if anyone's familiar with that it's an excellent tool it's like a white board it's not really white but it's an interactive white board too they have a tool that has uh audio visual capabilities chat capabilities uh has calculators it's great for science and math and the teacher and student can both uh write on the document you know uh so they can interact with each other and in conclusion my response my advice would be to respond to students as quickly as possible as a former healthcare worker when a patient told me they were short of breath i knew i had to respond quickly and it was important for me to reassure them that in a few moments they would be feeling better i feel the same way about our students we should respond to them as quickly as possible because as i said earlier it taken us a big step for a lot of students to ask for help lastly we must be patient everybody's not uh doesn't have savvy technological skills so we want to be patient with our instructors as well as our students sometimes the internet's a little slow so uh i am doing thank you for your time and attention thank you so much richard we're really grateful for your participation and for sharing your thoughts now we're going to move into our question time um and my colleague iris will moderate that for us thank you ivy uh my name is iris palmer i'm a senior advisor here at new america and really excited to listen to all the great uh conversation that we've had today um so i think i'm going to go with our oldest questions first um and so the first one is for you jan but i think other people can jump in if they're interested um do you respond to emails and questions from uh students outside of business hours very very definitely i do it's um i need to be available for um i do so limit i do try to say nine o'clock p.m i'm not going to respond i'm back on the clock at seven thirty in the morning and i'm happy to respond at that time that's wonderful um i figured that would be your answer and i am glad you're trying to set limits in such a difficult time we all do need that um so another question for you do you how do you support the unique needs of single parents and student parents on your campus we have a really good um community resource guide that helps um provide resources out in the community we do not offer daycare situation for the college due to liability and it's not feasible space wise but i will um like i really they're they're working out here if i'm on a zoom meeting there's children running around in the background i want to be able to help them and answer them and walk through our website to find resources it's just being it's just being there and answering and being that adult friendly face for them does that answer the question i think that is a really good answer to the question and i'd love to open that up to some of our other um panelists as well dave renae richard do you have anything you do particularly for student parents in this difficult time when many of us are without childcare this is dave um one thing i'll say just tying it back to the first question around hours of operation if it's at all possible one way you can help adults is uh or help parents is by being available when they're not actively trying to homeschool their kids and and things like that so anything you can do to skew hours and i know a lot what a lot of institutions are doing now is um uh staggering people's work hours so they do have people that work later into the evening or ones that start earlier in the morning so that they can offer more full coverage across the board the other thing we've seen is repurposing some staff that might normally be um focused on on-campus activities so normally their job is not to do outreach to students but giving them some basic training and having them be available too so it's kind of a an all hands on deck and and trying to make yourself as available as you can be by as many modalities as you can be the third thing is making self-service resources available and i know several of the speakers today touched on having uh websites that their students can go to to download information or watch videos or whatever it might be anything you can do that gives them that bridge until they can talk to you is helpful it's really helpful dave rena and richard do you have anything to add yes um so uh another question that we received is um how do you enforce social distancing guidelines on your campus and richard you talked a little bit about facilities and labs um and how we can make those um more friendly to social distancing but i'm wondering if anyone particularly in enforcing social distancing currently on campus um if anyone can speak to that this is jam and anoka ramsey has one door that the students come in security is there to write their name down and keep track of them and they can go directly only directly to our technology lab and of course after they leave everything is wiped down they're very they're very sanitized and uh it's that's the only place on campus so they can go at this time so you limit the numbers that can come in sorry richard did you want to join in on that yes we're doing the same thing because some programs do require a lab component or certain competencies that have to be assessed so we're going to i think april 27th uh have some of the uh labs open but it'll be limited to 10 people uh and and we have a building that has like four wings to it so it's going to be uh just 10 people to a wing and i believe everybody will be wearing mask um as well because some people are about to need to finish up so they can graduate so yes so richard you talked a little bit about how putting labs online and using virtual cadavers and things like that um are there any other boards of advice from you or any of the other panelists about how to put labs online or do you think sort of um maintaining social distance while using the labs is your best strategy in that case yes there's a uh uh application called visible body that deal with anatomy and physiology so uh visible body if anybody's teaching science or if you have if you know some science faculties are excellent application right now they're being they're offering their services free till june the 30th and what they have is they have uh any of the topics in anatomy physiology in all the body systems uh you can look at isolate bones isolate muscles remove dissections uh there's audio visual components there's quizzes um practice quizzes real quizzes a grade book you can even uh create your own course and right now it is free until june 30th that is very very useful information i think at this point um so i'm going to move on to our next question uh but it's also for you richard um what program do you use where students can log into the student success center yeah we don't have a program we just they access it through our webpage i created uh we created a webpage academic success center online as a part of jefferson college webpage and i had all the subjects like math science computer our foundations lab writing lab and we just created a link where if the student clicks on math a pdf opens up and all of the math instructors that work for me in the academic success center all their names and their shifts populates in their meeting room so if let's say me richard was i i'm in the science lab and i opened up my lab at eight o'clock in the morning my room so if it's eight ten a student can uh anytime after eight between eight four thirty they can click the link and i can talk to them and meet with them and and share my screen with them if i want to do a presentation so that's how we do that this is like walking and tutoring that's really useful um another question i think did you mention a program called uh go board yes i saw the question go board is free okay great it is free and uh if you contact them uh they will set up a free meeting with you uh and you can fact get your own unique url for your college what that will do will allow you to record your go board sessions with the student you'll get a link and then you can send that link to the student so they can review it later and refer back to it really good advice around the tools thanks i'm so glad you've seen that question richard that's very helpful um so what advice do you have for helping advisor colleagues who are resistant to using webcam advising platforms because of their fear and discomfort around technology i know we all know these people um and i want to open this up to the group if there's anyone who's come up with particular strategies to help facilitate the use of technology by people who maybe aren't that comfortable with it and i would actually say students also aren't always comfortable with technology either which we've heard in this conversation this is dave i can jump in with just some some general thoughts around this one would be uh start by understanding well i guess start by acknowledging it's a valid concern then move to understanding why they are concerned is it um their fear of use of the technology is it that um that you know they don't want people looking in their house because they have privacy concerns you know try and understand the why behind it and then uh offering them a safe space to practice so maybe they start by doing face-to-face zooms with a colleague and that feels less stressful than doing it with a student um and then they work their way up to that but just a couple ideas it's good advice i know it's very very challenging for a lot of teachers including my child's teacher um it's been quite a learning curve for almost all of us i think so that's good advice if anyone else has anything to add on that please um feel free to jump in if not i'm going to go on to the next question so what are the best tools that you use to get responses from students we've heard about email we've heard about texting we've heard about pushing out different kinds of we've heard about phone calls in this conversation what seems to work the best is it just the number of contacts or is it the modality that really makes a difference um this is rene sharing the one that i've seen that has worked the best is actually text messaging because that actually gives it it goes to the student um phone um and then they when they want to they can respond they're not they're not obligated i just think that it gets it right in front of them right at the beginning and just letting them know who it is um that's the one when i went to try um we had our lab for our age back was close to open up and then the night before they decided it wasn't really open up and so i had all these 30 students that thought they could go in the next day um to start and i started off with a simple email to them and asked them to respond to that when i didn't get anything i went to text messaging and i got probably more than half of the students responded to that and then i went to a phone call um so i think text messaging has been the the best tool i have found um besides phone calls and then just um the faculty has just put um areas that show on their their courses kind of announcements and everything and that's reached a lot of the students too this is dave i'll just add on um all of the above is uh typically the best option so we've actually looked at this in detail which modalities work better than others and i would agree with renae uh text messaging volume for us is as high as every other modality combined but at the same time we found that there are actually when you send the same message via multiple modalities it actually increases use of all of the modalities so if a voicemail and a text message simultaneously will get you better response than either alone the other thing is if you have history with a student uh interacting with them in the modality of their choice so if they typically email you email them back if they typically text you or call you use that modality so as much as you can be kind of versatile in all of them and try to uh adapt to students you have relationships with um that will always work best anybody else have any observations on modality i thought that was very helpful um so richard we have some people who want a little bit more information about visible body i think um if we could probably just go ahead and share some links after the webinar and make sure everybody has that information um so uh there are some also some questions around so healthcare is obviously very hands-on and lab based manufacturing is also very hands-on and lab based um can you offer any other strategies from your own experience in addressing the difficulty in transitioning these to online do you know richard if visible body would benefit from lna and lpn programs or would be able to work for those kinds of programs probably not it's more for anatomy and physiology so which most nursing students have taken by the time they enter the program if they're taking it as as part of the uh along with their core studies yes um other than sort of socially distancing your labs does anybody else have any observations on some of these other hands-on programs like manufacturing this is rene again i did have my faculty for the h-back program had a virtual lab that he used um that that he's currently using for them um let me see if i can find i don't remember what the um lab was called but i can always send that information to to you ivy and um then you can get it out to the participants maryne i think that would be a really great um resource for us to share after the webinar i think the more we can share sources for virtual labs the better off we're going to be in this situation so thank you for that um so on to the next question um when we had switched our classes to remote online the class finder system changed all date time details to say online but then we had students register and log in the first week where faculty were requiring synchronous live zoom lectures which really made a lot of students drop the class um have any of you run into this situation and how have you helped your institutions and students navigate it so basically going into a class thinking it's going to be an asynchronous online experience and then having it just be uh the same synchronous teaching uh but just virtually this may be something you all are going to be facing uh if we end up staying at least somewhat virtual uh going forward richard did you want to comment yes i've talked to some instructors and yes some students have fallen off um and not hearing from them in fact one class was calculus three and several students did not show up for a synchronous meeting it's a pretty intense class so yes there has been a problem here and we're doing colathons here at jeffson college they've uh called they're going to call all the students to find out what's going on to see how they're doing so that's one strategy we view we're using currently thank you richard that's a really good strategy for helping set expectations for students as we um go through what is a really unsettled unsettled time we're getting some other recommendations for resources um in the questions box and so we'll make sure we uh bring those together and share them out along with the the resources that have been um talked about here um how oh sorry this is iris yes how can i help you i just was um doing comment on that um we are noticing even though with ours we kind of had the ability for students to kind of do it online and we have still an open lab thing we are having students that are not coming into the open lab and um online and everything so we are looking um the faculty reaches out to me and says hey we've noticed that the student is doing their work in canvas however we have not seen them on our web x classroom could you please reach out and 90 of the time the students are like oh i didn't realize it had already been two weeks or three weeks so some of it's just um reaching out and making sure that the student knows um what when it is and making sure that those times are going um making sure they have the information on how to connect to it so i like the idea of just kind of doing calls to those students and making sure they understand when and how the modality is going because they might not understand that it's very complicated and really different across lots of different classes so it does seem like a really important thing to be proactive about um so we have a question around text messaging um so i know that a lot of colleges have um programs that help you text message but that is by no means um universal so is there a way that you text students using your personal phone do you somehow use your google phone for work for that can anybody elaborate on how they do that um this is renais sharing again i am one of those ones that we do not have a universal text um messaging program for the college and everything so i did sign up for a google voice account and i go into that and i downloaded the google voice app onto my phone and so i go into that google voice app and i do everything through that google voice app i just have to make sure that i let the student know that it is who it is because it is not my work number and it's obviously not my personal number so i've kind of sent out an email and i sent it and i called the students and let them know that hey this is who it is so that the students were aware of that yes the google if you use the google voice app on your phone it does disguise it so it's not your personal phone and you can forward that if you have your personal phone you can't or your work phone that like i said i we do it um over the voice over internet stuff um but it doesn't always give a clear um conversation so i've taken mine and transferred my work number to my google voice one so it will ring my my personal phone versus ringing on my computer and having to answer it through my computer and it seems to make the calls clearer so yes if you do use the google voice and you use the google voice app on your personal cell phone you have to make sure you go into that app every time it will disguise your um personal number it will give the google voice number instead we're getting a lot of recommendations um around other free software to be able to text um not from your personal number but i just want to open it up if any of the other panelists have ideas around that if not we can just share some of the other things that have come in through the q&a um so we're winding down here with our questions a couple of things that just have come in that i want to bring up one i think that we will be posting all the resources as i said we'll be posting the um the uh slides for everyone to be able to access and be able to access the the links um we are also um yes you can text using the google voice app sorry that was another question that just came in um so we will we will go ahead and post all of that um as far as the a lot of people are asking for your contact information panel so we will have a conversation about that offline and see if we can share that as well um but i think it's just been a really amazing conversation uh ivy if you want to go ahead and go to the last slide sure well speaking of contact information we actually have it right here right so we have our contact information do we have bears oh perfect we have everybody's so those of you who stayed with us till the end um here is the contact information for everyone on the call or um all of our panelists and us um so you should feel free i think to reach out and ask additional questions um ask people to come and present to your your um your colleges as you're dealing with these unfolding issues um i really want to thank everyone who joined us today and i want to thank our panelists you did an amazing job it was um really informative and very helpful and timely given where we are um ivy did you want to go to the last one so we can talk about how to contact you america oh it's not there um we hope you can all join us and connect with us um oh there it is keep in touch with us um via these different um forms both through our newsletter on twitter through linkedin and on um youtube uh we are going to be doing another webinar tomorrow about uh healthcare programs we hope you can join us for that and with that um i just want to say thank you all for joining us and thank you for your time and we hope that you will join us tomorrow thanks