 Hi, Kelly Fleming, Future Generations University. We like to call ourselves the most applied community development master's degree in the world. One of those reasons, closer, okay. One of the reasons we say we're the most applied is because we're based in the US and in the US, everything is best, most greatest, everything. But also, our philosophy of community development is an applied strategy to teaching community development to master's level students so that they can go on outside of the classroom and directly apply what they've learned in part of their mastery into the development work that they're doing. However, and I mentioned that I'm the chief academic officer because we're very small. We're sort of like an academy. We have 50 students at a time. And so as the chief academic officer, I am in charge of a number of other elements of the program that expand outside the classroom. I'm in charge of the accreditation. I'm in charge of the evaluation as well. So even though we're small and we take advantage of the fact that Moodle allows us to pivot the way that we teach our program, it actually also allows us to check those boxes for the regulations that these accreditation bodies and different people want from us. So I'll come back to that at the end. But I really do, so what I'm gonna talk about is our approach to applied learning. So we have students all over the world. They're using Moodle. They're in their country. As part of the application process for being in our program, you have to identify the community that you're going to work with. So from the beginning, they're already defining what community in their area they're going to be working with throughout the course of their degree. And so we were thinking about how do we make that a reality at the course level even. And so we developed what we call, oh, you have to change the slide. This, awesome. So we developed what we call community labs. So for those who work with project-based learning or applied learning, experiential learning, this is what we do to try and encourage and facilitate faculty really concentrating on those assessments that aren't essays and aren't thesis but are actually project-based learning that then they can assess directly. So we take the course learning objective. Each class has three or four course learning objectives. Each course learning objective is we work with the faculty again, faculty development, part of my job, to say how can you help students show that they've learned that? What can they do in the class? And by class, I mean their environment, right? They're going out there with their community and they're working directly with them. So what is it about this principle that you're teaching that they can practice in their classroom of the world, right? So how do you make an output or an assessment or a project-based learning assignment? These are all words to say the same thing, like this activity that the student is going to do, that you're both gonna scaffold, like I said, this comes from like e-learning philosophy, sorry, e-portfolio philosophy as well. We wanna scaffold both the activity, so the thing that they're doing, and we ask the faculty to write out instructions. Actually, if you go to the next slide, that would be good. So this is basically the template that we use and what I really like about it is that it has everything in one place. So it has the title of the lab they're gonna do, it has the course they're doing that for, the professor they're doing that for, the semester they're doing that, the description of the course and also the key dates of when this thing is due and how many points it is. And I think it's important to have all of that information together for the student to just make, continuously go back to like, what is the goal? What is the bigger picture here that then I'm going to divide into steps? And so the faculty has also incurred, I mean that required help to identify, sorry, the course learning objective for this lab and then break it down on one side for the activities. So your general instructions and then on the right side the artifacts, so that what it's gonna look like at the end and then the point values. So ideally you have it all steps, so this says step one and then step two and step three for the activity and then step one, step two, step three for the artifact. And then a point value assigned for each steps. Ideally in my notes, I have that this is actually a rubric, so it's not like five points for step one, it's five points if you do these things, four, three, two, like a rubric style. So, and I just wanted to show you one filled out. So this is from our non-profit management course with Dr. Erica Harney and she has this activity which is a needs assessment, which falls under the course learning objective that students can articulate and apply relevant leadership management styles and she goes through, this is just the first page and this is another thing I wanted to share is that the formatting really needs help because if you go to the next slide, you'll see that's step one. So the whole lab is actually kind of this long if you print it out. So this is something we're working on to try and make this much more user friendly and much more sort of a guided experience for students. But you can see she really tries to help people think about what they need to do, some advice as to where they could look for information and then some information as to exactly what we want them to produce as the artifact that they're gonna submit for assessment and then that particular step is seven points. So I think we're on to our last slide. So I'm doing good, talking too fast now, okay. So like I said, I like this concept of community lab because it really fits for a small place like us. I don't have the luxury of having things that don't fit with a bunch of other stuff. So the community lab is extremely student centered. It allows us to really, faculty are able within the structure to give student choice. They can choose to do what has been outlined. They can also choose to do something else of their choice. They can decide that they're doing the activity but the artifact's gonna look different. There's a lot of variability that can happen within there. But what comes out of it is something that's a very measurable structure for an applied learning activity. And that was really important for me because I use looking at both the instructions that the faculty gives students and what the students produce as part of the faculty evaluation process, the course evaluation process, the program, both development and evaluation. So we talk about how did this one go? Did it really fit with the learning objective? How should we tweak it to be more centered around that learning objective? Should we change the learning objectives for this class because it's not quite fitting? And also it helps us with designing another program. Like how can we use these examples? Because there's some things that work really well as project learning. How can we tweak, how can we use that activity but tweak what exactly they're doing out there in the world? It's a great tool for our marketing department because we end up with these wonderful, often visually stunning, great stories about what our students are doing out there with our education, with their community. So on Tuesday, we have a Tuesday webinar series and we had one of our students, John Mark, who graduated last year. He lives in Haiti, is in Haiti. They haven't had power for two weeks. Somehow he managed to come to our webinar, present on his projects that he had done, his learning journey through our program and shared a story map. I don't know if you know that product, but it kind of helps you structure out a GIS project. So he showed this. I wasn't there, I was here, so I have no idea how it actually all went. I'm waiting for the recording. But it really is a great tool to show what our students are doing. We're small, we're always looking for different people to fund us and partner with us. So these are great stories of how our students are out there in the world really bridging that between the starting with us in our program and then how they use these products that they make after they've graduated. So that's really all I had. Thanks. But yeah, plenty of time for questions, which is what I wanted. Thank you. I would just love to hear super quick some of the student projects. So right, so the other extension, thank you, the other extension that I really think is really helpful is that when students are used to doing this for an assignment, so they make a needs assessment as part of the nonprofit class, then in their lives or in their projects, they're like, oh, you know what? That a needs assessment, then there's a next step. There's a thing that was identified that I really want to work on. And so we have, I don't know, 30%, 50% of our students doing independent studies where they take what they learned in the class and they create a whole course on extending that learning outside of the class. So Jean-Marc's big project was one of these extensions where he actually got a peace prize to start women entrepreneurs go through a professional development workshop. And then he was presenting, because it's been a year now, how those people in his workshop have now expanded their projects. So they started with selling just fruits and vegetables. Now one woman's doing ginger coffee and has a contract with the US. These are the kinds of stories that we only have, like I said, 50 students, but we know that they are making a real impact where they are. And because they can stay where they are and because we use e-learning where they are, and we just do virtual online classes, they can stay there. There's no brain drain concern because they're really still really integrated with their program. And it also meant, because we used to have a large part of the program was that people would go and see community development projects around the world. And this was to help them see a project and then go back to their home countries and put that project into place. We were limited on the number, the types of people that were able to do that. And now we have a lot, women for instance, had a hard time leaving their work and their homes and their families to be in our program. And now we're up to 70% women in our program. So that's one of the real benefits of being able to really like deep dive and sort of commit to an online platform as like where we're gonna be doing the learning. So thank you. Did you start with these community labs or did you have another pedagogical project before? And if second option, what is the difference in student feedback about your project? Yeah, great question. That had something to do with what I was saying. We had these residential project, we had a residential program basically. So students would go to Peru, China, India, see a project and then sort of be left on their own to go back to their home country and take what they would learn. And there was some amount of like coaching but it was all by email and there wasn't a lot of like time to collaborate. And so with the community labs, we've kind of broken down that project, that time so that they can go through step one of the community lab and then come back to the class and get feedback from other students and iterate while they're in class with the direct feedback from faculty and other students. Our pedagogical approach before that was pretty standard. They're learning, they're learning and then they have to do a big like thesis at the end. And then that was gonna be this beautiful thing that was gonna, all the thoughts were gonna come together. And to be honest, it was a really expensive model, especially for us, we're really like very thin margins, right? And so that took a lot of individual coaching. It also had a high failure rate. We were having 70% graduation rates, which was still good but our rate now is 98%. So I mean, this way of having students be continuously engaged with their community but also with the material, I think has just made it a lot easier for them to transition to stay in the program, finish and then go on to do great applied community development work. Thank you.