 Okay, we're live. Welcome everybody to the second Sailor Summer School Hangout on Air and the, I think, the second official Sailor.org Hangout on Air. No, third official Sailor.org Hangout on Air. Ever. We had one yesterday, which should be up on our YouTube page, youtube.com slash user slash Sailor Foundation. So check that out as well. We spoke with Stephen Downs, who's big in the OER and open-ended community. So that's up on our page. Give it a look. And as for this Hangout today, the main purpose is to kind of catch up and, but mainly talk about final exams and proctored final exams. And I'm here, so I'm Sean Connor, Sailors Community Engagement Manager. I'm here with Devin Ritter, our Special Projects Administrator and one of the team behind the Summer School and one of the guys behind a lot of things here at Sailor. So we're mainly going to be talking about the final exams, the proctored final exams. Just Devin's going to take you through, show you how that works, where to go, and we'll be here to answer any questions. And then more generally, after that, we'll be here to answer whatever questions you might have about Sailor.org in general, the Summer School in general, other detailed questions, general questions, philosophical questions, whatever it might be. I'm going to turn it over to Devin right now, who's going to take you through. Right, thanks Sean. So as Sean mentioned, kind of the main purpose of today is to walk you all through how to register for exams, how to work through the proctored environments, the kind of difference between the regular non-credit-bearing exam and the procured credit-bearing exam. So we'll kind of go through those steps, all the information is on site, but it's useful to kind of go through and see how everything goes. So the easiest way to do that will be to do a screen share. So I'm going to switch to that, and then I'll walk you through my desktop and as I'm browsing through the windows. And of course what you're watching is we're going to see if you can tell me if... It's still a little hard. It's a slight connection. Should we have him just go ahead? Keep going. Slight delay. Because there's a lag. Okay, all right, because I'm going to catch up. Okay, great. So as a way to walk everyone through this, the easiest way to do that would be to go to one of the actual NCCRS credit-recommended courses that we're doing for the Summer School. So I just chose Random Late Corporate Communications, which is up in the C-10 course. So as you've been working through the course, students can obviously know that course is late on my units and there's a special section for final exam before we specifically get into that because for the NCCRS credit-recommended exam, as it notes, you do need to be proctored for this and to be proctored, there's two options. You can sign up with ProctorU, which is a remote proctoring service that Sailor uses as well as hundreds of colleges and universities across the world. You can also do an Imperson Proctor if you'd like, but we are going to walk you through the steps of how to set up ProctorU account. I'm just going to give you those details. And so as you can see through this resource box, after the final exam, there is a link for all the information about NCCRS. So this not only does it give you information eventually to Proctor, but links you to our page with the part of schools so you can know which schools of credit that you choose to use the credit-recommended exam and just kind of all the details about what NCCRS is in relation to Sailor and what you need to do. So how it works for students that obviously has a section of where you were talking about setting up the ProctorU. And so that link, find right here, opens up a separate window, gives you all the ProctorU protocols. So the main things to remember, Sailor has his own page on ProctorU, which is important because one of the little things with ProctorU is that when you register, you register specifically with the institution that you were planning on taking exams with. So if you happen to have a ProctorU, if you haven't attended school that also uses ProctorU, you would actually, you do need to use a separate email address because the email address you register with the institution is specific to that one as far as being able to schedule exams and being able to see your activity just so that in case two schools had the same type of exam, there would be no confusion about the foods you were taking. So as I said, through this page, there's a link directly to our ProctorU page on the ProctorU site. So you'll notice that immediately because it has our logo. It's also pretty easy. URL is proctoru.com backslash Sailor. Looks like a redirects to Portal. So if you do not already have an account, the first thing that you're going to have to do is create an account. And so I'll walk through that and I'll just do one for myself. I already but we'll go through and do one with my other email address. I'm going to encourage everyone to call you. Oh, are you having an account with ProctorU? I do already have an account. So I'll immediately create your account and give you the terms of use, which we obviously encourage everyone to read. I have read these before. So we'll click through there. All right. So it does, ProctorU does require that you say where you're from and give your address. I think part of this is so they can obviously track where students are coming and kind of be able to make sure that they're bandwidth and they have enough proctors for a different time zones because they do allow you to take exams at the time that you would want. So once you've gone through that, you are ready to schedule your exam. This will only have exams. Now that since this is specific to Sailor, this will only have exams that we've already put in here. And really when we say that exam is in here, it's really just which ones you're allowed to take in a product environment because ProctorU is one who has passed these specific exams. Current term, we only since our course of asynchronous, it's always current term. And you'll see that we have the three different options that we currently have right now. So you just click that and then you can see any of the windows that you want to take your exam. I'm not going to schedule one myself right now, but there's a lot of flexibility when you can do it. You can schedule in advance and just they'll give you a reminder. I think that your homepage of your ProctorU account will give you once you register for one, it'll kind of give you a countdown to when it is. But you can also do, like I said, take an exam now and they'll walk you through the steps and if you need to want to take it. So I do encourage you to schedule in advance. That ensures that the price is the $25 that we list and that ProctorU will of course have Proctor ready for you and at the schedule time. So once you have this done, you're pretty much set to go as far as taking the Proctor exam. So I'm going to go back to the course page and walk you through how you go about doing that. And so this is important. Again, the distinction between the regular final exam, which is not credit recommended and the optional credit recommended exam. So if you were to go to the first link here, this will take you to the Proctor exam or maybe, whoops, it really is our internet connection. So for, if you'll know that you're in the practice exam, if you come through here and it tells you to, well, this, since I'm an administrator, this is premium mode, I would say the temp quiz now, you know, you have to confirm that you did read the honor code. And that exam, just like any other one, as long as you didn't take it within 14 days, you can take it again. You can practice for the credit recommended exam. For the credit recommended exam, you'll notice it's different in that. So even for me, once you click through here, it will prompt you for a password. So this is where ProctorU comes into play or your onsite in person Proctor is that they're the ones who have the password for this. So if you get to the point of going through the exam and you're never prompted for this password, then you should know that it's not the actual credit recommended exam. And it is absolutely required that you do take this exam if you do want to be issued a transcript by sailor, if you're past that, then we can send to a school. And we, they have different records. So we can kind of tell the difference than ProctorU. Typically, if that would happen, they would probably call me immediately if there was an issue or they are familiar, and they would tell you to go back to the course page and use the correct link so that you're actually accessing the exam that is supposed to be in a proper environment. We've kind of run through the situation with them. So whatever Proctor is working with you should be aware of that. But luckily, we did separate the exam on the course page. So it should be pretty straightforward as far as going to the correct one. And once you're there, once they logged you in, it's the same exam just like any other sailor exam. I mean, 50 multiple choice questions, typically all multiple choice questions for these three exams. You have two hours to take them. And again, like our other exams, if you don't pass it the first time, you still can retake it. There is a 14-day wait period. And you would have to reschedule another appointment with ProctorU, which would be that extra fee, which is part of the reason we encourage students to do the practice exam, get a sense for the questions they're going to be like, make sure that they've kind of studied beforehand for any of the sections. And while we're talking about that, I'm actually going to show you a kind of a useful tidbit of information. So another is when you submit a final exam and you get your grade back immediately. So one of the, I don't know why that's split up like that. We, the way we make our exams, we try to let students know what units they're doing the best and worst on. So when you finish your exam, you'll get this kind of summary report and it will tell you how many questions were in that unit and how you did. So if for some reason you didn't pass, you should be able to kind of get a sense of what areas you might need to be focused on before taking the credit recommend exam or, or retaking it. So I encourage students to pay attention to that and go back and study those specific sessions rather than try to take the whole course again if they think that they're going to retake the exam. And this, of course, is once you've passed it, or once you've taken an exam, if you go through the course page on in the Moodle site where our testing environment is and you go to an exam you've already taken, as a student, it will give you your last attempt and click on that attempt and see that review again. So you still have access to your own score report and will be able to see the questions that you previously got wrong and also see, like I said, those units where you might need to be focused on. Sean, is there anything you can think of specifically that we should walk through more? Oh goodness, though. This is more than I actually know about the credit exams, having never gone through it detail by detail like this, or at least not for a long time. As a sailor, students probably take more courses than anyone though. Is there any things about through the course or signing up for the exam? I'm just going to switch off screen shift. I'll just say, you know, for the exams in general, and this is something that winds up coming through in emails that we get to our contact email address and stuff. Hello again. You know, make sure, when you're connecting to the exam, make sure you have a pretty strong connection or if like happens in our office, clearly, because I think we lost the feed for a little bit just before. The network is sometimes on again, off again. You know, either cross your fingers or work on the exam on a day when your network's pretty strong. You do have two hours, which usually is generous. You know, certainly give yourself some time to submit the exam. There's an option in there because I guess of how Moodle the exam structure is set up, and I'm talking about just the non-proctored exams right now, to sort of save and come back later, but you still got to come back within two hours, or it's going to wind up timing out and then you have that 14-day blackout period, which, you know, winds up being frustrating for a lot of people. I think for others, you know, not that big a deal. You wait a couple weeks, but it can be really frustrating when you're ready to take the exam now, you're studied now, you're ready to do well, and you've been locked out, and you have to wait a couple weeks. So just be aware of that. Yeah, and so that's kind of charming. So with our regular exams, given that students are taking our courses all over the world and that we don't proctor each exam, we really have no way to verify whether or not somebody not finishing the exam is due to internet out-of-the-technical error. So kind of standard operating procedure is once an exam is opened, even if the internet connection goes out and you're not able to finish it in that two hours, you kind of still have to maintain that 14-day waiting period. One of the nice things about having a proctored exam is that Proctor U will be able to tell if you did have an internet outage issue, and they send us an activity report of kind of what happened during the exam. And so if that was the case and they reported, yes, we were watching the student and they had an internet outage, we were scheduling the appointment, can we make sure that they're able to take it again? And then because we have that verification of the actual technical difficulty, that's really the situation where we are able to override that 14-day waiting period to kind of account for technical issues. So if that does happen, Proctored U will walk you through, you don't stress out, they'll let you reschedule the exam, you want it to pay for it again, and they'll let us know to do that attempt that you're able to actually go in on the next schedule, schedule time. So and like I said, if they notice that the internet doesn't have to bandwidth, they might try to reschedule for another day when it does work. And again, they're very good about walking students through that process, they do this for hundreds of schools and thousands of students, so they're very good at communicating any kind of issues and making sure that they know that this is important, that the exam could lead to credit and that it can be stressful so that, so they'll help you and they talk to us and we'll try to make sure to help you out. Yeah, I met a couple of them actually at a conference, they're really nice people, and David talks from regularly. I'm going to kill a few minutes here, so to give people an opportunity just ask questions. You can ask questions on our YouTube page if you're seeing this in the YouTube stream on the Hangouts Events page, you can't directly comment on that stream, but if you click on the YouTube icon, you can ask, you know, make comments, ask questions sort of on the actual YouTube page itself. You can certainly leave comments on our Google Plus stream and you can follow up with us right now if for whatever reason we don't see your question or we sign off before for it, it gets asked, you know, certainly follow up with us, contactatso.org or through any of our social media stuff, we'll get it, we'll get back to you. And you know, if you got a question about the exams, certainly you can get right to the source with Devin here, his emails on our team page. It's Devin not Ritter at Sailor.org. I guess we can talk towards spending a few more minutes before we sign off here, maybe the future of stuff that we're up to. Well, do we have any questions first? No? All right, Rachel and Marissa are with us as here. So also a big thank you to Rachel, John Marshall and Russ Isitro, our fellow team members who are sitting here monitoring streams and helping this happen. And we've all got the distraction of there's a dog in the office today. I guess we traded that might get a little complicated, but we're looking through the windows at the dog as well. Go on. So as Sean mentioned, kind of talking in the future about some of the things we're doing. So we do have a lot of projects going on specific to this conversation. We are planning on putting more courses through this credit recommendation process. So hopefully in the fall or very early winter, we plan to have six more courses with these credit opportunities. In the meantime, however, I just want to, I'm going to go back to screen share and just direct you in case you haven't found this information yourselves to the fact that other than these three courses that have NCCRS credit recommendations, we do have a total of nine courses right now that carries some sort of possibility to our college credit, whether through our own exams in this NCCRS process or aligned to other institutions' credit bearing exams. And to get there, so a lot of not always easy to find something on the side, and we apologize for that, but under the other, our projects have main hub for all these student credit pathways that's found down there. And you can read about specific partnerships that we've already formed and the kind of ways that we're working with institutions. So that NCCRS page that I previously went to from the course page, you can also get through from there, as well as information about how we're working with Excelsior College at Thomas Edison. But perhaps one of the more useful links on this page is just the full listing of courses currently done work to align to a credit option. So you'll see the three NCCRS courses here, and then as well as courses that we've aligned to Excelsior College UXL exams, which are the situation with those and same with Cleckline, Thomas Edison aligned for that. You take our course completely for free and you would take a final exam administered by one of those three institutions ranging from $95 or $80 that fees to $102. And if you were to get, especially with the Excelsior and Thomas Edison, there's guaranteed credit with those institutions, as well as lots of transfer possibilities. Cleck is accepted by about close to 3,000 schools, I believe, although they have lots of information on the site if you're specific in that specific institution you're interested in would recommend those. So if, you know, the type of student who is looking to kind of leverage Sailor coursework for some college credit, in addition to the NCCRS courses, these courses are really good options. And this is a page that is updated over time. I think currently we have about three to six more courses that are in progress that should be added to this page soon. So hopefully that number will build for students looking to kind of move on from Sailor to a formal institution. But for those just kind of learners who are just interested in learning these courses are also great for the subjects that they cover, even if you're not looking to do the credit option. Sean, anything else? Yeah, as we kind of hinted about in our first hangout, I think it's likely we'll do more courses in this sort of scheduled style. Maybe we'd keep it down to one or two at a time rather than three. And I think we'd break out from the, either we'd break out from the sort of, well certainly we'd break out from sort of the business political science and give people some more options, whether it's harder sciences or more arts and humanities, social sciences, different courses. We might, you know, pick up some of our most popular courses, which is in, you know, in both STEM and arts fields. And maybe we'd explore some of the more credit-connected courses, ones that either we're working directly with partners on credit-varying exams or ones that connect up to, that we've aligned to the college course clap exams and things like that. So that's coming. We also have sort of something coming up in the fall that I literally can't really talk that much about. It's working with, you know, collaborating with an outside institution and it's something we think is going to have pretty wide appeal and be really pretty cool. So do keep an eye on that. It's not, you know, it's not going to be that secret, of course, in a bit and we'll talk about it. But just, you know, keep an eye on our stream, subscribe to our blog, of course, always. Email subscription is awesome. And then you'll be sure to know about it. But I think that's all I got. All right. Well, if anyone, you know, if you have questions, of course, follow up with us separately after this. We'll get back to you. But until then, thanks for watching live or thanks for watching the recorded session, which will be available on our YouTube page as well. And it's been a pleasure. Good luck.