 Let's restart. Welcome. Take two. My name is Lily Compton, and as you can see, it's a big feat to get logistics together. We'll get started. And so today what we're going to do is a little bit of housekeeping before I pass on to my panel. First of all, we'll keep the questions to the end. We have sent out a survey to most of you to read a little bit of the content that we prepared and incorporated some of the questions that we got beforehand. However, not all the questions might be addressed in our presentation, so feel free to bring that up again at the end of the presentation. We'll take the questions from you in the audience here. I think the way to do it is to come up and then speak into the mic so that everyone in the room and online can hear the questions. Those of you who are online, feel free to write your questions in the chat box, and I believe Terry and John will help to address those questions as they come up. So to move on, let's move to the... Wait just a minute first. Let me speak for just a minute because I'm supposed to give it a welcoming to everyone. Hi folks. Hope everybody is enjoying the good food so far. We've had more than enough of it today, I think. On behalf of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and the College of Graduate Health Sciences, welcome to the 12th annual USETDA Association conference. After all we had to eat today, I just want everybody to keep their eyes open and maybe they'll hear a little bit about what we say, but hopefully. Whether by virtual means or in person, we are glad together again in Cleveland for this first hybrid USETDA meeting since the pandemic. One good thing from the pandemic is that all of us have become more online accomplished. It has helped create groups such as the USETDA formatting and engagement group, and one thing I want you to realize is that both of this year's plenary session actually evolved from those two groups. Those two groups are very important for our association. Now, they're relatively new. They're about two years, well not even two years old yet, I don't think, but we're in our second year. In the first year, we had the formatting group only, and now we have an engagement group, a community engagement group, and both of those groups are important. If you're not familiar with those, please become familiar with those groups because they're very active and actually very important for us. Now, one of these groups, and I'm going to talk about this a little bit later, one of these groups has actually started to focus on creating an ETD book. I'm going to tell you about that a little bit later, and I think it's going to be a very important book for everyone. Now, one way that you can get the information about the book is if you look at the preface to the information that we submitted, the pre-conference information that we submitted, it describes what's taking place relative to the ETD formatting and review book. As our ETD programs have developed on all of our campuses over so many years, how much of our information is really unique relative to what we do on our campuses? I suspect that all of it is pretty well kind of shared with universities as well as relative to what we actually do in the ETD processes that we have, but there are a lot of nuances to all of this, and when you get into the nitty gritty details, you start seeing those nuances show up. What happens is we kind of share now, but we share kind of helter-skelter. We'll go to this university or that university, and we see what that university is doing, and we say, oh, I would like to use their template. They've got the template up there. We download the template, and we have to redo the template because it doesn't fit what we're doing. We have an issue with standardization as a group, and we need to think about that real seriously because I think there's a lot of areas on all of our campuses where we could be doing things more together and actually eliminate a lot of work for everybody if we can standardize something that we do on one of our campuses and say, yeah, that's really the way, and as a group can get together and do this now and say, yeah, that's the way all of us should be doing this because that works, and it fits with my campus and fits with everybody's campus. So I think we need to start really thinking about, we don't have to standardize everything, of course. We'll keep our own title pages, but when you really think about it, that's probably the only thing that we really need to have that's different in most cases. We could really share a lot of what we do, but keep the title pages, of course, for our own universities and the way we design them and so forth, and that's easy enough to change that anywhere. The other thing is that over the past 20-some odd years now, since basically 1998 is when we had the first NTLD international conference in Memphis, Tennessee, which myself and Gail Mayn from Virginia Tech and Ed Fox and John Eaton, who's long retired now, we got together and we put that first program together, that first symposium together that was held in Memphis so many years ago. But the whole focus at that time was to get the world out about the EDDs and let's kind of get more and more universities and colleges involved in the ETD process. We've done that. We've been there, we've done that, and kind of reaching the end of the year or relative to bringing new universities in, because especially in this country, because most universities, they're really involved with the EDDs. They're all for it. At least that's what my assessment is at the present time. And so I think we need to kind of refocus ourselves a little bit. It's time for us to kind of branch out and say, hey, we know how to digitally post electronic thesis and dissertations now. What are we going to do that now that we're able to do it? How are we going to use that fact that we now have ETDs? How are we going to use that to add more value to our students and add value to our faculty and to our universities? And I think there's a lot of ways that we can do it. And one way is to focus more on the reader than on the process of us generating the ETD. In other words, we generate ETDs, but we need to realize the endpoint of everything we produce is a reader. So the easier it is for that reader to use the material that we provide, the better off our students are, and the better off the university is, especially if when they look at an ETD, it looks like a book. And this is one of my kind of points, my high points is that really we should, we should look like a book. We shouldn't look like a book report at all. You should look like a book. And how many books do you open up that are double spaced? If you're not working with kids books, it's probably not very many folks, very few. How many journals do you open up that are double spaced? I haven't seen one a long time. It doesn't happen. So keep that in mind. Okay. Now I know that it's difficult to change a lot of campuses. It's very difficult. But you need to, we're kind of the emissaries for ETDs on the campus. So we need to kind of keep that in mind and try to recruit assistance where you need to in order to improve the vision of your university. Universities first of all have to realize that their ETDs are out there in the public for everyone to see. Okay. So they need to look as good as possible. And we need to keep that in mind. And that's just one item. I think there's several items that I can talk about. I don't have time to talk about them right now. Before I do that, I want to do something that's kind of unusual. And I want to thank John Hagen for everything he has done with our ETD program and our US ETD Association. This is a difficult task to set up something like this, especially what he's done with this hybrid presentation this year is really, really something different than doing a pure online or a pure in person presentation. As you can tell by the fact that we do have glitches in our system and we have to stop and try to readjust things. And that's okay. But nevertheless, here's John right here. John, I just thank you for everything you've done. Okay. This usually comes at the end of an association meeting like this. But I want everybody to thank John every day they see him because this is a difficult task. I really know what it's about. Okay. So extend all thanks to John. I want to extend again, extend thank you to our board of directors for this program for all their hard work. I know what they're doing here as well. And they're working really hard to try to provide us a good association meeting. Now, in addition to that, I want to thank our College of Graduate Health Sciences Dean, Dr. Don Thomason. If it wasn't for Don picking up on my sending him an email about sponsorship, we wouldn't have the sponsorship we have today. And I asked him, I might be able to sponsor him a little bit. No, he went all out. We came a premium sponsor. And so I think that's great. You need to take that siege back to your universities as well. In other words, we need to sustain this. I think need to, as I said, we need to improve the product and kind of refocus ourselves a little bit, improve our membership hopefully, and bring in more universities into this program. And that's one way I think we can do it is to kind of branch out in a way in terms of improving what we do with ETDs. So with that, I want to kind of move over and let Lily take this now. And I guess I need to just mute my box. Thank you, Larry. Now, there was going to be an order of how I did things, but because it's complicated with the turning on and off the mics, I'm going to switch things around a little bit. So I'm going to go quickly to introduce the panelists. But then when I go to the first question, they will get a chance to introduce themselves again. All right. So I'm not going to switch the mics on and off twice. So let me start with the first person right here on the screen. We took these shots while we were on one of our weekly meetings, so candid, right? This is Lee. She joins us from Overleaf, and she will talk a little bit about how we use Overleaf in the process. Sally joins us from George Mason University. Myself, I am from Iowa State. Stacy next to me, she's from University of Florida. Erica is from the University of Utah, and Larry is from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. So we will jump straight to question one. Let me pull up my questions. So we looked at, as we were drafting the content, we kind of came up with an outline, but after that, the questions that came through, the first draft of questions that came through from you, there was a theme. So I'm trying to organize the questions that make sense in a thematic way. So the first question relates to organizational structures, right? So let's look at that. I've seen how different our institutions are regarding the ETDA staff. And by ETDA, I'm referring to electronic thesis and dissertation administration. That's what we all do. Sometimes we are housed in the grad college. Sometimes we're in the library. Sometimes we are somewhere else. We are all over. And sometimes we are a one person show. Sometimes we work in the team. For this, I'll move from the biggest to smallest in terms of the number of files processed per year. And so with that, I'm going to hand over to Stacey. And you can look at her slide on the screen as she talks through her structure. Hi. Yes, I'm at the University of Florida. As Lily mentioned, we're kind of the big folk on the panelists. We do about 1200 dissertations and theses each year. We have our largest semester is actually the summer semester. So we submit fall, spring, and summer. But summer is our largest cohort. I had about 462 doctoral dissertations go through this summer. So summer is quite the kicker for us. You can see we kind of have Lily put together how we work into my office. I'm the associate director, but I'm in the graduate school. So although thesis and dissertation is a portion of my job, I also handle like graduate council, the graduate curriculum committee, we publish the graduate catalog, the commencement program. So any of the graduate publications also come through my office. But specifically related to theses and dissertations, I do have two full time editors on staff. Collectively, we have over 50 years of service with the graduate school. So I'm very blessed to have very seasoned folks that have been around and partnered with me a long time. You may notice that we also point out that we have a partnership with the UF Computing Help Desk. Those are folks that are strictly IT. So I have two assistants that work for the help desk who are responsible for any updates to the template that we may provide to them. They also will help students through the technical issues of how to use the template. And they will help format the document in our template. But they are not editors. They do not review the document. So there is sometimes a little bit of confusion on our campus when the students don't realize they still need to submit to the graduate school and have it approved through my editors. So that is something that is a little bit different than a lot of other institutions. We also obviously work very closely with the university libraries and ProQuest. We do use their administrator to submit our publishing agreements but we don't use them for the review process. We have an internal system that was built actually a few years before the ProQuest. So it's not that we wouldn't have used theirs. We just had built in-house and so we still maintain that. I think that's a little bit about us. I'll allow Lily to go ahead. Hello everyone. I'm Erica Finley. I am the one of the manuscript editors at the University of Utah in the graduate school. I am not the actual head honcho for our thesis office but I am one of the people that does the on-the-ground editing. We can't hear you over here. One second. Oh I'm unmuted and I see that I'm talking. No one hears me. You can hear me online just not the in person people. I can hear you Erica. Can anyone hear me? I can hear you Sally. Okay thank you Erica. Thank you Erica. Further tweaking perhaps. Let's try it. All right Erica can you say something? Yes. Can you hear me? I can still hear you. Just not the people in front right? I can't hear what John is saying. I have not been able to hear anything from Terry's mic so I don't know if he's telling me to talk. I cannot hear. I can see that Lily's talking but like I can't hear her at all. All right can you hear me now? Yes I can hear you. All right and can you all hear them from my laptop? Can you hear me? Close enough. All right close enough we're gonna do this. Do I need to talk louder? Does that help? We're still hearing echoes from maybe that mic. Echoes. No sorry the echo is in this room. No I think it's going to echo anyway. Yeah little did y'all know this is an exercise in how to host a hybrid conference. Yes we're actually not even discussing ATDs at all we're just this is a beta test for a hybrid conference. We're not even going to talk about ATDs. Here everyone can look at a picture of a cat or an actual cat not a picture. There you go. This is a little Sam. I love your kitty. All right I think we're good. We're getting good reception in the room. All right Erica back to you. Okay all right so I am a manuscript editor at the University of Utah. We do about 800 to a thousand ETDs a year. Like Stacey I would say that our summers probably are busiest fall is definitely not fall is is our time where we can kind of all just breathe for a moment because summer was so awful. I am not the main person in my office I am I am just an editor. I do have a boss above me who is the thesis office manager and then below him we have three full-time manuscript editors and we did have one assistant manuscript editor who was part-time. We just lost her and I'm not sure that we're going to replace her so it looks like it might just be a four-person office from this point on. So the way we are structured we are in the graduate school. We have the thesis office manager basically checks our submissions in pro quest although we don't do the majority of our editing through pro quest we do that through our on base system. So it's mostly the manuscript editors going back and forth with students. We do all of our training. We maintain our templates. We teach people how to use our templates. We do outreach to departments to try to teach them about what we require in the thesis office and the thesis office manager is trying to deal with a significant backlog. I've only been at the University of Utah for about a year. Shortly before everything hit the fan with the pandemic apparently they were doing everything on paper so they've got a huge backlog that the thesis office managers trying to deal with all the paperwork from past semesters. So we are behind on publishing so he's been spending most of his time trying to get the publishing back on track. I suppose when he's done with that it'll be the four of us mostly doing the same thing managing any submissions that come in. We do have um latex is our biggest weakness I guess that'll be something we talk about in the future. We do have a latex and a word template and we are struggling to offer support for our latex template as much as we can but um yeah we are a very heavy science oriented school so we have a lot of reprinted material coming through if that's something that's of interest to people. I guess I'll move on to the next person and shut up. Thank you. I hope everybody can hear me because I can't see what's going on in the chat site since my screen is doing the sharing. So for Iowa State we are also housed in the grad college but we are divided under the Center for Communication Excellence. We split that separate from the graduate services and faculty services. Now where they come in is they deal with the paperwork like the exams the final oral exam things like that but when it comes to thesis and dissertation format reviews that's under our center right. So I'm the program coordinator and I supervise the consultants and reviewers and by consultants they are student consultants. They are grad students who have been trained to understand what format reviews entail what the guidelines are. They don't do the reviews right the reviewers do the reviews but they do the pre-format review. So they are the first line of defense for students. They are also the the support system when they get reviews back comments back from the reviewers and they don't know how to fix it. So they can get support that way. So there was a question that came and I'll address that now. The grad student consultants do not do the reviews they assist students in getting the reviews correct. So currently I have one reviewer so my if you look at the ETD size I'm right in the middle of all the five panelists we're about 660 files again fall is lower spring is heavy summer is also heavy. With one full-time reviewer it gets pretty tricky during crunch time right so we do have a backup reviewer and in the engagement community I was talking about how it's dangerous to have one reviewer. If your one reviewer is out then no reviewer no review gets done right so we looked into having a backup reviewer and this backup reviewer comes in during the last month of the cycle and she assists with all the heavy traffic you know and we split up the files so that helps us through crunch time. Other than that I think it's pretty similar to the university or Utah we deal with monitoring of guidelines and so forth. We organize events most of that will come up later in the separate questions but this is essentially what we do and the collaborators are pretty much the same we added a few like the legal counsel and the office of technology and transfer. So I'm going to move on now to Sally. Hi so I'm at George Mason University and my office is a I'm a one-person office which I'll talk more about and I know we'll come up in questions in the future. I do work with the registrar's office and the provost's office in different ways and that's in the material that Larry shared with everybody and it's going to be in the book but Mason has about in a calendar year we average about four hundred and seventy five's theses and dissertations that come through my office. My office is under university libraries we do not have a graduate school we're a decentralized school so we have many graduate programs we you know have almost 500 theses and dissertations per year but we do not have a governing body known as the graduate school. We have a graduate council that makes decisions and we have the provost's office which is in charge of the education side of the registrar's office which is in charge of the administrative paperwork side and then I'm sort of I'm not I'm officially under university libraries but my job consists of very little library work it makes sense for how I ended up there if you go if you look at the history but anyway for now what I do I'm the person who uh checks format reviews oh who does format reviews I also in leading up to format reviews I manage our website I update our guidelines I house our book to our two templates latex and word we created the word template oh probably about 11 years ago in conjunction with the department that no longer exists the department of I'm sorry the division of instructional technology they helped us create a template that has various features to make things easier for our students but they're gone now so I have to manage that and help students who need help with it so and in in an effort to make things easier for them I teach bi-weekly bi-weekly sessions on process in other words the process students have to complete in order to graduate so process and word the word template then once they're ready for format review they send me their documents for format review I review them generally it takes two rounds of review per student it may only take one it may take three or more but two is pretty normal then after that I'm the person who receives all of their paperwork so their final submission paperwork in the final copy of the document so they turn in the final copy of the document and all of their I'm graduating paperwork to me I process it and then after all that's done then I'm the person who does the ProQuest administrator processing we only do dissertations there and I upload by hand manually the theses into our institutional repository Mars so I'm under like I said I'm under university libraries but only that one section of ProQuest and ProQuest and Mars is actually library specific the rest of it I kind of function as a one-person graduate school in some ways thank you Sally and so you see was shifting in terms of file sizes but we're also changing in terms of how many staff members there are I will pass it now to Larry got it we'll see we're basically a two-person show the review manager and myself the review manager panels most of our formatting and review issues through Microsoft Word except that I she also are my review manager also does reviews for Overleaf as well for the formatting issues for any technical issues I deal with those technical issues in Overleaf typically reviews will take up to about roughly 10 hours on an average it'll take about 10 hours sometime ago we actually determined and we added a little bit to it that we needed for each ETD we needed about roughly 12 hours of review time okay now that seems kind of excessive I'm sure to the people that are dealing with hundreds or thousands of ETDs maybe not because I know that I understand by listening to the other folks here on the on the panel that there's a lot of people behind them doing things like for example Lily has people that do a lot of review stuff and work with the students well that's not what we do we work with the students ourselves and that's just the way we do it we don't have that many ETDs so we can definitely do that but we do give a fair amount of time for all of the ETDs and if you'll look at our our repository I think you'll see what the difference is it really makes a difference in the final product that we produce and as I said Shirley deals with the bulk of the reviews up front front and then she passes them to me once she thinks they're okay then she sends them to me and I do a final review and usually about 15 20 30 of the time I will pick up on something but as everybody knows there's really no such thing as a perfect review because you can write a document and put it on the shelf and pull it off a week later and you'll find all kinds of problems and that's just the way this business works but it's it's a big help because I don't I try not to look at the document until right at the end of the process and I do the final review and I write the email that goes out to whom it may concern all of our the registrar's office and all of our deans in the graduate school and review manager and that tells our dean that okay I'm ready to graduate they've they've all the exam information and all of that the way other institutions do it as well which is great I'm glad we don't have to deal with any of that so that takes off of us the only thing that we do that's a little bit different I think is when it comes to the approval the committee and the advisor approval of an ETD we take that to our office because we generate the forms they go out to those individuals that they do a digital approval online through these forms okay we get that information back we take a so-called a PDF snapshot of all that information and that's that is then posted in the file in the student file in our office to show that they have been approved for graduation and their ETD has approved because the way we do things is until we get that approval from the faculty and the advisor we do not do an official formal review we'll do a pre-review okay we'll look at formatting issues in a pre-review that can be prior to the defense and that tells the student whether or not what they're doing so far is okay if it's not they see that as well and they get a complete list of information relative to discrepancies in their ETD so we tell them not to redo but what they need to do is take that into consideration when they're working with the rest of their ETD so that they haven't generated 50 images that all have to or figures that have to be adjusted or tables that have to be adjusted it saves them a lot of time if they do that does do ever every student doesn't do that by the way some student the school all of a sudden here they are and they dump this stuff on us and they have that review they've had nothing we find out usually that those students haven't taken the training that we provide we provide kind of a unique system of training in that they work with an actual template that we have interjected problems into it we have put the typical 90% of the discrepancies we see we put into that document and then they have to go into that document and find those issues and correct them we give them some we have an instruction manual it goes with that exercise template and so they follow that because it kind of it's kind of a guideline as to how to go through the document and we find that students that do well with that process have essentially no problems with their ETD it takes care of all those issues and so that's been a really big help for us we have that document both in latex and in word we have the same type of system set up in both of those that they have to go through and find the problems so that's the way we kind of deal with our formatting issues as we try to cut them off up front before they become big and the only problem we have is a few students sometimes that try to wait to the last minute and they'll come in and it's usually really tough it's tough on my review manager it's tough on the student and usually it doesn't get to me and to be real tough but it can have a few times it does so that's kind of the way we deal with with that okay i'm going to turn it back all right i'm going to change up a little bit of the questions because i'm trying to watch for time and we have so much to go through so setting aside the questions the question about templates right can the panel talk to the kind of support system you provide for your students besides the template what is one unique way that you provide at your institution the support for your students and so here i'm just going to go with um erica would you like to share and i think i put you back on my laptop all right go ahead erica okay so i think um one of the things that we do that works really well is that we also do the preliminary reviews like larry anyone does those any any editor can do those but once someone submits for a full review it's selected by one editor and that editor continues to work with them throughout the entire time we do not have it to where they just go back into the the pile for the next go around so the same editor always deals with that student until we give them approval um and we have a lot of requirements and a lot of things that we look for even though we reduce some things we've added some more so that's fun we're just adding accessibility requirements but we have a lot of things that we're looking for and so sometimes it's not uncommon for us to go through the same manuscript nine times so it's a it's a lot of work with one student and i think having one person work with that one student continually is helpful um especially like we email back and forth with our students too so i can be like you still didn't do this right let's talk about how to fix that and i think that's really helpful dealing one student at a time great thank you and while i have the online speakers i'm going to pass it to sally sally would you share one thing that works well to support your students well so um let me know if you can't hear me so i i don't know that i do anything terribly unique but i just try to make sure that my students that are students understand that i'm there to help them and i'm not there to make things harder for them and that's i i really do feel like i'm the bogeyman that they that the graduate students sit around their campfire and talk about that eventually they're going to have to go see the dissertation so i try to make sure that they understand that i'm there to help that they can email me anytime that i i have in addition to the workshops i provide i also have office hours now they're virtual because i'm fully virtual but i have office hours and i try to stagger them throughout the day and week so they can be with me as early as nine a.m they can be with me as late as eight p.m because i only work with graduate students so i just try to make sure that they are clear that i'm there to help that i'm not there to make things worse so they can email me anytime i mean even if i was on vacation in august and i was checking my email and doing like wasn't doing format reviews at that time because it was final submission week so but i was still working at that time and i tell students don't be afraid call me if you need call me if you need me email me if you need me make an appointment with me if you need me don't ever ever feel like they don't ever feel like they are bothering me by making me by asking me to do my job if making me do my job is bothering me then i shouldn't do it so that's and i end up meeting all of the students in one way or another who are writing pcs and dissertations and i've you know i try to forge like administrator student relationships with them and to make sure that they know i'm accessible so that's the big thing i try to do and i guess that's the advantage of a one-person show so you don't need to guess who to go to there's only one person to go to um yeah people of often say should i send my email to your to your like s7's address or to the um officer i was like it doesn't matter because i'm the only person who reads both of them as far as i know um stacey what do you do at the university of florida and what we call a case order to and then that case remains on some of the things that the patient would normally look for but in our case we call the mouse or in the case so for example if they defended more than that's an issue and that's something that but they don't meet with students there um can't great and i want to say you know a lot of the institutions you have all these resources you just have a variation right so i'm just going to pick and choose a few um and i would say what i would say that stands out is obviously our grad students we host all these boot camps and pre checks um all with the assistance of our trained grad students um there was a question of how long our boot camps are there about 90 minutes um so they help us uh before the submission time and then i'll pass it to larry to talk about his mixer because um that's also another variation of support that a lot of institutions provide it's just called differently at your institutions at mine is info sessions at larry's is called a mixer and so i'll pass it to him okay hopefully i'm online now um we have we have a mixer twice a year we have a mixer in february and a mixer in september and what the what happens prior to the mixer is that we provide instructional information with videos and we update those videos every time that we really need to update those and um we pass those out to the students about two weeks prior to a mixer and like we did with this program in terms of this panel in terms of the fact that we passed out information uh prior to this meeting actually and ask for questions we do the same thing with our students we pass the information out to them and then we tell them the mixer is going to be a q and a it's going to be questions and answer session and so we spend about two hours answering questions and the students base their questions on the material that they've read prior to coming in well just like any class you have a book and you supposed to read the chapters before you go to class it's the same type of process but it's different in that it's virtual and we pass this information to them and rather than having them come in and listen to one lecture they've got our lectures so to speak right there in video and they can listen to them many times if they want to and especially if they're either going with word or if they're going to go uh i produce many of the latex videos and then charlie produces so many of the the uh process and the and the word videos that go out with it so depending on the on the path that they take and a student does have a choice to take a path then one of them will focus maybe on the old leaf information latex information another student will focus on the word information so we're kept busy for the two hour period that we meet with them twice a year and what we've done in the past is we've had we've kind of done this in two different ways and we've done it through blackboard and then most recently we've moved everything we've done in the blackboard over to microsoft teams and the reason we've done that is because once you start a microsoft team all of the information related to that team stays in the team it's right there all the conversations are contained right in that team there's no emails going back and forth whatsoever uh everything is there and students know how to use it i can assure you very well with it and we normally get uh oh anywhere between 30 to 50 questions from students before they actually uh come into a mixer some of those students for whatever reason don't provide us with a question prior to the mixer but they'll ask the questions once they get it and then when they hear that you know when we're at what we do first when we start a mixer is we answer all of the questions that we have already seen that we have received before the mixer started so we take care of those right up front and then everything has opened up for students had lived to answer to ask questions and that kind of you know it kind of spurs other students to ask questions because then they start hearing the answers what's already been provided and and they real oh i need to ask this question so then we get that so we're pretty pretty busy for two hours answering questions and the students we send out a survey form at the end and students seem to really like that process it seems to work well this last time we didn't get as many questions as far as the conference is concerned and how we set up the panel this time i think that the the structure was fine as the way we set it up but we didn't get our information out to everybody as soon as we should have we should have got it out about two weeks before we did and i think we would have been without a lot more questions we had some questions coming in if you coming in please we have plenty it keeps us busy all right so i'll move on to the question the next question is about templates so obviously templates is one of the easiest way to make sure that students get the support you try to build in some of these guidelines ahead of time so first of all before we go into the questions about templates obviously a lot of them are in word some of them in the pack that was a question about templates like what is a manuscript style dissertation for thesis so that's a question that was specifically targeted to sally even though some of our institutions do do it i'm going to have sally share with us what that is and how you deal with that sure um so for anyone who doesn't know you're probably all aware of it just in case you're a great one who doesn't know we call it we call it a manuscript style thesis or dissertation and as opposed to the traditional chapter style thesis or dissertation in which the body is broken up into you know chapter one or a literature review conclusion whatever instead it's you it's generally three separate manuscripts that i for the ease of talking to students about them that i just call chapters i don't understand their manuscripts i understand it's not part of a great book i just it's i it's easier to call them chapters for me just for the purposes of reviewing so it's three individual manuscripts they are either students have either already submitted them and had them published by journals they're in peer review or they're going to submit them but so they're held within the body of the document and sometimes you know we allow students and their committees to decide whether to do this or not some students just include the three manuscripts and that's it others will have an introduction at the beginning you know something to the effect of in the following manuscripts i will talk about blah blah blah and then a conclusion at the end saying as you can see in these manuscripts i talked about blah blah blah but not all of them do it and that's fine everything else is the same all of our other rules are the same so everything that's in the beginning of the traditional chapter style manuscript thesis or dissertation in signature sheet title page table of contents abstract etc etc everything at the end abstract references biography that all has to be there everything still has to be set up according to our guidelines and that's sometimes when we run into issues with students who have questions about it still has to be set up according to our guidelines but otherwise it's not really that much different we created a manuscript style template because a lot of students were asking for it and i i tried explaining before that you can absolutely take our current template the traditional template now you could absolutely take that and make that a manuscript template there's nothing about it that is inherently chapter based but for ease of use and for clarity we created a completely separate manuscript style document even though it works works exactly the same way and i'll skip this and i'll direct this question this follow-up question to erica so obviously we're talking about journal style manuscript which means students may have already published the manuscript or preparing the chapters to be published what do you see as the advantage of having this kind of template or why the need for this template i think because again with my school being very heavily based in the hard sciences it's becoming the norm to see these types of manuscripts come out these these these dissertations that are already published materials you know they they put in the ones that work in the lab they put in all this effort to co-author these papers throughout the course of their phd so that's really the bulk of their work and asking them to write something separate is something that just doesn't happen anymore so seeing this the shift is something that we need to better prepare for and i we do not have a separate template for it do have instructions for people to adapt our template to say we we ask that they label it the chapter so they'll call it chapter one whatever the title of their paper is and they'll have the copyright information printed there and then on the next page they'll start with the content we currently allow for them to copy the content and put it matching our our format or we are currently also allowing them to insert actual pages from the journal and just put page our proper page numbers on it and make sure it fits in our margins that's something that we're revisiting with our shift to accessibility because essentially those are pictures and not not text so it is not screen reader friendly we're trying to figure out some sort of compromise to where that can be adapted because that's a lot of extra work to take an article that's already formatted and then reformat it and that's something that a lot of students are not happy to do so allowing them to insert as is is something that's very helpful for them right now it also avoids a lot of issues with the publications not wanting some will allow adaptations but some are like no you must reprint as it which of course you know minor shifts and moving the the figure to the proper place and moving the margins around isn't a big deal but they don't want any changes in the text and we one of our requirements is that if you type out the information you have to refer to all the figures in proper order and not all publications do that so we're asking them to go back in and change things that the public the publishers don't really want to be changed so there's that balance of trying to figure out what works best for us versus what works best for the students so we're trying to figure out a way to allow them to just insert the pages and maintain accessibility what we did in that case the rule the rule that we made when I say we I'm using the royal Lee I made after asking some others the rule is if like if they have something that they cannot change like you were talking about if it's already been printed and the publisher says no it can never change from this format fine you are absolutely welcome to you to include say your article images of your article that are set in dual column single space pink font that's fine you can do that but it has to be an appendix so that's anything that you have in the body of the document has to be set up according to our guidelines if you want to include that article you are you're welcome to but it has to go in the appendix so thank you and I'm going to move now to talk a little bit more about templates so I'm trying to be mindful of the time that we have we have so much like I said to cover so I have to be selective to just kind of choose stuff and then give you time to ask questions as well so for the next question we're going to talk about templates right we talked about Microsoft templates before and and how we can use that for variation between the traditional style and the manuscript style but now I'd like to just kind of invite Lee to talk about Overleaf as a way to write in this software that allows people to write why is it advantage over Microsoft for example and then we'll go into how we support Overleaf templates as well so Lee thank you my name is Lee I'm on the support team at Overleaf and so one of the things I do is I answer a lot of emails about end users new type of play tech so if you're not familiar with Overleaf it's a collaborative online latex editor so it's a lot like google docs except it's for latex so one of the big benefits they can help students and etd programs is that latex works right in the browser so you don't have the overhead of having to support a student installing latex and then an editor and then how to get the editor to talk to latex properly and all that stuff so Overleaf works right in the browser and it has a lot of other features it allows you to collaborate with others that's the big benefit because if you try to collaborate on a latex project that you're just compiling locally on your computer and you want to send it to someone else you'd have to send them several files and then it's easy to lose track of which files most up to date it's just kind of hard I mean that would also be difficult if you were just emailing word files back and forth as well but Overleaf has a few features that other latex editors don't have the collaborations the big one but it also allows you to sync your projects to Dropbox and GitHub it integrates with some reference manager softwares it has real-time track changes and you can make comments directly inside the editor so that's just a few of the the benefits of Overleaf latex itself is also really beneficial especially for students in science and mathematics disciplines because it's very challenging to type mathematics with Microsoft Word it is really hard because you have to click several buttons and the latex really facilitates that but anyone anyone can use latex in any discipline it'll make bibliographies automatically so you don't have to figure out like does the journal title get italicized or is it bold or whatever system you might need the latex template itself will format it for you so that's also the big one because it makes the margins for you and it usually looks really nice so I think that's a short a little introduction but if I miss something does someone wants to know please ask me and I can talk about it thank you and I'm going to put Stacy on the spot because I know they have a Overleaf template but not a subscription so talk about that and how challenging it is what what the challenges are when you have a template but you don't have the necessary support for it so Aura let me know I can't hear you Stacy try again can you hear me now so we currently Overleaf does support us they do host a template for the University of Florida but we do not have the full support staff that like Lee was talking about our IT folks in the help desk actually are who support the latex template that is somewhat difficult in the sense that they those are help desk employees they're often student employees and so kind of learning the ins and out of latex are pretty difficult and then it seems like as soon as they mastered that then they moved on to a new job and so I I highly recommend that folks you know really set up an account and work closely with Overleaf rather than trying to host your own latex template and then you know have that made available we used to have someone that was in the help desk and they were extremely good at latex they they really understood it they had mastered it and they worked closely on that template but then they retired and once they were gone we found that even the folks that had worked under them for years did not understand all kinds of things about the biv files and the references and all of the things that we was pointing out are really well formulated on there and and with their support so I highly recommend going straight to Overleaf. Thank you and at Iowa State we learned the hard way too we have we had just the Overleaf template nobody to support it and the questions would come to us our reviewers didn't know how to fix it we just saw the problem right then they had to scramble and find ways to fix it which is really frustrating for us and the students so we managed to find funding we found grad student consultants who were experts in LAPAT and knew our guidelines and so sustaining that was our way of moving forward and getting support that we need I'm going to shift now to Larry to talk about how he uses the Overleaf for the ETDA process so in his office they review all the files in Overleaf is that right that's different from what we do even though we have the template the students submit the final product in PDF they did all the edits in Overleaf but in Larry's case he does the ETDA process in Overleaf and so I'll let him talk a little bit about that yes absolutely when you you can do what Lily does and their group does relative to generating the PDF file from Leitech itself which is very easy and then allowing the edits to take place within that PDF file however you're missing a lot of the power of Leitech by doing that because it's very simple Leitech leave comments directly on the self on the coloring of Overleaf and so I encourage and this is a way we actually do it is the students actually use those things as well they use them when they're proceeding to document put in there and then just by well I need something here I'll leave a note from myself so I'll go back and put that information in that's very helpful to the student we've had a couple of faculty three faculty faculty actually used Leitech they'll make they'll create an account because they want to begin to begin their student uh one is in the college of nursing uh was in there with two of the students now actually and they'll leave comments to the students writing their information and we try to stay out of it when that's happening um and I tell until the advisor is finished making comments to the students just leave them alone and that worked very well because then once they're finished I asked them to go ahead they're finished with it go ahead and raise your comments resolve your comments and then we start the review process and then we add comments for the review we don't get mixed up with the comments from the advisor and comments from the reviewer okay so that kind of keeps that separate it works very well with the few cases we have which we second again and that's that's good but well uh other one is we do all of our formatting reviews directly in overview we do not generate a PDF file and then do the over this you're exchanging too many files and that's the advantage of Overleaf is you start with one Overleaf project and you end with one Overleaf project you don't pass any files back and forth to anybody you share the file with the student rather than this because the student doesn't have the power that we have um the way we have our system set up we only have 10 seats of Overleaf in other words 10 people that I can allow to be users in the Overleaf system but that's more than enough we don't even need that much and the reason is because I can share an unlimited number of files with students okay the limitation on that is that I can only share that one file with 10 people but we don't have any research committees that are 10 people in size and I'm not sharing with everybody in the committee anyway right now we just share with the advisor if the advisor would like to be in there at the same time and that's great most of the time we don't do that we don't need to do that um what my review manager does is she will make a summary email to go out to those people that maybe a little technical and they see what's they watch what's going on with the review all the time the advisor does now we have moved from Overleaf from Overleaf from Blackboard with our with our work documents we were we moved everything there into teams and the reason we've done that is because it does do a little bit about what Overleaf does in consolidating all the communications into one one location and we're not exchanging documents back and forth and we don't have a problem with the student oh that was a wrong document I sent you the wrong document that doesn't happen because we had the document we control it now when Microsoft gets their their web version of Word up to snug which it isn't yet then we will be doing the same thing with Word documents we will share a Word document with the student and that will be the one document they use until they're finished okay there will be no exchange documents that's because there's too many emails too much stuff going on so it in that respect in terms of communication in terms of following edit they have a track edit function they have a track edit function like just well or anything else in fact cover codes everything I love everyone say I've got five people working on an Overlife document it was all it's a different color so you can see immediately by the highlighting and some changes that are made exactly who made those changes so and if I'm trying to instruct the student and help the student so they can see exactly what I did and then they can go back in there and look at that information oh yes that's a way to do that I don't have any more problems with it well I could make several edits to see where I've made changes look exactly what I did and they're all fine no problem okay I think we have 10 more minutes and so I I know we have a lot that we haven't covered but I want to stop our presentation here and take questions from you you've listened to us very patiently and I appreciate that with all the technical issues you know we've lost some time but please know that all the information that's coming through the evil it will continue to evolve as you bring up questions that will help us think through oh this is not clear we need to share this and our goal is that we can pull together this knowledge base so that everyone here can also contribute your own chapters and then we can see how things work across different institutions so if you have a question in this room please come up to the mic for those of you who are online please type your questions into the chat and I believe Terry you will be monitoring those and bringing those up for us okay so please feel free to come up you know things that we didn't get the cover we didn't get the cover consent form we didn't get to cover a lot of paperwork record keeping time management embargoes all of these questions are important to how you handle the ETDAs as we mentioned before it's not so much in getting the final product now it's a matter of helping our students make it accessible to our students to the readers that's the ultimate goal so what is it that concerns our students as they are publishing their scholarly work now and also in their future careers that's are the role of our ETDA process now not just holding a margin ruler to measure not just pushing them out the door right so any questions from the audience here maybe a comment about how you do it at your institution how it falls differently from our panels experiences something new that we haven't heard of yay we have somebody coming up to the mic thank you yay thank you very much I'm Tim Watson from the University and the Graduate Foundation so in graduate school a question to thank you mostly for Stacy but any of the other panelists so you probably heard this thing a lot about our post-COVID world and I just think we require our PhD students to do a core effort in person they have you got that in the office would go but of course we have adjusted like everybody else into the online interviews we are struggling with trying to find a platform in which to do at our IT services unfortunately are not going to get shared services but we've got our own issues with that at OSU so we don't have anybody at graduate school to help us with this so we're trying to find something we try to look into the period of the issues with that that can we are using Salesforce right now it is not a core back review system so I know Stacy you forwarded and developed our own system so I'm sure you see a little bit more about that but and even openly I wasn't really quite sure whether that would be a platform or something like that I keep saying to the staff I said I just want something that the students have been notified we return it you know give them their comments back and that's it if they want to have other comments then we shift it to something else but I just want that quick review system so we can just look at it and and go forward then we'll say too I was a a long time practice that so much person doing these format reviews the person because I felt that interaction with the student was important you know we've lost that with the year trade the whole time I was going to remember back and people were trying to schedule courses so part of the lines on the door right but we were way far away from that right and so we've lost a little bit of that I think as well but I will say the benefit of course is that you can manage your time better we didn't want to walk you places so we had to probably do your responsible for the application list so we had probably we're doing and do these more better reviews so I will say the bottom line does stop in terms of you know managing our time better and in fact students have a little better too but anyway just like to hear your thoughts on the format review system of course we are speaking about the student highly and I don't want to use a highly because I don't want to infuse the students about what's in final origin and what's their draft so thank you very much. So like Tim mentioned we've kind of been in this game for quite some time so I have to admit our first review system was built in cold fusion if anybody's familiar with that that was quite a long time ago we were also tracking stuff like paper forms at the time now we track all of our submission forms are all electronic the it is built in house so Tim I'm happy to let you kind of talk to our developers and you know kind of that they can give you more background information through the years we've had to integrate systems that change around campus so that is the one thing about having them when it's built in house your review process as soon as the university changes their platform for say how the final exam forms will be submitted then we have to basically rebuild our programming we ensure that a lot of forms and everything are in place before we do the review process and so those are all built into our system as well and then our final process we transfer it to the uf libraries who then coordinate with progress so we don't do any kind of review process in there one of the things that was really helpful to me because I know Larry like that's a lot about managing the number of reviews that we do and I'm like you tell my miss them coming in my office I I mean I will admit I think we could go through a lot of them much faster that way but like you said we had to drop everything to handle it now since we do kind of everything virtual they can still drop in we just don't get as many visitors but I built review templates for my reviewers so anything that is in say the template for the students so they need to know oh they're not formatting the tables correctly my reviewers just type the word table and it puts in all of the review comments for the table and then they can just delete what doesn't apply and so that actually was one of the most like time saving things it took me a while to build all the templates and all and updated every time Chicago manual style changes something but that has really helped out a lot and it ensures that my editors are providing exactly the same information across the board and that worked out really well for us as well I know we're tight on time thank you that's definitely something that we're also exploring we're trying to figure out if we can pilot an asynchronous format review because we have a lot of students that are distance ad students and so they never put on campus but we still want to give them that support any other questions we are running out of time period do you have any questions from the online work okay any other questions from the room last five minutes yes there's somebody else coming the school on the library we did about 200 free agencies here so it's not good for all my number and by comparison to most of the speakers we are a very enraptured person who's shot when it comes to online you do have that by the system just And there's a border of the commentary pages, but once they give you a chapter 1, what about saying there's an O even with this figure, there's no specific order looking to do it. So let me tell you, it doesn't have to be crazy many people don't want to do it. The other thing that we've been long time over the years, and we do have a large number of our grad students, who use ChemDrop to create a campus in front of us. And those are the people that will not use latex. A whole campus full of high tech people, and I actually thought it wouldn't be that he didn't use a social site with students that don't use latex. No, it's the chemists. So basically ChemDrop is really nicely with latex. So they're the ones that use our latex. And actually we've only created our work numbers. For us, because we've had very old ones at the time. So there are situations where they never did it. So going back to what I was saying about review and things like that, if we don't think it's our responsibility to review the content of it. So when somebody is addicted to it, they've already gone past the bed stage. They'll send us the PDF. And I was trying to source that. Whether it's a latex file, or an actual workout. That's why I'm just wondering. I'm mostly wondering because I don't want to have to recreate. Somehow the PDF gets corrupted, and then I have to basically create the PDF while being on original source file. By the time it gets to us, all of these main changes are all in there in the actual document. And then I will actually send something. We have a system of micro-analogies in the library. The laboratory in which it doesn't read. And we're going to mention what it means. So the way our system works is that the student actually deposits, and we can create something in the document and load it in the email. So it's kind of like what Texas does on our daily platform. And then we respond to it. So little to little said, everything's back to their work area would come in. And because I'm always working out of spam letters, I also send a separate email saying, hey, these are the changes we want to do. And so kinds of will take a couple back and forth. So the fact that I'll have two letters in the average year, I can do that on a daily basis. I don't have to worry about it. So what I'm going to say is, there are a lot of ways around it, but it's kind of a little interesting. Yes. Thank you. And yes, definitely one of the comments that I was going to bring up is that not every institution has guidelines. Some of the institutions that I've heard of, they are fine with once you have the title page, everything is up to you. It all boils down from the philosophy from our superiors, right? What's the rationale behind it? I know at Iowa State, we have guidelines because our dean wants to make sure that all ETDs are professional looking, consistent across all disciplines so that it's a branding thing, right? So if anybody picks up any ETD from our repository, they're going to look the same. From the template itself, if I look at the table of content, I can tell if it's a traditional or journal style. I can tell right away. So that's the kind of hope we have in terms of having that rationale behind specific guidelines. But it's not to say that you have to have guidelines. It all depends on your institution. If you have no guidelines, then I think it comes to what can we provide our students in terms of support so that their document becomes accessible to their readers. So one of the things that's coming up is accessibility. And you'll hear some of them talk during this conference and beyond. So thank you again. I think this wraps up our plenary with a few minutes over. I appreciate your patience with everything that went on. And I look forward to more input. I think Larry sent an email out. Feel free to reach out to him if you want to contribute to a chapter. More questions so that we can continue to make this evolving living book useful for all of us. That's very important. I think that the most important thing we can do is get feedback from the community. You're the community, the ETD community. And so we really need feedback as much as possible. And if you would like to participate in your university, you agrees that they would like to participate in the book chapter, although we've got started with a living book, please do so. And be sure to go in and read the preface that's in the information that we've already sent out. And just let us know if you want a chapter, I will assign a chapter to you. And you're off to work. We already have six chapters in process right now. We don't have, it's more than just these panelists at this time. Purdue University has also said they want to do a chapter. And also John Hagan says he wants to do a chapter as well. So we're off and running. Thank you.