 Good morning and welcome. My name is Rachel Fishman and I'm a senior policy analyst here at New America. Last week, Arizona State University announced a partnership with a massive open online course platform, edX, to provide a global freshman academy. For only $200 a credit hour, students who take free, massive open online courses and who pay a relatively small fee to verify their identity at the beginning of the course will be able to get ASU credit upon completion of coursework. The New York Times covered it, as did the Washington Post and many other major news outlets. Of course, the trade press covered it too. I saw in the Chronicle of Higher Education there are multiple stories about the initiative and ASU's play in the online space under the direction of their president, Michael Crowe. But the question is, is $200 a credit hour really affordable? Largely missing from the conversation was the fact that most community colleges cost much less per credit hour. Maricopa Community College District, which serves students from the Phoenix area, only costs $84 per credit, which is not abnormally low compared to community college tuition nationwide. And students at Maricopa have the opportunity to take face-to-face courses, hybrid courses that makes face-to-face instruction with online education and fully online courses. If students want, they can pursue fully online credentials and they can take entire semesters online. Importantly, students can also access much needed federal, financial, and state aid and other campus resources such as the library to help with research, tutoring service, and advising support. So while the national press gives lots of media attention to an initiative at ASU that will take at least two years to even get up and running, very little attention is given to the amazing innovation happening right now in community colleges. Indeed, we often hear very little in the press about what goes on at community colleges, despite the fact that they serve over 40% of undergraduates in America. In my report, Community College Online, which just came out this February, I set out to shed some light on the innovations happening at community colleges. As I mentioned, a significant proportion of undergraduates are enrolled in the public two-year sector and these students are more likely to have children, work more than 20 hours a week, attend college part-time, make less than $30,000 a year, and commute to school compared with their public four-year counterparts. It's clear that Community College students need flexibility in order to succeed for when their lives outside of the classroom prevent them from making it to campus every day to go to class or access important resources. ASU's model likely won't work for these students, but smart technology enhanced pathways can help smooth their path to the degree. It's important to note that when I say technology enhanced, I'm not talking about directing students into fully online courses and credentials. Most students in community colleges aren't attending solely online and most don't want to attend solely online, but what they do want is the flexibility and choice. Attending fully online likely won't improve student outcomes, especially for the most academically vulnerable students who tend not to fare as well in the online environment. Instead, I mean looking at the ways that we can use technology to enhance a student's educational experience, whether it be through an Emporium-style math remediation course, which we're going to hear more about today, or the use of hybrid models of content delivery, or even adopting an open education resource textbook and homework system so students have access to low-cost free materials from day one. Today, we'll hear from many colleges that were featured in the report. These faculty leaders and administrators work together on their campuses to help improve student outcomes through technology. We're trying something a little bit different today, and not only will you get to hear from our presenters, but you'll also have the ability to get hands-on with the technology, as you can see in the back of the room and out in the hallway. This is not your typical DC panel, where you can sit back and relax and tweet from afar, though if you are tweeting, we ask that you use the hashtag CCOnline. We wanted to do something a little bit more interactive than that. So I'll explain a little bit about the logistics. First, I'm going to introduce all of our presenters, and then each of them will give a short presentation. Afterwards, we're going to get a chance to interact with their different programs and materials. There are three stations set up in this room. There's one in the hallway, and there's one right across from where I'm standing in the studio. We'll have people to help direct people where to go. So first, I'm going to introduce all of our presenters, and then I'll let everybody know what the logistics are at the very end, how we're going to do this. So first up, I'm going to introduce all of you all at once, and then you'll all get to go in a row. Next, we'll have Betty Frost and Linda Pride who are faculty members from Jackson State Community College in Tennessee, who will discuss how they redesign their remedial math course. Then Bill Ryan from the Kentucky Community and Technical College system will discuss Learn on Demand, which offers fully online competency-based courses and credentials. Next, we'll have Paul Golish from Paradise Valley Community College in Arizona discuss how the Open Education Resource Movement is paving the way to more affordable course resources. Russ Little, the Chief Innovation Officer from PAR Framework, will talk about integrated planning and advising services. And lastly, Deb Adair will talk about Quality Matters, a faculty-centered, continuous improvement model that assures the quality of online courses through peer review and professional development. So I'm going to hand it off to Betty and Linda. Good morning. You'll get to hear from Dr. Pride when we break off into our sessions, since we only have about three to five minutes each. And being from, growing up in Mississippi, it takes me about three minutes to say two words. So I wanted, I didn't think we should try to swap up with the presentation here. Both Dr. Pride and I have taught at Jackson State for many, many, many years. And we have seen students come and go, most of whom were not successful in their developmental math. Originally, we had three math classes, three developmental math classes. And by the way, in Tennessee and pretty much nationwide now, 83% of our entering students test into needing remedial math. And so that we saw our students come and go and not be successful. 42% of our students were passing. So if you do the math on that, you've got 83% of the students and then 42% were successful. So we're losing a lot of students right there who really could have made it. But we were not providing the opportunities they needed. We realized that we were attempting to remediate high school math deficiencies. That is what the students didn't learn for 12 years. And we thought we could teach them again and the same way in three courses. The student had to pass the course or they started over the next term. There wasn't any, well I got this far so let me pick up where I left off. Before a student could actually enroll in a program for which they came to college for. We have a very large nursing and allied health program. Most of those programs only require developmental courses, developmental math courses. They do not require a college level math. But they had to pass all their developmental math before they could even apply to get into one of those programs. Their class time was in fact inflexible if a student signed up for an 8 o'clock class and then realized that their babysitter couldn't get there in time for them to get to the 8 o'clock class. They were just out of luck. They either quit coming and probably got an elf which is what most of your freshman students would do in that situation or they had to drop out and find another time the next semester. And then also each instructor kind of did their own thing. We all had competencies and objectives to follow, but I would design my class and maybe I'd go in a different order than Dr. Pride would go. And so that if a student needed to change from my class to Dr. Pride, they couldn't because we'd be in different places. If you have this bright blue sheet hand out, this is where what I'm going to kind of take off from. The key features of Jackson State's developmental math redesign was first we have what we call our smart math center. And about three pages over you can see a picture of it. We're very proud of it because the students feel like they're special when they walk inside that center. It's the Emporium that Rachel was referring to. It's a place where students actually meet class, but they have people there that can help them. They have computers and their own line as we will demonstrate later on. We require mastery learning. If you were ever in a math class and already knew what was going on but had to sit there and listen to it be explained again, you know what I'm talking about where you want to just move on and not be wasting your time. Worse yet, if you're in a math class and the teacher had already moved on and you didn't get it. So we require mastery learning. A student cannot go from one module to the next until they have successfully mastered that module. And that is one of the big reasons that we do modularization. We had to set up our courses as modules so that the student could have different levels of success. And Dr. Pryde and her another colleague had always wanted to do the things we're doing now, but we didn't have the technology to help us support it. And it was hard to keep up and impossible actually to keep up with everything by hand. But now with the new technologies out there, we're able to provide individualized opportunities for our students. We base the students' requirements on what their career goals were. The students would master the concept before they move forward and therefore they have the opportunity to move quickly or slowly depending on what their need is. We have on-demand individual assistance. There's a ratio of about ten students to one tutor. Tutors and the instructor there. And we're constantly moving around the math center. And you can imagine that if I'm passing by and a student has a question, it's much easier for them to say, hey, show me what's going on here than it would be if they were sitting out in a classroom and had to raise their hand to ask the question. So that makes it much quicker and the student gets help exactly when they need the help. The student also has immediate feedback on their homework, which is computer-based and their test. This motivates the student to keep on until they get it right. The computer system will say, sorry, that's not right. Remember to do this, this, and this and the student can go back and keep on until they get it right. They have more opportunities for successful completion. Once a module is completed, then it's done. If they don't pass the class, they begin the next semester with the module that they did not complete. And so that they feel successful as they move through the modules. Quote our students, they say, well, I can do this. If they'd done this in high school, I wouldn't be sitting here in this class. And when we first started, we had several students that had already been unsuccessful in our old way of doing it. Linda and I were talking last night about a gentleman that this was his fifth time, was it fifth or sixth? And he got through all the modules in one semester. And it was just that he was able to concentrate on what he needed to concentrate. Thank you. Hi, I'm Bill Ryan. I'm with the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. I want to talk a little bit about Learn on Demand. Learn on Demand is a design model. It is built as a modular format, as a design. It is competency-based. And one of the standards it has, it is a single course across our entire system. So for example, we have one English 101 course. So we have 16 colleges across our entire system. And you can imagine that every college has its own English faculty, and they all create their own online, traditional term-based classes. Learn on Demand decided when it started in its initial inception in 2006 through 2009 that they would only have one standard. And they would build it in a modular format. And they would build it so it would be competency-based. The courses are available right now to lead students through 11 different degrees, 22 certificates, and two diplomas available through these 16 different colleges. That list is still growing as some of our grant faculty and the people that apply for them have chosen to develop their new courses through Learn on Demand. One of the things that makes the modules attractive, as you were describing earlier, is the idea that students can go through at their own pace. We have been involved through the use of adaptive release and a pre-test and a post-test model that allows students to go through at their own pace if they've already got existing knowledge. So they can kind of go through it a little bit faster and it rewards them by giving them credit for that prior learning is what we call it. Each of our modules also has the EU resources, the content, the presentation materials that are developed and shared through our publishing partners, OER materials, our faculty developed and assisted. And those are put into modules so the students get what they need, when they need it, just at the right amount so they're not completely overwhelmed. Currently we are offering enrollments on 11 different Mondays through the traditional term, six times through the summer. That gives us a grand total of 30 opportunities to join in on this. As soon as we can figure out the non-term financial aid, a different discussion, we'll have the flexibility of offering modules and courses on an online anytime model, which is our ultimate intent. Part of the Learn on Demand model as well is a quality cycle. We started out with the quality rubric that we'll hear a little bit or in a little bit in a couple more minutes. Also took some lessons learned from the Blackboard rubric and have kind of merged into our own. And we begin the course development cycle using that rubric as a discussion point between the faculty developer, the project team leader, who's usually either a faculty member or a department chair type person that works with different faculty in the development of these Learn on Demand courses and an instructional designer. Sometimes it's a pair of designers, one at the local college, one at the system office as well. Key to this entire rubric is the assessment strategies. We've been having an increased focus on authentic assessments, especially in the latter part of the modules and the end of the courses to having much more realistic expectation of what the students should be able to perform and demonstrate in terms of those competencies and the outcomes. Before we deliver that course, it goes through a peer review process of three to five faculty from the other institutions. And we have found that it brings a greater depth and breadth from the courses and gives the chance for more faculty exchanges, which is kind of the hidden byproduct. And we find a lot more faculty starting to talk with each other across the colleges, which is kind of fun in a state as large as Kentucky with all the 16 different colleges in 70 different locations. The focus that we've been trying to bring to our entire community is that the outcomes emphasize the application and the creation of knowledge. So we're really focusing on those higher order of thinking skills. Wrapped around all of Learn on Demand courses are some personalized student support. We're trying to build up that network so that the student is always successful. A couple of pilots that started with Learn on Demand have now rolled out to our entire Kentucky community and technical college community. One is a call center. We have a 24-7 call center that started out as just for our online Learn on Demand students that now serves our over 90,000 students across the state. We also started out with Starfish, which is a retention and engagement tool to help identify problems that students may be having in advance before they raise their own hand that we could kind of watch them and monitor them. That had just got rolled out to the entire system this past fall. A couple of other things that we have that I'm expecting to someday see come across our system is an online tutoring service that is available to our Learn on Demand students. We use a product called BrainFuse and it is available online to our Learn on Demand students. And they also work with success coaches who work with the instructional advisor to be the student's advocate to help them get through those processes that students at a distance sometimes can't stand in line, can't wait in an office and be their advocate for them. And finally, that instructional component is also the last part of the Learn on Demand model. It is really a transformative... Somebody else can say that? Transformative. I need more coffee. I got up at 4 o'clock to get that flight and I can tell it's not working for me. Role because it's really moving that whole instructor into a role of facilitator in the highest level of being that guide of engaging them, of consulting with them and providing that feedback of educating while instructing. And that is, I think, the full service that we bring to Learn on Demand. So as a design model, I'll be out in the hallway and I'd be glad to talk to anybody about it and answer questions there. Thanks. Good morning. I'm Paul Golis. I'm from Phoenix, Arizona. Although you'll probably be able to tell I'm originally from Chicago, Illinois. I do have these handouts if you happen to have those. You may want to refer to them a little bit in there. Speaking of Chicago, by the way, this is the Cubs year. Really. It really is. I hope. It's worth a try. So I'm from Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. Part of the Maricopa Community Colleges that was mentioned earlier. And I'm going to be talking about open educational resources, which is basically what most people think of as free textbooks. But it's really a lot more than that. And textbooks are not only free, but they're open to be shared, remixed, reused, revised, redistributed for other faculty to use. Students spend approximately $1,200 a year on textbooks for about $100 a month. And sometimes much more. And in Arizona and community colleges, that's about 25% and sometimes even more of their cost. This is especially troubling as we were talking about earlier with developmental education. They're not even getting the college credit. And then on top of that, they're asked to pay tuition costs. And on top of that, the cost of the textbook. So it really can be very troubling. In a recent survey, it was noted that over 60% of students at one time or another don't purchase a textbook. They try and get away with outdoing that. And 23% regularly do that. I have a couple of daughters in college. I can tell you they try and get away with that as well. Sometimes it works okay. Sometimes not so much. And my daughter called me a couple of months ago. She's at Arizona State University. And she said, I have a big test tonight. I tried to make it without the textbook. Just came back from the bookstore. $234 for the one textbook. That was really painful. And then she said to me, wait a second. Aren't you leading a project here in Phoenix to have people use free textbooks? And I said, yeah, unfortunately ASU, I don't have a lot of influence there. But in the Maricopa Community Colleges, we're making a big dent. And we're up to our tagline is we want to save students $5 million over five years. We're at year two of the project. And we're at about $3.5 million. So we're going to have to revise our goal and say we would like to save students $5 million per year by the end of five years. So we hope to get there. One of our leaders in the OER project is Scottsdale Community College in which they've gotten pretty much their entire math department to use open textbooks, free textbooks. And so they're saving just at that one college over $300,000 a year for students. They offer over 75 sections of math with open educational resources. Again, OER is more than just free textbooks, though it can be an online homework system, videos, and much more. As far as the online homework system, one of our OER superstars in the country is a gentleman by the name of David Litman in the state of Washington. And about 10 years ago he said, you know what, I just can't handle it that my students are paying $80, $100 for an online homework system. I know math. I know how to program. I'll just write something. So he did. He wrote something that is very comparable to what some of the publishers put out there. And then the crazy guy just listens to input and feedback from folks all over the country and just keeps adding more to it and more to it. And now over 1,000 professors, not just in the U.S., but now some folks in Germany are translating his work and using it there as well. I'll be showing some of that a little bit later. Also, a gentleman by the name of James Sousa at Phoenix College. And if you live in the Phoenix area, you may have seen his billboard. The college put up a billboard for him and he was Arizona professor of the year. He's a very humble guy, so he really hates it when I mention that, so I do as much as possible when I mention it. But he has done over 4,300 videos that have over 20, I'm sorry, on YouTube, which I told him recently. I believe that has passed Brumpy Cat. So it's pretty exciting that people are watching math videos. The success rates also, so really, we got into the open educational resource game. A lot of people, including myself, I've been teaching with open educational resources for about four years now to save the students money, to make sure that they had access to those textbooks and other materials on the very first day. Some moderate success gains too and success rates, and so I've got that noted in there as well. I think I'm just about the end of my time, so you can find out more information a little bit later, but also at maricopa.edu slash OER. And also I'm working with a company called Lumen Learning that helps support folks that are using open educational resources because sometimes free, although the materials are free, it isn't always free to support it and support our faculty, and so they help with that. Thank you very much. See if my phone will actually stay there. That way I can time myself, so Rachel doesn't have a heart attack on time. I'm Russ Little. I'm director of the Student Success Plan open source software project, formerly at Sinclair Community College for almost 20 years. I'm currently the chief innovation officer at the PAR framework, which is predictive analytics and reporting. It's a non-profit working on measurement of what really works in higher education so that we can look at things that scale. What I'm here to talk to you today about those integrated planning and advising systems. I worked for almost a decade on a system called the Student Success Plan, or we call it SSP. And SSP is a case management type model to really provide holistic support and services around a student, wrap around, not just in the classroom, but also the life happens. The things like childcare and transportation and tutoring, as well as getting them the right academic path and plan through their progression at college. So, if you think of it a little bit like a customer relationship management tool, much like Salesforce, except with the goal of trying to help at-risk students maintain and graduate successfully from college. It includes tools like early alert, much like you might find in a starfish or grades first. It has an academic planning tool called MAP, so my academic plan. It has action plans that are much like an academic plan, but life plans. How do I overcome a transportation issue? How do I make sure that I have my budget put together? And can we then work together collaboratively to make sure students have all the resources they need to achieve those goals? Why is it a secret what a student's goals are? Why isn't everybody in the education community in a college helping a student reach their goal? Why is it a conversation between just a student and a coach or an advisor? Why aren't faculty and everybody else who touches that student helping them transition and move forward to that success? So that's the reason for the case management. Often students feel pinballed around the institution. When they go to financial aid and to other offices, we should all be working together to move them to that next step. So if I can see what the notes you put into the system are, I can see what actions were taken, I can see what interventions they were asked to do, I can see their academic plan and where they hope to graduate, so does it work? It does. We've seen more than double digit retention gains using the academic plan and using a fairly rigorous controlled study accounting for interaction effects about 20 different variables and it is significant down to about four decimal places. So the alpha is very strong and I won't take away any of the thunder from Sinclair who probably want to publish this but they have in the past said it is as much as 14% higher retention year to year. I think it's actually going to look a lot better than that when the study is finally done. So how about the cost? Student success plan is free like a puppy. It's open source software and much like you were talking about, you have open education resources, we have open software but it still has cost around it to implement and we do have technology partners who do help and in the handout there is an insert from one of those technology partners. So I will be giving a demo of the software in the back after the sessions wrap up and if you have questions about that or about the work we do at PAR framework I would love to entertain those and thank you for your time. Okay, good morning everyone. You'll have to forgive me at my adrenaline levels are so high because my 30 mile commute this morning took over two hours. So I got here at, you know, I think that's why we started like two minutes late because I just pulled in. So I'm Deb Bader and I'm the managing director and chief planning officer for quality matters and you've heard that referenced a few times. Many of these institutions do subscribe. We are a non-profit organization that has we work with colleges, universities, K-12 some corporations and the higher ed institutions are the bulk of our work and we work with them basically to help them make the quality of their online courses better. It we started about 10 or so years ago with the problem initially was there was a consortium of colleges and universities in Maryland that wanted to share seats in their courses. They wanted to let their students you know if they had capacity at one school and they were closed out in another they wanted to be able to let the students go back and forth but they didn't trust each other's courses so that they needed a way to assure the quality that they were of equivalent quality. And so that generated a FIPSI grant project which is the fund for improvement of secondary education that ran for three years that generated quality matters which is essentially a program and a process and a suite of tools. So QM starts with a set of standards for quality and online and blended courses and those are used in a continuous improvement process for quality assurance that ends with better learning experience for students. So we do that by initially creating research centered standards and we did that through a very rigorous process with the community of practitioners and developed that into actually a full rubric that provides guidance for how to apply those standards. But that is only one piece of it because if you've ever worked in higher ed you know that there's probably a lot of tools and resources that are out there but everyone the approach is the diversity is so great in higher ed that there isn't any comparison there's just adoption and remodeling. So we have basically three pieces to the program of the standards there's professional development for faculty about how to use those standards to improve their course and to review other courses for quality and there's an actual course review process that leads to certification of those courses. So to date we work with about 950 educational institutions the majority of them in higher ed and the majority not the great majority but the majority of our higher ed subscribers are community college institutions and actually they were the first to embrace this idea of being able to have a common measure of quality so in our earlier years the vast majority of our institutions we worked with were community colleges so they have been doing this for a long time. So the essential problem and the reason that the professional development piece is so important is when we were thinking about what do you look at in an online course for quality we focus on course design and course design became a really critical piece because it is observable with the artifacts of this are all observable and it's something that faculty needed help with. I think that the problem that we encountered was faculty had a long experience and understanding about how to deliver their course in a face to face classroom that does not work that model just does not work for online so there is this sense of trying to take what you did in your face to face classroom do it in the online classroom and what was happening was it was a leading to very difficult experiences for students so that professional development piece was critical to help faculty sort of rethink their approach so what we do with institutions is essentially make the suite of tools available. We run the course review process that can, courses that meet the quality matter standards are certified by quality matters but what's really happening is the schools are embracing the tools taking the quality assurance model and running it very broadly across their institution making it their own and running it very broadly and so if you come to our little corner of the world over here we'll show you some of the way this works in a little bit more detail and some of the impact that we think is going on with this.