 OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Thanks for coming. Hi, I'm Avi. This is my co-presenter Cindy. She's very small. Cindy sadly got sick and couldn't run. I think she's running online. So thank you Cindy if you're here, you're here in spirit. Today I just want to talk about just a few very simple subjects like removing barriers to education through distance learning. We are a text. I should have put high flex in the title. It's in the presentation, but it's not the title. Highplex ahead. Yeah. Okay. What happened in 2019? We were so innocent. Distance learning back then. Do you remember people telling you that they were taking online classes? What was your reaction back then? Oh, excuse me. Must have been expensive. Exactly. Yeah. Don't you want a real class? That's what virtual means is almost real, right? Not real. In other words, not real. It's not a class. Right. Almost a class. Yeah. And I wanted to help people who got degrees online. Oh, you got your PhD from Phoenix or whatever it might be. Okay, you're not going to be my boss. Right. That's that was the answer. I don't think it's like that anymore. Anyway, so back then, there was very little adopted by all schools that you all know. And there were some by universities, community colleges have led the way since the beginning. Let's just, let's just be real. They still do. All of the, yeah, all of the colleagues that are most jealous of teach for community colleges, I do as well, but not to the extent that they do. It's, it's very nice. So, anyways, when a, when a penguin in the back love each other very much, we get big results. But we learned from 2019, great time to buy stop and zoom. So we know what happened then, emergency online learning, which all of our administrators were very happy about universally beginning to end right. And we're teachers, not just those closer to retirement but those closer to grad school. Right. Nobody, I didn't want I certainly did not want to do it. I thought it was going to be terrible I was teaching French at Davis at the time. I said language teaching online. Are you serious, nobody's going to participate. Nobody's going to learn anything everybody's going to cheat. It's going to be terrible. None of that stuff happened. And none of it happens now. So, this is an emergency. Just as learning became a domain of 93% of students. That is from the US census I didn't just make that one up. So, at that time I was teaching at two adult schools and a university. One of the adult schools is very rural, very, very few staff, a few students, we only had two ESL teachers were both very much part time. And also I pulled some Cordova adult school, which is a medium size. My boss likes when I say that. It is this medium size. And so in my, my foreign language department, we had immediate full adoption. In fact, all across the university there was immediate full adoption. Adult schools to we weren't going to lose, you know, the steps that the steps that we've taken out here we weren't going to let go, any of us. Right. So within about a week we turned it around. Didn't we remember what happened. We turned it around. Didn't want to do it. It was expensive. It was difficult. People are afraid of getting sick. And we did. So, and again, the community colleges were pretty much already ready to do it. So we learned a few things from them. So when I'm learning at Folsom, Florida adult school, our classes exams were all administered online. We don't do that anymore because it's very, it's very staff intensive. And we don't have tons of staff that can do that. You know, all of us were probably exposed to a variety of solutions for this. For us, we had Cindy actually, one reason I would have loved her presence. She did all of the online classes testing. You know, we didn't have too many people do so. We had more of a sort of drive by process kind of thing. She might have experienced as well. And some other strategies like that. At the community college where I teach, we still do that for all of my online courses process is uniquely administered online. It's they don't ever, they'll never come to campus. Okay, what's our takeaway from 2020 aside from all the other things. One science fits some hashtag OS FS that's going to come up. Not all students enjoy online learning and we know not all teachers enjoy online teaching. What's more, not all teachers should be teaching online. You have to be a very dynamic presenter. It was really funny. I didn't include this mean that there's a great was a great one about engaging students online. And just, you know, involves feather boas and lots of stuff like that just trying to really trying to get everyone's attention. And the students are sitting there like Bernie, right at the inauguration. So we had the same the same skism among the instructors. I think students online is not always easy. If you're not comfortable with black squares and can't do his job, right, because there are a lot of folks who are different reasons. Cantor won't activate a camera. So that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But for folks who do this a lot, it doesn't, it doesn't make us uncomfortable. And I don't think, in my experience. I don't think is losing anything because they're not turning their camera on some of my most participating students. So I'm most participating students are leads who for cultural reasons will won't turn on their cameras, and they're just talking to you talking to you. They're some of my best. So the box players don't don't scare. All right. So I'm going to just fill the leg here. I've been zooming for a while. Okay. A couple of just three little best practices things things I'm going to rag on just a little bit. How many people have seen these in a zoom meeting. Big black rectangles, black squares, but that is going on. The presenter usually doesn't know nobody tells them, right. So what I often do is I try to simulate the experience that my students are having. So I joined on my phone, and I joined on my computer. See what it looks like to them. If my grandma can't read that, but it's not working. She is dead, but if you're alive, right. They metric, same metric. Yeah, 2011, I'm slowly getting over it. We need to really think about human computer interaction and how it differs, even from like street to street neighborhood to neighborhood, never mind around the world. We don't. My agency doesn't at this time have the bandwidth to loan Chromebooks to everybody. We, we did for a while and they not many came back, even when we disabled them. So it doesn't seem like it's in our experience it hasn't been something that has contributed, aside from during the emergency phase when we just really need to get people on there. So, ideally for me, I know this is hoping for a lot, but ideally a student would have their phone so they can participate. They can have some other thing like a small tablet Chromebook, maybe a computer, so they can be doing the Burlington or the canvas or the what have you. But I want to be able to participate if they, all they have is a phone. So that means when I design Canvas courses, I need to make sure that there's not a whole bunch of extra stuff. All these kinds of things I'm not a, you know, a UI guy, but I try to think about what it looks like to somebody else. Sorry, this is a, this is a pet peeve. When we're, when we're sharing Google Docs, who doesn't, right. We're sharing Google Docs. If we do the normal control plus plus control minus minus to make it bigger for grandma, then what's going to happen is you're going to get a much bigger ribbon, and the text doesn't change size. I like to show people, I like them to feel like they're watching a movie, but there's nothing, there's nothing there except the experience. So, what I'll do is, first of all, I'll punch this up to about 150 or 200. This is for me to write, I can't read those. I can't read words that small, even standing right here, it's pretty hard. So, I punch it up to about 150 200, press F 11, get rid of that stuff. Right there. So that's the other option for that. We're probably all familiar or you can pick up 11. They don't make it easy on these keyboards, not just this one, but lots of keywords out there. There's always some other activation key right here first different on every one. So, yeah, it's a process. Okay, 2021. I don't want to go back to work. I'm going to talk about the agencies where I was working at the time. I don't know what happened with everybody, but we did a lot of new input surveys and exit surveys like you all do. You get a lot of quantitative and qualitative data for people, how many do this, how many like this how many don't. So, we started doing classes test administration in person again was, it was the practical thing to do. And vaccine was widely available people were taking it. Our distance learning program continued to the life of some and the chagrin of others. Not everybody, not everybody likes it, but that's what this whole visitation is about. One size fits some. We heard about the great visitation around 2021. I'm not sure it's supported by data, but we all know that everybody has a friend who says I'm not going back. I'm not going back. That was me. I went back, but that was my, that was my memory of working in industry and then working in a cube a cube farm in education didn't want to do that again. So across agencies and institution types. There's, there's broad broad variation. I'll tell you about four that I was working for at the time, compare their different strategies. So let's continue in. It's a fairly large program in Anaheim. And I teach there online every day. Their program is fully 50% distance learning. And it's not because the administration decided they wanted it that way is what the students continue to ask for it. That's just this campus. It's not everywhere. We still, as I mentioned before, we all do classes online for all those online courses. Co-op assessments are all done online. It's really, really streamlined. The co-op process is really, really streamlined there. It's, it's Microsoft forms. Yeah, I don't, I'm not a fan, but as soon as they complete those, it was right to the data people. I don't have to print anything out and I have to waste any paper. It's just done. It's amazing. I finish all instructions online and all homework is on the LMS. And aside from Burlington English, I've been really good at talking people into getting Burlington for my students. So only, only my class, the whole community college has Burlington English. So aside from Burlington English, we use absolutely nothing that costs any money. So I switched to completely OER texts for this class at all my classes. And the data bear out in the student's trial, strongly prefer online learning. Over here at UC Davis, back in, I'm talking about 2021 now, all of our overseas programs, so we're made 100% online. When American students did foreign language placements, they were all online, they still are. It's kind of a self assessment now. Whether in person or distance, all of their midterms or finals, all the big stuff, it's all on the LMS. So we really left forward there. And I think that, you know, I actually, I want to thank that panel in the back, not for most of what they did, but because we got this, we got this leap forward that we weren't prepared to do before that before we were forced to do it. We weren't ready to do it. I would still be driving, you know, 17 hours a week to go to work. And so a lot of people. You see Davis in the next year. I can't see what it says. Yeah. Okay, so these days, we're down to about 10% distance learning. We kind of relegate it to when someone is violently ill. Okay, that kind of thing. The students are extremely flexible now in learning modality. They can, they're coming to us from high schools where they may have done two years online already. So they're totally primed for this. They don't think it's weird. They don't think it's not a class. Right. You tell them, oh, we have to be online. I did this yesterday. Sorry folks to be online and being San Diego. Have a time. That's the question. That's the whole question. We've become quite normalized. And we're still doing formal language presence for efficiency placement exams online and everything on LMS is. And this is true both at the main campus and at the center for professional education where I teach international students. Okay, what about Wilson cord over. This is the school that I am here representing today in 2021. From about 50% to about 25% distance learning students indicated very rigid preferences in terms of their modality. I want all online or I want all in person. And at this, at this time, instructor online courses were teaching from offsite gradually started coming back to the campus 100% of costs is testing being done in person. As far as the online courses go, everything has been done all on the LMS for a couple of years and assessments and all those kinds of things, even in face to face classes. By this point, it about, yeah, we'll come to that. Okay, 22 about 25%. I teach French here. These days, when I started teaching there 22% percent distance learning that's on a regular schedule, but anytime we need to do distance learning we do that as well. Students are very very flexible. As I was describing a moment ago. People who are teaching online courses are teaching from onsite and offsite, and in a hybrid manner so the way our hybrid courses are set up there. We have a computer on a podium with a camera facing instructor and a camera facing the audience. It's pretty cool, but it's no out. Right. So it works, but it's not, it's not ideal. All of course, all course we can assessment so on the LMS are done are done on the LMS. And we've done a lot of work on canvas this year, which I'll come to. Okay, 2022, you guys know what happened. We're in person but not 100% distance learning is normalized at all levels kindergarten to grad school. Agencies and instructors figured out they need to be very agile. We might have to jump into distance learning if there's a natural disaster. You guys know we had some very bad flooding in Northern California recently. So, and what about the next pandemic, right, I hear that I hear that from people sometimes, or the next disaster whatever happens right. So in some cases where you're not going to want to be driving for safety concerns. Okay, so causes test administration purpose in person continues a pace. And our distance learning can program is continuing at at Folsom Cordova. We have begun adding hybrid courses that's just a beta test we're doing this year. Next year, we want to add high flex courses. Okay, I'd like to talk about our educator training program. This is one of our biggest CTE it programs. Before, before the virus, it was taught in person. It was three or four times a week. So we're not astounded. And everything was done on sort of static PowerPoints with a mathematics focus so probably just like your districts, we have a district level proficiency test that people need to pass or that can be, you know, brought on as a parent here. It's never the math that people have problems but it's always the English. So in our, in our district so being a language teacher, I rewrote this program. And turned it into a heavily English focus program with mathematics included. Back then, the supplemental stuff was just all flat PDF just really scans of like many graphs or something really not easy on the eye. And we had eight graduates per semester, which would render about four paras for our district at a time. And they asked me to take over the course. So I put it all online. In 2020, our enrollment numbers double. And the next year, triple, and now they've stayed, they've stayed steady since then. We do everything dynamically on our own as of course. It's a language arts focus with math, I use going our text for math I'll tell you exactly which one later on. The supplemental stuff is dynamic everything in there they interact with. So there's no teacher how can I study my math. I don't know, look at this piece of paper. Right. None of that. Now we have, we graduate about 25 per semester which gives us about half that many educators, not everyone goes on to be a pair educator in our district, but they usually do so somewhere. I also added a lot of asynchronous content. Okay, like we're just a YouTube face. And asynchronous content. This is where I'm live streaming right now on my YouTube channel, which has 56 subscribers to subscribe if you would. My program is delivered 100% synchronously but what if you're sick, what if you have to take your kid to blah, blah, blah, all these kinds of things. I want that to be available for folks. And they tell me that they really appreciate it. I thought that I'm always really self conscious about about lectures. You can see this was 45 minutes long. And I think to myself, nobody wants to watch that. But that's not what they tell me. Yeah, this is, this is the face that I imagine, right when I post these things I think, oh, it's just me talking but consistently these are the qualitative data we get. Good good stuff. Okay, more about the PTP from 2021 on we started growing the course it went from being a course to being a program. We have two courses now. We take both courses in order to graduate. It's 100% online 100% synchronous. And I expanded the curriculum with OERs. So we started putting more human development content into the curriculum. And that being that if our, if our students graduate and become para educators, and then take six units of human development, then they have the right, as you guys probably know, they have the right to become preschool teachers. So, I want to really prime them for that. If they didn't have any background in my cloud. If they didn't have any background in it to begin with and if you're going to prime them. We also want to bring community college courses on to our campus starting next year. Hope that's what's going to happen. And the students do as well. Right, and elementary elementary algebra. I'll show you exactly which books those are. Julie is a professor of human development at Folsom Lake College. So she was a real win for us. And if the plan that I have described is carry out next year she'll be the instructor for those courses. We added the IETVSL course, ask me how to make lots of extra money for your district. This is it honestly. Teaching this course, we instruct the 70.2 co-op, which is the instructional assistant and doing that alongside the IET course renders a lot of good stuff on the back end. Right, HEL civics, we get tangible benefits. The students also get tangible benefits. Okay. Keep doing the program. Now it's, I don't know, people keep telling me it's it's a big deal. I don't know if it is, but it continues. Now we are able to administer the ESSA compliant test at our office instead of having to send people to the district office. So that's been really helpful until by staff. And for those who don't pass and haven't taken our course. They can take it until they pass. It's kind of like a driver's license though you've got to wait two weeks before you can, you can do it again. But usually what we say is what do you, when you take the course, you come to the course it's only like four and a half months long, and then take the test again. So that's an option as well for them. Okay, what did we learn, what have we learned to date. The first one is this barrier to education that we didn't know was there. It's kind of like proving a null, you don't know that something is not there. In some cases, so the form of physical location in space this was a problem for a lot of people, we didn't know that till 2020 95% of our participants are moms who only have free time between X and Y. That's where the course falls. It's perfect for them. Or they've been moms for a very long time, and they're looking for a change, something else to do. So, and then there are cultural considerations to I am a male instructor. Not everybody wants a male instructor. So moving online, really remove this barrier. And yeah, it could be happier. Could be happier. I mentioned before we do a lot of qualitative and quantitative analysis of what the students want what they want from us. And overwhelmingly they say, we want online. We've asked them pointedly again and again, would you like to come on one day a month, Friday afternoon for an hour checking with us. Nope, we sure don't. We had one out of 25 last semester, say that they did. And we would accommodate that person she could come in, you know, and he would would have a session with her but not happening. Yes. So, firmly online. But who doesn't like it. So, we removed even more barriers by adding these OER texts. I think sometimes people look at community college courses and they focus on the college part and they say, oh, it's going to be hard. It's going to cost money. It's going to do this. This removes that fear, because it's free, and it's accessible. Sign up, it takes five minutes to sign up. I found the comments, I found the straight book. Imagine, imagine to recall even development, it's put out by the Portland State University Press. There's a link every single one of these pages here has title, any little URLs for everything that I, that I talked about so if you see the presentation later on you don't want it from somebody will be able to click on all those things. Okay, at this point. So, I think more of these institutions where currently work have adopted OER texts. And I'll talk about each one I've talked all about NOCE and Folsom Portova, we'll actually come back to those next in this slide, which I just touched it. At UC Davis I stopped using any kind of for pay curriculum like ASR, ASR as I said, or anything else like that. And at Sacramento State, we have decided to stop asking the students to buy $300 textbooks. Who would have thought, you know, so we really like VHL it's kind of the foreign languages equivalent of Burlington English. It's nice to mix these easier teachers does not make things easy for students. And so for folks you might be struggling just to pay for gas to get to class that day, you know, we don't want to do that also we want people to enroll for our majors. So, free. Okay. This is something I really want to evangelize for this. This is a series of ESL books. You know, when you go into our comments, nothing has a fancy splashy, you know, front page or always just black and white. As opposed to the stuff you pay for right, but it was like image licensing is expensive. Anyways, Rebecca Alhider, she's a professor at Reedley College. I always, I always talk to somebody who knows her. I've spoken to her before she's great. She's written all these different ESL books, and there's a great crossover between we are comments and canvas comments, because she has taken like four of her books and put them online in in full four. So everything from the books has been translated to dynamic exercises in canvas. I'm a new student and beginning ESL, intermediate ESL advanced ESL. I said, guys, here's the whole book. The first, the first module in the class is textbook. One word, right textbook. You can download the book, it's big, or you can just look at all these modules because literally it's exactly the same thing. And sometimes they look and say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this. And sometimes they do and they don't tell me, I don't know, but I don't want to tell us. So, I always acknowledge her every, every time I'm teaching with her stuff, I say, well, teacher Rebecca says the book. Okay, what else. The Latin lesson today, I'll be aware. Students succeeded succeed when we hold an in person, an in person orientation and talk about per educator training program, but we want to do this for more of our, more of our offerings. We want to do it for the first four semesters that I taught the class, and then he showed up and it was kind of her idea she said why don't we do this. And you know what we did it so we had the folks come in before the class ever started. We showed them how to get on soup, we showed them how to get on campus, we showed them how to do this do that. And you know what, I didn't spend a week with tech trouble. The first week of class. And so I had noticed, I personally had no desire to do any in person training, but we did it. And we'll do it again because it was such, it was, it was such a come up. It was really nice. One size fits up. Right. So, I was a little rigid my thinking I thought I don't, I don't want to do that on campus, you know, lots of folks are not vaccinated. But, Mass, it's pretty much over. So I put one of those up. Okay, let's talk about DLAC project. We're really excited about it. You guys know that high flex is kind of new in adult education. That person put over it's entirely new. We don't have any towels yet. We do have three of these. They're all on cameras, which are cool, but they take unidirectional pictures. So if I were to set one up up here, and get all of you folks and get the top of my head, right it would follow me around like the owl does. It's not quite, it's not quite the same experience or if it would the back of the room would be equally as effective, but it's myopic. So, we're doing some sort of alpha and beta testing in terms of the hybrid courses. It is bolt on right now it's not built in. It's something that is probably perceived by people as being extra or, you know, not endemic to instruction, but I can be projecting on that when I haven't done the qualitative research to find out. One of the proposals to implement high flex learning modalities in a BSE ESL and it out of success Academy. We've got teachers identified for all of these are really really good folks. Every time I go into their classrooms is just, wow, you are great. So those are the ones that we want doing this kind of thing, you know, in my in my view. Okay, there's may teaching the unvaccinated with the Polycom camera. So I'm just over here, Cindy took this photo. Thanks, Cindy. And just beta testing it just to see how people enjoyed it. You know what, it's amazing. These guys are from an earlier class. They came to my earlier class, and came to this class, because that's it's extra learning it's extra free stuff. Why wouldn't I want to do that. I don't have anything else to do today. Right. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And it's been working well but since I, you know, certain things are just the domain of unions I can't map things on walls I can't paint my classroom but I can't do stuff like that. So I can't take the polycon and mount it back here if I want to. I can't put it on top of the whiteboard if I want to, I want to, but I'm not going to do that because it's not. Our new modality behind flex we assume that 100% online and 100% offline are also one size fits some approaches that they don't cover everyone. Some students can't do either. And some want to do both. So, this might may not be a revelation to you all. But to me it sort of was. Oh hey, there's a middle ground there's a middle ground there. In fact, here's our timeline. Next year 2023 2024 school year. Our process is is is this. We have complete completed our do you like project proposal that's why I'm here today. Our principal has just finished the grant application I think it's measure H grant. I think it's what it was. That's done, wouldn't hear back from that. And part of that grant is of course the the owls, but right now we're carrying out the polycom camera beta testing. I should mention that we have those cameras and two other classrooms and the teachers are trying them out as well. In March, we always do a needs assessment. So that'll happen has as it does usually it's coming up. I personally need to get on that actually pending the grant approval we want to implement the usage of the owls in the first weeks of the next year. And then I'm going to have to do a lot of teacher training. August is going to be busy you guys. I'm taking July off. So I'll call me now. Yeah. And doesn't do it when I want it to. Okay. I did something wrong. There we go. Okay, so thank you for coming to my Ted talk. That was essentially everything in a nutshell we hope to see you in Fremont next year and present on what we will be found in the first semester for further language teaching adventures please come find me on YouTube at language teacher in 3266. I didn't do anything about it. And also, you can check me out on academia. And hire me to do something. I could create classes for your, for your, for your district, wherever you might be. Also, oh, 10. And I had my email address here. But you can find that easily now. I'm curious. Okay. Please contact me at Jojo's at usd.org. I've been Avi. Thank you very much.