 All right. So I think we'll go ahead and get started if y'all are ready. So hello and welcome to our session. It's Breakout 3, Finishing Strong, a multi-prong approach to enhancing the electronic thesis and dissertation process. Sharing this information with you are several presenters, Kristen Terrell, Lily Compton, Elena Kodos and Sarah Huffman. My name is Emily and I will be your moderator for the next 20 minutes. A quick reminder before we begin, during the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted. Please feel free to use the Q&A tab to post questions which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. You can navigate to other sessions by clicking the desired sessions in the hop-in schedule or click the left-hand sidebar links. Thank you all for joining us and I will turn it over to the presenters. All right. I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen and hopefully you will be able to see my PowerPoint here. Can everyone see the PowerPoint? Could I get a verbal? Yes. Yes. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah Huffman. I am the Assistant Director of the Center for Communication Excellence at Iowa State University. Today we're going to talk to you a little bit about an approach, a multi-pronged approach that we have developed here to enhance the electronic thesis dissertation process, including the submission process. I'm going to be joined by my colleagues, Kristen Terrell, Lily Compton and also Elena Kodos. So just a quick overview of our model. We've really divided this up into three separate phases. The first of those is the preparing to write the actual thesis and dissertation. The second is the drafting and revision portion of revising the thesis and dissertation. And the third is the formatting and submission of the thesis dissertation. So just to give you a heads up, phase one, we can go into a lot more detail about this, but our colleagues are going to be presenting on this tomorrow in the presentation, the ACOMP track or the academic communication practices track, building capacity and writing high quality thesis and dissertations. This is in breakout room 19, and it's going to cover details of that phase one support. So maybe put that on your calendars if you're a little bit more interested in that preparatory stage. So to give you a bit of background, the Center for Communication Excellence really targets the academic communication development of both graduate students and postdocs at Iowa State University. And so the CCE wants to support both academic writing and speaking today. We're going to be focusing a bit more on academic writing. But that development from day one of the masters or PhD students arrival at the university. So again, we're going to talk more about the development of that preparation stage in a new program that we have in tomorrow's session. Phase two here involves the drafting and revising of the thesis and dissertation. So what we have here is a screenshot of our thesis and dissertation writing program. So you may be able to see some of the subcategories that we have listed here, including thesis and dissertation consultations, seminars, boot camps and writing retreats, thesis dissertation writing and planning tools, as well as formatting tools and resources. Now this is a category and it's into itself under the writing portion of our support that we provide to graduate students. And in the thesis and dissertation consultations, I'll kind of, this is just basically that screenshot, but I'll go ahead and get more into the details of what each of these programs offers. So the thesis dissertation consultations are really one-on-one sessions that we provide in which we provide support to graduate students. So we have thesis and dissertation writing consultants who have been trained in an intensive writing consultant training program, first of all, in order to basically provide excellent mentorship to the masters and PhD students with whom they're meeting. These are one-on-one sessions with peer tutors. So all of our writing consultants are PhD students at Iowa State, so they are peers. They will have gone through the process or maybe are currently going through the process of writing and submitting their thesis and dissertation. And so this was one of the aspects that we really thought most beneficial to providing support because this is support from a peer instead of support from potentially a staff member. These consultations are free to students and they're encouraged to make as many consultations as they need up to one a week. And so we are able to provide them basically from the time they hopefully start the writing process or the planning for the thesis and dissertation process earlier in their graduate careers. We're able to provide them support basically sustained through their entire time in the program. In addition to those one-on-one sessions, and we're currently holding sessions in both face-to-face and online formats. So in addition to those one-on-one sessions, we also offer kind of a one-to-many support system in which there are boot camps, seminars, and writing retreats. So in the seminars, these are informational seminars that provide guidelines for how to basically align a thesis or dissertation document with the graduate college's submission requirements. There are also a number of other tools and resources that are introduced at these seminars in which students can begin the planning process for their thesis or dissertation. The boot camps that we have are targeted at formatting, assisting students with the formatting phase of their drafting and revision for submission to the graduate college. And so in these boot camps, also led by the thesis and dissertation writing consultants, one of our consultants leads the boot camp. We have another consultant usually walking around kind of answering individual questions that students may have. And it's really more of a workshop type feel. And so these are focused on Microsoft Word formats only at this time. We have plans, obviously, to develop this into an expanded version, looking at LaTeX and Intel Overleaf as well. But at the time, we're focusing mainly on the Microsoft Word formats. So it involves both an informational session plus a hands-on question-answer session. So students can really get all of those questions answered about how to whatever, you know, regarding the formatting stages of their thesis or dissertation. And then we have a writing retreat that we offer every semester. This is a prolonged session. Usually it's about four hours long and we have it just one day a semester, including in the summer. This is to enhance the accountability of the students in order to provide them a space, kind of a dedicated time and space, so they can get a good chunk of their writing done on their thesis or dissertation. So during the session, we have a goal setting strategy, kind of a workshop at the beginning. We have students articulate their goals for this particular retreat. And then throughout the session in which they are able to work on towards those goals, we have a check-in on those goals at the very end of the retreat as well. But throughout the session, we have on-call writing tutors that the students can access. And this really allows participants to get that one-on-one support while still being in the zone of writing. We also encourage them to turn off their other electronic devices, shut down all of their other, maybe turn their phones off for a while so they can really dedicate this time to writing a substantial chunk of their thesis or dissertation. This also allows them to have that support without waiting necessarily for a one-on-one appointment that they may need to reserve with a writing consultant. And then we have our formatting tools and resources, and here's the link that we have to those. These involve both downloadable thesis and dissertation templates that we've supplied in both Microsoft Word as well as LaTeX versions. These are annotated according to what students are basically the different types of writing that students are doing. They're standardized across all of their, all of the formats that we offer. And so the language parallels the graduate college guidelines in the same language appears in these formatted templates. So we have both the traditional and the journal article style formats available to students in case the journal article style, obviously as they're compiling multiple potential publications, future publications or current publications to kind of create a portfolio for their thesis or dissertation. And this, this is also kind of a continuation of the formatting tools and resources. What we also have provided are checklists. So these are, again, standardized across the stakeholder groups between those who review the thesis and dissertations, our writing tutors, and our graduate student versions. So again, these are able to be kind of accessed and used concurrently by all of these stakeholder groups. And again, their standardized language used in the revision request emails, which is really important so we can easily point students to potential, maybe some potential revisions that they would need to make. I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to my colleague, Kristen, for the next slide here. Thank you, Sarah. Can you hear me? Yes. Great. So I want to talk a little bit more in detail about these checklists because we did put a lot of work into redesigning our format support materials that we provide on that website. And the goal was to make sure that everybody involved in the thesis and dissertation formatting is very much on the same page and can communicate with each other effectively. So we had been working with students who were just experiencing really a lot of stress about formatting their thesis and dissertation. And then they would submit it to ProQuest once they were done and passed their defense and get format revision suggestions by email and just not really understand what those requirements were that they had failed to meet on their first submission. And sometimes it was even to the point where, you know, they would schedule a one-on-one consultation with a consultant and the consultant also wasn't really clear on what that reviewer was requesting. And so we wanted to make sure that everybody involved from consultants to students to thesis reviewers was communicating effectively so that we could reduce the stress for the students. And one of the strategies that we've used is coming up with these very standardized checklists. The one that we're looking at right now is the Graduate College Reviewers Thesis Dissertation and Format Checklist. And you can see that it's divided into two columns. One of them is format checked and then the other one is consultant comments and resources. In the format checked column, this is every format requirement, all the minimum requirements that a thesis or dissertation has to meet to get approved and published in ProQuest. It's a lengthy list and it kind of goes through, it's organized by topic. So there's, you know, things like margins and fonts, page numbers, chapter titles, every requirement that we have with a checklist. And then in the right hand column, okay, can you go back a slide please Sarah? In the right hand column, it says consultant comments and resources. If a student has failed to meet a requirement, this is the language that they will see if they get an email for revisions from the Graduate College and it will basically be in this exact language. So the purpose of this is that there's really no ambiguity. And if the student themselves can't figure it out, they can easily bring it to a consultant and get very quick feedback and accurate sort of suggestions for revisions so that the next time they resubmit to ProQuest, they don't, you know, still have to revise it one more time. So this has really changed how we work and it's made it so much more consistent with the feedback that they get from reviewers and we've had a lot of success with it. Okay, this is a similar checklist. This is actually used by consultants and we call it the asynchronous format check. This is for students who want to sort of do a practice round before they submit to ProQuest in the first place. And they can get feedback from a trained consultant at the CCE and this is the report that they'll get back from that asynchronous review. Again, the global formatting requirements in the left hand column are standard. It's the same ones that we present in the Graduate College review or checklist. But there's kind of a blank space for the consultant comments. And the reason for that is that we don't just want to point out what the requirement is, but we might want to give some explanation of, well, how do you make that happen in Microsoft Word. And so we want to use this column to instruct them on how to achieve it, not just say you need to have this requirement. Sorry, I just wanted to jump in real quick. We just have about four minutes left in the session. Okay, thank you. This is the last one. This is the format self-check. You can download this one from the website and this is for students to use on their own to just make sure that they're meeting all the requirements. This is also a great conversation starter for one-on-one consultations. Because if, again, a student doesn't know how to get the requirement, they can just ask, oh, how do I do this margin or whatever it seems to be. We have, in addition to the one-on-one consultations, we've got some convenient options. We've got format consultations, which are just 30 minutes long. These are really popular because sometimes people really don't have an hour. They're busy. So they can just come in for a half-hour quick check. And then we've also started doing these walk-in clinics. These are terrific because, again, when students get requests for revisions, it can really stress them out. And the idea that they can just come into the center or log into WebEx during a certain time period and get help right away has been immensely welcomed by the students. A lot of the students who do come in for walk-ins got what's called major revision where they didn't even use the template or they're not even aware that we have format requirements. And so this is very helpful for them because, you know, they're not even getting that explicit, you know, on page six you need to fix the margin sort of revision request. They're just saying, use the template. So this is a great opportunity to introduce those resources to students. In addition to the walk-in clinics, which aren't all the time, but just a couple of times per semester, we've got other on-demand resources like we've got a whole YouTube channel that demonstrates how to use Microsoft Word to get all of those format requirements into your document. And we've also got a whole collection of pages from real thesis and dissertations that are annotated to show, you know, if you meet this requirement, here's what it'll look like on the page. And those are downloadable from our website. This is an example of the annotated pages with the title page. It just really gets into detail about what those requirements look like in real life. Moving forward, we do want to really expand our support for people who use LaTeX. This is a science and engineering university and we do have just a lot of graduate students using this technology instead of Microsoft Word. And so we're going to try to build up the resources that we have right now for Microsoft Word users and then duplicate them for LaTeX users, including a bootcamp on-demand resources like the YouTube videos and the annotated pages. And then scheduleable consultations, which we haven't had up to this point and this semester we are starting those. Great. Thank you so much. We have a question in the chat. It's from Ron. He says that your templates look great. And as you look back, what were some of the challenges of incorporating a Word template into your submission process? For example, were there sections or instructions for the template that users still struggled with despite how the template was pre-formatted? That's a good question. Kristen, do you want to tackle that one? Sure. There are a lot of challenges. I'd say the biggest challenge is that students don't fully understand how powerful that template is. And so they will sort of try to reinvent the wheel as they use the template instead of, you know, going with the flow and just using the template as written. And so a lot of times when we meet with students, we're kind of reverse engineering their document design choices and also educating them on how the technology works so that in future projects they don't have to have that same struggle. So like an example might be Microsoft Word has a built-in table of contents that auto-updates and people who don't know that that's there will just manually type a table of contents. And it takes hours and it doesn't look as nice and the page numbers are never accurate. And so it's like, okay, let's save you some time, show you how to use the technology, and then hopefully next time they don't run into the same problem. That's wonderful. Thank you. Are there any other questions that we have? Okay. Well, thank you all for sharing your experiences with us and your advice. I think if anyone has questions that they think of, you know, reach out to them, Ping, Sarah, Kristen, or Lily and get some advice. So I thank you for coming to the session. Thank you for presenting at the session. And I wish you all a happy rest of the conference. Thank you. Thank you, Emily.