Katrina Tamura: Hello. Welcome, everyone. My name is Katrina Tamura, and these are my colleagues, Chris Vela Che and Kristi Reyes, and we are all teachers at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, and we teach English as a second language to adults. And our students-- as all students need help with onboarding, and this is something that we've been researching and trying to figure out the best ways to do to help students enter our classrooms and welcome them and engage them so that they want to stick around. So we're going to share some information with you that we have found and some practices that we feel are very helpful.

You can go to the next slide. All right, so teaching online requires additional approaches and support to encourage students to persist and the interactions of the first few weeks are really crucial for students for investment in the course. And today, we're going to share ways to begin outreach to students before a new course begins, and we'll also provide suggestions and ways to support students and encourage engagement and build relationships.

There is research to help us along and to know what to do, and here are some citations for you. In the first one, we see that adult students on ground and face-to-face instruction, they tend to drop within the first three weeks of class if they're going to drop. And when time is dedicated at the beginning of a course to building relationships and giving adult student's information about the course and what they're going to learn and the expectations, students are more likely to persist. It's the same thing as online as well.

So we just need to really make sure that an online instruction, those strategies start even before the course begins. And online instructors can connect with students by offering personal information such as a welcoming video and an instructor bio with a photo. Pretty simple things that we can do to personalize our course and welcome students into the class.

And more research here. Once a course is started, we know that regular follow up with a teacher, teacher-student interactions. It's really important for student motivation and involvement, and research shows a correlation between frequent interaction with instructors and student satisfaction with instruction. And instructors should establish a predictable routine and a time frame for when and how students can expect to receive communication from the instructor.

That's really important. Setting up expectations, frontloading them, letting them know, building a routine. And online activities need to replicate what happens in the physical classroom as closely as possible. Community building, planned interactions among students, and abundant of student practice, timely feedback, reflection, and teacher and student interaction. Those are all really important components that research shows work to help with student retention and onboarding.

So what onboarding steps do you take? In the chat, can you introduce yourself and tell us what you teach. Describe your challenges with remote instruction and then respond to these questions here. Do you contact students before the start date of your class? How do you contact them? What information do you share and how successful have you been?

So take a minute right now to just tell us who you are, where you're from, and if there's a challenge that you experience with remote instruction, please let us know about that. And then tell us, do you contact your students before the start date of class? Do you wait a couple of weeks? See who's left or do you start before and how do you contact them?

Oh, you started in person this year, I see someone said. That's great. And what information do you share with them? OK, so I'm going to let you go ahead and answer those questions in chat, and we'll come back to them later.

So you can just go ahead and continue to introduce yourself and answer those questions. So regular and effective feedback looks like a teacher reaching out to students. And you might want to do this in several ways. You can start with approved tools that your institution has. I mean, they change from place to place, so make sure that you're using what your program wants you to use, but some examples of these tools for reaching out are social networking media like Facebook and Instagram, texting, like the Remind app, Google Voice, and WhatsApp.

These kinds of tools are really helpful. If you find out what students are using and what they are using at the start of the class, maybe that will act as a gateway. So you can get them to start using your LMS or whatever tool that you would prefer them to use, but try to find out what they're using if it's approved, then use that because research shows that 36% fewer students dropped when something like this, some sort of social networking or device that's outside of an LMS was used. And it increased attendance by 7%.

So that's worth looking into and worth trying. Of course, we don't want to encourage anybody to use something you're not supposed to, but if you are allowed to, give it a try. And another thing that we want to suggest is to make a gain plan before your class begins. Before the course starts, teachers should make a plan and consider when will your contact happen, how often will it take place, and how will it occur?

And @ONE has a great professional development series, and their class is about onboarding. In their classes, they suggested creating a calendar or an Excel sheet with preplanned dates and times and noting your communication modalities and keeping notes on the communications that you have with your students. Make a text task list and archive your announcements so you know what you said, when you said it, and then you can also use those announcements in future classes.

You don't have to remake them if they're the same thing. So it's time saving, and notes on your office hours. What happened during your office hour? Who showed up?

What questions did they have? Your no show email log. Have you reached out to these students? Which ones did you reach out to? Did anyone respond? You can note that for yourself, and phone calls.

You need to log your phone calls and then anything else you think would be helpful to remind to give you a reminder about who you're contacting and what happened so when you look at your roster you know who you should be reaching out to and when you did so. And again, establishing a regular plan for communication will help you with that. You'll know that you sent notices at certain dates and times.

And then a clear and detailed communication policy with multiple means, such as your email, text, phone, calls, chatting with an LMS, meeting up online. Students need to know when that's going to happen and the guidelines for it and how to do it. So you should go ahead and give them that information from the beginning, and you'll want to send out some weekly plan, some objectives or topics so students know what's going to happen this week. What should they be looking for?

The communications should have answers to questions that have come up during the week. You might want to note them. Again, even if you responded to them in class, you might want to note them in an email or in a post, and then a summary of class content with homework and next steps, and then words of encouragement and inspiration to motivate students. Links to videos or new items related to course topics.

Those are all really good things to include in your carefully planned communications. And find out what the intake form, a students' preferred means of receiving information. So you can create a discussion forum and students can just post their questions on your LMS. You can send out announcements, emails, a video is a really good idea explaining how to use the LMS discussion board and phone calls.

Which of these do your students prefer? You can ask them in a survey. Just say, how would you like me to contact you? What's the best way to get news to you and information?

You can also let them know that this is how I am going to do it. Here are your options. And a welcome letter is really important because you're going to have to get all of this information out to students. So if you craft a nice welcome letter, that includes your instructor contact information, a link to your welcome video, your intake survey, your dates and times for asynchronous and synchronous meetings.

Your LMS and Zoom links, links to support services. Final steps information, like your details for week 1, what should you do to start this course and what should you do to end this course, and then link or attach your syllabus in some way to your welcome letter, and add some sort of a personal touch. It can be as simple as Bitmoji like mine there or it can be a picture of yourself.

It can be a quote. Something that tells students something about yourself and invites them in. So that's the welcome letter. And this is an example of a welcome video, and the welcome video is not necessarily a list of all of the instructions you want to give them and what they have to do the first week, but it's just something to tell them about you since you don't get to meet them in person, you're not with them.

You might want to send something that tells a little something about yourself. This is something I made just using Adobe Spark Video and some pictures I had and it's very easy to do, and it's something that will personalize the course and welcome students into it. So this is my example.

[video playback]

[music playing]

- My name is Katrina Tamura. I will be your teacher this fall. This is me and this is my Bitmoji. Do you have a Bitmoji? We look forward to working with you this fall.

Here is a little information about me and how I became an ESL teacher. I started teaching ASL as a volunteer. I was in high school. This is me with my very first ESL class.

After high school, I went to Queretaro, Mexico and studied Spanish and communications at the university. Being an international student wasn't easy, but I learned a lot and I really enjoyed my time there. After college, I decided I wanted to be an ESL teacher, so I went to Shandong, China and taught at Yantai University for one year.

I lived in a small apartment in the foreigner's hotel on campus. I worked with juniors, seniors, and freshmen. I also got to travel a lot and I learned a lot about China. I got the opportunity to work with Chinese colleagues, other teachers, and we exchanged ideas and came up with new ways to teach. Even though these may seem like distant memories in my photo book, they're not.

They're really very important experiences that shaped how I teach and how I learn. Although we're not going to be meeting face to face or in person, I want you to know that I'm here for you and I will be in Zoom, I will be in Canvas, and I'm going to be here for you this term. So please reach out when you need me because I really enjoy working with students and I look forward to working with you.

[music playing]

[end playback]

OK, so as you can see, there were no instructions. There were no do this, do that, do another thing. It was purely a welcome video telling something about myself and personalizing the course and letting students know who I am and who they're going to be working with for the next eight or 16 weeks. And you can go to the next.

OK, and you might be wondering the intake survey, so the welcome video. You'll want to include that in your welcome letter as well as the intake survey, and this is a great intake survey that Kristi made, and the intake survey is used to find out what the student's needs are, what technology they have, what classes they've already taken. Again, how do they want to be contacted?

That can be included on the intake survey form. So your computer, your internet access, technology skills, previous classes, and then how do you want to be contacted. You can create a Google Form for that and it's a very simple thing to do, but it ends up to be extremely helpful when you start trying to contact students.

And so support services are always really important to list in your welcome letter. And things like the counseling services, tutoring, tech support, career services, free and low cost internet, Zoom instructions, all of those things are very important to include. Of course, a lot of students may not look at this-- may not look at the email or click on this link, so you should provide this information maybe in other places or point students to these services and these supports at other times.

But it's a good place to start in the welcome letter. And an LMS welcome video looks a little different from the welcome video where it's just talking about yourself. The LMS video is actually introducing them into the course and showing them around in your course, and we can take a look at that. Not very much of it, but we can give a little example of what it looks like or it might look like.

So students would log in to their LMS and then find this video. Or it can be attached to the [audio out]. We'll be working together. I've been teaching in our California Community Colleges for the past 16 years, and I really love my job and I really love working with you. I have a few things I want to show you about our Canvas page. So let's go ahead and take a look at what it looks like and how you can navigate the pages. So I'm going to share that with you.

So this is what our home page looks like when you log into Canvas, and of course, you're going to see a video here from me. This video, I'm making for you, and then you're going to see this Start tab. This Start tab, when you click it, it'll bring you to the first thing you need to see in the course, and then all you need to do is click the next page.

As you can see, it's different, because now, it's welcoming them, but it's also giving them instructions and it's going to show them how to navigate in the course. Now, my students are ESL students so I try to go very slowly with this. Your student group may not need as much attention in this area, but I do think it's really important to have that welcome video and have the explanation about what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to do it to get started.

So now, I'm going to turn it over to my brilliant and beautiful colleague, Chris Vela Che.

Chris Vela Che: Thank you, Katrina, and welcome, everybody. Happy Thursday. Just to add a few-- well, to add a little bit to what Katrina explain about the welcome video and the navigation video. You want to chunk it out. I have done both at the same time, like introducing myself and telling my students how to navigate campus and it has become chaotic.

It's too much information. So if you divide those videos, one where you introduce yourself and then the other one where you explain Canvas, that will be excellent. Just a tip from my experience. So chunk it out always.

So I am going to talk a little bit about what I do for my ESL level 1. I have an ESL level 1 class. We are talking about low beginner students in Canvas. So there is a lot of things that goes behind instructions that I send my students, but the most important thing is that you provide a video on how to navigate-- and well, first of all, how to log in.

That's a process that a lot of my ESL level 1 students struggle and it takes time. So make a video of how to log in to Canvas and share it with students and then make another video on how to navigate Canvas as well. Chunk it out.

So I'm going to show you a little bit of what I do. So first of all, I just I try to have a plan of what I want to do. You can start-- I started as well in the past with just modeling the steps and then screen record. So if I'm showing them how to log in to Canvas, what is the first step they need to do if they're using a computer or if they're using a cell phone?

That's two different things and two different experiences, so you have to take that into consideration. Most of my students have only cell phones, not necessarily laptops. So I have to make sure I have a video on how to log in to Canvas using their cell phones. You can screen record your instructions using Zoom.

Practice first and then go through the process. Make sure you don't have a lot of fillers when you are speaking. Be clear and slow and to the point, especially if you have a beginner ESL class. You can also use other software like Loom and Screencastify and other softwares that are out there.

Option 2, if you want to spend or invest a little extra time, you can write instructions and create a slideshow that you can share with students so they can interact directly with your instructions. You can add hyperlinks when you have instruction number 1. Log in to Canvas. You put a link exactly what do they need to click, and then they can interact with your slideshow whether it's a PowerPoint or a Google slide.

But this option 2 for me has been the most useful when I create a slideshow that is super, it is very explicit. That's the word. Explicit.

If you're making a short video on how to log in to Canvas, make sure that you add accurate English captions. So for those students who-- I mean, it's good for their English to read what you're saying. I have found out that my students enjoy reading the video that I send them.

Read them and listen to the video as well. And then, of course, after you finish that video off your steps, make sure you share that with students as soon as possible. I think these steps should be part of the steps of orientation. As soon as they enroll in your class, boom. Get a video how to log into Canvas, because it takes time. It takes time.

It's a process, so they need time before classes begin. You can also post this-- and I don't know about what kind of elements you are using, but I have created a page where I have all my resources in case I get new students, I can just direct them. OK, go to the Resource page in Canvas and check how to log in to Canvas. Everything is there.

So this is an example of what I did last year with my ESL level 1 class. I made some slideshows, and as you can see, it's pretty explicit. I had a computer and then where you need to go. Get on the internet. What is the internet, some of them may ask.

google.com, right? www, blah blah, blah. Then you click right here. Right here. Then after, I illustrated all the steps. I screen record the slides and of course captions.

Captions are very, very important to make your video accessible to all. Then I share it. I share it as soon as students are enrolled a week at least before class begins. This is then my onboarding system for my beginning level ESL class.

I typically send a hello from Chris video, similar to what Katrina showed us before, along with the welcome letter and then the syllabus and the Canvas login and navigation. I just send them an email with all the links that they need to click on at least a week before classes begin. Let's see. I also send them reminders.

I mean, my students are probably tired when I send-- I usually send them reminders every other day, hey, log in to Canvas. So reminders, you can use reminders our elements, which is Canvas. I use-- well, sometimes I use Pronto, Remind, or emails. Hey, class begins next Monday, have you logged in to Canvas?

Do you need help? Again, reminders. You want to be buggy-- well, not bugging, but have the students think about their classes before they begin. I also send them an online learner best practices.

Some of my students have never been to school, let alone being an online learner. So what is expected if I'm an online learner? So I send them some best practices. Log in to Zoom a few minutes early in case you have technology-related problems. You don't want to be late.

So things that they can be prepared. Remember, if you-- I'm sorry. If you do repetition and if you put a routine, ESL, lower levels or beginners are more likely to succeed. Repetition is key. Routine is key for lower levels.

So that's it on my end for beginning level onboarding. I'm going to pass the baton to Kristi Reyes, and she will share what she does for her advanced class.

Kristi Reyes: I think we'd all love to see one of those videos, so maybe if we had time, we can go back and see that at the end. And I'll just say that I work with teachers all over the state and even some teachers in other states and I've heard again and again teachers say, well, the beginning ESL students, they can't study online. They can't do it. They don't know how, but it's worked for us actually, teachers.

They can do it. We can't make the excuse for them that they don't have the English to do it, because a lot of them do have the technology skills and they are ready to do it. Some of them don't granted, but I feel like if we don't teach them the technology, I don't think there is anyone out there who is going to do it, and they're there already at a disadvantage by having low level literacy.

Are we putting them at a second disadvantage putting up another barrier and keeping him behind by not helping them gain digital literacy? I don't think we want to do that. So if our skills are not up to speed, all of us in this presentation, I'm sure all of you you're here because you see that this is an important thing. Online learning is the wave of the future.

Carolyn Zachary said we're not going back. We've seen the convenience of offering more distance learning and more hybrid options for our learners. We're not going back. So we need to get comfortable with it and it should start even with our lowest level students starting very small. Even if we're just face to face with them, we can start to demonstrate for them, how they can at least use their email at least.

So anyway, that's my little preaching from the soapbox.

Chris Vela Che: One second, Kristi. Kristi, can I just add to that? I didn't share this, but let me share experience from doing all of this because this is a lot of work. But once you have all of these onboarding content, you can recycle.

You don't have to-- you can start little like Kristi said. I had a student from Venezuela, she's 82 years old, and she spends-- well, at the beginning was like a different language. For her, it was chaotic. I had to talk to the family members and we couldn't get her on Canvas until maybe a few weeks later and then she's been taking classes for a couple semesters with me because she's pretty, pretty low, but she was able to do homework recently in Canvas. 81 year old by herself.

Oh, my goodness. Like my gosh, all the work is paying off, but it is possible. And Kristi, you are right. There's evidence, so yeah, go ahead, Kristi, I'm sorry. I needed to share that.

Kristi Reyes: Yes, we will. Thank you for that question. We're going to share the link in just a moment. So I've been teaching hybrid to our program's highest level English language learners. The ones who are getting ready to transition into adult high school program or they're getting better English for their jobs or even the professions.

I have many professionals in my classes. Many of you probably have or they're looking to transition into our college career or even transfer level courses to go on to a university program eventually. So I've been doing this since 2015, where before that, I was even using Blackboard when our college had that, and then we transitioned like the majority I think almost probably all the community colleges now are using Canvas.

Around 2015 we transitioned, and so I've been I was using blended learning. And so you can do that. If your program is not using hybrid or online learning or distance learning, you should still start to get students used to using an LMS because their kids are using Google Classroom, Schoology, maybe even Canvas, and so that will give them-- I see immigrant students, the roles are often switched where they're depending on their kids so much and they're so out of the loop with what their kids are doing that can you imagine if you just don't even know what's going on with your kids?

But if they can help their kids. We spend hours helping my middle school age son with his homework, and if I were not speaking English and I didn't know the technology, I would not be able to help him at all, but I can help him because I have at least the technology. The math part, I don't have.

But anyway, so I've been teaching hybrid for a while, and all of these things that you've been sending out, I have to tell you, our program has been managed enrollment since the early 2000s. If you don't have managed enrollment, you might want to consider it, because it works really well. We have eight week terms.

We do have several classes too that are open enrollment, but with the pandemic and the move to remote instruction, our courses now and we're still in remote instruction for a little bit longer. We had to become much more flexible and so, while we send all this out a week or two before, students are coming in the day before, the day of, a week after the middle of a term. Some students are even coming at the end, so it's good to compile this all maybe in one module somewhere in your LMS.

And as Chris said, then you have it there and you can just copy it over into your new course and update it. And so things like a liquid syllabus, which a liquid syllabus-- I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with that-- is not the paper form but clickable like a Google site. I've been using Smore, which is a newsletter, and that's something you can send out before the class begins in the event that students don't yet know how to enter that LMS, which is true for a lot of our students. They're struggling at first, but they can still get the preview to the course in advance.

I like to use Padlet a lot. Are you all familiar with Padlet? Can you type yes or no in the chat? Do you use Padlet? Yeah, so Padlet has this map wall, and I like to create a map and send it out to my students, and they don't have to create an account or anything, and it's really great if you're teaching ESL, if you're teaching immigrant students, they can just tap or click on where they're from.

And so not only am I finding out where they're from, they're connecting with each other, and they can see, oh, my gosh. You're kidding me. There's someone from my hometown in the class? So that's a way you can even have them start to connect with each other and they can put a photo or a video. And then it's just so important once your class is started to have in your LMS your presence.

Early in the beginning of online instruction, and I think even today, there seems to be this idea is, oh, we'll build the LMS, we'll let them know, and we'll just sit back and wait for them to come. We'll build it and they'll come. It does not work that way. Online instruction requires even more hand-holding like times two, and it can be so isolating.

So we need to be there. Hi, students, welcome, come in, come in, just like we are in the physical classroom. We need to be present and welcoming with that warm, welcoming presence that we have in our LMS. Continue, please.

When I first started my hybrid classes, it was a summer evening class, and I was convincing myself that it was doomed to fail. I really should have had a better attitude, but I decided, how can I how can I do something to help them? It was the first time I had ever taught it. It was one of our very first hybrid courses for our program, and so I decided on the left you can have a look at this.

I decided to create a contract to help them understand some of the class time is going to be in person, but you have to keep up with the coursework. You're going to have to go into the LMS. You have to, otherwise you're going to be behind. So it was just a little checklist of the policies, like I understand that I need to log into Canvas. I understand that this is a 12 hour week course with three hours online.

So it was just a little thing for understanding, and then another thing that you should really include in your syllabus and stress, not just in your first class meeting if you're doing synchronous and have it repeated throughout your course is the understanding of what netiquette is. Our ESL students will not know that word usually, but when you give some examples, they can come up with the examples with you as well, maybe even have them formulate the rules for proper and polite communication online. I usually formulate my own, but there they are and I have them right there really early on in the syllabus so that everybody's clear.

If you are including-- and I think traditionally, online instruction, especially if the community college level where they're credit and non credit, online usually meant asynchronous. You just go into the LMS and you do the work, but we've seen that our students can do Zoom, Google Meet, whatever, and there's real value in that, especially for language instruction. My students love it.

They show up for Zoom all of the time, so the students have been able to keep up with the class despite all of their different things going on in their lives. Lack of child care, work schedules that may change. If we record the classes and post them in the LMS, they will persist. They'll watch those recordings and keep up. It's really important to have one link for all your class meetings so that-- I even have one link for all of my courses.

I'm teaching three courses so I don't get confused. So I think that's a really great thing that we can think about going forward. So Katrina mentioned the teacher student connection, but we also really, really need to have in our LMS just like you would see if you were walking in your school and you pass an ESL classroom how you would see students in small groups talking. Somehow, whatever you can do, you need to replicate that in the LMS.

So that can be structured discussions that you set up, but you can also have a discussion post that's open. A discussion board, where they can go there and they can post questions about where's the best place to find Mexican food around here? I need pet care this weekend.

Does anybody have a reference for me for pet care? I'm going to go travel this weekend. So unstructured, too, and what I like to do is for the structured, it's usually based on some grammar or vocabulary or something a theme or a reading for the structured discussions, and I include a rubric very clear up front with very clear explicit instructions of what I expect.

So when you really set it up well like that and model it and you are present, the teacher, within the discussions and the activities, then you can rest assured that there will be better participation. And we need to remember to offer a variety of modalities for presenting our information to students. Not just text based. So that means teachers get ready, learn how to make video.

It's easy to record yourself in Zoom, but also, give different ways for students to express themselves. A lot of LMSes in the discussion forum allow students to record their voices or even create video. Flipgrid is a great tool for video. And then some teachers say, well, a discussion board for level 1?

Well, yes, you could do a discussion board for level 1. You do it just how you teach writing. You have a language frame. Even for level 1, you could have students maybe write on a piece of paper, my name is, I live in, and then they have to type it out, and they're working on their keyboarding and typing skills.

Next, please. I think a lot of teachers that I've talked to have started doing this. I don't know if your agency office hours. If you're a full time faculty like at a community college, you have to have office hours, and at my school, our associate or part time faculty, they get some compensation to give office hours.

When we're in person, that meant sitting in a classroom and waiting for the students to come, but a great thing that we can use in the future is office hours that might meet our students availability better. So for example, when we're in person, my class is from 8:30 to almost 12 o'clock, and my office hour-- I'm not going to stick around all afternoon because they're not sticking around. I usually have my office hour at 12. Well, they're going on to their next class or they're going to lunch, so I'm usually alone for that office hour, to be honest with you.

So instead, maybe it would be a really good use of the technology that we have learned to use over the last almost 20 months, hasn't it been by now? We can use Zoom, we can use Google Meet. We can use all of these different tools to offer office hours at different times. Maybe if you teach in the morning, maybe an office hour that students would actually come to might be later in the day.

So think about that. And how I've done that is-- because I still don't like to sit around in Zoom is that I asked students to make an appointment. And Doodle-- you're probably familiar with Doodle. You sometimes get a Doodle invite to find out who all can meet at a certain time. But Doodle, if you make an account, you can create a bookable calendar.

So you put in your availability, you send the link to students, they can open it and click, and then you will get an email saying, Rosemarie would like to meet you at this time, and then you can just send the Zoom link and it goes straight to your calendar and there you are. Calendly is another one that I've heard a lot of teachers use, but we need to do this. If you've ever done this, when students stop coming in person or they stop being present in my online course, I text them, I email them, and sometimes I don't get a response.

Telephone calls do get a response. Old fashioned telephone calls. Now, our students tend to text more. The research shows that 90% or more. The last time OTN did a text survey of select adult agencies adult serving VOA agencies, it was 90% of the students surveyed have cell phones. I'm sure it's more now.

I'm sure it's more. So texting for sure, but they may not answer. But if you call them, it works miraculously. It works so well, so I really encourage you, because it's our job security that's on the line, and when students get a phone call from the teacher, they'll be there the next day. I guarantee it.

They will be there. They know that you care and they know that you noticed that they were not there. So to finish up, onboarding has become so important during this pandemic. It has, because if we're still offering remote instruction, our students don't osmosis how to get into Zoom, how to log into an LMS.

So I think you can see it's become very important to do. But what I'm saying is we should continue it even when we go back to in-person instruction. Even if you never teach online, you should be sending out things to your students about your course before the class begins. It humanizes you.

It is a practice that will get students excited about the class. It will help them persist. So that's my message going away. So that's our presentation. Go ahead.

I will share the link in the chat, and if you have anything you would like to share, please go ahead. I think we have two minutes or so. So you see the evaluation there as well as the link to these slides. Is there something new that you would like to try? I think it would be a really great idea-- I think someone from an agency in Oakland mentioned having a systematic onboarding process.

If you could get together with your fellow teachers and come up with that, if students were receiving something that looked the same or some similar pieces of information from every teacher, that would be really wonderful. So a systematic process for onboarding is a great idea. Highly recommend that.

Holly Clark: Kristi, we do actually still have 12 minutes, according to my clock. It's up to you guys. We can open it for Q&A?

Kristi Reyes: Yeah, so if you want to unmute yourself and ask a question or let us know if there's something that sparked an idea in your mind of something you would like to try. And then if not, I'd like to go back and maybe Chris could show a couple of minutes of one of her videos that she created, and I just have to say that, yes, our email is at the beginning of the slide show. So I put the slides in the chat, and if you go to the beginning, our emails are at the beginning.

And I just have to say that Chris took this risk. She did so much work creating all of these videos and slideshows for students. We first said, oh, can you try just for the languages that are the top three languages spoken by students in our program, which are of course Spanish because we're about 50 miles from the border in San Diego County-- North San Diego County.

Our second most common spoken language by our students in our program is Farsi, actually Chinese and then Farsi. But she went through and made these ways to translate the videos into the languages spoken by all of our students. So there was no way they couldn't figure it out. There was just no way they couldn't figure out.

So the first time she decided, OK, pretty much our college said, you have to have Canvas open to your students for remote instruction. Whether you use it a lot or not, you have to have it open and at least have your syllabus posted in there. So she decided to start using it, and we're our own little professional learning community, the three of us.

And she emailed me and it was about five days before the class was going to begin, her first time to use Canvas, and you can see when students have logged in, and she said, oh my God, some students have logged into Canvas. They've already been in there an hour and she was so excited. So you can do it. You can do it with even beginning level students.

Chris Vela Che: So this is the video that I created in collaboration with other instructors. They help me with some of the trends. Just to make sure the translation was accurate, we were asking everybody checking out if the translation was accurate. But yeah, I got a lot of support from our colleagues.

As you can see, I am not writing, well, let me play the voice here. One second.

[video playback]

- Click on the A to Z index. Click on the letter P. Click on the letter P. Click on Password, Student, Student Account, set up for new students only.

Chris Vela Che: Let me put it in a different language..

- Here, you will add a small w without any zeros in your student ID number. Oh, sorry, everybody. So I'll play it.

Add a small w, your student ID number without the 0. Once you're ready, click on Set Password, and here, you will check your email, because MiraCosta College will email you a One-Time Passcode, or OTP. This is an example of an OTP. So check your email and type in your email.

Chris Vela Che: I have in 11 languages I have Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, and English, of course.

[end playback]

Kristi Reyes: Chris, I think there was a question. Did you use Adobe Spark or how did you create that video?

Chris Vela Che: It was-- Well, I used Loom to screen record and I use the YouTube Music Library for free copyright music from YouTube. And what else did I use? YouTube to upload it to my channel.

I upload it so it's-- I did my captions on YouTube. If you're using Canvas as an LMS, I think if you have studio, that's an easier way to caption your videos. But I used Google Slides for my instructions to illustrate the instructions and then screen record with Loom.

Now, let me show you here how Loom looks like. Are you guys familiar with Loom? It's similar to Screencastify, but again, you don't need to use this. You can screen record with Zoom and it's as effective as a Loom, right? As Loom.

And then I upload it to-- oh, I also use WeVideo. WeVideo, is everybody familiar with WeVideo? WeVideo is a video editing software. It has a free account for a certain amount. Well, a little bit of-- I think it's just like a few minutes of video that they allow you. But yes, but like I said, on my portion of the presentation, you don't have to start doing all of these things like YouTube and all these softwares that I use.

You can start with something simple as modeling using Zoom. But yeah, I can add the things that I used for the video in a different slide over here. I didn't add it, but I can add it. So when we share the link, you can find all the materials that I use for my video. And is there any other questions? I'm not looking at the chat, but I don't know if with strategies like teachers.

Yes, WeVideo is a free program where you can edit and add many things. It's pretty cool. And it took time. I'm not going to lie. It took time to make that video, but once you create that video, you can use re-use it. And it's effective, because I have evidence that my students, my level 1 students, get on board in Canvas during the week that I send that.

Right now, we begin this next term this week, and I have 10 students already logged in to my Canvas course. So without my help, it was just only the videos that I sent. So it works, but it has to be something that you invest time and think about a plan. What is it that you want to accomplish? So yes.

Kristi Reyes: We have question from Gorance. Was support given by your institutions for teachers to make the adjustment to using an LMS and Zoom for instruction? Our teachers in our particular program at the higher levels have been encouraged to use an LMS, even though they weren't teaching hybrid or online. So many of them had been doing that for quite a long time.

Well, the pandemic-- Friday the 13th, March 13, it hit right at our spring break for our school. So our school took an extra week of spring break and our college offered a week long of training, but so much of what they offered do not really apply to us, because, well, it's just so different what we do. You know what we do in adult ed.

It's not quite the same, and plus, our students don't even-- the students that take credit classes, they register themselves. That's not really how it works for us. Our students don't do that, and so there were so many pieces missing, so we were encouraged by our dean to create-- there were a couple of us. I was one of them.

We created a program, and I'm going to be talking about it in the next session here coming up in Cape. And we stretch it out over a year to, not just talk about how to use Canvas, that was part of it. But in Canvas, teachers were also learning about how to deliver high quality online instruction. So Katrina was a graduate and Chris already knows all this, but she is currently participating, and so that was something that we did.