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Otan Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

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OTAN Online. Digital Leadership Academy, D LAC, 2021 Mid-Project Report: Moreno Valley Adult School. May 13, 2021. Slide, Bridging the Pharmacy Tech Gap, a list of team members

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Good morning, everyone. My name is Jennifer Griffin, I am the DLAC lead and GED teacher and lead teacher for Moreno Valley Community Adult School, and we're excited to be here today to present our project, our mid-year review, for bridging the pharmacy tech gap. Before I introduce the rest of the team, I do want to tell you in the chat I just put the link through a Google Doc, and it will take you to all of the links that you will see as we go through our presentation. So you can go and explore those on your own time.

Our team members include Dr. Patricia Bazanos our principal, Lolita Anderson our ESL teacher and ESL department chair, she's here presenting with me today. Cynthia Canchola is our CTE pharmacy tech teacher, she is not here but she worked in partnership and collaboration with us as we went through this whole process. And then I am also joined by Jennifer McGrath, our GED teacher and lead teacher.

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Slide, Moreno Valley Community Adult School, Programs We Offer, a bullet point list

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A little bit about our agency, Moreno Valley offers adult basic education classes, English as a second language, high school diploma, high school equivalency or GED and our careers tech ED department.

Currently, we have 696 students enrolled in a virtual, 100% virtual program. Prior to the COVID pandemic, we averaged about 1,000 students who would come to in either morning, or an Afternoon, evening session, and then COVID hit and we had to pivot.

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Slide, Issues We Saw in the Wake of the COVID Pandemic, a bullet point list

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So prior to COVID, we were 100% face to face. We had two programs, a high diploma online and a GED online section that was a hybrid but not really, those were the only two programs that we had that had any type of online component.

The pandemic required that all of us really just pivoted and did everything that we were doing in the face to face instruction, instruction and turning it into a technology-based setting, which was a lot. So this DLAC course that we took with Destiny Simpson and Dr. Porter and our coaches in OTAN, it really helped us address these issues and rethink how we were going to do this as we move forward and we'll get more on that in just a minute.

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Jennifer McGrath. Slide, M V C A S Pharmacy Technician Program, a bullet point list

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And so to introduce our pharmacy technician program, we have had this program in existence in our school for the past three years.

It is a nine month course and includes internship, which is where the students actually go out in the pharmacies and learn more about and get on-the-job site experience, and towards their hours for total certification. In order to be in this program, they have to have a high school diploma, or equivalency and a valid social security number. And upon completion of this program, they are able to earn their immunization certification which is where they're able to actually give shots in the pharmacies, which is helping out with the COVID situation. And as well as they get their state board certification to be a pharmacy tech.

And it is good for the state of California that is also a National Board equivalency of this as well, where they could go and travel to different states to be able to work as a pharmacy tech.

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Slide, Pharmacy Technician Students, pictures of students in the hallway of the school, studying in a lab, and sitting at a table with a scale

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And here's some pictures of some of our students, and this is pre COVID, so that's why they don't have their masks on, so these pictures were taken pre COVID. And you can see here and those are our classrooms and some of our cohort students and we have students that are practicing learning how to do the measurement and the accounts of their medications. And as well as how to weigh the different medications for compound medications where they have to put different ones together.

So this is part of their training that they do on site in the class, then they take this experience out into the field.

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Slide, The Future of Pharmacy Technicians, a quote from Pharmacist dot com and pictures of people in white coats in pharmacies

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And part of our reason for doing this, we offer this course [AUDIO OUT] place because there is a high demand for pharmacy technicians in the area and especially the next two years there is a projection at least 2000 pharmacy technician positions that will need to be filled in the area, and this is for the Riverside and San Bernardino County areas. So there is a great need for this particular entry level job for our students.

And with that being said, and because of the fact that there could be a greater demand for helping out our medical officers and helping to provide vaccinations, our pharmacy techs can be certified to give those shots as well in the pharmacies. And this is a picture of one of our students down here who actually graduated from our program and she works in the field. And just a quick story, she was the one who gave my husband his second vaccine shot, so just about a month ago. It was pretty neat to have one of our former students giving a shot to my husband, that was pretty cool.

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Slide, How will this course address the gaps, a bullet point list

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So basically what we're doing to help our pharmacy technician program, is that we work in collaboration with our pharmacy teacher. She has identified some skill areas where we need to help to grow our enrollment in the pharmacy tech program. We need to help our students to have to bridge these gaps, and so we decided to create what's called a bridge course. And doing this bridge course we've identified five gap areas that will help our students before they make the transition to go into the actual pharmacy tech program.

So what this is, we are developing a customer service course so they can learn a little bit about what it's like to be behind the counter and communication skills and whatnot. And they will also have better background in medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, and as well as strengthening their skills in math and what the areas of medical mathematics that they need for this particular course. And it's also going to line up more closely with our CASAS math tests. And that last component is our computer and digital literacy skills, where we need to help strengthen student skills and working with the computers because they're going to be online using the computers quite a bit. And as well as working with the pharmacy techs, the software that is being run in the pharmacies.

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Slide, Recruitment, screenshots of the Moreno Valley Twitter page and website

(SPEECH)
And so I will take it off to you Jenny.

So like many agencies when COVID hit, we saw a decline in our enrollment and they were scared of technology, they weren't sure how class was going to work, they weren't sure how they were going to be able to do school when they couldn't come to the site. We did see a drop, but to combat that we, recruited heavily on social media and our website to get students enrolled and get them ready to go. To enroll and recruit students for this pharmacy tech class, we plan to do class visits be it virtual or in-person depending on how the fall rolls out in 2021.

Our counselors are speaking to interested students as well as teachers, and former students who went through the CTE program are coming back and talking to students who could be potentially interested to recruit them towards it.

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Slide, Technology Orientation, a bullet point list

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We also noticed that we had some gaps in our students digital literacy skills as far as how are we going to do school. Like all of you when we pivoted to Zoom in online instruction, we really did struggle getting students into the site. How to get to do a classroom, how to log into a zoom, and there were several hours of myself and other teachers sitting down with students one on one, going through how to do that.

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A website, Technology Boot Camp, with links to videos

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So to mitigate some of the frustration experienced by students and by teachers, we put together this technology orientation website, it's also on that Google Docs that I just sent you. In here it has just some basic how to videos, how to log in school account Google, the ins and outs of Google Classroom. And we use this just as a reference for teachers and staff alike to reference and then they could give this website link to their students, and it's also synced to our school website. If you don't have YouTube, if you're not using it, I encourage you to, there's a lot of great stuff in here.

Something that we are most proud about is, not only did we make this as a staff for our teachers and students use, but some of our students with the initiative and decided that they were going to help out. So with that Lolita, could you please talk about the student created tutorials?

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Lolita Anderson. Slide, A Google Doc titled Digital Resources for Student Devices, comprised of a table with hyperlinks

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Yes of course. So by now you are fully aware that digital literacy is a valuable tool for lifelong learning. So once you get your adult language learners to buy in, it's important that you're conscious of the devices that they're using, and that brings us to the student created tutorial. So I got my students to buy in and I had over 30 students joined on zoom. As soon as I asked the students to use annotation tools, I had students asking for help. I realized I was helping them based on the device I was on. Other students were trying to help based on the devices they were on.

So one thing, before this Zoom chaos turned into some chaos, I thought we all know how to use YouTube, right? Yes, OK. So I asked the students to open up a new tab and basically search for tutorials based on the device that they're on. So we use Burlington English, we're on Zoom and we use Google Classroom. So they started searching and I couldn't copy and paste from the chat fast enough. I mean students caught on how to copy and paste onto the document that I was using. And so the next thing we know it became a collective effort, and it was just very empowering for the students and extremely helpful. And it's OK that we have dupes, because every student's effort is in there. And yeah, that's my testimony and I believe we're moving on to screening and requires scores with Jennifer McGrath.

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Jennifer returns to the previous slide, Technology Orientation

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Yes, so with that and just a little sidebar, Lolita teaches our ESL program and it was ESL students that created all those tutorials. So just wanted to give you a big shout out on that, but I was really proud of that for ESL program.

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Slide, Screening and Required Scores, two tables

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And so now moving on and making that transition in screen. So I'm thinking about how are we going to select our students to be part of the Bridge Program, and what are the type of students we're looking for this Bridge course that we can help better service them and give them a Spark at their interest in wanting to go into the pharmacy tech field.

And so we are looking at our test scores for the ABE and ASE students, we want to target for reading scores in low adult secondary education, NRS levels 5 and 6. And also we are going to go down to as low as an NRS level 4 and 5 and 6 in the math. With the consideration that we are going to be providing a much more intervention in the medical math module for the course, we will be providing a lot more interventions to help fill in those gaps because most of our students may have high literacy, but may not have as high level in skills and mathematics. It could be because of the literacy exams there may be, so that's something that we

Want to take into consideration.

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Slide, Required Scores, a table

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And then, of course for our ESL students, we will be looking at targeting the ESL students that are in NRS level six advanced level. And keeping in mind that these students will be probably in their current ABE, ESL classes, and also maybe doing their GED classes or high school diploma classes and finish them. And they may take this rich course at the same time. So it's kind of a National championship, and even have a goal setting up, Oh OK, I'm Richmond in pharmacy tech, I want to get my skills ready to go to that level.

So we're looking at this student population here, to help tie-in that and then they help, the goal is to have them when they're finished with their ESL, ABE classes. And this is, of course, the way to make that transition to enroll the actual pharmacy tech program and continue their pathway into a job. And so how we bridge this gap, Lolita.

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Slide, What Resources will we use?

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Burlington English as and online learning management system the ESL department uses and also credits for increasing ESL CASAS test scores. So these students are meeting their benchmarks payment points, but Burlington English also has a career readiness courses, and of those CTE courses is pharmacy technician. So having said that, our hope here at the Moreno Valley Community Adult School is to be in collaboration with Burlington English. And get permission to integrate their curriculum, supplemental material, worksheets, and embed them into some of our five modules that we are offering , and intro to pharmacy. I believe that gets us to our next slide--

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Slide, Outcomes and Future Goals, a bullet point list

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That's OK, I just wanted to add on to that as well, and is that in addition to using Burlington English as one of our resources, but just be the pharmacy tech soft skills component of it. We are also contemplating in a variety of resources the curriculum would be using, the actual pharmacy tech curriculum to fill in for the anatomy and physiology and as well as for the medical mathematics department. We'll be using Ans-tech sources and Anna Bright right and teach creative resources.

So it's going to be a blended of a variety curriculum for these modules. And then with that, the whole goal is that we're looking at some outcomes and couple outcomes here what is that, the main idea is to increase and sustain enrollment in the pharmacy tech program. We want to expand that and create more enrollment for this course. And also of course to support the increasing job market demand for pharmacy technicians in the Inland Empire Region , which includes the city of Moreno Valley.

And with this in mind, we're hoping to expand our medical pathways, and build further bridge courses to create and expand our medical pathways into medical billing and coding, phlebotomy. We do have a phlebotomy program on our campus, we want to do a great bridge course for that program as well, and for hopefully a future medical Assistance program in the future.

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Slide, Public Domain

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And one of the things we would like to be able to do is, because this is such a new and very unique adventure, is that after we have piloted this course in the fall-- this fall we're going to be piloting this course and over the next year through refinements and evaluations and seeing how it works and everything.

We're going to use the Moodle platform to create this course and put it in there. So we have a show that we're going to be working with, and we're to build the course in there. And after it's all said and done, over the next year after the second year of our cohort, we would like to put this out on the public domain and put it out there and offer it for other adult education agencies across the country to have access to it, to see if it's something that could be helpful for their programs as well. So kind of giving back to the community what we have gained from our DLAC program, we want to give something back, so this is a very exciting venture that we'll be doing.

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Slide, How Did the D LAC Process and OTAN Assist Us, a bullet point list

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And Jen.

The long and the short of it, I know we're running low on time. So the DLAC process and the OTAN course, without this program and these courses, we wouldn't be here today presenting to you about the bridging the pharmacy tech gap, we wouldn't be able to do that. To date we have developed our orientation materials and we've worked it into our master schedule for fall of 2021. This whole process assisted us in developing our leadership and presentation styles and communication styles.

And the work that Dr. Porter provided allowed us to really see where our strengths were and different ways we needed to approach tasks. And then all of our DLAC training provided us to learn and network with other adult agencies and pull ideas together, because it's really better to use more than one brain right. The smartest person in the room is really the room. So that's really how DLAC and OTAN assisted us. Jenn if you could move it on to the next?

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Slide, Special Thanks to

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So a special Thanks to Dr. Porter, Destiny Simpson, Neda, Penny and all of OTAN support staff, and a special shout out to Coach Susan Gaer. Development of this course, would not be possible and ideally these resources provided valuable insights to what we need to consider, and how we can build this course from the ground up. So thank you so much from Moreno Valley Adult School team.

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OTAN Online. Digital Leadership Academy, D LAC, 2021 Mid-Project Report: Moreno Valley Adult School. May 13, 2021

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