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OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Avi Jones: Thanks for coming. Hi, I'm Avi. This is my co-presenter, Cindy. She's very small. Cindy sadly got sick and couldn't come. But I think she's joining online. So thank you, Cindy, if you're there. 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, OER Texts. I should have put HyFlex in the title. It's in the presentation, but it's not a the title. HyFlex ahead.

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 what was your reaction back then?

Speaker: Weird.

Avi Jones: Oh, excuse me.

Speaker: [ INAUDIBLE ]

Avi Jones: Must have been expensive.

Speaker: [ INAUDIBLE ]

Avi Jones: Exactly. Yeah. Don't you want a real class? That's what virtual means, is almost real. Not real. In other words, not real. It's not a class, it's almost a class. And then what about people who got degrees online? Oh, you got your PhD from Phoenix, or whatever it might be. OK, you're not going to be my boss. I'm sorry. That was the attitude. I don't think it's like that anymore. Anyway, so back then there was very little adoption by adult schools, as you all know. And there were some by universities.

Community colleges have led the way since the beginning. Let's just be real. They still do. All of the colleagues that I'm most jealous of teach for community colleges. I do as well, but not to the extent that they do. Anyways, yes, it's very nice. So anyways, when a penguin and a bat love each other very much, we get mixed results. What we learned from 2019, great time to buy stock in Zoom.

Speaker: [giggling] Hindsight.

Avi Jones: So we know what happens then. Emergency online learning, which all of our administrators were very happy about universally, beginning to end, right. And so were the teachers. Not just those closer to retirement, but those closer to grad school. Nobody-- 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. And 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 terrible. None of that stuff happened. And none of it happens now.

So during the emergency, distance learning became the 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 at a University. One of the adult schools was very rural. Very, very few staff, a few students. We only had two ESL teachers. We were both very much part-time. And then I was teaching also at Folsom-Cordova Adult School, which is a medium size. My boss likes when I say that. It is though. It gives me [ INAUDIBLE ]

And so in my foreign language department, we had immediate full adoption. In fact, all across the university there was immediate full adoption. Adult schools too. We weren't going to lose the steps that-- the steps that we taken that year, we weren't going to let go, any of us. So within about a week, we turned it around, didn't we? You remember what happened. We turned it around. We didn't want to do it. It was expensive. It was difficult. People are afraid of getting sick, and we did it.

And again, the community colleges were pretty much already ready to do it. So we learned a few things from them. During emergency online learning at Folsom-Cordova Adult School, our class exams were all administered online. We don't do that anymore because it's very staff-intensive and we don't have tons of staff that can do that. All of us, we're probably exposed to a variety of solutions for this. For us, we had Cindy actually. That's one reason why I would have loved her presence. She did all of the online courses testing.

We didn't have-- she let me know that we didn't have too many people do so. We had more of a drive-by process kind of thing. She had experience 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, CASAS is uniquely administered online. They don't ever come to campus.

What's our takeaway from 2020, aside from all the other things? One-size fits some #OSFS. 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. Yeah, there's a really funny-- I didn't include this meme. But there's a great one about engaging students online. And just involves feather boas, and lots of stuff like that, just really trying to get everyone's attention. And the students are sitting there like Bernie at the inauguration.

So we had the same schism among the instructors. Engaging students online is not always easy. If you're not comfortable with black squares, you can't do this job. Because there are a lot of folks who for different reasons, can't or won't activate a camera. So that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But for folks who do this a lot, 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 my most participating students are ladies who for cultural reasons, won't turn on their cameras. And they're just talking, and talking, and talking. They are some of my best. So the black squares don't scare. All right. Let me get this overlay here. I've been Zooming for a while. A couple of-- just three best practices things. Things that I'm going to rag on just a little bit.

How many people have seen these in a Zoom meeting? Big black rectangles, big black squares. What the heck is going on? The presenter usually doesn't know. Nobody tells them, right. The thing that I often do is I try to simulate the experience that my students are having. So I join on my phone, and I join on my computer, see what it looks like to them. If my grandma can't read that, then it's not working. She is dead. But if she were alive, same metric. 2011. I'm slowly getting over it.

So we need to really think about the human-computer interaction. And how it differs even from street-to-street, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, never mind around the world. My agency doesn't at this time have the bandwidth to loan Chromebooks to everybody. We did for a while, and 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 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, they can participate blah, blah, blah. And then they would have some other thing like a small tablet, Chromebook, maybe a computer, so they can be doing that Burlington, or the Canvas, or what have you. But I want them to be able to participate if 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 UI guy, but I try to think about what it looks like if somebody else.

OK. sorry, this is a pet peeve. When we're sharing Google Docs-- who doesn't, right? We're showing 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. It's just a pet peeve for me. I like to show people-- I want them to feel like they're watching a movie, but there's nothing there except the experience.

So what I'll do is first, I'll punch this up to about 150 or 200. This is for me too. 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 F11 to get rid of that stuff. That's it right there. So that's the other option for that. You're probably all familiar, or you can hit F11. They don't make it easy on these keyboards. Not just this one, but lots of keyboards out there. [ INAUDIBLE ] there's always some other activation key, that you have to hit first-- different on every one. So it's a process.

OK. 2021. I don't want to go back to work.

Speaker: [laughing]

[ INAUDIBLE ]

Avi Jones: [ INAUDIBLE ] All right. My wife likes this one. In 2021, we had partial return to in-person. And 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-- we do entrance 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?

At our agency, we started doing courses test administration in person, again. It was the practical thing to do. And vaccine was widely available, people were taking it. Our distance learning program continued to the delight of some, and the chagrin of others. Not everybody likes it, but that's what this whole presentation is about.

One-size-fits-some. Remember that we heard about the great resignation 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 memory of working in the industry, and then working in a cube farm in education. Didn't want to do that, again. But as agencies and institution types, there's broad variation. I'll tell you about four that I was working for at the time, compare their different strategies.

North Orange Continuing. 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, it's what the students continued to ask for. That's just this campus, it's not everywhere. We still as I mentioned before, we all do CASAS online for all of those online courses. So all assessments are all done online. It's really, really streamlined. The COAAP process is really, really streamlined there.

It's Microsoft Forums. I'm not a fan. But as soon as they complete those, it goes right to their data people. I don't have to print anything out. I don't have to waste any paper. It's just done. It's amazing. Of course, all instructions are 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 my class at the whole community college has Burlington English. So aside from Burlington English, we use absolutely nothing that costs any money. So I've switched to completely OER Texts for this class, and all my classes.

As I mentioned before, in the data here out, the students strongly prefer online learning. Over here at UC Davis, back in-- I'm talking about 2021, now. All of our overseas programs still remained 100% online. When American students did foreign language placements, they were all online. They still are. It's kind of a self-assessment, now. Students whether in-person or at a distance, all of their midterms, and finals, all the big stuff, it's all on the LMS. So we really leapt forward there.

And I think that I actually-- I want to thank the [ INAUDIBLE ] 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 17 hours a week to go to work, and so would a lot of people. UC Davis in the next year-- should be 2022, I can't see what it says. Yeah.

So these days, we're down to about 10% distance learning. We relegate it to when someone is violently ill, that kind of thing. The students are extremely flexible, now, in learning modality. 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.

You tell them, oh, we have to be online-- I did this yesterday. Sorry folks, we have to be online. I'll be in San Diego. Hey, what time? That's the question. That's the whole question. So it's become quite normalized. And we're still doing foreign language proficiency placement exams online, and everything on LMS. And this is true both at the main campus, and at the Center for Professional Education where I teach international students.

What about Folsom-Cordova? This is the school that I am here representing, today. In 2021, it went 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 time, instructors of online courses were teaching from offsite, gradually started coming back to the campus. 100% of CASAS testing being done in-person. As far as the online courses go, everything has been done 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 in about-- will come to that. 2022, about 25%.

Sac State. I teach French here. These days-- when I started teaching there were 2022, 25% distance learning. That's not a regular schedule. But any time we need to do distance learning, we do that as well. The 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, it's just a computer on a podium, the camera facing the instructor, and a camera facing the audience. It's pretty cool, but it's no out. So it works, but it's not ideal.

Of course, all coursework and assessments on the LMS are done on the LMS. And we've done a lot of work on Canvas this year, which I'll come to. 2022, you guys know what happened. We continued to return to in-person, but not 100%. Distance learning is normalized at all levels, kindergarten to grad school. Agencies and instructors figured out they needed to be very agile. We might have to [ INAUDIBLE ] distance learning, if there's a natural disaster. You guys know we had some very bad flooding in Northern California recently.

And what about the next pandemic? I hear that. I hear that from people sometimes. Or the next disaster, whatever happens, right. There are going to be cases where you're not going to want to be driving for safety concerns. So CASAS test administration in-person continues apace. And our distance learning program is continuing at Folsom-Cordova. We have begun adding hybrid courses. That's just a beta test, so we're doing this here. Next year, we want to add HyFlex courses.

OK. I'd like to talk about our Paraeducator Training Program. This is one of our biggest CTE/IET programs. Before the virus, it was taught in person. It was three, or four times a week. Enrollment numbers were not astounding. And everything was done on 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 they can be brought on as an paraeducator.

It's never the math that people have problems with, it's always the English in our district. So being the language teacher, I rewrote this program. And turned it into a heavily English-focused program with mathematics included. Back then, the supplemental stuff was just all flat PDFs. Just really scans of like mimeographs 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.

2020, boom. They asked me to take over the course. So I put it all online. In 2020, our enrollment numbers doubled. And then the next year, tripled. And now they've stayed steady since then. We do everything dynamically on LMS, of course. It's a language arts focus with math. I use [ INAUDIBLE ] for math, I'll tell you exactly which one, later on. All of the supplemental stuff is dynamic. Everything in there, they interact with. So there's no, Teacher, how can I study my math? Oh, I don't know. Go look at this piece of paper. It's none of that.

Now, we graduates about 25 per semester, which gives us about half that many paraeducators. Not everyone goes on to be a paraeducator in our district, but they usually do so somewhere. I also added a lot of asynchronous content. Can't see my gorgeous YouTube face. [ INAUDIBLE ] We're not doing that. Added Asynchronous Content. This is where I'm livestreaming right now on my YouTube channel, which has 56 subscribers. So subscribe if you would.

The training 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 lectures. You can see this one was 45 minutes long. And I think to myself, nobody wants to watch that. But that's not what they tell me. This is the face that I imagine when I post these things. I think, oh it's just me talking. But consistently, these are the qualitative data we get. Very good stuff.

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. You need to take both courses in order to graduate. It 100% online, 100% synchronous. And I extended the curriculum with OERs. So we started putting more human development content into the curriculum. The idea being that if our students graduate, and become paraeducators. 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-- cloud what? If they didn't have any background in it to begin with, then [ INAUDIBLE ] going to prime them. We also want to bring community college courses onto our campus, starting next year. Hope that's what's going to happen, and the students do as well. At elementary algebra, I'll show you exactly which books those are. We've brought on Kieli. Kieli is a professor of human development at Folsom Lake College. So she was a real win for us. And if the plan that I described is carried out next year, she'll be the instructor for those courses.

We added the IET/VESL course. Ask me how to make lots of extra money for your district. This is it, honestly. Because teaching this course, we instruct the 70.2 COAAP, which is the instructional assistant. And doing that alongside the IET course, renders a lot of good stuff on the back-end. [ INAUDIBLE ] EL Civics. We get tangible benefits. The students also get tangible benefits. Kept growing the program, now it's-- I don't know. People keep telling me 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, I'm told by staff. And for those who don't pass, and haven't taken our course, they're allowed to 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 do it again. But usually, what we say is, why don't you take the course? Come take the course, it's only like 4 and 1/2 months long. And then take the test again. So that's an option as well for them.

OK. 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 until 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.

And then there are cultural considerations too. I am a male instructor. Not everybody wants a male instructor. So moving online really remove this barrier. And Yeah, I couldn't be happier, couldn't 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, check-in with us? Nope, we sure don't.

We had 1 out of 25 last semester saying that they did. And we would accommodate that person. She could come in, and Kieli would have a session with her. But it's not happening. Yes, Sir, remain firmly online. Free stuff. Who doesn't like it? Free, Free, Free. 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, its going do that.

This removes that fear because it's free, and it's accessible. You sign up. It takes five minutes to sign up. OER Commons, I found this great book imaginatively called Human Development. It's put out by the Portland State University Press. There's a link. Every single one of these pages here has tiny little URLs for everything that I talk about. So if you see the presentation later on, you downloaded it from somebody, you'll be able to click on all those things.

OK. At this point, all four of these institutions where I currently work have adopted OER Texts. And I've talk about each one. I've talked about NOCE, and Folsom-Cordova. We'll actually come back to those in this slide, which I just touched. At UC Davis, I stopped using any kind of for-pay curriculum like Azhar as I say, 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?

So we really like VHL. It's kind of the foreign languages equivalent of Burlington English. It's very nice. It makes things easy for teachers. Does not make things easy for students. So for folks who might be struggling just to pay for gas to get to class that day-- no, we don't want to do that. Also we want people to enroll for our majors. So [ INAUDIBLE ] OK. This is something I really want to evangelize for. This series of ESL books-- when you go on to OER Commons nothing has a fancy, splashy front page. They're always just black and white, as opposed to the stuff you pay for, right. But image licensing is expensive.

Anyways, Rebecca Al Haider, she's a professor at Reedley College. I always talk to somebody who knows her. I've spoken to her before, she's great. Anyways, she's written all of these different ESL books. And there's a great crossover between OER Commons, and Canvas Commons because she has taken like four of her books and put them online in full form. So everything from her books has been translated to dynamic exercises in Canvas.

So whenever I get a new student, and we're getting ESL, intermediate ESL, advanced ESL. I say, guys, here's the whole book. The first module in the class is textbook-- one word, 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'll look and say, oh, yeah it is. And sometimes they do and they don't tell me. I don't know, but not a lot of templates. So thank you, Teacher Rebecca. And I always acknowledge her. Every time I'm teaching with her stuff, I say, well, Teacher Rebecca says, blah, blah, blah.

What else? The Latin lesson, today. Better beware. Students succeed when we hold an in-person orientation. I'm talking about the Paraeducator Training Program. But we want to do this for more of our offerings. This is something we didn't do for the first four semesters that I taught the class. And then Kieli 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 Zoom. We showed them how to get on Canvas. We showed them how to do this, to do that. And you know what, I didn't spend a week with tech trouble, the first week of class. 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 a come-up. It was really nice. One-size-fits-some. All right. So I was a little rigid in my thinking. I thought, I don't want to do that on campus. Lots of folks are not vaccinated. But turns out masks prevent COVID. So I put one of those on.

OK let's talk about our DLAC Project. We're really excited about it. You guys know that HyFlex is kind of new in Adult Education. At Folsom-Cordova, it's entirely new. We don't have any [ INAUDIBLE ] yet. We do have three of these Polycom cameras, which are cool. But they take unidirectional pictures. So if I were to set one 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, but it's not quite the same experience. But if I put it at the back of the room, it would be equally as effective. But it's myopic.

So currently, 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 not endemic to instruction. But I could be projecting on that one, I haven't done the qualitative research to find out. Anyways our proposal is to implement HyFlex learning modalities in ABE/ASE, ESL, and in our Math Success Academy.

We've got teachers identified for all of these. They're really, really good folks every time I go to their classrooms, it's just-- wow, you are great. So those are the ones that we want doing this kind of thing in my view. OK. There's me teaching the unvaccinated with the Polycom camera, which is 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 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. So wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And it's been working well. But since I'm-- certain things are just in the domain of unions. I can't mount things on walls. I can't paint my classroom. I can't do stuff like that. So I can't take the Polycom, 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 [ INAUDIBLE ]

Our new modality will be HyFlex. 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 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, and maybe there are many middle grounds, in fact.

Here is our timeline. Next year, the 2023/2024 school year, our process is this. We have completed our DLAC Project proposal. That's why I'm here, today. Our principal has just finished the grant application. I think it's a Measure H Grant, I think it's what it was. That's done. Waiting to hear back from that. And part of that grant is, of course, the Owls. But right now, we're carrying out the Polycom Camera beta testing. I should mention that we have those cameras in two other classrooms, and the teachers are trying them out as well.

In March, we always do a Needs Assessment. So that will happen as it does usually. It's coming up, and 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 don't call me there.

Speaker: [laughing]

Avi Jones: Just kidding. And it doesn't do it when I want it to. I think there's something wrong. There we go. 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 found in the first semester. For further language teaching adventures, please come find me on YouTube @LANGUAGETEACHERING 3266. They gave me that, I couldn't do anything about it.

And also you could check me out on academia, and hire me to do something. I could do great classes for your district, wherever you might be. Also OTAN, and I have my email address here. But you can find that easily enough. Hey, there he is. OK. Please contact me, ajjones@fcusd.org. I'm Avi. Thank you very much.