Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Susanne Sparks: So a little bit about me, as I mentioned, I was teaching five years using this, but that was at an adult school for high school Diploma, not a GED.

And so sometimes people think if you have something that's an online instruction, you just sitting there pushing buttons in front of a screen and you're not able to really develop anything more than surface learning. That's not the case here, because there's projects, we're going to get into all of this.

Audience: Yes.

Susanne Sparks: There's projects that the students can do. And anyway, let's get started with that. I'm going to show you a little video here, if it cooperates, and I think it will. It's not using the page down. We'll just go again.

Audience: Tab and it'll go over.

Susanne Sparks: Tab, it did not like tab either. OK, we'll get there. Slide control, I would like to control the slides.

Are you able to advance?

Audience: Michelle, did you make them co-host?

Audience: I think I did.

Audience: Whose screen are we looking at there?

Audience: That's mine.

Audience: So you and Susanne, you're the only one that can advance it if we're looking at your screen.

Susanne Sparks: OK.

Audience: So-- OK, sorry. There you go.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah, thank you. OK. So I'm going to make a co-host. Yes, definitely. It's looking good.

Audience: So now you need to share your screen.

Susanne Sparks: It says I'm screen sharing.

Audience: Maybe add in here.

Susanne Sparks: That's what it--

Audience: You need to get out of the full view.

Susanne Sparks: OK.

Audience: Or should I stop sharing or--

Susanne Sparks: I'm done.

Audience: There. Now that's her.

Audience: OK. That's--

Susanne Sparks: OK.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: It worked out great. OK.

I like this video that I'm going to show you. I used it as the training and introduction for my students. I had my own slide deck. You'll see some of it here, not too much, but I used as a way to get them on board with what it was. So here we go.

[video playback]

- 6:30.

- Technology has made it possible for students to take courses almost anywhere by simply logging onto their computers. And in tonight's education matters, Juanita Stevenson joins us with how the Fresno County Office of Education has been connected to online education for more than 18 years.

- Well, Cyber High is owned and operated by the Fresno County Office of Education and has become one of the leaders in online curriculum in California.

16-year-old Manpreed Sidhu is a senior at Madera High School. He's got a lot on his plate this year, but one thing he's not worried about is his English class.

- I have to get English out of the way. It's really nice to know because then I can just focus on my calculus.

- Manpreed is taking his English class through Cyber High, an online education program that's allowing him to get ahead.

- I'm trying to accelerate myself, so it's have an easier year because it's my last year. So I don't want to put so much hard work. I'm already like stressed out for college.

- The educational institution that is providing the online curriculum to Manpreed parade and Madeira High School is located in this nondescript building in Southeast Fresno.

- Cyber high is a division of the Fresno County Office of Education. All of the employees that work at Cyber High are, in fact, employees of the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools.

- Working at their computers, those employees write the curriculum and provide a host of other educational materials to over 500 schools throughout California.

- We have approximately 70 courses and more than 30 of them are A-G-approved courses, which means that a student who completes the course earns credit for admission to the University of California.

- Community day schools, like the Fresno County Office of Education's Violet Heintz Education Academy primarily used the online program to help its students catch up on their credits.

- We use it to help kids catch up on their credits because most of them come to our school lacking a lot of credits that they should have. They haven't been to school in a while.

- The program is also helping students, like 16-year-old Bradley, stay on track to graduate.

- Cyber High has been really beneficial for me because, because since I am in a group home, I'm moving from place to place. It's helped me get a lot of the credits that I need that I might not have gotten.

- Mainstream high schools also contract with Cyber High. The Madera Unified School District offers the curriculum to its 5,400 high school students. Over 1,000 are enrolled in courses.

- We use it in a number of ways. Primarily it's used for credit recovery. However, we also use it for original credit. And then also some students take courses for partial credit.

- Dr. Rebecca Malmo, with Madera Unified, says the district evaluated a lot of online programs before deciding on the one offered by the Fresno County Office of Education.

- It was everything from engagement, quality. A-G approval was a requirement for our committee, the use of videos, multimedia, things like that. And Cyber High really was the best product that we looked at.

- Madera students can access the program during school, after school and at home. But educators say having access to a teacher is critical.

- I think a certificated teacher available to students really is the key to success.

- Cyber High educators say they want their programs to be engaging and provide a lot of online learning tools, but the focus is always on the student.

- One of the things that I think really differentiates us and separates us from our competitors is that we're not privatizing education. We're working for an educational entity and we care about the kids. So our bottom line isn't what our board members want. Our bottom line is our students being able to be successful.

- Now, students say what they like about Cyber High is that it allows them to work at their own pace.

- And there's multiple different places that are using this program. It's not just for one type of student, obviously.

- No, it's not just for kids who've got to make up credit. If you want to get ahead, you can also take a course. You want to graduate early, you can take a course. Yeah.

- And the teachers are accessible from the program or do they work with the teachers that are already at their schools?

- No, they work with the teachers who are at their school, but that's part of the requirement to sign up for Cyber High. You've got to have a teacher involved.

- All right, interesting program. Juanita, thanks so much, appreciate it.

[end playback]

Susanne Sparks: I think it was interesting what she said at the end there. There has to be a teacher involved and it's not independent study. And you'll find, as we proceed through the slide deck, that there's ways that the teacher is essential to be part of the experience, or we'll show you that. OK. I'll get out of that.

[video playback]

- 6:30

Susanne Sparks: No.

- Technology has made it possible for students to take courses on--

[end playback]

Susanne Sparks: OK, all right. I want to go back to the slides. I think that's the way. I don't want to watch that again.

We're just getting used to this whole system here. So, please--

Audience: Explain it to me-

Yeah. And so that I can--

Susanne Sparks: Side it out of the way?

Audience: Yeah, the whole top banner so you can see this.

Susanne Sparks: [muffled voice] now click on that field in here-- yeah. So we get there and then we're going to get out of it, and then we'll go to the next one.

All right, something that we have on this next slide is some testimonies of actual teachers that have used it. If you go to the cyberhigh.org, not .com, please don't make that mistake, you go to cyberhigh.org, you can hear a lot of different testimonies. I just randomly picked two teachers and one administrator. So we'll give that a chance.

[video playback]

- I work for the Tracy Unified School District. I've been with the district for 17 years and with this program for six. It is a really unique program. The kids are so deficient in their credits at their home school that they don't really have a chance of graduating.

Tracy Unified School District primarily chooses Cyber High because it is basically cost effective and the easiness to learn how to do it, teacher and student-wise, it makes it simple and you don't have to spend a lot of time doing so.

I get students that are very, very deficient in credits. A lot of them come to me hopeless. They don't think that there's going to ever be a chance that they are going to make up enough credits. And the Cyber High program allows them to work fast enough to get these credits. They are able to get on track and they are able to graduate and get their diploma. Former students often come back and tell me how they're still doing, and they know that it started with the Cyber High program to get them back on track, to get them to where they needed to be and go to graduate with a diploma.

What I really like about cyber high and what I find, easy to use is it's divided up into five units. A lot of my students go into the program with partial credit, so they have three credits here in one class, four credits. I can easily pull an English class with four students. OK, do these two units and then that's the two credits. It makes it simple so you can divide your classes the way you want to.

The customer support is just fantastic and he just instantly calls me back or if we have to talk on the phone, but often he'll just email me back. And it's just nice to know he's there.

[end playback]

Susanne Sparks: Nice. And I could also state that I experienced that as well, the customer service. Anytime I needed something, whether it's enrolling a student and not having their student ID, because we want to get them started before that starts or any question, they were always able to answer immediately. It was pretty fantastic.

Here's another one.

[video playback]

- My name is Lisa Storer, and I'm the credit recovery teacher for Santa Cruz City School. So we're really happy with the Cyber High program because the district has made a commitment to have every Santa Cruz City School District student aided you ready at graduation, and Cyber High has helped us.

A major reason the district chose Cyber High is the financial flexibility of the program. And I have to say it's been great working with all the people that we have contact with in the different departments. So that's a huge plus to the technical support has just been amazing. So we're really pleased with the support. The financial aspect has really worked well for the district.

For many students in the district, Cyber High has proven to give them a second chance academically. Many of the students I work with there in the credit recovery program, so it means they're failing classes and pretty much they've given up on being academic students. They start working on Cyber High and then they start improving and then they start doing the work on their own and using all the resources they can.

I've seen students just have tremendous turnarounds. I've seen students who weren't A-G and said, I'm not going to be A-G, are A-G. So it's had a tremendous impact. But I just love how it renews a joy in learning for students and they feel smart again. And you can see it. You can watch them grow.

The other thing that the program does is it gives these kids a structure. A lot of these students feel like they don't belong in high school. They don't like it. The structure doesn't work for them. But because of the structure of the program, they can really gain confidence and feel successful at something in school.

I think all the support pieces have really helped them connect to it, the glossaries. I think they can feel that the program is trying to make them successful. It's there for them.

One of the most rewarding things about working with Cyber High is watching them understand, learn and find it interesting to, oh, I get it. And it's just really rewarding and exciting when they feel this is great. And they're kind of amazed. For example, for all the activities in the quizzes, when they can use the glossary, it really is a light goes off.

And the fact that one thing I often tell them is that Cyber High wants you to learn how to go and find the correct information. That's one of the biggest things they're teaching you because that's what you're going to do in college. And that seems to be really successful.

[end playback]

Susanne Sparks: All right, just one more, and this is a principal.

Audience: Give me a second.

Audience: No way.

Audience: Yeah. In fact, I think he's since retired since we [muffled voice].

[video playback]

- Calero High School is an alternative school of choice. And essentially what that means is that students apply to come here in grades 10, 11 and 12. We are a smaller environment, very supportive environment. And our niche is students who have not succeeded in the large, comprehensive high school.

We chose Cyber High for East Side Union High School District because we found it to be a reliable and efficient system for credit recovery for students.

As a principal, what I'm looking for is, A, something that's going to work every day, B, something that's going to motivate students, C, if there is a problem and I call, what's the response time. And my experience has been he responds immediately to me and solves the problem. That's critical for us. The administration function of the program is you can learn it quickly and monitor it quickly.

The most difficult step for students is jumping in. Because I always say to students, the difference with online education is that you control the pace of your education. In a regular classroom, you have to attend 180 hours. Whether you can accelerate or not, it doesn't matter, you still have to be there. With online education, the student controls the pace of instruction. And once students understand that, they get hooked on the idea that they can progress and accelerate through a class.

It works beautifully. What I've seen with students is once they catch the bug, I can't stop them. Once they get addicted, they say to themselves-- they'll walk into my office and they'll say, I can't believe I wasn't doing this before. And you never know when that's going to happen for a student, when they're going to have that first successful experience.

The strength of it is, is that it empowers students, especially students who are behind in credits, and it gives them hope. Because if the only way that they could recover credits would be to sit in a class for 180 days, they wouldn't graduate. But once they see that they can control the pace of instruction, they can do it at home, they can do the work at home and on weekends, and they can come in just for the testing portion of it. It's a 24/7 opportunity for them to catch up.

I have one young lady who's a senior this year. And she was on track to graduate and then she had medical problems, which kept her from coming to school. And without coming to school and completing her units, it didn't look like she was going to graduate. Now that she's in home hospital and not coming to school, and she really took to heart Cyber High, she's accelerating and she's going to graduate. And she comes in after school excited to take a test right now.

She can't be at school all day, but she can come in long enough to take that test. And because of that, she's going to graduate in May.

The most important question, when I get a call and someone says, hey, Robert, what do you think of Cyber High? Can I recommend it? That's it. Would I recommend this to someone who is not using it? And that's an easy question for me. The answer is yes.

[end playback]

Susanne Sparks: All right. So we've heard some testimonials, what it was like to see an advertisement for Cyber High on the news. And we're going to proceed from that right now.

All right, so this is not a program that's just coming to be, OK? It has been around for a long time. So let me get--

Audience: You can go to Present up on the top.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah.

Audience: It's being blocked--

Susanne Sparks: By this guy.

Audience: So just move a little-- yeah, there you go.

Susanne Sparks: OK.

Audience: You can hit the little minus sign there and minimize that.

Susanne Sparks: Just get rid of that. I think I--

Audience: Yeah, click on the minus sign over there. There you go.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah.

Audience: Now it's not as-- there we go.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah. So we look at Cyber High as being an originator and not something that came out of something, but some-- it was a program that started things instead of far away things.

OK. So in this slide, the timeframe is around 1998 for Asynchronous Online, but the roots date back to 1978. All right, so it's been entrenched with a lot of different programs over the years and in the service of California's migrant student population. When I was teaching, I was teaching five years at an adult school. About 80% of my students were English language learners.

So what do you think is the first question that if you're an English language learner, that you would want to know about this online program that you're going to be in entering?

Audience: Hard. Actually, this is even for high school diploma students. You have to leave.

Susanne Sparks: OK.

Audience: Yeah.

Audience: How much do I have to read?

Susanne Sparks: All right. That's a fair question.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: You're going to see that there's some courses that are in Spanish. Most of them are in English, but there are some courses that I would start my students off in Spanish. All right, so it's owned and operated by the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools. You want to say--

Rob Cords: Sure. And just to answer your question right quick, both here about reading levels and quantity of reading, there is plenty of it. One of the things that is critical, as Susanne just mentioned, being owned by a county superintendent of schools is we never want this program to be a credit mill. We don't want the students' grade credits and ultimately diploma to be meaningless.

So they are grade level appropriate courses. But also Susanne mentioned our history is in migrant Ed, so we've learned to make courses very accessible. And we've tried to put balanced components in. So, yes, there's plenty of reading, but there are also videos. There's also project based learning. There are also lots of interactive components and lots of many quizzes.

Audience: Is there a built-in reader like--

Rob Cords: Practice speech?

Audience: Yeah.

Rob Cords: In some of the courses.

Susanne Sparks: And I have a slide on that. We'll show you that.

Rob Cords: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: Some of them not all, but--

Rob Cords: Yeah, there's a history to that. Just to give you the 32nd version, we had originally started having live speech actors doing it. But we realized after doing four or five courses like that with the amount of time editing that goes into that, and you don't need to anymore, it's just impractical. And right at that crux was when the ability for audio or digital translation was getting because it was terrible a long time ago.

And so we have employed a new digital system and that's being put to use as we speak. So hopefully that answers that.

Susanne Sparks: All right. So we have a impact evaluation. A, does this program work? So let's look at whoever is using it and see what's happening. Is it a flop? Is it helping? Is it working?

So upon Cyber High's inception, a multi-year study accompanying the launch demonstrated 42% increase in graduation rates. As we continue in the program or in this slide presentation, you're going to see some more detail about what's happening in the prisons. You're going to see different places where the impact and the meaningful incorporation of this program at schools was really working. OK.

And so it was-- someone is saying here, I can say with confidence that Cyber High has only improved since its inception. They have seen some changes just in the five years I was using it. In fact, for example, we didn't have Earth science. So if we wanted to teach Earth science, it would be direct instruction or otherwise. But now it's in Cyber High.

Audience: So I have a couple of questions. And so in our district, the way that it would be implemented like so I currently teach Earth science and biology. And I'm using a textbook and the textbooks are getting old. And so my principal are looking at, well, what is the next direction, the curriculum. This looks like it could be.

But the way we do it is we have a HyFlex classroom where I am talking to the students in the classroom via Google Meet. And I have students on very much like we're doing right now, where you have Stanford, yeah, I'm at home, I'm not in the classroom with them. I have an aide in a classroom going around. And mostly what she's doing is helping them with the technology part.

And so I give them assignments. I go over the answers and stuff. I answer questions and things like that on the Google Meet each week. And would this blend in well with that instruction except the curriculum being what you folks have?

Rob Cords: Online. So I'm going to answer this in a couple of different ways. Can it work like that? Yes. Was it initially designed like that? No.

Audience: Yeah.

Rob Cords: But what we'd be happy to do, I'd be happy to do it for any of you guys, if you want us to set up a demo, the stages that this would be. If you want a demo account or we can get you logins and you could actually go through the science courses, if that's your area--

Audience: We'd like to do that.

Rob Cords: That way you can clear it for that, give it a yay or nay. If you come back and say, yes, this is something I like and would like to try, we can set up a short-term pilot for you guys. And so that way you can try it out in class and see if it's going to work for your students.

Audience: And the follow-up, as we're also looking at moving from Google Classroom to Canvas, does this work well with Canvas?

Rob Cords: Yeah. There is no technical integration.

Audience: Yeah. But this link from Canvas to your thing or--

Rob Cords: I don't know why you couldn't. I haven't personally spent any time in Canvas interacting with Cyber High, so I wouldn't answer that.

Audience: I think the way it would work is it would just be an external link so the students could skip that link if they wanted. But a lot of our students, their only view of the internet is through Google Classroom and through their courses. They don't really use it otherwise. So they would be like, well, rather than sending them directly to your website, they would link to it from their Canvas or from their Google Classroom.

Audience: Yeah. They've got a little trial and error to figure out--

Susanne Sparks: Yeah, I didn't do it that way for the--

Audience: You used to go straight to Cyber High?

Susanne Sparks: Definitely, yeah. And Cyber High grades also. And-- OK. So this slide is also identifying a few of the other things they were talking about. You were talking about textbooks and some of the other information in here. You'll see. What do you think would be a textbook for an online course? What do you think? What do you think would be the best case scenario?

Audience: Well, it's something, like an interactive text would be the best case scenario where you got the text there that could be read to you, but you've also got videos you get linked to you. You got online like labs for science, like little virtual labs, things like that, would be the best.

Audience: Right, like to have a little beaker. And then you click on the beaker and it pours the chemicals out. And then you get to see an animation of the chemical reaction. That would be textbook for me.

Audience: Yeah, the end of a living textbook, yeah.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: OK. In my classroom, I didn't have a shelf full of textbooks because the textbooks are integrated. There's occasional ones where you could get-- if you wanted to have paper textbooks in front of your readers, yes. Cyber High would provide them free of charge.

Audience: [muffled voices]

Susanne Sparks: So--

Audience: We do have students who are like, I need to touch something.

Susanne Sparks: That's fine, yeah.

Audience: Yeah. I think that stuff for them just so they can feel the paper.

Audience: Yeah. I have students who write because their questions are out of the textbook and they'll write down the questions, then take a picture and upload it to Google Classroom, because they don't want to type it up. So I'm like--

Rob Cords: [interposing voices]

Susanne Sparks: Yeah, very much.

Audience: And then you tell them to practice typing and they're like, no thanks.

Audience: Yeah.

Rob Cords: Yeah.

Audience: I think you're typing, Teacher. So if you want to write it and read it and you do it in the right format, go for it.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: I like what it says here. We serve every conceivable high school education program. OK, we don't have to get into that. You can see.

Audience: I can conceive of a lot of things.

Rob Cords: I bet you we're serving them.

Susanne Sparks: Truly.

Rob Cords: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: It's everywhere. All right, so here we go. Earned recovered high school credits and looking within the four-year window preceding, my last day to pull.

Audience: That's for me.

Susanne Sparks: That's in. North of 600,000 units, credits had been earned or recovered by Cyber High. You want to say more about that?

Rob Cords: Well, you know, it's just something we're real proud of. And it's not that, you know, students couldn't have graduated without us, but we just like we're pleased to be one of the gears in the set. And the fact that that's a lot of students across the graduation stage. And, of course, it's in complete partnership with our schools and teachers. But we're just it's something we're really pleased to be a part of providing a tool that's making a difference for students especially in that kind of volume.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah, high volume and making a difference, great. OK. So it's a mastery based program. So they have to demonstrate competency by different things, different assessments and different assignments that are within the courses.

All of the courses are divided into five standalone units, each with a final exam, OK? There's quizzes and the quizzes will self-grade. That's where the teacher would come in handy as well. Because you can as an instructor and you have access to seeing everyone's progress. The last time they logged in, you can tell, you can see everything online. It's awesome.

And with that, you can also see where they're having trouble. So they might have a quiz that they're not passing and they're taking it again. You can take the quizzes unlimited. The final exam is different. It is not unlimited. But you can see where students are having problems and they can tell you also.

And you can call them over and even have small group if you have more than one. And you can actually see what quiz questions they're not getting and they'll keep doing it over and over. But that's where you step in.

And, OK, so it says at client discretion, Cyber High can be used for partial credits, complete courses, original credit or secondary credits. So you have-- say, for example, you have students that only need-- they're short seven credits in English, OK? So they can take-- if the whole course is five units, they can take those five units, five credits, and then they can take their other two and they don't have to proceed from there. So you can take partial credits in that way, because--

Audience: You have a lot of that in our district. Yeah, I believe you because students come in at all points.

Audience: I had a student that just needed to get 0.5 credits.

Susanne Sparks: OK.

Audience: And so they finished one chapter. OK, there you go again, [interposing voices] credits.

Audience: And that's it. Does the program determine that or does the teacher have to determine, OK, this is 4.5 credits, or is that calculated?

Susanne Sparks: I wouldn't give them 0.5 one chapter. I would give them a whole credit or a whole unit. If they do that unit, you surpassed what you needed.

Audience: But you determine that, not the program? That's what she's--

Susanne Sparks: Right.

Rob Cords: Yeah. It's typically the counselor or the teacher who determines that if partial credits are allowed. And as Susanne mentioned, each semester course divided into five units, each unit would mirror a credit. But instead of having one final exam at the end of the course, there's one final exam at the end of each unit.

Susanne Sparks: Each unit.

Rob Cords: Each unit is just like a standalone mini course in and of itself. And so it's critical that students know when they come in. They're not getting credit for how long they're sitting in front of the computer or how many pages they're clicking through. They're getting credit for demonstrating mastery on those final exams.

Susanne Sparks: Does that make sense? All right. So let's continue.

Audience: I do have a question on that, though. If you have a student who puts in the work but doesn't show the mastery, can you still give them the credits?

Rob Cords: So this is the beautiful thing, and this should be the case with any online provider you have. We are simply a curriculum company.

Audience: We decide what units we get?

Rob Cords: You guys are absolutely the ones who-- for example, let's say it spits out a progress report or whatever the final grade report is that you use. If for whatever reason you are doing blended learning or some other aspect that you need to modify a grade, we would never come in and say, you didn't give this student the D that they have on their grade report, because you ultimately, as a teacher, are the professional overseeing the student. We are just a curriculum program. So--

Audience: So if and do the students look at their grades through your platform?

Rob Cords: They can.

Audience: OK. If we want them to. And can we override the scores and put in the--

Rob Cords: Yeah, because we don't have an interface with your student information system. You are manually putting those grades in--

Audience: Right from there.

Rob Cords: Yeah. So whatever you believe that the student earned, that's ultimately what you put in [interposing voices].

Audience: For our control. Because most of our students, it isn't the mastery we're looking for, it's the effort we're looking for. Yeah.

Rob Cords: Yeah. And I would say the vast majority of our clients utilize our grade reports just right out of the gate, exactly as they come. But you certainly have the authority to override them as needed.

Susanne Sparks: There's also a component built in for extra credit. They can pass a quiz and we have a certain threshold for what is considered passing, but they can also get extra credit to bring that number up. Also when the course is completed with the final exam passed, it moves out of their current courses into completed courses. And so you can tell when you're sitting down figuring grades, you can tell which ones are actual live for that quarter because it'll give-- it always assigns date also.

Rob Cords: And if you have a lot of transients in your schools where students are in and out, as long as you're a contractor or a client of ours, we save wherever the student left off. So even if they come back a year later or two years later, they can pick up right where they left off.

Audience: Yeah, we have a lot of that. Yeah.

Rob Cords: It's super common.

Audience: Is there a maximum amount of time that you keep them?

Rob Cords: As long as you're a client of ours, we'll keep all the data.

Audience: [interposing voices]

Rob Cords: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: It's great because you can have a student that drops out for unknown reasons.

Rob Cords: It just happens.

Susanne Sparks: And sometimes known reasons. But it just happens.

Audience: Yeah, I heard they could leave it.

Audience: I'll have students come back after five years, six years.

Rob Cords: Yeah.

Audience: They just need that time to take care of something and then--

Rob Cords: Life happens.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: It'll tell everything that they've done, what day they did it, how far they got. And it's actually ideal. That's why I'm their fan club here. OK.

So here we go. Unlimited use is something more that Rob would have to talk about because that would be getting into the pricing area of things.

Rob Cords: Well, just to give you a feel, we have two different options for purchase. And this is not meant to be a sales thing, whatsoever. But just so you know, we have some clients--

Audience: [interposing voices]

Rob Cords: Well, no. Susanne's not even-- a she's not a paid rep. She's just doing out of love for the program, and so don't want to spoil this in any way. But if you want to use this in a very limited fashion, there's a way that you could pay just on a per exam basis. That's like 7% of our clients that do that and 93% use this unlimited use. And we're ultimately-- I mean, we have to charge to cover all of our costs. But we are a nonprofit. And so we want to see the program used as widely as it can be. So when we say unlimited use, there's no fine print. There's many of your students as many courses, partial or full as you want. And--

Audience: So with adult students, how do we--

Rob Cords: How does that work?

Audience: Yeah, how do we-- right, because we're talking about credit recovery and all of these things in the set, because again, I'm at the college.

Rob Cords: Yeah.

Audience: So how could the students trained or enrolled in the GED-HiSET prep courses take advantage of something like Cyber High?

Rob Cords: So that's really-- especially when you mentioned GED-HiSET where things can get muddy. I think of three different tiers. Some of our adult school students are actually wrapped into their unified school district's contract. So they're just an add-on to that. And so they're not paying individually. So any students that they have that are working on high school diploma, it's just all wrapped into that district's contract.

I have one district down Southern California. The adult school, believe it or not, pays for the entire district because they have a lot more money. And so it's a weird-- yeah weird deal the way that--

Audience: That's the opposite.

Rob Cords: Yeah. It's very, very strange but it is there.

And in some circumstances where it may be an adult school that's standalone, it's responsible for everything on their own, and we would contract directly with the adult school, and I would look at what potential use would be with their administration.

Audience: We have one adult school in our consortium. But the biggest portion of our consortium is through the college.

Rob Cords: OK.

Audience: We have a very big adult Ed sector with ESL, GED, and CTE.

Rob Cords: Yeah. And we even contract with the College of the Redwoods. That's why I was just asking how far those are away up north. And they act like a consortium, so they're the hub. So we have the contract with the college, but then the college is the one doing the direct support for some outside schools that come in.

So we certainly have flexibility. We just need to figure out what is it going to look like.

Audience: Yeah.

Rob Cords: And I can sit down and talk with you guys.

Audience: Because after we'll get calls or they want to know their options for their high school, Quincy. Some folks are specifically interested in the diploma. and in our county. But adult school is really the only option, otherwise they have to do like the ones they--

Rob Cords: Yeah, we just need to make sure that there are, because, as Susanne mentioned, teachers are critical to this, that we have teachers that are assigned within that system that are working directly with.

Audience: Or there's a class or the material being available in Spanish? So did I get that right?

Susanne Sparks: We're getting there. We're getting there.

Rob Cords: It's limited.

Susanne Sparks: But I have a list of those.

Audience: I'd like to add how we do it over at East Bay. So sometimes these online courses are distance learning courses, whatever we're using, we sometimes use them as a supplement in our GED classes. So there is sometimes-- there are sometimes students who want to switch over from GED to high school diploma. And so when they complete something in distance learning, we can say, hey, you've got this much 100% complete, well, then--

Rob Cords: Transfer over.

Audience: Transfer it over as credits.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah, that the school would handle that.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Sparks: And somebody could come in and--

Audience: [interposing voices] We do have high school diploma students who say, I want to go into GED, and they bring some of that distance learning material with them to help supplement what the teacher is teaching.

Susanne Sparks: Yeah.

Audience: So it's definitely a way that we use online stuff.

Susanne Sparks: We had some students that were transferring their GED in and then they needed to do the Cyber High to finish. Also, when I heard that OTAN was sponsoring or I don't know if that's the right word, Canvas for everybody, that's in the adult school realm that they're associated with. I was like, OK, here's the next thing you can buy, because it's going to get to farther. OK, farther and faster. OK. It's very user friendly. You'll hear that from everybody, OK?

So, Rob, if you want to talk about this one.

Rob Cords: This is really a passion project of ours that I'm just-- I could not be happier with. Yeah, I was mentioning to Susanne I think it was 2013 or 2014. I approached California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation about bringing Cyber High. And luckily, there were a few people who believed in it, but the majority just laughed and said, there is no way we're going to bring it online program into the prison system. It's never there.

Well, fast forward, it took about seven years to get all the infrastructure in place, and you can imagine trying to get all the wiring done, the hotspots and the computer labs and the whole nine yards. We are in now every single one of the prisons in the state of California.

Audience: Did Chromebooks help in that process?

Rob Cords: No, Chromebooks were not part of it at all.

Audience: Really?

Rob Cords: No. And there's a whole story where that goes into, but they were all desktops because there had to be provisions for student access and teacher access, which were different levels. You wouldn't believe what went on behind the scenes to this.

[interposing voices]

Rob Cords: And it was a while. So they started in earnest. Let's see, I think it was July 1st, 2020 was when they first had students actively working. And this is actually old from what I gave it to Susanne several months ago. But they have now earned over 30,000 credits in the prison system. And I'll talk to prisoners on the phone. They'll use their call out time and say, hey, I'm working on this, I'm working so hard on this, can you help me with this or whatever. And we get letters from them all the time.

And it's just something we're-- we looked at saying, hey, we have this tool. We believe that it can make a huge difference in the recidivism rates, if prisoners can come out with a high school diploma or better and get a real job. Because what got me into this, I had a friend through a church program that had a couple of felonies and getting hired was almost impossible, he didn't have a high school diploma. And so what do you do to put food on the table when you can't get a legit job? And so this was how can we help people to be on a path to get a legit job? That's how this started.

So we're their sole high school diploma program provider now and it's just-- the students behind bars, they're exceeding it more--

Audience: Are you working with adults and youth adult? OK.

Rob Cords: Well, and that's the interesting thing.

Audience: Because there's the youth program as well.

Rob Cords: There was. So that was Department of Juvenile Justice. And so we had that contract as well. But Newsom disbanded the entire [muffled voice] that took place on June 30 of this last year. So all the students that were in that system were pushed back to their county school.

Audience: District.

Rob Cords: Yeah. So that whole program is just no longer instated and evaporated. So, yeah--

Susanne Sparks: Things change.

Rob Cords: Yeah. We know we still do serve some important community schools, but that's separate students here--

Susanne Sparks: I'm going to proceed here. I love what you said. That was very interesting. You have access to this course offerings sheet. It's right here on the table, so if you'd like to pick one of those up.

So what I would start with was grammar. OK, this is an English class. It is an English class designed to meet the needs of second language learners. So grammar was a favorite go to when someone is just coming in grammar.

But here's the classes that are in Spanish. OK, basic math A and B, health education, US history A and B, economics and American government.

Audience: Have you tried taking a page in one of your website pages and running it through Google Translate?

Rob Cords: It's a disaster.

Audience: OK.

Rob Cords: Some things work, some don't. Yeah. All of those-- and these are older versions. All of those were-- actually we contracted to have them translated.

Audience: These are full-on.

Rob Cords: Yeah. And we literally just signed another contract with another translator to come through and start updating these again because they're older than they should be. But, yeah, that's it's all done manually. They're just there.

Audience: If we tried-- if I took a biology website and ran it through Google Translate, it wouldn't come out very good, it's a disaster.

Rob Cords: Yeah. And obviously, we would save it because it's really expensive to have translations done. We'd save a ton of money to have them done digitally, but it's just the quality is just terrible.

Susanne Sparks: OK. So this was a very important go-to and it attracted the newer students, especially, because maybe they have apprehensions of what are they getting into. It's all English, what am I going to do? We taught them also tools where they could use their translators. I mean, there's--

Audience: Yeah. I have other options who will copy it. They would copy and paste in like they'd have to speak Farsi. They just always have Google Translate open and they're copying and pasting.

Rob Cords: And when that's your only option, it's better than nothing. It's just not as good as it can be.

Audience: Yeah, because sometimes the one to one translation doesn't make sense.

Rob Cords: Exactly.

Audience: Have you thought of expanding to other languages? like we have a huge Vietnamese population and will often have the same exact thing where they have Google Translate out as they're looking at their worksheet.

Rob Cords: And so have we thought of it? Yeah. The problem is I'm just being completely forthright and visible to you. As a nonprofit, we have to figure out where every dollar is going to go, and it's like $48,000, of course, to translate. It's really expensive. So everything we have to decide, what's our impact across the state and be for every dollar that we spend. And so--

Audience: [interposing voices] a brand new class rather than translating it.

Rob Cords: Yeah. It just comes back to what's the impact and the use case going to be. Yeah. So, yes, you're right. If I have that unlimited checkbook, I would.