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Narrator: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Mary Ann Perry: Good morning, everybody. Thank you for getting up early for us. We're so happy to see you.

And my name is Mary Ann Perry, and this is my co-presenter Lori Love. And we're here to share some insights from our JUICE pilot program for NEDP learner. So without further ado, let's dive in, and I hope that we will keep you on schedule with this.

So just to start out, we'll have Lori tell, just very quickly, what is NEDP, for those of you who aren't familiar with it. And then I'll talk about the product that we're pilot testing called JUICE. So Lori, what is NEDP?

Lori Love: Well, I'm glad you asked, and I'm thrilled to be here. NEDP is another way to complete your high school diploma, and in the state of New York, we have four options, and NEDP one of them. And I would like to know how many of you here today are familiar with NEDP? If you just want to raise your hand.

[interposing voices]

Speaker: We have one-- so it looks like we have one person who is familiar.

Lori Love: Oh, perfect. Perfect. So clients work through eight competencies, and everything has to be at 100% demonstrated. And in order to enter the program, they have to have certain reading, math, and writing skills, and that's NEDP in a nutshell.

Mary Ann Perry: Cool, and as someone who has just learned about NEDP in the last year or so, from Lori and others, I was amazed to learn that students really work so independently on their own, and that's become a central aspect of our pilot, which we'll talk about. So the JUICE product, or JUICE Readiness Library, is from Relatable Learning. Relatable Learning is a little startup company that I started after a four-year grant, where we developed a new approach to help learners build their basic skills and master their basic academic skills. And you'll get a peek at it during the presentation, but that's what we're piloting as part of our program.

So I'm going to get us into our story a little bit here, and just say that I approach CASAS-- and I think I have a member of the CASAS team also on the Zoom with us, Jane. I met Lori and other mentors from New York through Margaret Fitzpatrick, and I showed them what we have. And we collectively decided that it could be very useful, and we decided to run the pilot. And Lori, some of the reasons for the pilot, if you just want to talk about it a little bit, like how we're going to talk about the skill gaps that--

[interposing voices]

Lori Love: Sure. So just a really quick background on the hub, New York is a very diverse state. We have lots of rural communities. Not everyone has in NEDP agency in their backyard. People don't want to travel up to 50 miles to even take their diagnostics.

So New York State and CASAS work together to provide a hub, and it's just a place where people apply, and then they take their diagnostics. And if they meet the cut scores, then they meet with one of the three mentors, and they start the program. I was tasked with the job to send remedial resources, and it needed to be a program that was easy to navigate, that also had the reading, math, and writing component, and JUICE really fit that need.

Mary Ann Perry: So far, as it says on the slide, we have about 30-- a little more than 30 learners, and there are also 30 tutors or advisors or people working with those learners who have been given access to JUICE as part of our pilot. A little bit about the students, Lori, just demographics?

Lori Love: Sure. The majority of the hub clients are between 25 and 55 years old, which means they've been out of the educational system for quite some time, and they may lack the confidence to do the work. You probably have found also in your areas that more women than men, and again, as I mentioned earlier, not just New York City or the urban areas, like Rochester or Syracuse, Binghamton, they're also out in rural communities. Most of them are native English speakers, and for the hub, they study on their own. And later, we'll talk about a New York agency called SEIU 1199, who is also using JUICE as their help for diagnostics.

Mary Ann Perry: Cool. So how are they using it, and we are going to give you a little demo of JUICE. But we wanted to explain how we rolled this out, and basically, Lori, you're providing each learner with a little handout. Right? Do you want to just say-- because it's really going to be kind of an independent situation, but you are getting them started. Is it based on their diagnostic score?

Lori Love: Yes. Yes. So I like these people's names. So let's just say Susie has contacted the Hub Portal, and she wants to work towards her high school diploma using NEDP.

Well, she's scheduled for a diagnostic test. She does that online, remote, and then if she doesn't quite meet those diagnostic scores, I as the point person am tasked to send her what she needs. So I have her score report. I review her report, and then I select the JUICE cat categories for her to work on, just like you see here in the picture on the screen.

I send that as a document, and I highlight areas that Susie will need to work on. I send her an email with instructions, very easy, understandable instructions. Within a few weeks, I check in on Susie to see if she has started the program. I can also see how long she has spent in the program. Then, when she feels comfortable, she reschedules the diagnostic, and we can talk later about how well it has worked for some of our clients.

Mary Ann Perry: And just a quick point of clarification, in this particular pilot, students are signing in directly to JUICE. But some of you here may realize or may know that JUICE is also running a pilot with the California Distance Learning Consortium, and in those contexts students get a link to JUICE inside their online course. So those are some of the options we have, but just wanted to make that clarification, in case it's helpful. So what are the skills, Lori, that they have commonly struggled with? And then we're going to demonstrate in JUICE how they might practice a couple of these, just so people can get a sense of what's happening, when they go to JUICE to try to get help.

Lori Love: Sure. So here in the state of New York, we use the 30 series math. We are not required to use the CASAS rules math or reading. We use the CASAS rules reading for their reading diagnostic in the hub, but the math, we have been able to continue to use the life skills math. And it's everything that you could possibly imagine, from math measurements, which are the proportion, the area-- or sorry. Math measurements like area and volume and perimeter, down to percentages, just even to know how to change a decimal to and a percent and back again.

Mary Ann Perry: Right.

Lori Love: Of course, for the writing, they need everything to help them pass the writing diagnostic and to type up a three or above rubric essay.

Mary Ann Perry: Cool. OK, and I'm sure most of the people that would be with us today would be very familiar with these as common areas, where people need some help to build their skills. So I'm going to get out of the presentation for just a moment. I'm going to try to do this smoothly, if I can, and I'm going to-- and let me know if you all can see here-- but you should be seeing an image of the JUICE Skills Library. So raise your hand or let us know if you're not seeing that.

And the students-- this looks a little bit like the handout that Lori provided. And the student can come here they can search for the skill, or they can just navigate through the topics. They can also view skills by subject.

So grammar was one of the problems that many of the students need help on. So I wanted to first just show you general navigation in JUICE, in terms of being like a skill-building library. And then once you find, or the student finds, the thing that they do want to work on, they start at the module level, which is sort of a competency level, and you'll get an idea here of how JUICE works.

So basically, the student can navigate, and they have various forms of help available. They can listen to an audio coach, as they read. They can choose the lesson to work on.

They can play a practice game to see which skills they need help on. These little orange slices will show me where I've been and what I've already worked on. So there's a tracking, and I can also go back to the library.

So the whole philosophy of JUICE is to always present skills in a real world context. This context could be customized for career training or other purposes, but this is a general purpose context. Now, grammar is hard to come up with a problem that you have to solve with grammar, but here, we imagine that the learner has to edit a community newsletter and make sure it's free of errors. So JUICE provides audio coaching, and I'll turn this on to see if you can hear it.

Juice Audio Coach: Welcome to Facing Grammar Fearlessly. Do you want to refresh your grammar--

Mary Ann Perry: I'll just stop there, but that's a characteristic of many parts of JUICE, that students can get audio narration and help. As a student looks for the skill they want to work on, a couple of things I'll point out. And I'm just going to go down to the area that we're going to do a little demo in capitalization and punctuation and show you that some of these things are confusing to learners.

What's a semicolon? What's a colon? And these little question clues can help them find the thing that they need help on. So capital letters is the one we were going to show you.

So this is an example of how JUICE provides many different choices for a student to review and learn a skill. And just as a quick overview, before we try one of these, the overview is a step-by-step presentation with audio narration. It's like the voice of a tutor that takes you through in a step-by-step way, provides an example of everything that is being described or presented, and these are pretty short. They're usually about 7 to 10 minutes long, but students can, obviously, take as much time as they need. And the audio narration can reinforce, or if they're studying in noisy places, it can be a big help.

So I'll just scoot down and imagine that we are working on how to understand when to use capital letters and what the rules are and looking at the examples. We're reading all of this, we get tips along the way, just provides a lot of integrated learning aids and supports, any kind of integrated learning aid that might be helpful to a student. It also provides a lot of visual elements that can help a student retain knowledge and summarize rules that they've just gone over and learned.

So those are just a couple of things that can be embedded in an overview, and at the end of that, it encourages students to go and do one of the Try It tutorials. And in this situation they get three different contexts that they can practice capitalization skills. In this case, Time to give back a space for seniors, If you build it, will they come, It's going to be writing about a new athletic center, Preparing for life, Looking for the future of our schools.

In a JUICE tutorial-- and by the way, you can see there's a lot of choice, and one of the things we like to do is give different learners different ways to practice and learn what they need to focus on. I chose, If you build it, they will come. You're writing an editorial that will inform people about a proposed new athletic center. You need to convey the essential information. So not surprisingly, we're going to be working on which of these words needs to be capitalized.

So you might be thinking, well, this looks a lot like the overview. It does, and it's another way to review and learn that information, but now, you have to answer questions. So always capitalize the first word in a sentence. Which version is correct? Great, that was an easy one for me. Always capitalize the pronoun I.

One of the things about our tutorials is we always give a lot of feedback on the incorrect answers, and then you get to try again. So the Not Yet philosophy is you may have gotten it wrong, but you're just not there yet. And the quality of feedback we give can help you get there. So that's essentially what the Try It tutorials are. That takes a lot longer for students to work through, as you can see, but it's another way that they can begin, if they prefer to be hands on.

They could also start by playing a short challenge game. The challenge games are the interactive and game-based approach to learning that we provide, and each skill includes three different challenge games. Each of these is really also a tutorial experience, and we'll try one of the games just quickly.

But I just want to say, that if we played the one game I'll show you to completion, we can actually play that game many times with different questions and different materials. So there's an awful lot of practice here for building the skill. So I like to call this whole lesson experience as more of a gymnasium for a skill workout, because you can spend a lot of time. And Lori and I'll show you a little bit about that later. So that just tells me how this game is going to work.

All right. Click to highlight the words that should be capitalized and are not. All right. A lot of time, but I'll just say that I think high school should be capitalized. To place national competition-- its football team, the Fillmore warriors, I think that should be capitalized, and competition in Columbus.

OK. Let's check it. All right. Now, this is important. As I said, we give a lot of detailed feedback.

So I've gotten a few things wrong that I have to figure out, and what I can do is I can go back and correct my answer. Let's check it again, and I still have a problem. Anybody want to help me? OK. Maybe these.

If I get to the end, and I haven't gotten it right yet, JUICE says, you're out of time. Let me help you. Let's go ahead and see how it's supposed to go. So I can just continue practicing.

Because we want to show you a lot more, I'm going to stop playing the game right now. But I just want to reinforce that getting it wrong should never feel like a bad experience for me. It's really a chance to learn from my mistakes and try again.

So that whole philosophy of JUICE is important throughout. It's about encouraging the learner to keep working and trying, just like a good sports coach would encourage me. If you don't play, you're not going to learn how to get the ball in the hoop.

So back to just for contrast, Lori mentioned measurements. So this would just give you a visual on another skill, a set of skills, and Lori, we didn't really pick one. But we could say the context here is you're working for a resort hotel, and there are many things going on in the hotel. And you're involved in figuring out, and in this particular case, you have to calculate perimeter.

So I think you get the feeling of this now, and you're going to get a nice explanation of how to calculate perimeter. You're going to get to try it in several different real world problem solving situations, and then you're going to practice by playing challenge games, and see if you can get the perimeter information that is needed for the real world situation you're in. So I'm going to stop the demo there, go back, and continue our presentation.

Let's see. I think I got that right. And just let Lori talk for a little bit, because of course, when we started the pilot, I said to Lori what I've just said to you. But Lori, tell the folks, from your point of view so far in our pilot, what are the benefits to the learners?

Lori Love: Well, in my introductory email to the applicants, I do tell them that it's engaging and fun, and that that really should be my middle name. Because I don't learn probably within the classroom. I like to learn with hands on. It has to be fun and has to be engaging, and this program fits that.

One thing about JUICE, it is an independent study, which really helps those who want to enter NEDP continue to build on that independent study. It supports learners at different levels, which is really important. Because someone may only need to refresh on a couple concepts, and others may need to concentrate on everything in order to meet their cut scores.

And as Mary Ann said, there's many choices to pick from, constant feedback, and that they can keep trying. And above all, it builds the confidence that, as you as Adult Literacy instructors know, that our clients, our students, they are lacking. They've tried maybe for years to earn their high school equivalency and can't, and this is a program that will help them build that confidence.

Mary Ann Perry: Right, and then you kind of covered this, but from the point of view of the instructor, just the flip side of-- and of course you're not in a classroom teaching at the moment. And you have many years experience doing that, so you can see it from all those points of view.

Lori Love: Sure. There are just a couple here I want to concentrate on. It frees up time for lesson planning, and the other important one is that it supports learners at different skill levels. I have not been fortunate to be in any type of agency, where I have one set of students that all need the same thing. I've been in classrooms, where it's been the old-fashioned, one-room schoolhouse, and I've had to find resources to help everybody.

And what's really nice about this is, as I work with someone else, or as you would work with someone else, other students can be working on JUICE. They can be doing this all on their own or-- and I don't know if Mary Ann is going to talk about this-- but it can be used as a group lesson. So if you have five people in the classroom that need area, you can put it up on the big screen, and everyone can play the games and have fun learning together.

Mary Ann Perry: Right. Now, that's helpful. Thanks, Lori. Now, what we're going to do is share a little bit of feedback and some of the results to date. It's still ongoing of our pilot. So we're looking forward to getting even more, but Lori, tell us a little bit about what we know so far.

Lori Love: Sure. So I probably sent the program out to about 20 applicants who did not meet the cut score. This is just one of the testimonials that I received back, and this woman, she is my client now. She's been out of school for quite some time.

As you can see, her age is 54, and she really enjoyed the program. And she thinks it was awesome, the lessons were easy to understand, and she likes the fact that there was the audio coaching. So she had a tutor with her, without someone breathing down her neck, and she could go through the information all on her own.

Mary Ann Perry: Yeah, and we're going to show you a little bit of data about what students choices were in just a minute. And she mentioned the challenge games, and we've seen that before. And I'll just mention, during our design research in building JUICE, what we found is that students have very different preferences about how to learn.

And some students self-identify as people that don't like to read, and those students are more likely to start with the game and just test themselves and see if they maybe can do it. But in doing that, they're getting a tutorial experience. Other students feel safer starting with an overview and really going through it very carefully, before they try doing it in the tutorial or the games.

So I just think that by providing a rich set of choices and the supportive feedback, we're able to accommodate a lot of different types of learners. We're excited this is early days, but from Lori and her colleagues, as two other mentors in New York, we did we have seen some success stories. So Lori, just share that, and again we're not claiming this is the be all and end all but it's encouraging to us.

Lori Love: No, it is very encouraging not only to JUICE but also to the applicants who are trying their best to raise their scores. So as you can see from this data, this is from SEIU 1199, in New York City. Most of them have raised their score at least 8 points and one did 20, student number three, with only nine hours in JUICE across two weeks.

So this individual was able to raise their score by 20 points. That is phenomenal. To me, that's just amazing, to take this program and able to spend that little amount of time and get the desired results.

Student four is interesting. They had tested the essay, took a year to review on their own without any help. And then they tried JUICE, and about a month, they were able to get the cut score on the writing diagnostic, which is tremendous.

Mary Ann Perry: And Lori, what's your theory about that? Do you think maybe a student had a lot of the basic knowledge but wasn't putting it together? Because I think a program like JUICE can help you-- when you go to that module page, and you see all the different skills in relation to one another, planning your essay.

We didn't look at the essay module. We can. But it's a very nice module, because it shows the relationship of all the parts of writing an essay-- your thesis, your conclusion, the supporting detail. I think I know that Vivian, whose student that is, was very surprised to and very delighted. So there are so many mysteries to what enables people. Is it the confidence? Is it the putting it all together? Is it a combination of all those things?

Lori Love: Well, in my honest opinion, I have seen the score reports, and I am not surprised. Because I've been in adult literacy since 2005, 2006, and these are students who have dropped out of school in 10th or 11th grade. They have not had all of the distance, the percentages, proportions.

Mary Ann Perry: Right.

Lori Love: And they are able to log into JUICE and get what they need. And it fits them because they are an adult student. They need that confidence. They just need to have a program that will help them want to build on and learn. So yeah. I don't think it's just that they have this background. I think a lot of them do not have the background, and JUICE gives them everything that they need from the beginning to the end.

Mary Ann Perry: Here's what we have found a little bit interesting too. Now, this is just sort of a graph of-- it shows like a little over the 30 students. Now, some have just started, and some have been in JUICE for a while. But what's interesting is also the colors in the graph show the choices they made about which learning resource to work in.

On the left, the vertical axis is the number of hours a particular student, right at the moment, has worked in JUICE. And again, this is not meant to be a big research project or anything, because these did not all start on the same day, like I said. But just along Lori's theory about it's about helping the individual get the help they need, and some people need a little and some need a lot. It has been true in other research we've done that there is this kind of distribution across these different ways to learn and get a tutorial and practice, and I just think that's interesting.

So for people in the workshop, we're going to stop in a couple of minutes, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this too. I can say that these tutorials, which the color blue is the tutorials, the tutorial is a very step-by-step guided instruction on how to apply the skill. Just like if Lori sat down side by side with me, and in fact, they are modeled on experienced teachers and exactly how they speak to a student and show a student. And I'm really impressed with how much time many of these students spent in the tutorials.

And I know that the games are pretty popular, and I think they serve two purposes. One, they basically show you what you don't know, because you find out immediately if you can't apply the skill. And but now, you can go back and use these other resources. So I don't know. Lori, what was your reaction when you saw this graph?

Lori Love: It was amazing. This really goes in with what we are taught as adult literacy instructors, that I do, we do, and you do, and the overview is something that an instructor would go over. And then the student tries it, and then they get to enhance their skills in the challenge games. So it's great. I don't know how many times I can say it. I just love it.

[interposing voices]

Mary Ann Perry: I think that in the end-- and we can have a little discussion time for those of you who are still with us and want to chime in. But the thing that I've taken away from working in JUICE and watching people work with it is that you can't learn math without doing math. But if you think you're bad at math, it's painful to do math and practice math. And what JUICE aims to do is create a positive environment, where making mistakes is just what you do to find out and learn more and try again.

So this whole philosophy, you're not there yet, but you're almost there. So keep going, and that encouragement aspect of building confidence is a known, proven, social-emotional factor in learner success. It's the one non-cognitive factor that's been shown to unequivocally be important to learners. And I think adult learners need that as much or more than younger learners do.

So anyway, thank you Lori, and thanks, everybody. Mandilee, we'll be happy to take questions and have a moment. And people can speak up or put questions in the chat or whatever they would like. That's the end of our formal presentation. So you're going to have time for coffee before the next session.

Jane Eguez: Thank you so much, Mary Ann and Lori. Really appreciate everything. I've learned and I already knew so much about JUICE, so I hope we have some other good takeaways. For those that are still here, please, feel free to come off of mute, if you have any questions. I also popped a link into the chat for the evaluation so please make sure you find time for that as well.

Audience: Hi. This is Jane. Hi. Mary Ann and Lori. Thank you.

Mary Ann Perry: Hi, Jane.

Lori Love: Hi.

Jane Eguez: Can you tell more about the JUICE pilot in California?

[interposing voices]

Mary Ann Perry: Yes, absolutely. As part of the CDLC consortium-- cooperative, sorry-- JUICE is available to a pretty big number of schools, up to 25, possibly more. And we're actively piloting and have been installed-- JUICE installs as an LTI tool. And in fact, the next session in the schedule, there's a presentation on getting started with Canvas that includes a little bit about JUICE as well.

But we are available, and we would love to work with some more of the schools in the cooperative. And as I think I mentioned earlier, it's a pretty simple thing to install the LTI tool in your Canvas system, and at that point, any instructor that wants to do what Lori is doing would just get a link. And I could show you, but there's a little-- when the teacher logs into JUICE-- there's a little place where you can copy the link to a particular page.

It could be a game. It could be a module. It could be one of the skills, and then you put it in a Canvas assignment. And you can also bring up JUICE, kind of like Lori was saying, you can bring it up in class, and use it for face-to-face activities. And then you can make it available to students in the same way that Lori and the other mentors are doing.

So yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about that, and I'm so glad you asked. Because I think the Canvas-- the migration into Canvas, obviously, is a very big transition for schools and for teachers. So this next session is really about those challenges, but there'll be a little feature about JUICE too.

Jane Eguez: Good. Well, and I know that NEDP, the National External Diploma Program, is expanding in California as well.

[interposing voices]

More sites coming on board and growing. So I'm sure this connection between JUICE and NEDP will help all these students.

Mary Ann Perry: That's exciting.

Jane Eguez: Yeah.

Mary Ann Perry: Yeah, and just so everybody knows we are a very little startup company in the early stages of seeking to find our place in your market and get support to continue doing it. So it's just been a fabulous experience for us working with the New Yorkers, and we'd love to do the same thing with the Californians in NEDP and in whatever form, if they're also part of distance learning cooperative, and (Inaudible) to get into Canvas. So yeah,

Jane Eguez: Congratulations. Good. Job.

Mary Ann Perry: Thank you. Thanks very much, and we'd love to hear from other people, if you guys have thoughts. It's just really important for us to get feedback right now about your reactions or your questions. We appreciate it. So thanks so much, Jane.

Jane Eguez: There's a question in the chat box.

Mary Ann Perry: Oh, let's see.

Speaker: Yeah. So Roland asked, so as an instructor, I have a particular math student in mind, and how do I register and set up JUICE?

Mary Ann Perry: Well, Roland, I think what would be great, and I'm going to make sure-- I'm going to give you my email address, Mary Ann at-- let's see if I can type it right-- relatablelearning.com. Or you can write to us that contactus@relatablelearning.com, and we'll figure it out. If you, like Lori and the New Yorkers, are not using JUICE in Canvas, that's one thing I can talk to you about. If you are part of one of the Canvas pilots, here in California, I'll talk to you about how to do it that way, but would love to connect. So I'll make a note of your name too.

Speaker: And then, Roland, if you would like, you can go ahead and pop your email in the chat, and I can make sure that Mary Ann gets it. And Mary Ann, I think that you might need to hit Enter, or you may have sent a private chat to someone, because I'm not seeing it in the chat box.

Mary Ann Perry: Oh, I guess I did. I'm so sorry. I need to learn how to do this. OK. Here we go. Sorry. I was going to give you my email. So I think I sent it to Jane.

Jane Eguez: Yes, you did.

Mary Ann Perry: OK, or contact us at relatablelearning.com. Awesome. Yeah. That's what you do. Love to hear about your student and what your needs are and where you are.

So will be fun, and what's interesting and exciting-- it's challenging to be a small company in the startup phase. But what's exciting, I think, for you is that any of you who get involved with us at this stage, as Lori and NEDP has, you will influence how we direct our efforts to grow and build out JUICE for this community. And we really are eager to have that engagement and that opportunity to learn about what works and what the needs are.

Jane Eguez: Very good.

Mary Ann Perry: Yeah. OK, Roland. I see your address, so I'm going to get that too.

Speaker: And I've already emailed it to you, Mary Ann.

Mary Ann Perry: OK. Great. (Inaudible).

[interposing voices]

Speaker: No, no, no. That's why I'm here.

Mary Ann Perry: Quick question for Jane, because I know you know everything probably about the entity through programs. So it's growing in California. Is it growing in other states in the United States? Because I think you're in nine states right now.

Jane Eguez: Yes, and just the latest is New Mexico, and they're just, I think as of today, it's all been approved. And they're going to start training in New Mexico. So we're excited. That's been a long time coming, but it looks like that'll be a-- it is viable, and now so New Mexico is the newest state to come on board.

Mary Ann Perry: Well, just one quick comment. It turns out, both Lori and I grew up in rural areas. I'm from North Carolina, from a rural area, and so one thing that really fascinated me about Lori's particular role as mentor is that she's working with folks that really may not have any community support, and I just think that's so powerful. It's one of the powerful things about NEDP is that you can support people in school settings, community education settings, but also in rural settings, which is huge.

Jane Eguez: It is, and it's a huge need in California. We tend to think California is just LA and San Francisco, big cities, but we have large swaths of the state that are very rural, and it is very hard to get services. So NEDP, one of the sites is in one of their rural areas, but with this hub concept, I think it's really an exciting way to even expand it more. Because with the hub, you can serve people throughout the state.

Mary Ann Perry: Well, yeah, and now, with the national effort to improve broadband, more people in rural areas will have reliable service. And I should have mentioned this, but JUICE does support mobile phones. The overviews and tutorials and all of the navigation works on a smartphone.

We do want to reimplement our games, which we're very experimental. But as we see now, the games really work, and they engage students. So that's a future roadmap project for us to make the games also work on a mobile phone. And JUICE is also accessible and supports accessibility interfaces, with the exception of the games, which again, that's part of our roadmap goal is to make the games accessible and mobile. So I think that's also very important to meet all the different learners' needs.

Jane Eguez: Yeah.

Lori Love: If I can interject, I've been reading some of the chats. And as someone who is from western Pennsylvania, in a very small village, to now where I live in western New York, it's really interesting to know that my thoughts of California are probably the same as other people of New York. That it's urban everywhere, and it really isn't.

And we do not, the county I live in, we have no NEDP. We have satellite, adult literacy satellite offices, and JUICE is just a great way for students to be working from home on their lesson. So yes, I love being in the country.

Mary Ann Perry: Well, I just want to thank Lori. Jane, you as well, but Lori and Vivian and Susan Takas as well. Because this has just given us a tremendous sense of confidence and confirmation that we can add some value. So we are very excited to have some-- just a little bit of evidence here and a little bit of data I think has made a big difference for us.

Jane Eguez: Yeah. It's a challenge to make learning exciting and relevant and applicable, and I think you're doing a great job of pulling all of that together to keep the learners engaged.

Mary Ann Perry: Well, CASAS, quite frankly, was an inspiration. When I learned about your competency-based approach, that is just such a big fundamental part of what you do in your programs. That's why I was so happy to learn about CASAS and then about NEDP.

Yeah. It's great, and we just want to keep going. So I'm excited about the comments, and I want to save the chat, Mandilee if you can. I just have to make sure I know how to do that, so I can.

Speaker: Yeah. I'll make sure you have time to do that, and Mary Hughes popped a question in. And she says, how do you equate the work in JUICE to any required credits-- time, modules, complete?

Mary Ann Perry: Mary, that's such a great question, and it's one that we want to tackle. I don't know if you remember, I showed you on JUICE, where those little orange slices would track your work. And we decided, when we built it initially, because of this desire to make everyone feel they have equal access to a little bit of help or a lot of help, we didn't implement it initially with any kind of judgment about how much someone had to do or requirements.

But as we go forward, and JUICE can be assigned in a more formal setting, we are looking at the possibilities that might be, for example, using challenge games as a way to approximate mastery or readiness. So that's something that Lori has given us some feedback about as well. Because of course, as a mentor there, she wants to know if somebody is ready to take the diagnostic test, and we realize our informal assessments can play a role in that. So that's future research and opportunity to check it out.

But right now, we don't have a formal correlation to what you would award or how you would rate these skills. And one thing that's interesting to us, if you want to unmute and tell us what your perspective is, is we would like to offer JUICE for career training. Because as I think I mentioned, we could modify the context for electrician training, plumbing training, nursing training, and we thought that it would motivate those students to have their career goal context in more of these lessons and tutorials and examples.

But we do want to correlate all of our modules to the CASAS competencies and the career and college readiness competencies. So I believe that we're at an intermediate, intermediate/advanced level today, but we haven't tried to formalize that yet. And we would need some partners to do that, because obviously, probably, you and others are more expert at that than we are, or perhaps a group like CASAS has certainly got the expertise to help us do that. We can do an informal correlation, and we will be working on that, partly because we're getting good feedback from on pilots that will help us do that. Tell me if that was helpful in answering your question.

[interposing voices]

Audience: Yes, that is helpful. So it's a tool to get their skills up not necessarily to use to give them credits towards their diploma. There's no other system to do that. OK. Just clarifying that. Thank you.

Mary Ann Perry: Yeah, and just as a little historical thing, it was originally developed in a four year department of ed grant in order to give just-in-time remedial developmental education help to adults working on an associate's degree. So that was the original premise under which we developed it, but we've realized that it really has much broader application than people working on a college degree. And many of those skills are what you call high school skills or middle school/high school skills. So yeah, but thank you. Mary, I'm curious to know what you do and what school you're from, if you want to share that.

Audience: Oh, sure. So I teach at an adult school in Fairfield, California, so not quite the Bay Area, not quite Sacramento. So not rural either, but I teach high school classes, and I'm just starting to also work with ESL students.

So a little bit of computers, which I love working with ESL students on computers. But also again working with our below basic and students trying to get either their skills up for GED or earn their high school diploma. So a little mix of lots of things. Not CTE stuff, but it is interesting, your comment about that. Because we have a lot of CTE things, and of course, we're trying to grow that.

Mary Ann Perry: Yeah. Well, if you want to reach out, please do, because we'd love to pile it with a school like yours. And we are piloting in GED classes right now, GED prep classes,

Audience: OK. Yeah.

Mary Ann Perry: Through the Canvas Distance Learning Consortium-- cooperative. Sorry.

Audience: Yeah, and we're not using Canvas now, but I will chair, obviously, with our administrators, just so it's another thing for them to look at with the consortium as well.

Mary Ann Perry: Right. Right, and just curious, I want to learn more about what the challenges are for programs to get into the Canvas pilot. Because I understand, because I had a lot of experience with that in higher education, that's a pretty big leap for an organization to make.

Audience: Yeah. All right. Thank you so much.

Mary Ann Perry: Yeah. Thank you. Anybody else want to share where you teach and who your students are? We just love hearing about it. I know we only have a couple of minutes left, so we could probably call this the close and thank everybody very much. Lori, thank you.

Lori Love: Oh, you're welcome. My pleasure.