I'd first like to introduce you to our Executive Vice President and COO, Jason Blake. He has a few words before we begin today. Thank you, Lindley. I just want to confirm everybody is on at this point. Liz, is everybody on? Yep. Go ahead. All right. Well, thanks again, everybody, for joining us today on this call. I want to thank Chris, Forrest, Jim, and Stephen for taking the time out of their day to walk us through some of the new ground that we're learning as we go through COVID. Every day, as you guys probably are aware, things are changing, and as the foundation, we're trying to pivot very quickly to accommodate these changes, and we're making some great successes. I want to just share a couple things that we were putting on our strategy list for the rest of this year and moving into next year. We know when COVID started in March, we looked at it as an opportunity for us to go out there and look at where we could change things and where we could add things for the foundation. One of the things we did notice that as people kind of moved away from the office, they still wanted to collaborate. We noticed that a lot with our members, but specifically, we started noticing things with the instructors. I think we all at this point had an aha moment, and I think one of our instructors, when I was on a call with him, said, hey, I love this group because our industry is so specific. I have all these questions all the time, and I don't know who to ask. I don't know who to share them with. In addition to that, I go to these meetings with the rest of the teachers. I might be on ACTE, or I might be in a different association, but I'm not getting any questions that I want because we're so different. That kind of brings us to where we are today, where we're launching our webinar series. With our webinar series, the goal of more of the association is to get our instructors more engaged in our association, to be able to collaborate and utilize the tools that our members have, and to also bring some tools that the instructors need as they move forward. We'll be launching a membership category for schools going forward, and in that launching, you'll see some of the specifics and the value proposition that we're putting together. What our hope really is is to get more collaboration from the instructors, specifically as we move forward with technology changing. We're reevaluating our standards for our schools that we've accredited going forward. We're going to get more input from you guys going forward. The second thing is we want to increase the exposure for our instructors on the conference. We'll be launching a conference in 2021, date to be determined, but we're going to dress up this conference. We're going to spend some money and bring in ... We'll still have our specific breakout sessions where there'll be a lot of technical pieces, but we want to bring some leadership components into this going forward, and we want to make sure that we're hitting topics that matter to these instructors. More to come on that, but I wanted to give you an idea of where we're going with this. We're very excited about this. I think it's a great opportunity for us to all collaborate and move forward with this. Thank you again, Chris, for leading this, and I'll pass it back over to you guys at this point. We look forward to your conversation. Thank you very much, Jason. Today's webinar, entitled Fast Thinkers, Instructional Challenges, Outcomes, and Fall 2020 Plans, will address the issues that you've all had to navigate post-COVID-19. So please let me welcome our guests today. Our moderator is Chris Hadfield. He's the director of the Minnesota State Transportation Center of Excellence. Our first panelist, Jim Mack, is the head instructor at Berks Career and Technology Center in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and he teaches at the Heavy Equipment High School program. Stephen Murphy is the director at the Caterpillar Think Big program at Florence Darlington Technical College, and he is our second panelist. And Mr. Forrest Brownlee is a second-year student instructor at Hibbing Community College. Now before I turn it over to Chris, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us today that you should submit your questions as they come about. So feel free to send them on over, and I will moderate them. So after every topic, we can get everything issued in a relevant way. This webinar is also recorded, so you may re-watch it or on-demand at your convenience. If you do have questions, please click on the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our moderator, Chris Hadfield. Thank you, everyone. Well, thank you, Lindley, Liz, and Jason, and everybody at the AED Foundation. And as well, every instructor and educator that's on here, as well as if there is a couple of employers on here, we thank you for being on here. During these trying times, especially with education and workforce development, we've been thrown a few curveballs, I think would be fair enough to say. Our instructors really fall into that category of heroes because they've had to really take it seriously, adjust things significantly. We all know that in career and technical education, it's a hands-on world. And when we were put and told to be home when we're in a hands-on world, they had to react. So the three folks that we've got here today really deserve a virtual round of applause because they've been able to kind of take the situation and say, okay, let's sit down, let's react, but yet at the same time, let's do the best that we can. And they've been chosen because of the specific situations that they've been placed in and the reactions that they had. So this webinar and this little Q&A and topic panelist thing is really going to help those that are listening with some insight. I also want you to know that there's going to be some things that are going to come up and we're going to talk about the future and what that looks like, but the general sense of things is to know that if you're an instructor out there and you're listening, you are not alone. Everybody is out there doing the same thing and the three people that are on here are just a small sample of the hundreds, maybe even thousands of instructors across the United States in technical education that had to do with things. And so just know that you're not alone out there and we're all with you and we're all in this together as a hashtag that everybody is using these days. So one of the first topics that we're going to do, and then if you have anything for a Q&A, you are going to have two minutes of Q&A after each topic, we have four topics that we've picked out and we have each person is going to get a chance to talk about things kind of around Robin style. And the very first topic we're going to talk about is what was that immediate reaction? In March, we heard the president, as well as many governors say, stay at home, stay at home, put a mask on, stay at home. And that meant everybody in the workplace, that wasn't essential, of course, in diesel and transportation, many of us were essential. That also meant a lot of us in schools, we had to go home immediately. In my state, in Minnesota, we had spring break and then we had five days to prepare for being at home. So we want the panelists to talk about what was that immediate reaction by you? What about your students' reaction? How about your administrators' reaction? So what was that reaction? And what was some of the challenges that really came about? Did you have enough laptops? There's no internet service in the rural part you serve. What are some of those challenges? So I'm going to start with Steve Murphy. And Steve, kind of tell us what your stuff and what's going on there. Well, thank you, Chris. The first immediate reaction, I'll just share one of the personal things I had. We're sitting in the Think Big booth in Con Expo in the rain, and we're starting to talk about, are we going to get home when the flight's going to run? And when you consider that, how do I run a class after spring break when I don't even know if I'm going to get home? And those kind of things are running in the back of our minds. But to switch to the administrator side, since I have some of the responsibility here as well, the first thing that's coming up is this is not acceptable. You can't remove the number one hands-on skill-developing component, which is the lab from the environment. And I think that was going to be one of the biggest challenges that we've run into, and that was primary in my mind. And the first gut reaction is, we're not going to take the program through it. We're going to sit down for a couple of weeks. We're going to pick back up and make up these labs. And as this developed, it really became evident it's not just two weeks. We've got a lot. We've got an endurance race to run here. We've got to be able to pick up and make this possible for our students, even in the faculty that are working with us, into the future. And what we ended up doing, just to kind of bridge that gap in the next spot, is to take down and take that next step and say, we're going to be able to run some labs, but we're going to have to do everything we can to get that lecture going and online. And that's a transition that we had to manage up front. So let's come to some of my initial reactions, and we'll toss that back over to you. Thanks, Steve. Jim, you know, the high schools were a little different. They weren't exclusive, but they were different. Can you speak to that? Sure. Yeah, in the high school setting, we weren't on spring break at the time. Here in Pennsylvania, we found out at my school about 3 p.m. on a Friday. The students had already left, and we found out we were going to be closed for the next two weeks. A lot of teachers that were present were able to gather up things. Some teachers were out that day. They were allowed to come in one day later on the following Monday to gather supplies, and we were able to get in contact with our students. I got to say, it probably wasn't a complete surprise watching the news, you know, people speculated that this could happen. Our school had been working on implementing a learning management system, moving our content to that. That was one of our initiatives this year. In every classroom, every program was at a different spot. So earlier in March, they had come around to check to see what programs thought they could facilitate an online class and which ones couldn't. That prompted me to gather all the personal emails for my students. They didn't have one email through our school. There are 16 different sending schools. They all have one through their sending school, but some of those even block outside emails. So that turned out to work in my favor, to be able to contact the students. As far as technology, many of the students had school-issued laptops from their districts, but there were still challenges with that. Some blocked certain content. Some had YouTube sites blocked. Others may not have had technology resources at home, but they were able to get them within a few weeks from their sending districts. Tim, you talked about that not having a whole lot of notice there. Was it literally a, the building feels like it's going to be emptied and you're going to be locked out for an indefinite period of time, grab what you can out of your classroom and get going? Initially, it was just the two weeks warning. We're going to be closed for two weeks. And then by the end of that two weeks, they decided it would be the rest of the school year. So no, it wasn't. I think most teachers knew to take their school-issued laptop home, but I know a lot of teachers left curriculum and content at school that they wish they later had. Yeah. Was there any equipment that you took home or teaching tools or things like that? I was fortunate. I had a lot of my content available digitally weeks before I had made a backup on a portable hard drive. So really it was just that. It was just electronic content and the computer. I didn't take home any physical equipment besides that. Yeah. Thank you, Jim. Really appreciate it. Forrest, same, same getting tossed to you initially, you know, at least in, in the upper Midwest, you know, we, we had a different scenario, but we still had a reaction from governors. Tell us about yours. Well, I guess the first, we were on spring break, which was kind of nice in a way and bad in another way where we kind of saw the, the two week period coming where we were still at home. And at the beginning of that, the first reaction was okay, well, we'll have lots of catch up to do when we get back in the shop. And then like everybody else said, it turned into a, oh, okay. So now we got to figure out how to get our lecture stuff in, get the students up to par and then catch up to lab in the summertime, which is what we ended up doing up here for our second year students. The first year students, we still have to bring in the fold and get them through once we get back on campus, if we can. So the, that was kind of that reaction time going into it. And then for the students reaction, there was a lot of, there wasn't a lot of pushback off to get go because a lot of them were still at work. A lot of the second year students had interns going over spring break. They were busy until they started getting laid off. And then all of a sudden there was a lot of talk on, well, how can we get back to school? What are we going to do to get through? How are we going to graduate? How are we going to get our lab time in? And that was a hurdle we had to get across farther on down the line with going to online asynchronous instruction. And then the biggest thing for us up here, what I saw was just the internet access and accessibility of technology. We have not had our students have laptops in the past because there's always a computer lab used down the hallway. You can't afford a laptop, you go to the computer lab. So that really kind of changed how we're thinking on moving forward here and getting our courses more and more online. So that information is out there. Thanks Forrest. Steve and Jim, I'm going to bring it back to you guys again with a pivot on the topic. Students, what was your students' reaction? Positive, negative? I would say, I would say initially the students just looking for some direction, you know, how do we stay home? In my particular case, we've had internships that I've got students out on internships that will be rotating back for the next set of courses. I've got students leaving, going on internships. So getting mentors up to speed, getting students, you know, where do I go? Is my job open today? And they're just looking for direction. And once, once we establish the direction, you know, how are we going to operate? Got that out to be. I think their reaction changed. One of the things that students really came to the forefront with students is they're very good with a smartphone, but beyond technology past that, there is a lot of big learning curve for them. So they've been learning along with us, getting up to speed with, you know, how do I edit a Word document and turn it back in so that it looks like the instructor wanted it to begin with? Or can I, can I add notes to a PDF or how do we do that exchange and leveraging a learning management system is valuable so that they're not just emailing files back and forth. They have an official place to drop it. So some of that we're very blessed with because we did have a strong, robust learning management system in place beforehand. A lot of our students that are continuing are experienced with that, but I think their reaction would be very different in the fall semester we're coming into just to say they haven't had the experience. So that, that's a blessing we had just because of timing that a lot of our students are existing and they already had some previous experience with us. Jim, in the high school, things are always different. How did your students react in similar manner? Yeah, overall, I would say the response was confusion for the students and not entirely their own fault. They got a lot of mixed messages. A lot of districts were very hesitant to require any work because they're concerned about meeting the learning support needs of our students. So they, some sent out a communication that everything was optional. So then when I was trying to have mandatory content, mandatory assignments, the students were unsure what was required of them or what was expected. It probably took about four weeks and a lot of personal contact from call home to parents to get that sorted out. All the schools were very gracious in how they handled grading. You know, students had basically unlimited time to make up the work because we had the same. Some had internet outages or, you know, connectivity issues. So it took a little while for the students to come on board. But till the end of the quarter, everyone was online completing their work. Thanks, Jim. Forrest, I know you talked a lot already about students, but was there any, was there a lot of flexibility that was given to the students? There was an extreme amount of flexibility is the way I like to put it. It was a mixed hat. Just in my small group of students, I had students turn stuff in. They would, if they didn't have access to a computer and all they had was a flip phone, so they didn't have a smartphone, they would get ahold of me. I would put all the assignments in a little notebook and I'd sit in the back of my pickup truck outside the garage or at the shop and they'd swing by and pick it up. Students that just had a smartphone, so they couldn't quite do all the stuff I really wanted them to do online. And then I had a group of students that were, had a computer, they're familiar with it. They had access to the internet either at their workplace, which is where a lot of them were accessing the internet, or they came into campus where we actually had to boost our wifi out in the parking lot. So you could go and look outside during the week and there'd be a parking lot, we'd have a bunch of cars there. There's a bunch of people on computers. It's like, well, I wonder how many of them are there working or how many of them are there gaming or something, but you got to do what you got to do. So that's the difference across everything. That was great. Thank you for us, Jim, Steve. Well, I think it's about that time, Lindley, where we start taking a little bit of Q&A and we were a little ahead of schedule. That's good. So is there any Q&A? Absolutely. I haven't had, I've had a couple of questions here. I have one from Charles Siegel. He's over at San Jacinto. He's been using email assignments via attachments has been a very good help to him. He wanted to mention that and that they've been using this policy for over five years to force students to gain computer literacy. So thank you for that comment. Unfortunately, their high schools down there don't teach computer literacy anymore. So the more wealthy school systems do possibly budget cuts at some schools. Have you all dealt with this or have you encountered similar issues? I can speak a little bit to that, particularly at a high school level. I was surprised the realm of the variety of literacy skills I saw regarding computers with my students. They all use a computer in the classroom, the Microsoft Office suite, but when it came time to communicate via email, I had some of my students, considering they're 10th through 12th grade, typing the entire message in the subject line of the email. They saw it as texting. They didn't realize there was a title and a body. So in one way, it really forced them to up their game and rapidly learn how to use some of these technologies that they haven't. Just like it has all of us. We've never been as familiar with doing Zoom or conferences as we are now. Excellent. Thank you so much, Jim. With that, we're still a little bit ahead of schedule. So Chris, if you want to take it on over to topic number two, that'd be greatly appreciated. That's great. Thanks, Lindley. Steve, Jim, and Forrest, topic two, resources. You know, during this time, we've been thrown a lot of resources. We've had a lot of textbook publishing companies that have said, hey, our LMS system is free now. We're trying to help out. We're just trying to help out every teacher across the nation. Here's a free, you know, 45-day subscription or 60-day subscription or end of the year, all the way. We've seen LMSs go for free. We've seen manufacturers give us some stuff. Plus, in some cases on the resources, it wasn't just curricular. It was maybe even equipment or cameras. And frankly, it's not just the physical things, but the non-physical things. Schools provided resources. For example, they hired new IT people or additional IT people. They reassigned IT people to be able to help. And K-12 districts bought five pallets of Chromebooks and so on and so forth. So our next topic is resources, physical, non-physical, financial, non-financial. We had a lot of them. What worked and what didn't? Steve, you want to take it? Well, from the resource standpoint, there's a time that you got to scale up and learn a new technology. So I think one of the things that really hit a lot of instructors I talked with is the sheer volume of resources available. There are a lot of open source resources. There are more than available than you can review. And if you didn't have any experience before running a particular piece of software or one that I've become a lot more familiar with is OBS for the open source management of video. And just the time that it takes to spool up doing something, that is something that it's hard to process through. But that is something that did help. And as we continue to move through that, I think that's what we're finding is you've got to be able to use whatever you're given. And just be able to click the box and say, yes, I have a new technology or we can fund the project and get it to you. You've got some time to invest. And so that has been the challenge to get that up. But hats off to organizations making the things available, connecting people to additional resources. I think Zoom is a piece of technology that I did not know we exist. I've built WebEx before and we've had the Microsoft Teams and things. But as far as a company that has done well through this, I think they have served a vital role. We can continue to have this dialogue. Just as a resource, something that I found that really helped with or noticed about students is even though we create video, we like to think our lectures are engaging and dynamic and they like to sit in our lectures. They don't like watching our videos anymore. They like our lecture. And when you create a video that's 30 minutes long or 45 minutes long and you try to mirror your lecture, those don't go over nearly as well as we might think as instructors. And so I found that using the live meeting, the live interaction to be valuable. Instead of videoing my lecture, get them on that and require a meeting once or twice a week. I hold daily meetings with my students. And you pick your technology, you pick your resource. But just the contact daily with them encourages them to keep them on task. And I found that very valuable. So how we implement those resources and how we structure it, you can't remove the instructor from the atmosphere and just expect the technology to fill that gap. We still have to be present with that technology. Steve, you got some great points there. I will have to say that I personally think that everybody loves my three-hour lecture on planetary gear sets without a break. But, you know, maybe I'm partial. But you are correct that some of the times we think something goes well in person and then all of a sudden, oh, we have this new resource and it's electronic and it's just going to work great. No, we still have to think pedagogy about that. So maybe my three-hour lecture on planetary gear sets that I enjoy talking about maybe isn't going to work for everybody else. Which, by the way, nobody's ever enjoyed my three-hour lecture on planetary gear sets. Jim, same to you. Sure. Well, we were fortunate. Like I said, our school had already identified an LMS and it was Schoology. So the one thing the stay-at-home orders did was it really gave our teachers ample time to build content on there. We began to take the training videos we had. We were using PowerPoints. We set them up as interactive tasks on Schoology. Now, keep in mind, it was only the theory portion. We didn't really have any substitutes for the hands-on. In my program, I know some programs were doing daily live meetings. My students, some of them were working through this. I know one was working at a John Deere dealership. Some were involved in cleaning at their local grocery store. So we really went with an asynchronous learning approach. It didn't matter when they went on, just so they would complete the work and assignments. To give them more of an open voice and interaction, we had weekly discussion boards that worked out well. And it was overwhelming how many resources were opened up through publishers and OEMs. I know our school, we used the Freightliner Get Ahead program quite a bit. Today's class was a new one to us that opened up resources, which was tremendous because our students, most of them had a paper textbook that was now locked in their locker at school. And they didn't have access, put the assignments online, but we had to be able to give them all the resources they needed. Overall, our focus, I have a co-teacher that works with me. We decided to focus on the content-heavy subjects, like, you know, the different types of clutches and how they operate, or identifying hydraulic fittings, things that, you know, were more theory-rich and required less lab time, to make good use of our time out of the classroom, banking on, you know, hopefully in the fall or next year, we'll be back to normal. I don't know what that's going to look like now, but, you know, we're running out of that content. And it was a loss not having the hands-on. Thanks, Jim. That was awesome. I, you know, Forrest is one of the people that I email a lot of my resources to. And I think I personally learned in March that I had overwhelmed a lot of instructors with a significant amount of resources. I actually got a couple emails back that said, hey, Chris, stop, stop emailing me. I love you. Stop it. Nobody actually said that, that they loved me, but they didn't say stop it. Forrest, you know, you were one of the guys that I sent that overwhelming amount of resources to, can you talk a little bit more about that overwhelming and talk about some of the resources that did not work for you at your program? All right. My biggest thing is when I sat down and looked at where we were at in the year as far as where our curriculum ended up by spring break and we were on break is a lot of my, thankfully a lot of my lecture-heavy stuff was done already. So we had, let's see, once it was all figured out and we actually got back in instruction, we had six weeks with students to finish them up and get them out. So what I did instead of taking my students who hadn't had a lot of, I was actually, it was amazing to see how that there wasn't as much computer literacy as I thought there was built in already. Where I utilized our D2L platform, which was our college-based platform, just because they had a little bit of work with it. And then what I opted to do instead of putting a whole bunch of those free resources out there and just confusing everybody is I put all those resources off to the sides as I wanted to maybe try as we go down the road. And then I tried to go heavily on using the D2L platform and getting the information out there. It was a lot of, a lot more work on my end, I think, because I ended up spending a lot more time taking and putting assignments together and putting packets together on D2L, which is a Dropbox form. So I'd take my normal lecture and break it apart and then throw it on there and then say, okay, here's the lecture. Depending on what it was, I would go through it and send a little video and then I would have an assignment attached to that. And it worked out good in the end, but I wish, and I am doing now, is setting up a lot more of my lecture stuff in the smaller videos. I know, Stephen, you said the hour-long lecture on Zoom is really rough on the students and it's rough on us too. So I was like, well, maybe if I could do a 10-minute blip and then throw a little assignment in there and then move on, probably the best way to go, so we're going to try that. And then I met with my students two times a day, two times a week. So Thursdays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, we met. I met in the morning for the students that might've been working afternoons and I met in the afternoon for the students that might've been working days or had stuff going on. And nine times out of 10, all the students found a way to attend, even twice a day. And, you know, the first five minutes were the students interacting and visiting, seeing what's going on. And then we spent some time talking over at the PowerPoint I had set up on B2L and then the assignment. So it worked, but there's lots of room for improvement. Well, that's actually good for us. And, you know, there's always room for improvement with everybody, myself included. We all recognize that, and that's good. Lindley, I know there's some Q&A out there. And one of the things we didn't talk about necessarily in the resources part of the topic was the physical resources. I know there was some chat based on physical resources. Did you want to cover some Q&A? Great, Chris. Thanks. Gary Mackey over at Ferris State has a question. He wanted to tell you all that they have a robust LMS system and had it readily available to incorporate it in their program, that Ferris provided them with Zoom accounts, VPN network access from their servers to access all information. They've been using numerous online OEM trainings and how did others handle labs? Well, that's a good question. Anybody go ahead and answer that. I'll jump in there, Chris, a little bit on the labs. Our first reaction was that we were gonna go online and then make up labs as an individual instructor and the class in a smaller setting. We got to a point where this is gonna snowball on us and we realized going into our summer, the way we're structured, I have an eight week rotation, so they'll be out for a internship with their dealership for eight weeks and then they're coming back to us. At some point in that semester, if you just keep pushing the labs back and back, you're gonna lose the opportunity to make them up or you have to continue the rotation. And so we decided for our summer semester, we were gonna go completely online and try to generate as much lab content in a virtual setting. And I think that leads to, one of my big takeaways from this has been, we have to advocate for the hands-on environment because we saw so much loss of competency when they don't have that reinforcement in the online environment. But I understand everybody is trying to make that decision. How do we get and serve our students during this time? And how do we continue to drive down the road and keep this bus on track? But at the same time, we've got to realize our primary learning style is that lab and something we have to advocate, even in this environment, that that's something that we do need for our existence. And everybody, I might relate to you out there, it's difficult to try to maintain that learning environment in the lab. Some things that have worked well for us here is to bring in the small groups, our plan for the fall, and this jumps ahead a little bit, but we are planning to be back in the lab here in South Carolina for the fall and realize that may be a distance or separation, extra space required. All right, Stephen, thank you. We have one more question. Chris, did you want to mention something? Well, I think it was a question that was in there and it's Charles had talked about relying on the local dealership. Can any of you three talk about relying on your local employers and having their support during this time and what areas maybe that they had helped you with? Well, I can speak real quick to that. Before the students were laid off, I had called out to all the employers and said, hey, we can't be back in the labs on campus. If I send you guys a checklist of projects the students need to complete, can you have them find a way to either have them work with somebody that's doing a job that pertains to it? I tried to keep it as flexible as I could. Will you guys sign off on them so I have some documentation and I can go back to them? I have some documentation and I can visit with the employer, stop at the shop and see what's going on. And everybody was like, yeah, that's awesome. We can do that. And then a lot of people ended up getting laid off. So some of the students that were great and then the other ones, we did end up having a short window of time this summer where we were able to have real small groups. I had to have everything lined up for the labs. They came in individually, did the lab more of a one-on-one situation and the way they went out the door, the next group came in and did the lab. So sometimes the best laid plans don't work, but it would have worked really good if everybody would have stayed working. So. Great. Okay. So let's move on to the next topic. So long-term, this pandemic that we're in, this COVID thing we're in, this hit us as educators kind of in a unique way. I understand, and I'm not saying that it didn't hit the entire nation in a big way. It truly did. But in workforce development, in career and technical education, in a field we were traditionally hands-on, we still are and have to be hands-on. It really hit us hard. And it didn't just hit us for a handful of days. It was a handful of months. So it made a big impact on us. Maybe, and Steve, we're gonna start with you again. Long-term, how did this affect you? How did this change your instruction, both as a teacher, the way you instruct, the way your school reacts, the way your students are taught, you as a person, long-term, how'd this figure out? So long-term, I think there's some things we've done in the short-term to bridge the gap, but we don't wanna lose focus long-term. Our focus is hands-on education. It is technical with a skillset. So I think that will be something we have to work toward as an industry. But some things that we will have coming out of this, we will have more resources that we've got experience with. We will have more advisory meetings, probably say, hey, I can't make it today. Can we go ahead and throw on a Zoom meeting? Can we, and prior to this situation, we didn't have the literacy or the experience just to be able to say, hey, jump on a video conference. As a student coming in for some advice, I want a tour. Well, would you be interested in taking a virtual tour instead of driving 300 miles to look at the facility? There are things that come out of this that we have the opportunity to leverage that we wouldn't have had just a few months ago. The hybrid class, and I think this is one of those that we have to walk down very carefully because, again, focusing, it's that hands-on skillset that we're developing, but we will have more resources we can plug in to fill some of those lecture content hours in a hybrid format where we can spend more time in a lab and put more of that content in an online environment. We've got video shot now. We've got some of the resources that we can add to a student and say, go check this project out, and it can substitute for some of those hours, and it's the knowledge that they're gaining and use that extra time in the lab for the applications that in development of the skillset. Mr. Murphy, that just was amazing. I can't tell you that that was just music to my ears that we do still have to focus on the future and focus on what's right and what we need to do, but we have some new adaptations. Jim, we talked a little bit about the adaptions, and the high school is a different ball of wax. We have parents now involved versus in post-secondary, we don't have parents involved, and what type of permanent changes or at least longer-term changes have been made or will be made on yours? Sure. For me, I think it's where we are probably going anyway with use of technology, but this disaster has basically accelerated it that we're probably 10 years ahead implementing an LMS, and I'd estimate that I probably have two-thirds of my three-year program already built in an online LMS environment, short of the lab environment, which I agree there is no substitute to. So what I see going forward is obviously finishing out the rest of that curriculum and using more of what we call in high school a flipped classroom approach where I assign the lecture, I assign the theory as a homework or as an assignment, and when the students come in, make more use of that lab environment. There'll be more time to work one-on-one with students, do specific demonstrations for them, and I don't see really going back to taking a... It used to be about a half hour or 45-minute chunk of time for a theory lesson for students each day. I can now use that time in the shop and have them complete that online at their own place or at their own convenience. I think it's gonna work better, allow us more flexibility, and like we said, that is our strength, having that lab environment, teaching the hands-on skills that allow us to make better use of those strengths. Thanks, Jim. I've heard a lot about, and I personally, when I was an instructor, I did that flipped classroom model, and it does work, and obviously in hands-on education and career and technical education, you hit the nail right on the head. It's gonna change us, and we're maybe 10 years ahead of where we would have been, but there are still some core principles that we have to recognize. Forrest, for your program, you're in the second year specifically, but obviously you collaborate with your partner that teaches the first-year set of courses. How did this change the permanent? I think the biggest change is looking at our curriculum would be that lecture portion, getting that set up in a good way on D2L so that's there for the students to use even if they're not available. I guess as I look forward, there's still time that needs to be spent in that, lecture is a strong word, but in that theory portion, time spent around the transmission, talking how it all works with the students present before we take it apart and put it back together, but a lot of the stuff that the students would possibly miss if they weren't there for a day or if they didn't quite catch what we were going through are able to go back in and really dig into the information that's available to them on that online platform. So I think that's one of the biggest changes I saw was the look forward now of getting all of our material open so the students have access to it all the time, not just in the lecture portion of the class. I think that was the biggest takeaway without jumping into what the plan is for fall. And then another long-term change is getting a little more flow to the labs so that the students know when they're gonna be, for instance, if we're finishing up with our power transmissions, they understand that we're going into the manual transmissions, they can start going up and doing some reading if they have time and kind of get up to snuff before we even start getting into them. So. Thanks, Forrest. We're gonna jump actually to the Q&A for Linley in a little bit here. And Steve, I will have to admit some of the things that have changed just all permanently. You mentioned the advisory committee and I see somebody in the chat. The question had mentioned the advisory committee potentially going on to a Zoom. I think I attended 27 advisory committees on Zoom since March and because they were on Zoom and apparently I was available at night. And so I did 27 advisory committees just in my world and obviously not the same school, 27 different schools and people have said this is permanently gonna change just end in, but we just have to make sure it's done in the right way and for the right reasons and certainly applications. Linley, I know we have some questions that are really, really good questions that I think we wanna put some time on. Yes. This is a question about social distancing from Gary Mackey over at Ferris. He says that they have enough space, but not enough fixtures. An example would be a transmission lab. They have student teams or groups working on projects. Are there any ideas on how to handle this? Steve, you wanna take that one? I had a Zoom bomber here. Well, there is, I'll just start by saying we feel your pain because I think that's what many of us are focusing on. In my environment, I'll just share that because we have rotations. I have traditionally run two cohorts. So we'll have a smaller cohort where I can let them go tear down engines, but at the same time, they're tearing engines down. I've got a group in transmissions over here. And so that lets us share our iron. One of the things that has also hit us and we're talking this is social distancing, but it's directly opposed to social distancing is we're talking about reducing our class size numbers. And then that means you increase your section numbers. And the business office is going to look at us and say, how can we justify running a section with nine students or eight students in it when we traditionally would have, you know, 15, 20 students in those sections. And I know those vary around the country. So balancing the business side of it against social distancing, I think is where we're gonna see a larger struggle in the future because we could break the class sizes down small enough and create some unique rotations around it. But does that make a business model effective? And I think that's where I see that that battleground is gonna be stages around the section size. Oh, Steve, you hit it right there. That business model is gonna be stressed and challenged. Florist and Jim, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah. Jimmy, I'll go first. Go ahead. Sure, I can go first. I know for us, we've often had limited resources. Our students learn how to do shielded metal arc welding, and we've only had one welder. So, you know, to answer Gary's question, I wonder how much you can stretch that asynchronous learning. If you only have one transmission fixture, can you have one small group of students start there? Others work on different aspects. It's probably very different than what we've been accustomed to in a college setting. You know, the theory won't match up, but if it is a flipped approach, and if they're gaining that knowledge on their own, how many variety of jobs can you facilitate in a lab environment? Florist? Yeah, and just to piggyback on that, my biggest challenge right now is trying to find the happy medium between how many separate projects can I have going on with smaller groups of students and keep my sanity, because there's just me with the class. So if I have four people taking apart transmissions, four people taking apart the differentials, and I got another four people working on hydraulic bench, you bounce around in that amount of lab time, and you start to lose track of what's going on. So it's really trying to figure out that happy medium to keep the social distancing. That's going to be the biggest challenge I see going in the fall. I think we've seen schools, and this is true everywhere. I think we've seen schools that already have policies about social distancing and masks for the fall, and of course more to be determined and communicated as we get a little bit closer. I know Steve was telling us just before this that he said, well, this is the direction we're going, but next week could be a different direction, right, Steve? Yeah, there's the misinformation, and if you're experiencing misinformation at your institution right now or your school, don't feel alone at all, because you've called us a panel, and I think it said fast thinkers. I don't know if the expert term was in there or not, but we're working through this just like everyone else, and so there's a lot of things that are quickly changing, quickly moving. Just to touch back on that last question, I have not proved it yet, but one of the things that one of my team members came to me with was an idea about using smaller numbers of labs or trainers is we'll tear down an engine as an example, and we'll build all the labs around that one engine, and then you rotate different groups of students through that station as opposed to having every student tear down their individual lab, and I think that's something that's very different from the mentality we have here in the past. It gives students such a confidence to be able to have a project, own it, and you get that shot of adrenaline in your arm when your engine starts and runs, and that gives you the ability to really help boost them to the next level, but in this environment, we are looking at how do we use our trainers effectively, and I know Kenneth from Oklahoma State gave me a shout out here publicly in the chat, so I'll call him out in the audience, but I used to work there, and one of our former instructors was in the middle of a transmission class, and they had all the transmissions separated in the shop when they shut down, and so how do you recover from all your trainers being scattered and try to put the class back together when it's just you as the instructor there, so those are a lot of unique challenges. Hope you find a good answer. If you get the answer to that one, share it with me. Sorry, I forgot I was muted. Yeah, if we all had all the answers, life would just be so easy. So speaking of all the answers and some of the unknown answers, our next and last topic is fall 2020. So fall 2020 is gonna be here in six to eight weeks, depending on when your school is gonna start, and some of them we've even heard are gonna start earlier than that and end earlier. We've heard rumors of, not just rumors, we've heard some universities that are gonna end by Thanksgiving. So start talking to us, and Steve, I'm gonna give you the first one. Fall 2020, classes, size, the unknown, enrollment, what your students are expecting, what they know already and what they don't know already. Steve, go ahead and start us off. So just to set the stage for us, we're online in the summer, so we're migrating from the online environment back into what we are going to attempt to do as a hybrid face-to-face. We're gonna attempt to run our sections with a instructor in the classroom teaching with the video, a live stream, WebEx is probably our particular tool of choice that most of us will be using because that's what our school has purchased. With that being said, what's the student's expectation coming in? Our enrollment numbers are down on campus, and that goes beyond just our particular Think Big program, but on campus, we're seeing a massive campaign today to recruit students, but what students are telling us is if I'm going to be in a hands-on program, I want to be meeting face-to-face, and so I'm not gonna sign up as a student to participate in an online class. If I'm going online, I'm gonna choose something that's, and this would be an instructor term or the modality that matches the online environment. So students, they'll tell you, you know, I want business class or I want a class that if you think about developing skillsets, something I can do this skill online and then IT or another form of classes. So we're seeing students change majors into those areas away from the technical just because of this, but to get back to our further plans for the fall, we do plan, and one of our biggest concerns is being identified as a hotspot and how do we recover from a hotspot if that is identified, and so that is the purpose and the reason to run those streams from the classroom. So if our instructor is identified and has to step away from the classroom, they can continue that online or another one can step into that environment. For me, our students, we do not have housing on campus. Being a college environment, they come to us from the two state areas, our dealers manage the housing, and so they have some serious concerns about bringing students back, and if we're gonna be online, why do we wanna put social distance online and then let everyone in the apartment all live in the same common area? So there is a, from our program, we're looking at, we're treating much more like a family, much more of a closed group, and we're planning to run that face-to-face because we know they're going to be face-to-face at the apartments. We're gonna try to do as much of that in class and social distance, the lecture lab area and then, or the lecture area, and then in the lab area, divide that up as best we can. Thanks, Steve. You know, you touched on that substitute subject, and what if this teacher gets exposed and asked to quarantine for 14 days, now what? You know, Jim, I, and thanks for doing that, Steve. Jim, I'm jealous of you. And I once taught high school automotive for about four years, and I always felt like every one of those students could have taught me on my phone how to use it a little bit better than I knew how to use it, or they taught me the newest, latest, greatest, whatever it is, social media, something or another, how to use it. And so, you know, as we go into fall 2020, you have a unique situation, and maybe you want to talk about that. You have a different crowd that's coming in. It's a different enrollment crowd. Can you talk about your fall 2020 plans and the uniqueness of the situation you're in? Sure, yeah. I was noticing some of that as Steven talked. For example, I haven't seen any decrease in our enrollment, you know, partly because we're a free school through public school. I have, you know, same enrollment, same trends we've been following. The other advantage is the students are with me for three years. So, you know, I have time to make up lost opportunity where at college, it's a much more fleeting time. As far as our school, though, there's a lot of unknowns since we serve as so many individual districts. We're not really decision makers. We have to follow whatever policy those 16 districts implement. The students typically come to us for a half a day, either morning or afternoon session. So I know most of our districts still are unsure what it looks like. So that even puts us back further. I know there's talk that it might be like every other day attendance or two or three days a week, and maybe Friday is all online learning. So there's a lot of uncertainty what it will look like. Like I said, my plan though, is to deliver as much instruction as possible online. And the days that I do get the students there in person, make the most of that by using our, you know, our physical space, our lab environment, having them work on their projects. Same thing as what they mentioned with colleges, my students stop mid projects. I have machines apart with all different repairs. The good news is most of their students are returning and while it's gonna be six or seven months later, they can pick up and resume and finish those projects to completion. That's so great, Jim. Thank you so much. Forrest, you know, one of the big challenges especially in an AED accredited program is maintaining a high level of program excellence and keeping that program excellent. And so in fall 2020, things are gonna change and you've gotta still maintain that high level, that really good experience for the students. That's what AED's foundation is saying and supporting is that, look, it's not just this program, it's this program. Tell us about your fall 2020 programs and your plans and how you're gonna maintain that level of quality. All right, well, my first step for fall is getting ahold of all the former first year students and making sure that their plan is to come back on campus when we go back to school. I'm actually, I got a list of phone numbers and this morning I called a couple of students and got mostly answering machines, but I'm hoping I start getting some calls back. Our plan, we sat down, I'm really involved with our governance at the college here and our plan as of now is to resume hands-on lab with social distancing and mask practices and then have all of our lecture be asynchronous or online and that's plan got finalized yesterday. So faculty and students are really hearing about the final plan today. So that'll, I'm hoping within a week we'll give a better picture of what exactly I'm looking at for student population coming back and then kind of spearhead how I'm setting up for the fall. Like I said before, the lecture portion is gonna be a lot of short sections with the quizzes and assignments built into it and then that's gonna force me to put all my stuff onto that platform online where it's easy to get to, easy for the students to get to and it's gonna force the lab portion to be a lot more hands-on because you have to social distance. So the students are gonna be more of a one-on-one location and have those areas set up and ready to go when the students come in. I've spent most of the summer, any kind of free time in the shop cleaning up projects that were started last year with the students that are gone and graduated now and trying to get a clean slate in here which is gonna make a big difference. Thanks Forrest. Lily, I know there's some really good questions and some of them were partially answered but if maybe you wanted to start that Q&A. That would be great. I would like to just start where they've come in an order and it seems like there is a lot of virtual learning with AV equipment, YouTube, all of the resources we've been provided with. Is there anyone else out there that has encountered any issues with using online learning or not even online learning but online platforms? Well, I think some of the comments were questions related to even the quality of the content. For example, YouTube, there's a wide variety. As an instructor, I often cringe at many of the things my students look at on YouTube or what they think is proper procedures. So we do have to be very selective in what content we guide them to. What I've found is building our own content is the best. So I have a channel, I've been putting up YouTube videos and putting up YouTube videos. Sometimes it's just narration over maybe a cat has that flash player with the high track and showing sprocket wear. So I did a 15-minute narration of that for my students. So it's beginning to build that content and then finding ones out there that are for manufacturers or are solid, good content. Excellent, thank you so much, Jim. I just wanna make sure we get through these last couple of questions here. What do you guys think about splitting a three-hour lab with 14 students into an hour and a half lab with more concentrated time? I guess I'm struggling to see the math hour and a half. You're saying you're gonna run two labs, seven students, if I'm interpreting question right. So I'll just run kind of on that and feel free to correct me in the chat. If that's not what's happening, I think you're saying you're gonna split it in half and then run two sections. I think that is reasonably what I did in the first part of what broke down here. And it is gonna require that your instructors and I know different locations have different requirements on hours, but we've had some instructors working almost around the clock to try to make a pattern like that happen and work. So keep that in mind as far as students, it does work to space it out so you have extra time. The sanitation between the stations, something we ran into is what do you have to do to turn that lab space around? Because if you're social distancing and you run everyone through the same doorknob or the same trainer or the same transmission, the same toolbox, same wrench, what good does the social distancing do? So thinking about that aspect of it would be important. Excellent, thank you, Steven. Gary over at Ferris is telling me that his semester will be ending around Thanksgiving. What are you all doing to compress your semester, especially labs and still meeting the AED accreditation standards? Anybody can take that one. Like Jeopardy, who's gonna hit the button? Right now, I'm not compressing the labs. I figured that by compressing the lecture and putting that online, I could spend more time in the labs. It might not be very fun for me because it is gonna involve a lot more time on the ground, on campus, to get all the students through socially distancing. That's kind of the only, I'm sure it's not the only thing that's gonna be a little bit of a challenge. I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of fun. Kind of the only, I'm sure it's not the only way, but that's how I've been looking at it is it's just gonna be a lot more time in the shop with the students one-on-one than having everybody in there and the mass chaos. Thank you, Jim. The final question comes from Gary Kepich. You're saying that some of his school district administrators were discussing the school bus capacity limit at 50%. They talked about allowing parents the option to transport students. This is not something he thought about. Is there something, is there any of the transportation needs of students being met at any of your schools? I mean, maybe Jim could address this one as well. Sure, I'd be happy to. Yeah, I've heard that that is gonna be one of our biggest challenges in a high school or public school setting. We might be able to deal with the students when they get there, but how are we even going to get them there? I know our school mentioned student driving permits. We usually are reluctant, are cautious in handing them out. I heard that they plan on handing out more of those than ever before for any of the students that can drive or have that ability in an effort to help alleviate that. So I think between student drivers and parents, maybe it is realistic to have that 50% bus capacity. Excellent. Was there any other comments before we end the session today? I wanted to keep us on at one hour. I wanna thank Chris and Jim and Stephen and Forrest and AED Foundation for making this all happen. And number one, all of you participants that make it successful to share ideas amongst one another. If you have any other follow-up questions, please feel free to email me or give me a call as I talk to most of you a lot. And I'll wrap up this session. If there's nothing I'm missing, we'll end it right now. How's that sound, guys? Everyone have every question they need? Thank you, everybody. Keep working hard, keep pushing for those standards. Yeah, everyone keep working hard together as a group. Great. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thanks.

COVID-19 pandemic

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