>> All right. Welcome, to our next installment of our
Improving Online CTE Pathways Speaker Series. My name is Bob Nash. I'm the Dean of Academic Affairs with
CVC-OEI, and I will help facilitate today. For those of you who don't
know, our IOP grant program, Improving Online Pathways grant program, has
supplied 70 grants to 68 colleges for a total of $27.5 million awarded this
since the start of July 2019. This funding came from state of California
through the state legislature by way of our California Community College Chancellor's
Office for the purpose of two general goals, creating online programs in CTE areas toward
either short-term industry valued certificates or programs and/or enabling pathways
from our online college, Calbright, to one of the other 115 colleges
in California Community Colleges.
Today, we are under the theme of
social media, digital media and design. So we have three colleges, Ventura, Diablo
Valley and Rio Hondo, who will present today. They'll each have five to
seven minutes to present, which should allow us some
time for chats and questions. And if you would put them in the chat window,
your questions, we will hold them till the end and ask our presenters at that time, so feel
free to type them in chat at any moment.
All right, I will now hand it off
to Nick Norris from Ventura College. Nick, unmute yourself and get started. >> Thanks, Bob. Nice to be here with you all, appreciate it. I've put together just a few slides here. With the help of our district office, we put
together a video, which is a few minutes long. And I think it tells a lot of the story of what
it is we worked on and we're able to accomplish. So if it's OK, let's play this video. And then I've got a slide or two
after this just to, you know, highlight some more things and nail things home. But I believe, Donna, you're managing this. My name is Nick Norris. I'm a business instructor
here at Ventura College. Social Media Marketing is meant to give students
the tools needed to work in and compete for jobs in a digital marketing environment. >> Social media is important today,
because it's in our everyday lives.
>> It's important that the students understand that Social Media Marketing is a business
function that has real business objectives. There is real fiscal monetary return on
investment that marketers need to keep in mind. >> Hi, I'm Jennifer Kalfsbeek-Goetz, Vice President of Academic
Affairs at Ventura College. And I'm just really excited to share with you our new certificate
in social media and marketing.
>> With this grant, our goals for the program
were to replace textbooks that were — that cost with zero textbook cost resources,
give the students not only academic learning, but actual hands-on experience, for
example, record a podcast using anchor.fm or to create a branded Spotify playlist, or
to create a Facebook advertising campaign. Not just read about it and talk about
it and study it, but to actually do it.
Another objective was to give
students the experience needed to work in the industry remotely using technology. And I feel like we've accomplished those goals. From a technology standpoint,
things happen really fast. So a textbook that was written
four years ago, for example, doesn't take into account a
little thing called TikTok. Maybe you've heard of it. So we were able to kind of replicate the
textbook experience with a series of podcasts about specific topics within the major topic of
social media marketing, influencer marketing, leveraging content marketing from a
social media marketing standpoint. Same thing with community management. And so far, it's been a huge success. We include closed captioning,
so they are accessible. And the students seem to have a really,
really good reaction to that material. >> Been very beneficial, actually. When I started the program, I had recently
started working at a nonprofit and really wanted to learn more about social media marketing
and specifically on the marketing strategies and ways that social media can help it. >> This is an industry of constant change and it
is our job to embrace the change in platforms, in technologies, in trends, in how Google
algorithms change every year, in how Facebook's, you know, company platforms
restrictions change every year.
We need to adapt to the times and the changes. >> I did all my classes online
for the most part. And that helped a lot because
like I mentioned, I was working. And so it was nice to have the ability to do a
class online and not have to commute so much. >> And we have to imagine that some of
these trends that have happened as a result of the pandemic will be ongoing,
meaning that companies will continue to want their staff to work remotely. And so, we're actually giving students
the skills needed in order to compete in the workplace now because they're prepared.
They can do learning remotely. They can work in groups remotely. They can work on projects and
submit assignments remotely. All of the same activities and behaviors
that employer would be looking for, our students when they go through this
class, when they go through this program, will have the abilities to accomplish
what the employers are looking for. So without the additional hours and
resources available from this grant, I would not have been able to dedicate the
dozens, if not hundreds of hours that went into building this class and program online. >> Another really cool thing about this program
is that the courses are CVC-OEI aligned, which means that they are aligned to the
highest standard of rubrics that support regular and effective or regular
and substantive interaction, as well as other really important things
including ADA compliance and accessibility.
>> And a great experience, I've learned about
different career pathways that I can take. >> You're training a workforce to
have good paying middle income jobs and we're pretty darn proud of that. [ Music ] >> Got to unmute yourself there, Nick. >> Thanks for the reminder. OK, go back one more slide. So, relevance to students. In addition to studying academic topics
from the course outline of record, is it critical for students to get
experience using social media marketing tools or assignments were created
to give students a chance to practice popular tactics and strategies. And just so you all know, I started a
small marketing agency like 12 years ago, 13 years ago, and everything that
I had done professionally got paid for and bought a house with. I bring that into the classroom. And so, the students are getting really,
really hands-on experience that they can take to their jobs, to potential jobs, and so on.
If you go to the next one, that'd be helpful. So we really focus on the tactics and strategies
that students can practice in the real world. And then again, so the textbooks
just weren't working out for me. So luckily, with my contacts through my alumni
network and previous clients and partners that I've worked with in the past, I was
able to record a series of podcasts focusing on different strategies within digital
marketing or social media marketing. This woman I'm speaking to right here
is an influencer marketing specialist at Duncan Enterprises, which
is a global cosmetics brand.
And she explained to us everything
that she does on a day-to-day basis to build connections and
further her brand's efforts. And so those were — those were the lessons
that I recorded while creating this class. And I think that's it. We go to the last slide. Questions. And I saw a few coming in the
chat, but I didn't get a chance to read them while I was talking, so. >> Yeah, that's OK, Nick, we're good
— We'll get to those at the end.
Just type in your questions,
everyone, and I will definitely move on and save all the cues till the end. Right now we'll move on to
Diablo Valley College. Anne and Joann, please take it away. >> Hi, everyone. I'm Anne Kingsley. I'm the kind of project coordinator as well as the distance ed coordinator
at Diablo Valley College. And I'm here with my colleague, Joann
Denning, who we've been working together on creating some online art
digital media certificate. So we're going to talk a little bit
about our process for that tonight. >> Hi, I'm Joann Denning and Anne has been
wonderful to work with and she approached us when DBC became involved in
the Online Pathways Grant. And we really knew at that time that we had
to develop and build our online offerings. We had currently been offering two
or three courses online regularly. One was the Intro to Graphic Design and
the other class was the Intro to Web Class.
But we really didn't have a lot of
curriculum for students to take online. Part of that was we were kind of overwhelmed with just being a career education
program, trying to develop coursework. And so what the grant allowed us to do is really
get trained and train our faculty and to learn about the best practices of online education. So it was very timely. And we really wanted to be able to offer
online courses because we felt that many of our students were working and
couldn't come to campus regularly.
And we also wanted to be
able to offer more courses. We currently have three labs, but
we have a big program in at — in art digital media at Diablo Valley College,
we have animation, gaming, we have web, we have UX, UI, graphic design, and video. And we have certificates
in almost all those areas. So we really needed to just be able
to offer more courses to students. And then lastly, we wanted the opportunity to
develop more advanced coursework that was going to meet the needs of industry
driven needs at the time. So we took this opportunity to, well,
why don't we — Yeah, I think that's it, we took this opportunity to
build an articulation agreement with Mission College, which
is down in Santa Clara. And so, we've been in collaboration with
them, really mapping our classes to see if we would be able to potentially let our
students take some of the coursework down there. And some of their students
take coursework up at DBC.
So that if we were going to offer, for
example, an intermediate web class, we would know that we would
be able to fill it regionally. And we can go the next slide. Yeah, so our project goals were to create
certificates of achievement in online mode, and we had a lot of curriculum we
needed to track into online coursework. And we really build some articulation
agreements with other colleges so that we could offer some advanced curriculum.
And then you want to talk
about challenges, Anne? >> Yeah. So a couple of the
challenges was there were some classes where the instructors have never taught
online before, we've never offered it online. For example, we have an Art 105,
which is like an Intro to Drawing and is just a wonderful class, but is at heart
and soul has always been taught in person. So we had to figure out how to try and translate
that kind of heart and soul to the online with training, video and things like that.
The other course is we had an intro to digital
imaging where it had not been taught online and the challenge for that course
online was figuring out how to get the expensive software products into
people's hands rather than from a [inaudible] — rather than where they would usually
use it on campus, which was a lab. And because of that — those questions,
we figured out a lot of workarounds. But because of the questions of software,
we got those instructors involved in technology meetings and
technology committees. So I think those were some
of the challenges that were in a good way brought everyone together. And then I know Joann is going to mention a
little bit about the articulation agreements. >> Yeah, so what we did is — or what we're
continuing to do is we mapped our courses with courses that were offered
at Mission College. And a lot of the coursework was already there. And then Mission College is
going to develop a few classes. And so, that's been great. And we've had that opportunity
to really work with them to see if we could map this curriculum.
And then like Ann said, the training of the
instructors was really critical and very timely because that's we kind of
went into pandemic mode. I kind of think it saved us. We had — I had been trained. Another full time instructor
Kevin Leaper had been trained, and we have four full time instructors
in our program and three of us had gone through the training, and we're already able to offer quality online courses
when the pandemic hit. So that really helped us sort of dive in and
immediately start working with our adjuncts. Because in our program, we have
four full time, one hybrid full time and then eight part time faculty,
most teaching two classes and none of them had taught online before. And so all of them kind of at that point,
we're starting to think about training because of the OEI grant and we were
able to sort of jump in, in the summer.
>> And I think what we'll
do is we'll just skip ahead of the timeline, so we can pass this through. I'm sure these will be shared. And I think we've mentioned
some of the project successes. But I'll just mention too, that some of our
courses have gone through the OEI alignment. And those courses again, we use
all the time within this program, but also to teach out to the whole
college on how to do this kind of work.
So really, these two certificates have kind of spearheaded a bigger movement
of quality online instruction. So do you want to just walk
through the certificates, Joann? >> Sure. If you could go back. Yes. So we decided because I had been teaching
online and the web instructor, Troy Bennett, had been teaching online that we would
start with these two certificates. The first was graphic design. And that's where Anne talked about the
challenges with the art 105 drawing instructor who really had technologically
didn't ever imagine herself to — that she would be teaching online, but she
really embraced it and went through the training and I think developed an amazing
online, intro to drawing class. And then we had other courses that we needed to develop an offer online,
like the digital illustration.
And then the digital media projects class, which
was a difficult class because it's actually sort of like a business, students come from all
areas of digital media, graphic design, web, animation, video, and they build
client driven projects in there. And before we had offered it in person,
but we were finding more and more of a need to offer it online, to make
it accessible to students. And we were able to really build that class. And now we meet online, the
students collaborate online. So I think in addition to really building our
curriculum, what the training gave us was a lot of new technology to work with
that we've sort of transitioned into building better advisory committees
with, into having our department meetings and being able to collaborate
a lot more effectively. >> Thank you, Joann. That's an interesting program.
And I see a question we'll
get around to in a moment. But we'll get to our last
presentation, which is a video. We can't show the entire
video to you from Rio Hondo. But we will share the link so you
can finish it on your own time. It's about 15 minutes long. So you'll see about the first
half, is that right, Donna? And do you have that now? OK.
Here we go. I'm Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Rio
Hondo College and the full time faculty here. And I'd like to speak to you
about the CVC-OEI project. Hi, folks. So what I wanted to do is go
over exactly how excited we were to be able to participate in this project. It really created a great opportunity for us
to grow our program but also to reach students that might normally not be able to
make it to our on campus classes. So, a little bit about our area. Our program, the graphic design program, completely replaced the commercial
art program at Rio Hondo College. In 2015, we started to revamp and sort of
got what was an old commercial art program that had four classes and a small
local Associate of Arts degree. We are now over 14 courses
including non-credit courses. We have two associate degrees,
one AA and one AS.
The AS targeting graphic design
majors and the targeting artists who want to add graphic design skills. And we also have seven certificates
of achievement. We have an Entrepreneurial
Graphic Design certificate, which we're really proud, we
just introduced last fall. And we have a variety of 12 unit to 18
unit certificates which are all stacked, enabling students to easier
move through the program and helps increase retention
and of course student success. Our area, the majority of
our population is Latinx. I believe our percentage
is up to 89% of our campus. And we primarily have an underserved
community of learners, who for the most part, the majority of them have
never even considered going into creative professions
in terms of a viable option.
And we understand a lot of this comes from
families who are unfamiliar or who are reticent about the creative professions
is, you know, is my son/daughter, child going to be in my basement
for the rest of their life. But what we wanted to do when we redesign
the program was to make people aware that there is a huge industry in LA and Orange
County, that's growing by 10%, in the orange — LA and Orange County area in terms of
employment opportunities over the next 10 years. And we're really excited to be able to bring
the type of quality education to our community, but also to reach beyond it, and
perhaps really the entire state. So our program, again, graphic design, for those
of you who might not be completely familiar with it, a lot of people think you know,
what do they do they design business cards? Well, we do that. And we do a lot of other things, too. It's estimated that every day when
you wake up to when you go to sleep, if you are in a Western industrialized
country, you see an average of 500 to 800 visual images every day.
And we're talking about the typefaces on
your freeway signs, the labels on your shoes, the boxes that you're eating
your breakfast cereal from. Everything around us that generally
tries to communicate information, whether it's entertainment, or you know,
viable environmental information, directions, et cetera, that's graphic design. And what makes graphic design
unique as a foundational program is that over 30 job occupations, and
really to be that sort of conservative, over 50 of them are really looking at graphic
design as a foundational set of skill sets that people can use to apply
to other professions.
Plus, graphic design is used as
a very viable asset to people who aren't creative professionals,
that if it appears on your resume that you have graphic design skills, that can really increase your value
in terms of employment as well. So what we've really tried to do by
porting our program and making it offered through distance education, as well as on
campus, is to not only expand our reach to our local district students, and these
are students who have transportation issues, childcare issues, people who work during the
day when our traditional classes are taught, people who might not physically be able to
come to campus, there's all kinds of variety of students who we feel we aren't reaching
with a traditional on campus course offering that now we'll be able to reach through
our distance education offerings as well.
We also had a limitation just in terms of
our own physical growth here on our campus because of the unavailability of physical
buildings to expand into, et cetera. And now, this gives us the ability
to actually grow our program and add more content as our
program grows as well. We also want to reach out to non-traditional
students, incarcerated students, anybody who we can sort of reach that
couldn't make it to a traditional campus. So this is really who we feel
that we're reaching the most. Our project goals are really to increase
student outreach inside and outside the district to increase our core sections,
and of course, our enrollment, and to also increase student success in terms of
skills, vocational, application, and transfer.
And that last three triad of sort of pathways,
if you will, is really what an online presence through distance education
really empowers us to do. So we figure our market, our target market
or our target student is really threefold. It's the student who wants to add graphic
design skills to their repertoire, whether they're in nursing, wildland fire,
law, philosophy, or whatever their major is, graphic design skills are an asset to anybody. So again, this is what we talked about when
I first started talking about the program is that if you show that you've got a certificate,
and let's say, branding and identity design that we offer, then they're going to be able
to go to you, whoever hires you and go, Hey, could — do you think you could help us figure
out this logo or trademark that we're working on or help us work with a design
studio or something like that? Or people who are just curious lifelong
learners who want to add those skill sets.
The second pathway we really look at are people
that want to go into business for themselves. So in our area, we have a lot of entrepreneurial
students who sell-t shirts at swap meets, who are selling on Etsy and eBay and doing
things on their own out of the sort of trunks of their cars and portable screen printing
machines and things of that nature, who aren't as interested in
transferring to a four-year college but what a more foundational
sort of base of skill. >> OK, our seven minutes are up. But we will share that link to
that video that you can finish. And, Grant, if you — if you
have a link handy and can share that in chat and everyone can get it there. So let's go back to some of these questions. And they may have been answered already. But Lynn [assumed spelling] asks, for students to create a podcast off campus
— This is for the first program. To create podcast, if you require that
of students, did you loan out microphones or any other technology for
them to do that, Nick? >> We didn't.
And in all honesty, I don't
think that's necessary. It's nice. It's nice to have a microphone,
like the Blue Snowball. But, you know, most computer
mics and phone mics work. The anchor.fm app goes on the phone
and you can record directly into it like you were talking on the phone. So it was not necessary. We did not have anybody ask, so.
>> OK. A question for all of you, any can
step in, what strategies have been developed to respond to individual learning styles
to further individualizing instruction. Did any of you address that in a specific way? Grant from Rio Hondo. >> Yeah, one of the things that we did at Rio
Hondo, let me preface this by saying I'm here in place of our faculty member who is the
point person on this graphic design project. I'm the Dean of Arts and Cultural programs,
and I'm also the Dean of Distance Ed.
So we talk a lot about individualized
instruction, especially in the arts areas. And one of the things that we learned
is that, you know, through, you know, a century of teaching art at the
college and university level, we really are offering individualized tracking
and instruction to students in large art, music, theater classrooms all the time. So, one of the things that we tried to bring
into this grant program is the knowledge from a lot of our instructors who are
used to having multiple ability levels, multiple levels of training, or multiple
different approaches to learning.
So what we did was the folks that came into
this grant from the various CTE programs, we tried to set them up with a point person in
the arts if they wanted to communicate directly about how they could reach
these multilevel or, as you say, multi-learning styles in one specific classroom. It yielded some pretty interesting results, too. We're not ready to really talk about it publicly but I think we'll have more
information in probably a year. We're working on some papers. >> OK. Grant, while we have you, your instructor
mentioned serving incarcerated students. Can that be done online, and how so? >> That's a really great
question, I — No, it can't be. I [inaudible] really is after
recently incarcerated students. The work that we've done in our
area is with students that are — have, you know, come out and are
now in the general population. We have a really, really large group of students
on our campus that are doing that kind of work. Students that are inside, they don't have
internet access, they can't use computer.
A lot of them are specifically
forbidden from using a computer. So, you know, I think the real thrust
here is trying to reach students who are, you know, recently, formerly incarcerated. >> OK, thank you for that. Maybe one last question. And this is actually an interest
I have in Diablo Valley's program, aligning with mission, maybe
collaborating with them. Is this a — could this be
a joint degree program? Because it's very intriguing. You could offer a course in fall,
they would offer it in spring and if you have trouble filling your classes
between you, you could help each other that way. Is that the idea? >> Yes, that is the idea. And what we're — we're really trying to make it so that we're actually sharing
an advisory board as well.
So we have a pretty robust board
right now that meets every spring with like 10 industry professionals
that have been giving us guidance. And we're hoping to make this
a regional collaboration. It isn't currently — it's
just faculty working together. And we do kind of get support
from management a little bit. But we would really like to build fully
online degrees that weren't college specific. That would be the goal so that the workload is
not on any one college and we really can look at what our program strengths are, what we
can offer and make it available to students. So that is the goal. We're kind of in the initial stages of it. And Mission College has a very robust digital
media program like we do so they're kind of a good partner, but we
would really love to expand it. >> Very good. Thank you. Joann. Henry is asked to make a closing comment. We have 30 seconds, Henry, take it away. You have to unmute yourself, where are you? Can you unmute. There you go. >> Yes, here we go.
I would like this group to know you've been
joined by a legend in the field, Bernie Luskin, who created telecourses, online courses,
all kinds of stuff going forward. So you're in a great audience. And I want to express my appreciation to
you because I served on the launch team and helped write the original
grant for this thing. And I am absolutely overwhelmed by what you
folks are doing and how you're moving forward. I'm getting goosebumps right
now as I'm talking about this. But congratulations, keep it going. Bernie and I are just absolutely overwhelmed
with what you guys are doing out there. So, thank you very much. >> Thank you, Henry.
Very kind of you to say. And it's great to see you, Bernie, as always. All right, I want to thank all our
presenters and our guests today. This will be recorded for
later viewing and stay tuned. We have several of these speaker series
webinars coming up so you can find those on our website and register for them there. Have a great afternoon. We'll see you next time..
