How Riverside Community College Uses Webcasting to Heal the Healthcare Crisis

Hello, and welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars, documenting creative uses of media

sites around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, Vice President for

Education at Sonic Foundry.

And today's webinar is entitled How Riverside

Community College Uses Webcasting to Heal the Health

Care Crisis.

Once again, we have a lot of people joining us from all

over the country and all over the world.

There's almost 100 people registered into our online by

the time we were going on the air here today.

We have universities from almost every state and

providence in United States and Canada.

We also have a significant number of people joining us

from various health-related government agencies around the

world, a testament to our timely topic and our very

knowledgeable presenter.

Before I introduce him, I want to go over a few housekeeping

items. I'll be your moderator for our webinar today.

In two different interfaces that we're broadcasting, in

one you'll see a speech bubble present above the video

window right now.

In the advanced player with a primarily black background, if

you hover towards the bottom you'll see control icons pop

up and you'll see the speech bubble there.

This speech bubble is your way to click on it and submit a

question that I will receive here in the room and can

relate to our guest. I'll be holding the questions till

after he's done with his prepared remarks.

If you'll kindly include your email address, if I do not get

your question before the end of the session, I will be able

to relay that question to our guest who's kindly agreed to

answer them offline, any ones we don't get to in the time

that we have.

Additionally, in the same icon area, you will find something

that looks like links.

Behind that icon you will find supplementary information

about today's presentation, including my guest's

PowerPoint slide deck, which he has graciously agreed to

share with you all as well.

Now to introduce my friend Stephen Ashby.

Stephen Ashby has been the multimedia operations

specialist at Riverside Community College, or

Riverside City College as it's now known, for

more than 10 years.

In the college's instructional media center digital library,

in this role he coordinates the district's video

conferencing, streaming media, and instructional equipment,

obviously including Mediasite, which we consider him one of

our experts.

Welcome to Madison, Stephen.

Thank you for having me and I appreciate being here today

and being able to talk about our great nursing program that

started way back in 2004.

Way back.

It's been a long time and the program's been very

successful, as we'll talk about here.

Thank you for having me.

As we know in 2004, our nursing program came to us and

said there's obviously a problem

with the nursing shortage.

As you can see by the numbers here, it's not just in

California, it's going to be nationwide, is nationwide.

And especially now with the health care initiative by

President Obama there's going to be more people that are

going to be getting health care and there will be even a

greater need for nurses in institutions.

Our problem locally at Riverside City College is that

over 500 students apply each year to our nursing program,

and because of a classroom restriction, they can only

accept 60 of those students.

Well, they needed to accept more students.

We need to get more nurses out into the workplace, and we

need to be able to provide better health care that way.

So how do we do that?

The faculty, when they came to us said it needs to be easy to

use, we don't want to have to worry about supporting it, we

want it to integrate with everything we're

doing in the classroom.

The main thing is that they need to be able to get the

student who still had dial-up.

In '04 everybody was just getting DSL, if you could

afford it then.

So they needed to be able to get down to dial-up users.

They wanted it to be secure so that way nobody could download

their presentation and use in any malicious manner.

But the main thing, there was something that they clicked

with our users as Mediasite came and presented to us and

said, we don't pedagogically alter the way in which you

teach your class.

And that struck a chord with not only myself, but with the

faculty as well.

Because they don't have to alter their teaching style to

use it, and that's what they really wanted to do.

So our solution that we came up with was we put everything

into a spectrum, learning desk inside the classroom--

I'll show you a picture of that a little bit later on.

We put a Mediasite RL in there, integrated it with

various scaling and switching equipment.

You can see all the items we used here.

We used a Vaddio hideaway camera.

So when the room is not in use by a streaming class, the

faculty don't have to worry about anyone looking at the

camera or viewing their material there.

This actually became the basis of what we started using for

all of our other classrooms on campuses.

We renovated buildings, we based everything off of this

model because it works so well, not just for Mediasite

lectures, but just for instructional purposes.

If you don't have to switch inputs on a projector or do

anything like that, it worked very, very well.

And you can see the faculty loved it.

They're teaching here.

This is our classroom and what we're doing there.

In fact, that was a lecture from just a couple weeks ago.

The program's been very successful.

As you can see our first grant from 2004 there were

additional 43 graduates that we wouldn't have had.

In our second cohort there are 25 graduates, and a new 10

that literally just started back in February.

We also collaborate with our Cal State Fullerton on a video

conferencing project so that our nursing students can get

their Bachelor's in nursing degree while they're still

attending classes, while they're still going to work

and doing everything there.

But they actually attend their classes at RCC, and they also

have used some material from Fullerton provided by

Mediasite as well.

And you can see everything, because it's integrated here,

that's actually a document camera that our instructor's

using to present there.

She's going over some human dynamic worksheets at the

beginning of the class, and going there.

So as I said, the program was very successful, and so in

2007 we received a technology award from the California

Community College Systems office, and it kind of started

a breed around campus that wow, this program's

successful, the students like it.

What we do?

How do we use that?

And at the moment it was only for nursing.

They had purchased a grant to get all the servers, get the

equipment, and we needed to expand it to fit their needs.

So, in 2008 the college invested in another system and

we've been expanding and using it.

The nursing program also has been expanding podcasting,

which is really, really popular with the students.

I get more calls for support about why isn't the podcast

available than anything, and it's

been really well received.

Some of the budget cutbacks, we had to cut back on the

expansion of it, but our nursing program's still going

strong because we were able to set up an integrated system in

a classroom where I physically don't have to be in the

classroom to record the lecture.

The faculty turn on the camera, and that's the only

thing they do different than when they

normally teach a class.

They just have to turn on a camera in the classroom.

Everything else is what they would normally do.

They wear a wireless microphone so that the

students can hear them in the classroom, they use the LCD

projector, they use the computer to do their

PowerPoints, if the need to use a document camera.

Everything's completely integrated

and simple for them.

So hopefully we can re-expand that.

But with the budget cutbacks we sustained.

We've still been able to maintain a strong nursing

program and been able to keep them going.

As you can see, even when they do videos there, not the

greatest of subjects maybe that we'd want to talk about--

they were trying to find out what's wrong, but even the

videos are coming across in scale as well.

As I mentioned, when we first built this system back in 2005

was when we finally got it, it was the end of '04, it became

the basis for what we did in other classrooms. We started

using the Extron scaler switcher to be able to

integrate everything into the classroom, so if you're using

a document camera, switch projectors.

On the desktop we put a MLC module so that faculty

directly have control.

You don't have to have a remote for the projector,

don't even have to have a remote for the DVD/VCR that's

[UNINTELLIGIBLE].

They can use everything directly from there.

Shure wireless microphones, which we're using today.

External audio mixers.

And again, Vaddio, we've been very

happy with their products--

using their ceiling view cameras, both the XD version

and the SDs, and LCD projectors and sound

reinforcement.

This became our standard classroom model that we

continue to implement, and even in the new-- we're

building a new nursing and sciences building out there,

and this is the basis for all of that.

We're going to attempt to keep putting that in all the

classrooms as we go through.

And as we said, this is what their typical desktop will

look like--

complete control of everything in there.

You have everything you need to go.

In our new nursing and sciences, we keep evolving the

system based on what faculty desires are.

So we'll also incorporate some screen and lighting control as

well, hopefully.

I can't make any promise at the moment.

We're still digging dirt around.

But that's the goals that we can incorporate and make it

easier for them to manage in the classroom and make their

lives a lot easier.

As I was saying, we integrated everything into the spectrum--

lectern in the classroom there.

It works really great.

You can stack everything within that lectern and you

don't have to worry about security because it locks up--

the faculty doesn't want to have keys.

Additionally, it allows you do some really easy cable

management and make everything nice and pretty.

You see the [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

maybe right there on the bottom of the cabinet.

I guess that was it for my prepared remarks.

I hope I didn't go through them too fast.

Nope, good job.

Now, Stephen is a professional broadcaster in college.

I learned the sportscaster, so you can tell you sound better

than me when you do this.

But there's some questions coming in already, and are you

willing to take them?

Sure.

All right.

Here we go.

One of the first questions that came in right away, and

it's typical of what I hear when I go around the country

talking to different people who are attacking the health

care crisis, the nursing shortage and such, is TJ asks,

have you noticed any decline in the nursing certification

pass rate for those that attend primarily with

webcasting?

No, actually we've had a really high success rate with

all of our nursing students that have done

online version only.

We're in the 90s with the passing of our students that

do the online only version.

The faculty are really good at Riverside City College about

ensuring that the students continually check in with

them, that they monitor their progress.

If they see that they're struggling on exams, they meet

with them and they find out why and they make sure that is

it a problem that they're not getting the content because

they're watching online.

They make sure they know why if they're having problems,

but we've had a really, really high success rate with our

online students.

So student advising has stepped up, kept pace with the

increased enrollment at a distance.

Our face-to-face students they do that with as well.

We want to make sure--

our nursing [UNINTELLIGIBLE],

we want to make sure every student that's in there

passes, but not just that they pass, that they actually know

what they're doing.

These people are handling life and death

situations every day.

You want to make sure that they're knowledgeable in what

they're doing.

Our faculty are very good about following up with all of

the students.

If you didn't get such a grade on this test, they want to

meet with you and find out what's going on and maybe why

you weren't as successful as you could have been.

People want to ask about simulation mannequins and do

you use those at Riverside Community College in the

nursing program?

We do use the simulated mannequins.

We haven't integrated them into the media site lectures

as well, but we do use them.

Had a lot of great success with them.

Everybody's really happy.

There's actually going to be a lab expansion in the new

building as well, but we actually took a classroom and

they converted it into a simulator lab.

The students have really appreciated it, as well as,

I'm sure, some of the patients that didn't have to have

students learn on them.

I guess the question then is do you see ways that you could

use Mediasite with those?

Oh yeah, you definitely could.

Some of our faculty do their--

ahead of time they have the students watch lectures so

that they can prepare for some of the testing that's going to

go on ahead of time.

If we wanted to we could, obviously, do the same thing

with the sim lab.

We could have the instructor go in there, do a

demonstration of whatever they needed to demonstrate, and

we'd be able just to distribute it on the Mediasite

and the students could watch it at their leisure.

If they wanted to review how to do a number of things,

they'd be able to do so very easily.

It's just part of what we could slowly expand with our

system here.

OK.

These questions are coming in so fast, they're going by.

With the shortage of available faculty, are you making

strides with the didactic portion of the program?

How do you guarantee Mediasite prepared, clinical faculty for

these extra students?

We actually have clinical faculty that we bring in.

So we maintain, I think it's 10 to 12 students per clinical

faculty member.

So when a faculty member is working on the clinical side,

if they're working with those Mediasite students, they make

sure that their time is billed to the

Mediasite to that grant.

But our students have the same clinical time as the

face-to-face students, they just don't come to class.

Well, they do, they attend class online, but they don't

come face-to-face.

They're attending online.

But we make sure that all of the clinical staff are there.

I've had to be in the hospital myself.

I wouldn't want anybody who hasn't actually had hands-on

experience in this sort of field.

OK.

That makes sense.

And I've had some of our nursing students, when my wife

and I had our child 10 months ago, we ran into two nursing

students that had been through the program and I recognized.

They were phenomenal students, phenomenal nurses.

A little perky for 2:00 in the morning, but if that's the

worst you can say about your nurse, then it's a good day.

Very good.

Another person asked, and a lot of people ask this

question, but Linda asks, what percentage of classes are

taken online?

What percentage of blended learning

classes are taken online?

It's a lower percentage.

We're doing it with our nursing program primarily at

the moment.

It's always been our goal to expand it, and we started to

expand, but as I've mentioned, our budget cutbacks.

We created a mobile system so that we can go to any

classroom in the [UNINTELLIGIBLE],

but we've had to scale that back since I'm the only one

that really does those lectures.

I need student support to be able to do that.

We've had to scale it back a little bit, but once things

come around here, we'll start expanding it and

start pushing up.

I really don't have a percentage, so I'm sorry I

couldn't give you a hard number there.

We're right now primarily our nursing, but we are expanding

as we go about.

Glenda has a good question, she asked pre-requisites for

these courses.

Can anyone sign up for these online courses or do you have

specific criteria for who can and can't sign up for these

online courses?

Oh no, there's definitely some criteria.

They've got to have gone through our

nursing one and two.

There's a laundry list of requirements that the students

have to go through.

The flex students, because they're flexible learners,

they actually have to test in and make sure that they're

competent learners online.

Some people, you don't pick up the material online.

So our faculty make sure that they're aware of what they

need to learn, that they're able to do that, and that they

can be successful.

You don't want to set anybody up for failure, and our

faculty do a great job of making sure that the students

are geared for success and that they can learn in this

sort of environment.

Got it.

That makes sense.

So before the upper level classes and second, that the

faculty has definitely made an assessment and worked with the

student to see if this learning style is going to be

conducive to their matriculation.

Exactly.

OK.

Another question is from Monica is do students mix?

Do online students integrate with the main class, perhaps

in the clinical setting?

In the clinical setting, and I believe there is some mixing

about that.

I would have to double-check with our

nursing faculty on that.

But I believe they do.

There are several clinical groups that go through.

So I believe they do mix.

I don't know how much socializing they do outside of

the classroom, but I know there's some sort of--

And if Monica will allow me, I want to expand on your

question because a lot of people ask this.

You're in the trenches, you're both an expert pedagogically

on front of the camera, and you know how to run all that

stuff technically in the back, which there's a lot of those

technical questions.

But to Monica's question, can you describe what is the

experience for the student who's primarily getting their

interactions through the web?

Are you finding them socially feeling distant?

Do they crave these kind of interactions that they get in

the clinicals?

Are there programs and efforts that you make to make sure

that they mix?

What's your observation so far after these years in it?

What I've seen, at least from my side, and I know our

nursing director could talk a lot more about this than I,

those students are very well adept at making sure that they

interact with everybody.

They're really good at socializing.

And because it's not just-- this is one portion of the

nursing program.

Of the program.

They get their lecture online, but none of us would want a

nurse that only strictly learned from a book.

They actually go into clinical setting, they work with

patients, they do things there.

As she anticipated.

Yeah.

So they not only do that, but then they form study groups.

So there's many facets to the program and they definitely

get a good social aspect of it.

They're interacting with patients, which is the most

important thing.

Now I get what she's saying even better.

That's great.

So you're saying lecture is just one facet of an overall

successful program.

So you're doing lecture at a distance and shifting time,

but all the other elements are still there.

So the sense of community is still there, even if you've

automated a portion of it.

Correct.

As I said, I don't think any of us want a nurse that just

learned off the books.

Now I'm going to drag into the technical.

A lot of people would--

I'm going to say what they want-- they'd like you to go

to that slide with the desktop, as you call it.

And I'm going to start with Debbie's question.

When you showed the pick of the desktop, was it the front

of the recording box or the switcher panel?

This is actually in a box on the desk.

So if you were the instructor teaching, it's literally right

there on the desk in front of you.

As your PC here and there would be a module right

alongside of it that this box is in.

So you have direct control of everything right at your

fingertips.

So it's not Mediasite.

It controls the classroom too--

Yes.

--for students that are there.

They're making their choices, what's

going to be being projected.

And then the way they've integrated the Mediasite, the

Mediasite is down in the cabinet also capturing the

choices that the instructor made of what they're

displaying and delivering it to people online, both live

and on-demand.

Did I say that correctly?

Yeah.

So, and in this, do you want to tell people what sources

you have in the room, because there's a lot of different

people asking.

Drill down into that.

Yeah.

On here, the on/offs for your LCD projector, and we have a

VCR/DVD player that's inside their cabinet so that they can

do any of those.

And of course, VHS is going the way of dodo, so we'll

probably phase out the VCR portion of that.

Our cable tuners are strictly so we can get our educational

channel, KRCC, so you could see out to the classroom or--

Because you have an

educational broadcast channel--

We do.

--still, on public access cable too?

Yes.

So we can get that out to the classroom, or if we have a

national disaster of some sorts we could actually put

that in the classroom, and if faculty want to show it to

their students they can.

There's a document camera in there.

We use the in-ceiling cameras from Vaddio, so you don't take

up desk space unnecessarily with a large document camera

like an Elmo or some of that.

You have your laptop input, which is on the

right-hand side here.

Your VGA audio, network and power.

So everything's right direct on the desk.

And then there's a PC integrated in the classroom,

or that could be a Macintosh--

I won't discriminate against that or on of the--

The RCA jacks at the top are for auxiliary support.

If we needed to bring in a VCR, say one broke in the

cabinet, or if somebody wanted to bring in

something on a camera.

They had video at a surgery or something, they wanted to

bring it in.

They could just simply plug it in right there and they're

good to go and they can go ahead and use it.

So this, independent of Mediasite, before the

introduction of Mediasite, this is the dashboard that

runs a typical classroom in the program?

It now is, yeah.

It now is.

We started using this with our Mediasite and

then we evolved it.

[UNINTELLIGIBLE]

together.

Gotcha.

And everything's in that nice cabinet with

the good air flow.

You know people had questions about that too, so we'll come

back and cover some of that, both online and offline.

Integration.

Gene asks, can this system be integrated with the learning

management system as part of online delivery?

So I'll let you answer first and I'll jump in, but do you

deliver the content to people through the LMS, and if so,

what LMS do you use?

We're using Blackboard currently.

We can integrate it with Blackboard.

Currently we keep it segregated from Blackboard and

it's its own entity.

So that way students, they don't have to worry about

logging into Blackboard if there's any sort of

maintenance that needs to be done.

So you send the students to my product--

Mediasite generates its own self-contained content

management and delivery system.

A portal is automatically generated.

Not just individual presentations, like you're

watching now, but Mediasite also creates catalogs of

presentations that you can manage very easily.

You're saying at your school that you actually have the

students come right to natural native Mediasite portal?

Yeah.

We keep them to the Mediasite site portal.

We guarantee--

our up-time's like 99%.

We're rarely down, and we like that.

That's why we send them directly to us.

We can guarantee the up-time and I don't have to worry

about it being down or servers going on or they're doing some

sort of patch.

We distribute the link through Blackboard, so we just tell

them here's the link to go to Mediasite.

We send them directly there for the integration.

Gotcha.

But you can integrate it even more automatically if you wish

so that the delivery is through the LMS.

Dave asks the question--

I mean they're just rolling in.

You're going to be busy on the plane home.

Dave asked, out-of-service area or out-of-state students.

How do you use this process to educate students at remote

sites, out of your service area or out-of-state to try to

educate students in rural areas?

Do you have to be able to come to the clinicals and

everything?

What do you do?

How far is your reach?

Dave, I'm actually glad that you asked that question.

I forgot to mention it as we were there.

But we have a very large reach.

As I said, we started Riverside Community College,

but now we're three colleges.

As part of that we have satellites at our March

Education Center, at Ben Clark Training Center.

Specifically at our March Education Center, there is a

group of nursing students that that is where they attend

classes and they attend face-to-face lectures there.

So because we have limited instructing capabilities, we

actually have a group of students who, at the March

Education Center, we have one psychiatric mental health

instructor.

His lectures are streamed to the March Education Center.

That's how they participate in the psychiatric

mental health lectures.

They watch his video stream.

So I always have to make sure those ones go off without a

flaw because we get calls about those immediately when

they don't come in.

But that's the primary usage for at least the outlying

areas is support for face-to-face instruction, or

support for instances where we can't have a face-to-face

faculty member there.

I don't know that we've done any out-of-state.

It would probably work into some complicated areas with

ensuring that you had clinical settings there, and you made

sure that the students got their clinical environment.

Now that goes to a good question, hopefully, that

Debbie asked.

She said--

maintenance--

do you have someone who checks and maintains the media

centers for the instructors, both at remote

sites or closed sites?

What kind of FTE, what kind of process and staff do you have

to have to check these media centers for the instructors?

We do all the maintenance ourselves in there.

It's myself and there's another gentleman who does our

installations and repairs, but I have to take care of all the

basic, you know, my mic isn't working, things like that.

Make sure that everything's there.

And then if anything's really major, something caught on

fire, blew up, the various things that happen to us in

AV, I have to call in a repair technician to give us a hand

and help out with that.

Now, you've mentioned Vaddio--

this isn't an infomercial or anything else like that.

But Vaddio is a company that's familiar to us.

We have some of their equipment in this room.

They're mostly well-known for automatic tracking cameras.

What exactly are you using of theirs, and are you doing some

automation there?

We have their control view hideaway camera that's in the

ceiling, and their SD document camera.

We have had limited success with the tracking systems. The

IR system that they have works phenomenal, as long as--

what happens in our classroom is the students like to come

up to the front and ask questions afterwards.

Well, they would trigger the IR relays on the camera and

the camera would be constantly switching back and forth

between them.

Then it would literally be like R2D2 and just wig out and

start jumping up and down on the ceiling.

So, although it worked in our setting, it

didn't quite work well.

So we're going to try--

we were just talking about this-- we're going to try the

tracking map system that's there.

It works, but it's that students coming to the front

that really throws off the system.

So what we've been talking about is, because a lot of you

have had questions, but to the rest of you is one of most

common questions that people have, especially in community

colleges that are stretched thin with so many students

enrolling, is they're trying to absolutely minimize the

number of FTE required.

One of the things that's happening, like right now,

Mediasite, Sonic Foundry Event Services is filming us.

There's a handsome man behind the camera aiming it at us

keeping us in frame.

People want to figure out do I have to have someone operating

the camera or not in a classroom that's being

videoed, or can I have a fixed view, or can I use technology,

like he was just talking about from Vaddio and other

companies, that is automatically robotically

following people.

And you say sometimes it gets confused with students coming

to the front.

So what do you do?

Do you have somebody operating and filming people, or do you

have a fixed view?

What you do?

For our nursing program we have a fixed view.

We give them a wide range, so that would have some white

board to work with as well.

And they stick to that.

Hopefully, we're going to make it so that it's switchable and

mobile and they can do it that way.

But we give them a fixed view, and the Vaddio

stuff, we can move them.

But for the most part, our faculty are pretty stationary;

they don't move around a lot.

Most the times is if they're doing demonstrations, how to

use the IV meter or things like that.

That's when they'll be mobile.

But it's completely automated in the classroom.

I don't have to go in there and set anything up for

nursing faculty.

They go in, turn on the camera, put on their

microphone, and I take care everything else on the

technical side of it.

And if there's a problem I poke my head in the classroom

and fix it really quick.

Another question that I can answer, a nice person asked

about voice and says, is there capability in Mediasite to

have two-way voice within the system?

I'll answer that, the answer is no.

The way you're asking this question to me now, the way

you typed it, and the way I'm speaking back to you, this is

the modality that we have designed into Mediasite for

this type of live and on-demand webcasting system is

the scale that we have. It's not a two-way IP voice type

system, like other technologies may be.

Another question, and we do this offline, but there's a

lot of people who'd like to know, and some schools can't

share this and it's kind of complicated, but they'd like

to know if you'd be willing to share with people who've

shared their email, the cost per room roughly that the room

set-up that you've recommended.

Would you be willing to share that with people?

Not to put you on the spot in front of 100 people worldwide

or anything.

Just an estimate?

Yeah, I could definitely give an estimate.

Off the top of my head I would just be throwing you a number.

So I would definitely have to crunch some

numbers and find out.

We'll work that out for those of you who've asked and

included your email.

If you didn't include your email you can ask again, but

we'll make sure we'll get an estimate of what he showed

you, because I know that that's

useful to a lot of people.

Boy, there's a lot of questions.

You guys are great.

The phones are lighting up.

Smart people.

Another question--

OK, there's a whole swath of questions that

are all about tests.

Testing.

Do you do any sort of online testing, Monica

asks, Martha asked.

How do you do testing relative to this?

As I said, the online Mediasite is one facet of it.

We do make them come to campus so that they can take their

test. They want that face-to-face interaction with

them, and you can do that.

So they do come on campus to take their tests.

It's just one of those aspects there.

Got it.

Another questions, I'm going to pick the one that is

easiest for me to read with my eyesight.

Kathy asks, have you had difficulty expanding the

clinical offerings, scaling the clinical offerings, to

accommodate the increased number of students that you're

able to accommodate in a lecture?

As far as to my knowledge, I don't think there's been any

problem with expanding the clinical setting.

A lot of the limitations are based on the actual

environment you're going into.

If you go to a hospital, they may only allow a certain

number of clinical students there because we're not the

only nursing college in Riverside or even in Southern

California.

So we have a limited number of clinical students, so we can

put it into there, but we work very well with all of our

hospital partners to ensure that we get our students

enough clinical time and that we get them face-to-face

interaction with patients.

Another question that Ellen asked is about scope.

Are all nursing courses at Riverside City

College offered online?

How do faculty assess skills before

students attend clinical?

So those are two separate questions.

First, are all of the nursing courses offered online as an

online component?

No.

They're only a couple of our classes and they're the

advanced level classes that are offered online.

We want to make sure that you get the first basic

instructions--

how do you start an IV, checking a patient's

temperature, getting all of your basic things

face-to-face.

And as those students advance, those are much larger classes.

As those students advance, we can move some of this to the

online aspect of it.

And then her follow-up question, that was a follow-up

to a before a question.

How do faculty assess the skills of students before they

attend clinical?

Part of, and I don't know if I put this so eloquently, is

that some of our nursing faculty have actually created

Mediasite videos that are specific for skills that

they're going to be testing on.

So the very first week of the semester, our poor nursing

students are there really a lot of the time.

And so the faculty have them watch these skill videos

before they even come on campus for that first week.

You're required to watch these videos, and

then they test them--

What's their length?

--on the skills.

They vary.

There are some that they only did about half hour, 45

minutes, some are about an hour and a half.

And they're literally saying, you're going to be tested in

clinicals about how to take someone's temperature, how to

intubate somebody, how to do this.

They show them how to do it and they're supposed to watch

this before they come in, like an orientation.

Yeah.

It's definitely an orientation video.

Cool.

That's got to be and advantage over the way it used to be,

throwing them in cold, I would say.

Well, they used to have to do it face-to-face, so they were

actually able to increase the amount of instruction time

because they could take away the amount of time they had

to, I don't want to waste, but the time they had to use doing

face-to-face instruction with these clinical skills.

They could have them watch it online and then test the

skills, as opposed to having to do face-to-face

instruction for it.

All right.

That's a good little nugget right there.

There's a couple different questions, but Martha asked it

this way the best. Does this technology have real-time

captioning?

Do you require captioning?

Is this an option?

I know the answer to this question, but what do you do

about captioning at Riverside CC?

If it's requested by a student in the classroom from our DSPS

department, and we work with our DSPS people.

Part of the 5.3 release with Mediasite is integrated with

live captioning, so you can actually work with a vendor

and they get access to the file and everything's done

remotely for you by the vendor, and we're able to get

it up and available for our students.

We've only had one student in our nursing program that

required it, and it was before it was integrated in there.

So we had to do a little bit of work on that end, but we've

had some really great luck with the captioning.

We make sure that any student needs an accommodation that

they are taken care of and they're accommodated.

That's fantastic.

That's good to know.

But definitely it's a reality that Riverside

CC has to deal with.

Oh yeah.

We make sure everybody is taken care of.

Our disabled student services and

programs is just fantastic.

Any of our students that need accommodations we take care of

them and ensure that not only their needs are met, but that

they get the same level of instruction as a normal

student would get.

All right.

So policy question.

This is a broad question, and a lot of people have asked

this in different ways.

One person asked, did faculty automatically embrace, or was

this a mandate?

Were there naysayers?

How did you bring them along?

It was a challenge at first. Some faculty were hesitant,

and I don't know if it was--

a lot of it wasn't the I don't want my lectures online.

Some of them are just-- they weren't very technologically

savvy and they were scared that they were going to break

the system or that they would do something that could

negatively impact it.

That was a lot of the concerns I had from a lot of faculty

members, or from at least a few of them.

Our Dean of Nursing, Sandy Baker, said we're going to do

this, we're going to move forward, we need to do this.

So she pushed for it and made sure that we did that.

I went through and I trained all the faculty.

I put them in a room, showed them the system, showed them

how it worked, and we made sure that everybody was

comfortable with it, that they knew how to use it.

In fact, one of the faculty members that was very hesitant

to use it, she says I'm not technological, I know I'm

going to mess it up, she became one of our best faculty

at teaching it.

She made sure everything was set up early, she made sure a

microphone was there.

If there was even a slightest problem in the room, she would

call me when the batteries were low on the microphone

just so I was aware of it.

So they became really well-versed in the system.

How many classes that are captioned can your staff

support at a time?

Like people want to know the ratio of

staff to recorded classes.

What do you think is necessary?

One-to-one, like there's got to be a person every time

there's a class going on, or can one person

support three classes?

What do you imagine the ideal ratio is?

I mean an ideal ratio is one-to-one.

You have somebody here who's taking care of it.

If there's a technical problem somebody can take care of it.

Unfortunately, I'm the one-man show at Riverside.

It's good because there's only one level of support, they

just come directly to one person.

But when we were expanding our system and doing three to four

lectures at a time, it can get a little tiresome.

I would make sure I have my sneakers on, I'd be running

across campus that day from classroom to classroom if

there was a problem.

But knock on wood, we've had really good success.

It's a rarity that we have a problem.

It's usually a microphone is out.

That's our biggest issue.

Batteries go out or--

When we solve that problem, both you and I can retire.

The batteries in the wireless microphone problem.

Somebody's going to write in and say that.

This is a great question that Ellen asks.

I'm just a couple more as we run out of time, but this is a

politically charged question.

Are classroom faculty compensated for the expanded

number of students they are teaching?

Is there any talk of that?

Has it ever come up on your campus?

I'm sure it has.

That's above my pay grade, and--

Dean level question.

Yeah.

That would be a dean level consideration, and I couldn't

even speak for Sandy on that.

If you want to send us your email, I definitely could

forward that on to our Dean of Nursing and I'm sure she'd be

happy to answer your question, or she may not, but I can at

least forward that on and hopefully get it

answered that way.

And definitely in different countries.

I in my travels, as Vice President of Education,

definitely have seen as many different universities as

there are, there's as many different policies on what the

effect is of increasing the number of students and reach

online and how that affects the faculty.

Sometimes not at all, sometimes it's a

consideration.

Well that's fantastic.

One last question that has come in.

Are most of the people accessing this content from

home cable modems and DSL, or are they accessing it from

labs on campus?

Can you comment on bandwidth and residential access?

A lot of it is our residential access.

We call it our PJs program affectionately.

Pajamas?

Yeah, PJs, yeah.

They're in their PJs at home with a cup of coffee watching

their lectures.

It's because we need to make it convenient for those users.

They may be a mom who also has a full-time job, who is

worried about day care, and all the various things being a

parent that you have to worry about or even just a person

generally, you've got other classes that you have

to take care of.

So a lot of it is residential users that are accessing it.

I get a wide mix of DSL, cable people.

I even have a couple of people that are still on dial-up,

they're using it.

And all of them are able to access it, and they're very

happy with the quality.

We haven't had any real problems with it.

Two or three that we've had problems, but a lot of it was

when files first came out.

They were having issues with supporting

the Mediasite stuff.

So knock on wood, we haven't had any issues lately.

That's great.

So when we started planning for the lowest common

denominator and not wanting to exclude anyone based on their

economics and how powerful their PC was, these were all

considerations.

You're saying now you're pumping this stuff out, you're

having almost

no problems. Yeah.

No, the problems that we have are usually I misspelled

username or I put in their password wrong.

It's all little stuff, it's nothing

related to their bandwidth.

It's all just little issues.

Another swath of questions, and I'll let you off the hot

seat here, but another swath of questions are all around

privacy, and one particular one, how do you handle HIPAA

compliance relative to Riverside?

Is it a concern?

That would be another issue I'd have to push off to our

Dean, Sandy Baker.

I really couldn't adequately answer that, and I'd want to

make sure that she had her two cents on that, because she'd

be the one who--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

But obviously you're doing it and you found a way for the

school to be comfortable capturing this medical

information and transmitting it in a world of privacy.

The last question I'm going to take is, and this is actually

a repeat of a question, but I guess people

really do want to know.

Specifically, how specific can you be about what competency

testing you use to ensure that the student is appropriate for

blended or hybrid learning?

In other words, when you touched on that topic, when

you said hey, the faculty make sure that the student is

amenable to learning online, a lot of people want to know

specifically what do you do to do that?

The faculty take care of all of the testing there and do

all of that.

They have instruments?

Do they make you take a test or do they just interview you

and look at your learning style?

What do you think?

I believe they make them take a test, and again, that's

something that we'd follow-up with offline.

I believe they make them take a test, as well as they do

face-to-face--

sit down with them and they make sure that they're going

to be successful in the program.

And watch their grades, too, from other examples possibly.

Oh yeah.

That's part of the monitoring of all of our students.

We make sure that they're successful and if they're

having any sort of struggles we make sure that the students

either they go through some sort of remediation, or that

we find out what's going on-- maybe there's some family

drama going on or various things that we

can take care of.

Well, that's great.

That's fantastic.

Well, that is plenty of questions.

I think everybody out there for all of your questions, and

I could barely keep up with them, and a lot of you asked

them in very articulate ways, which always

extremely helps me.

One final question that a person asked is when are we

doing this again because they wanted to watch it again and

they'd missed part of it.

Well, as usual, this presentation is going to be

available, this exact same link, shortly

after we stop talking.

It's going to be available on-demand.

Feel free to forward it to anyone you think needs to

share it and review it at your leisure.

Thank you to all of you who have asked

questions with follow-up.

We will try to get to all of you who have left your email

with any questions that you send it now or in the future

on this project.

And my friend Stephen has agreed to help us work through

that pile in the days to come, which is even more generous

with your time.

I want to thank you so much for coming

all the way out here--

I want to thank [? Bailey ?]

for letting you come out here and sharing you with us this

last couple of days.

I want to thank Mediasite Event services, Sonic Foundry

Event Services for producing another great webcast. And I

look forward to seeing all of you the next time.