From Class to Campus: Mastering Tech Integration & Expansion for Student Success

Matthew Short:

We are thrilled that you have decided to join us here today, and hope that you enjoy today’s discussion and walk away prepared to inspire your students and make a positive impact on their careers. My name is Matthew Short. I’m on the GoReact Client Success team, and I’ll be helping moderate today’s presentation.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with GoReact, we are a skills mastery and assessment solution used primarily across campuses in the United States and the United Kingdom. I’m happy to be joined today by our panelists from Harper College. I’ll have them introduce themselves here in just a bit.

Before we begin our discussion, I’ll run through a few points of housekeeping. Today’s event will last about 45 minutes. This includes roughly 30 minutes of discussion and about 10 to 15 minutes for questions and answers. We are recording today’s presentation, so if you do need to hop off before we finish or you want to share this recording with any of your colleagues or peers, we will email the recording following today’s session.

We do want the session to be as interactive as possible, so throughout the presentation, please feel free to submit any questions you may have for panelists or for myself as the host. To submit questions, please use the Q&A function within Zoom, and we’ll answer as many questions in today’s session as we have time for.

You’ll also see a chat function within Zoom. Please feel free to use this to introduce yourself, tell us what school you are with, and if you have links or resources to share with other attendees, please feel free to drop those there.

So with housekeeping out of the way, I do want to start our session here by letting our friends from Harper College introduce themselves to the audience by sharing their names, their current role or discipline, and how long they’ve worked at Harper College. I’m going to start introductions with Melissa who can also provide additional information about Harper College as an institution as part of her introduction as well. So Melissa, feel free to take it away.

Melissa Baysingar:

Thank you, Matthew. As Matthew said, my name is Melissa Baysingar. I am an instructional designer at Harper College, so I work in our faculty development center. We call it our Academy for Teaching Excellence. Harper College as an institution, we are a large community college in Palatine, Illinois, so that is in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. We have about 23,000 students, so we are very happy to have some of our fabulous faculty with us today on the panel, and I will let them introduce themselves.

Matthew Short:

Excellent, thank you, Melissa. So for the remainder, I’ll just go through in the order that I have you here in Zoom. So next I have Adrian.

Adrian Fleisher:

That’s right. How you doing today? My name is Adrian. I teach in the Kinesiology Department at Harper. I started in January of 2019. My first classes started during the polar vortex up here, if you recall that. For my courses in the Kinesiology Department, we’ll get into this later on, but just to give you an idea of blend, we have some students who are first year students, some people who are master’s degree students who are going for their endorsement in physical education. So a pretty diverse group of people in the course that we’re going to talk about today.

Matthew Short:

Perfect. Thank you, Adrian. So next I’ll call Jeff.

Jeff Przybylo:

Hey, everybody. My name is Jeff Przybylo. I am 28 year member of the Speech Communication Department at Harper. I’m currently one of the chairs of the department. I’ve been recording student speeches since 1996 and have done it in every conceivable way, and I’m thrilled to finally be able to share some of our methods here today.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. Thank you, Jeff. I’ll call Carol next.

Carol Carlson-Nofsinger:

Hi, I’m Carol Carlson-Nofsinger, and I am the coordinator of Legal Studies, previously called Paralegal Studies, at Harper College. I’m also an associate professor here, and so most of our students are interested in some kind of legal career or moving forward on a pathway to go to law school, and I’ve been at Harper College for about five years now.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. Thank you, Carol. We’ll call Charlotte next.

Charlotte Schulze-Hewett:

I’m Charlotte Schulze-Hewett. I’ve been at Harper for about 15 years or so. I’ve only been using GoReact for a couple of years. I’m in the Math Department, and I’ve used it in a few different courses, calculus, pre-calculus, and my math for elementary education majors, and it’s been an interesting tool for me to use.

Matthew Short:

Wonderful. Thank you so much. And last but not least, Donna.

Donna Oswald:

Hi, I am Donna Oswald. I’m part of the Health Careers division. I am the Phlebotomy Program coordinator and assistant professor faculty member. I’ve been with Harper since 2015, and I utilized GoReact with both my introduction first Phlebotomy 101 students and also at their clinical rotation. Clinical rotations, we utilize the system.

Matthew Short:

Perfect. Thank you so much. I appreciate everybody’s introduction to help get things started today. So let’s dive into some of the discussion topics that we had geared for today. And I’m going to start with Jeff. Jeff has literally been using the product far longer than I have. Jeff was my second client facing conversation when I joined GoReact about three years. So definitely a lot of experience and utilization of the tool, even beyond my years. So Jeff, I want to start with you. Can you share how GoReact was initially chosen and adopted within the communications department at Harper College?

Jeff Przybylo:

Yeah, I’ve always been obsessed with recording performance. I was a high jumper back in high school, and my coach was one of the first that I know of to record us. This was 1983, 4, and we would step by step stop and look at every aspect of the high jump, so I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. Before GoReact started, I was working as a digital faculty consultant for a publisher, and we were at the National Communication Convention running seminars and talking to faculty and stuff. And one of the people from that publisher said to me, “Hey, there’s this other company on the other side over there, they’re called GoReact, go spy on them,” is basically what they said. They said, “Go figure out what they’re doing over there,” because this publisher was doing similar things. And I went over, and basically I’ve jumped ship since then.

So this is one of the things here at Harper that we say a lot that COVID hashed a lot of good things, a lot of bad things, but a lot of good things. COVID launched our relationship with GoReact in a big way. When I left the publishing company as a position, as a side job that I was doing as a digital faculty consultant and started using GoReact in my classes. It was everything that I had ever wanted in recording of speeches and evaluating speeches and rubrics for speeches. So I was using it, and I was having my students pay for it. So the students could buy a one-off license, I don’t even know what it was at the time, 20 bucks, 30 bucks. I got rid of my textbook to help them afford that. And the more I used it, the more other faculty in my department used it, and the more other people on campus heard about it and said, “What is that thing you’re doing?”

And then COVID hit, and all of our instructors had to figure out a way to do this efficiently. A lot of them were using YouTube, and very inefficient, not very private. So we went to work. My dean, Jamie Rewartz was instrumental in working with Melissa’s department and our deans and our provost to get us a site license for this. It was so effective that they agreed to continue to pay for that site license. And now as you can see, it’s grown beyond the speech department to all kinds of other departments and other uses. So it was definitely an evolution, but it was a very cool one.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for that kind of initial context there, Jeff. And I also want to bring in our other remaining faculty panelists here to tell us a bit about your disciplines and walk us through some of the key use cases for GoReact within your respective department. So I’ll kind of cue you based on the list I have here. So we’ll start with Carol to share a little bit of the context of how she’s leveraging it within the Legal Studies program at Harper.

Carol Carlson-Nofsinger:

Yeah. So as Jeff said, after COVID hit, my program had been a fully face-to-face program prior to my arrival at Harper College. And then I had moved a couple classes online that were going to launch in the fall of 2019. And of course, we were mostly face-to-face, and all of a sudden we had to quickly adapt our courses to online, and we did the best we could under the circumstances, but we’re an ABA approved program. And what that means is the American Bar Association approves our program. It’s kind of the gold stamp of approval for legal studies and paralegal studies programs across the United States. And so we have to follow ABA guidelines. One of the guidelines requires us to assess students’ oral communication skills. That’s very difficult to do in an asynchronous online course. So we had to come up with a tool that we could use to implement so that we could satisfy the guideline.

And luckily, Melissa introduced me to GoReact, and I thought it was very user-friendly for myself, my staff, and also the students. And so I started incorporating it into one of my classes to begin, which is contract law. So to give you an example, I created two assignments for my students in my contract law class. The first one was to ask them to show a contract that they had signed themselves, any variety of a contract, so lease to a software agreement or anything like that. And then I gave them specific provisions of the contract they had to identify. So they would actually share their screen, show us the contract, show us the provisions, and discuss them as per the assignment instructions.

The second assignment that I incorporated into the contract law class was a group assignment. So another ABA guideline requires students to work together and interact with one another even in asynchronous courses. Now, obviously since we use Blackboard as our learning management system here at Harper College, a lot of us use discussion board for that purpose, but I wanted to introduce another type of tool that students could use to work together. And so that’s why I adopted GoReact for that assignment.

So students were given kind of a mock and poorly written employment agreement, and they had to go through it and come up with three suggestions. One suggestion to change something in the agreement, one suggestion to reorganize the agreement, and one suggestion to add something to the agreement. And that was based on a fictitious set of facts provided by our clients, so to speak. So those are two examples of how I’m using GoReact in my classes and how it evolved basically out of necessity to assess these various things that we need to do to meet our ABA guidelines.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. Thank you, Carol. Next we’ll queue up Adrian.

Adrian, can you still hear me?

Adrian Fleisher:

Oh, I sure can.

Matthew Short:

Oh, there we go. I was going to queue you up next to share how your department program has leveraged GoReact within your coursework.

Adrian Fleisher:

Sure, sure. In our coursework, when we go into our 200 level courses for kinesiology, our students have to show aptitude and skill in being able to administer certain testing protocols, whether it’s a field test like a 300 yard shuttle, a 40 yard dash, or 5-10-5 yard shuttle, or if it’s more clinical in nature where we’re talking about perhaps blood pressure reading or taking pulse. So to that end, our students needed to have some type of vehicle where they could actually administer those tests and deliver those tests. Now, the setup I used in GoReact was a one-on-one format where they submitted a video and I would evaluate the video. So it was one-on-one between the student and the instructor.

And that fulfilled our requirements for some of our courses, our one to two, two to two in terms of lecture to lab ratio to meet articulation agreements. And this was my first time using GoReact, and I’ll give you the context of what I was confronted with. My chair person said, and I love when they do this because it really forces me to stretch. “Okay, Adrian, we have a 16-week course, we want you to make it eight weeks.” “That’s great. Sounds fantastic.” “Yeah, but it’s all in-person lab, but we want you to make it all online.” “Okay, great. I’ll do that too.”

So I like the challenge that they throw at me sometimes, and thankfully, GoReact was available and allowed me the opportunity to integrate in GoReact into my coursework to allow that type of communication and facilitate that part of the class. Otherwise, it would’ve been a challenge in terms of trying to use like a Webex or, much to your point, something that’s not as secure, like a just YouTube video.

Matthew Short:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that context there, Adrian. Donna, I’ll have you share next.

Donna Oswald:

So we utilize GoReact, and COVID really pushed us because things were shut down, so I had to find a way. We did discussions and I felt like the students weren’t connecting. They can’t see each other, they couldn’t talk. So for our Phlebotomy 101 class, which is our principal and practice, we had case studies, and we’d normally present it in an in-face class. Can’t do that, so we started gearing it to GoReact, and then the students then could see their fellow peers pose and then provide a question like, at the end of their GoReact I said, “Pose a question to your peer,” and then the other peer would answer that question. So it gave that sense of community still even to know we couldn’t be on campus together. And we continued with that.

And our 102 class, which is our clinical class, kind of pushed us because we were an in-person class for that. We’d met four times throughout the semester. And so I started using GoReact for that class for also too to do discussions, but also clinical feedback. So students, while they were at clinicals, had to post their weekly progress, their hours, their draws. So they started using GoReact for that, and we saw this sense of community form and be like, “Oh, I experienced that too.” And then they’d follow up and be like, “Hey, while you were at clinicals, did you have this?” And in the area of phlebotomy, it was challenges. It was also interactions that they’ve had with the patient clientele. So it, again, provided that sense of community, that class went completely online. So I’m still using GoReact in both my classes, but we also utilize it for videos and skill sets.

So I’d show them the worst phlebotomy video and pick it apart, “Tell me what’s wrong with this. How would you improve?” And then getting student feedback. And it allowed us, I think too as instructors to understand at what level of understanding do our students at and are they able to pick up the things that we’re asking them to. So we really enjoy and still use GoReact. I actually don’t use our discussion board in Blackboard now with the introduction of GoReact, but I think in the healthcare setting, being able to adapt with technology, but students found that it’s nice to still stay connected in an online class while they’re all at various places within the program.

So that became a beneficial resource to us to also too part of our creditors, that communication, professionalism. Can they communicate professionally? So it was another thing that we really enjoyed being able to represent within the program. And so it gave us the resources to stay connected in a time where we didn’t see each other.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for that, Donna. And last but not least, again, Charlotte, would you like to share a little bit of how your discipline is leveraging GoReact within your coursework?

Charlotte Schulze-Hewett:

Sure, sure. So I was looking for an alternative [inaudible 00:18:35] boards for my online courses. So I think possibly in math, it’s a particular challenge in our asynchronous courses to get our students to interact because our students, they’re not that interested in anything as far as having a connection with the other students. They want to get the answer and be done with the homework or whatever. They’re not there for a connection with other students so much.

And as far as the discussion boards went, it was all just very superficial. They would just answer the question, they would just do the bare minimum for the discussion board. And the students were tired of it and I was tired of it. And so I asked somebody in our Academy for Teaching Excellence, possibly Melissa and possibly somebody else, and they said, “Why don’t you try GoReact?” And I thought, “Yes, why don’t we give this a try?” And it has certainly helped. I definitely feel like I’m getting a sense of, at the very least, what my students know. So it’s a big improvement over the discussion boards. I’m still not sure that I’m getting a great interaction between students, and again, that may just be because they’re not that interested in doing that.

So I do tend to have my students do about five GoReact assignments throughout the semester. I always start with getting to know you assignment, and that’s a good thing that they can get used to GoReact, but also meet each other virtually. And then the next ones are where they show that they know how to do some of the course content, and it’s a good way for me to see that they are mastering the material and/or maybe they’re not mastering the material, one way or the other, we find that out.

And so what I like to do is I’ll give them a personalized math problem. Sometimes it’s personalized based on, for example, how many letters are in their first and last names or something like that. Because I don’t literally want every single student doing the exact same problem because then as soon as the first one has done it, everybody just knows how to do it.

Matthew Short:

Yep, 100%.

Charlotte Schulze-Hewett:

Yep. So that’s generally what I do. But I did want to mention that GoReact as far as the geometry goes with the math for the elementary education majors, that’s got definitely a big bonus over the discussion boards. It’s very nice to actually see my students doing the geometry.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much for that perspective there, Charlotte. So we’ve had our faculty panelists share within their respective programs how GoReact is leveraged. So I want to shift gears a little bit and queue up Melissa here to talk about GoReact kind at a higher perspective within the institution and how this is scaled or kind of pushed out to other departments that weren’t utilizing it before. So Melissa, would you mind telling us a bit how you within the Department of Teaching Excellence within Harper College have built kind of awareness and promoted exploration of the tool across Harper College?

Melissa Baysingar:

Sure, absolutely. And it really… I think, Jeff did a great job of… Just like my lights turned off here, of course, just as I start talking. All right. Jeff did a great job of explaining how it really started in our liberal arts area, in communications, and our American Sign Language program. And it really was the integration within Blackboards. So those areas coming to our academy. So we have our learning management system is Blackboard. We have fabulous Blackboard administrator, Karen Herold. They worked together and then worked with GoReact to get the integration in place.

And I think that was really important in allowing the growth, because like Jeff explained, you can have students purchase the tool or have an individual program or class or department, but to really help it expand, it started with that integration. So I really didn’t get involved as an instructional designer, as someone that does faculty training and professional development until we had that integration in place. And I knew that it would be very easy for any faculty to access and learn about this tool.

So mid-2020 was when the integration happened. It was early 2021, maybe even late 2020 when Matthew and I were put in contact together, because we’re like, “Oh, we have this new integration.” So we started to do workshops. So Matthew and I actually partnered and did some workshops in 2021 where we’re kind of announcing, “This tool is integrated. Liberal arts, communications, they’re rocking it over there, but if you teach phlebotomy, math, kinesiology, other fields know that this tool exists.” So we ran a couple of workshops for faculty, we got some testimonials from faculty that were using it to share. And then I also developed an on-demand workshop that we ran for several semesters so that faculty could rev up on GoReact anytime, even if they weren’t able to attend some of those initial live workshops.

And then the faculty themselves, beyond just what we can do as a faculty development center in the academy, faculty are so good, this webinar is such a great case in point, so good about sharing what they’re doing, sharing ideas. So we’ve had several faculty present at either our internal events, at GoReact events about what they’re doing in their classrooms. So Jeff’s been amazing about sharing what he was doing way back from the beginning, very willing to share.

We had a faculty present at Reaction 2024 last month, one of our physics faculty. We’ve had one of our dental hygiene faculty present at our assessment conferences. So the Harper faculty are just amazing and willing to kind of spread the word when there is a tool that they’re using that they like. So I would say yeah, that’s kind of the process of growth, and it’s been really driven from the start by our faculty.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely. Excellent. I appreciate you sharing that perspective, Melissa. So I want to open this next question up for all panelists. So as you all, excuse me, have deployed GoReact within your respective coursework, what impact or changes have you seen in your students’ performance since introducing or implementing this within your curriculum or your coursework within Blackboard? So if anybody wants to kick things off with that question, feel free to do so.

Jeff Przybylo:

I could jump in there. Actually, when you tell someone you teach public speaking online, the first thing they say is, “How do you do that?” And before we had GoReact, the output from the students, and I hate to say this, was garbage. This was students trying to get out of speech class. They thought this would be the easier way to do public speaking. And there was all the technology, the barriers for the technology. But then when I started moving to GoReact and then the rest of the department and we got the site license, it opened up… it took down all those technological barriers, it made it real. Students on my evaluations will say, “GoReact made it feel like I was in a real class, face-to-face class with my students.” It wasn’t just exchanging videos. It was completely interactive. And I use it a million different ways that we don’t have time for here in a 45-minute seminar.

But I would say, and I think some of my colleagues would say this too, that sometimes our GoReact speeches are better from these online students than our students in face-to-face classes. So we’ve seen tremendous impact, 360.

Carol Carlson-Nofsinger:

I agree with Donna that our students feel a sense of community in an asynchronous online class that they didn’t feel prior to using GoReact. I think it’s nice instead of just seeing text in a discussion board, if you see someone’s face and they’re talking to you and they’re showing you things and you’re having a live presentation and then students can weigh in. In my assignments, I require students to comment either by video or with a textual comment on the presentations that the students have done so that they’re interacting that way.

A lot of the students choose to use the video comment in GoReact rather than just typing in a text box kind of a thing. So I think that’s really created that sense of community, that additional sense of engagement. Again, I agree with Jeff that on the student evaluations, the students report that they like GoReact and they found it to be one of the great things about the course, one of the things that they found really connected them to the course and the other students.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. And I think back to what Charlotte was saying earlier with kind of that getting to know you initial icebreaker activity within GoReact, particularly whether it’s a hybrid or a fully remote course, that can be kind of that initial experience that may help you build a little bit of community and rapport with students within that coursework, particularly on an open peer review where everybody can potentially see folks’ introduction like, “Oh, yeah, I’m from that town too,” or, “That’s where I grew up,” or, “Oh, that’s why I took this course as well.” I think that is one of those anchors or tethers that can start to foster those relationships within the course.

Any other comments from our panelists as far as kind of the changes or impacts you’ve seen from GoReact within your coursework or even with just kind of your students in general when leveraging the tool?

Adrian Fleisher:

I will comment on this. Given our technology is so ubiquitous, and you have a problem with your cell phone, you hand it to your youngest kid and they can fix it in two seconds, it was easily adopted, easily understood. And I even did a very low barrier assignment just to make sure the functionality and the telemetry and everything was in place for the students before I actually started to roll out the bona fide content for points. And to say it went off without a hitch is a really easy encapsulation. It was simple to the point and very easily adopted by the students within my class.

Matthew Short:

Wonderful. Wonderful.

All right, so we’ll keep this just kind of open for all panelists as well. My next question, and I feel like there was a few very practical references to kind of this question for our discussion. We’ve talked about COVID being a pretty significant impetus to we need a tool or some means by which we can continue to teach our coursework, and also Adrian’s experience where, “Hey, I need you to dial this down to eight weeks and I need you to be able to do this all virtually,” some kind of practical experience where we’re being asked to modify how we teach or how we deploy a curriculum. When you all are faced with scenarios where you have challenges or you’re being tasked to accomplish something, how are you typically finding tools or means by which to accomplish those objectives or those kind of asks that are being levied at you? What resources, what ways do you identify tools or capabilities to allow you to accommodate that?

Charlotte Schulze-Hewett:

So there’s two things actually. If I’m looking for a tool, I’ll reach out to the academy, Janet and Melissa and other people there, or talk with my colleagues in the math department. But sometimes I don’t even know that there’s a tool that I should be looking for if that makes any sense. But I will just go to some conferences, usually a math conference, et cetera, and I’ll discover something that I didn’t even know was out there. And that can be something that’s like, “Oh, well, that would be great.” So I mean, that’s often even better. And so things like options for grading or something, and I’m like, “That would be good.” So that’s another way of learning about some new technology. Yeah.

Matthew Short:

Excellent.

Melissa Baysingar:

I’ll jump in and piggyback off something that Charlotte said, which I think is really important. And I think she said something like, or maybe it’s not even technology. So I think from our Academy for Teaching Excellence perspective, we’re here to help faculty meet the needs of their students, meet the needs of their classes. So sometimes finding a tool that really, I think, should start with a need, and it might be that technology is the solution, it might not be. And so I think it’s the idea of working together, whether it’s faculty working together, whether it’s faculty working with the academy to really identify what’s the real need and what is the solution that best fulfills that for us and our students.

And sometime if it’s something where a video-based assessment or communication tool is a good fit, it’s awesome to have GoReact, but those types of conversations have spurred a lot of the tools, and there was a lot of these kinds of conversations during the pandemic. So we do have a lot more college-wide tools now because of needs that faculty brought forward. But even if it’s not technology, it’s those conversations working together, solutions that fit needs that kind of drive those choices.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely. And Donna, I think I saw you potentially taking yourself off mute to contribute or provide a response as well.

Donna Oswald:

Yeah. So the use of technology, I found that sometimes I reach out to the academy, but it’s also too when COVID hit, they asked me, “As a health career provider, can you teach someone how to draw blood online?” I’m like, “No, that’s a scary concept.” But it kind of forced me too to also look at what stuff in lab could I record and then put it up in GoReact and show them, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do once we do come back.” But I also found too as I’ve been part of other things with the academy, it became a necessary need in the utilizing those resources. But at the same time, we don’t realize we needed it until it kind of got forced upon us. And I think it was a good thing because I kept it. So yeah. I honestly, I told them, I’m like, “I don’t want no one touching me if they’ve never touched a person.” So there were certain things that I couldn’t do.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely. Perfect.

Carol Carlson-Nofsinger:

Yeah, I could just chime in and say that I attended Melissa’s workshop on GoReact, and that’s how I found out about it. But to spread the word and to encourage my faculty to use it, Melissa came and did a one-hour professional development workshop along with my faculty meeting to introduce the adjuncts in my program to GoReact and to give them some basic tools that they could use to implement GoReact, and just even get them interested in using the tool. And then numerous faculty reached out to Melissa on their own after that professional development session to use GoReact and implement it into their legal studies courses. So that was a way that we kind of spread the word, but also made adjunct faculty in my department aware of the fact that the tool existed.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I appreciate all that… I’m sorry, go ahead, Adrian.

Adrian Fleisher:

I was saying it’s certainly a tool that it allows a greater or broader scope, if you will, for us to deliver content. As I alluded to in my opening statement, I had some individuals in my Kinesiology 231 who were or are secondary teachers or elementary school teachers, and as a result, they couldn’t attend class at one o’clock in the afternoon like a traditional student. So we had to come up with a solution to be able to offer them alternative solutions to be able to deliver content. And now what we’re seeing in our department is whether it’s a yoga class or it’s Kinesiology 231 or I just found out we have two classes we’re going to offer in the asynchronous blended format, something like this from a curriculum standpoint can actually be a useful tool to broaden and open our scope and also broaden and open, if you will, our population of people that we can bring into the program. It reduces some of those or limits some of those barriers that we might’ve had previously.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. So as we are quickly approaching our time, and for the audience, I’ve let the discussion go a bit longer just because I feel like there’s so much impactful, helpful content and perspective here from the team here at Harper. If there are questions, please make sure to drop them into the Q&A, and with the time we have, we’ll answer as many as we can. But just to kind of add one more question to tie up our discussion from the team gathered here today. From your perspectives… And this doesn’t necessarily need to be specific to GoReact, it can be kind of more general about any kind of piece of technology or tool that you’re leveraging. From your perspectives, what are the key factors or strategies that in your mind contribute to the successful adoption or rollout of tools or programs within the coursework that you implement from your background or experiences?

Carol Carlson-Nofsinger:

Getting faculty buy-in is important. So explaining the value of the tool, demonstrating how the tool can be used successfully in the classroom, showing them that it’s easy to implement the tool for students to use and for them to get trained and use the tool, I think that those are all key factors in making sure that faculty are willing to adopt the tool in their various classes, whatever tool it might be.

Matthew Short:

Absolutely.

Melissa Baysingar:

I think a couple of things that are really helpful for rolling out tools is if the tool is considered accessibility for students, that’s really helpful and it can be kind of a non-starter for any tool if it’s not something that all of our students can access and use effectively to meet the needs of the class. So the accessibility features, privacy features of a tool are essential for successful rollout, as well as general support, support from the tool that we’re using. So really quality getting started and onboarding items both for kind of train the trainer and for faculty and for students. And I think those are the two main things that… So those are things that really help.

Matthew Short:

And I like that kind of as a compliment too. We’ve discussed here today how we’ve had to differentiate the ways we instruct based on some of the constraints or challenges we’re facing, but also kind of that complement to it in terms of the accessibility of the tool to our students, making sure that it is accommodating, it is accessible to those various learners that we are actively trying to engage with our learning and instructional tool. So I really like that as a compliment to what we’ve discussed here as well.

Any other thoughts or perspectives on those key factors or ways to help gain that adoption or buy-in from folks? And Donna, I saw you raise your hand there. Perfect.

Donna Oswald:

So the buy-in from the students, I get students that sometimes English is the second language, so doing a discussion board and typing out is more difficult. So using GoReact, they’re able to express themselves in a way they probably couldn’t express themselves from an accessibility level. Also, too, I’ve had students that were hard of hearing or had ADS concerns, but that allowed them to be vocal in the class and comfortable doing so. So it was a huge buy-in from the students then is the accessibility and being able to not have to write things in a language that you may not be comfortable using.

Matthew Short:

Excellent. All right. Any other thoughts before we kind of conclude the discussion portion from the group?

All right. Excellent. Well, I appreciate the panel from Harper College here sharing their perspective and experience utilizing the tool here today. And I do apologize, we are very quickly approaching the time that we have allotted here for today. So for those that have posted questions, we can follow up with you to answer those questions as we have time for.

So just as a final thought on today’s discussion, I hope that this has been helpful here today. I think it highlights two important things. I think it highlights a diverse array of disciplines and subject areas where skill development and assessment tools such as GoReact can make a significant impact or add value to student learning. I also hope you take away that successful wide-scale adoption of any tool or system, it’s never by accident. It takes the buy-in and dedication of champions like we have assembled here today that have seen the value within their respective disciplines and can kind of show that in practical ways within their core disciplines.

I think it also takes the support and advocacy of faculty and technology support teams like we’ve seen here with Melissa and the Academy of Teaching Excellence at Harper College. While I know it’s a little cliche when it comes to learning and success, it does take a village, and on behalf of GoReact and those that recognize and appreciate the hard work that you all do, I know your students are in great hands with the ways that you’ve adopted these tools to better improve their learning outcomes. So I want to thank you all for that and also for joining us here today and sharing your perspective.

So we want to thank those that attended today’s session and joining us and making it an interactive presentation. I hope to see you all in future GoReact webinars, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.