Scaling for Growth & Impact: How National University Expanded Video-Technology Use to Drive Achievement Across its Student Community

Pete Morgan:

Okay. Hello everyone and welcome to our webinar today. We are incredibly thrilled to have you joining us and hope that everyone can bring some enjoyment from this presentation and walk away feeling better prepared, more informed, and all outright excited to inspire our students to make better steps towards their future career paths. My name is Pete Morgan. I am the strategic account manager for GoReact and handle all of our partnerships, our large enterprise customers, everything from the initial vision of learning activities, all the way through the actual tangible aspect of that fruition. I will be hosting today’s presentation and for those of you who are not familiar with GoReact, we are a competency based video assessment and feedback solution used primarily across the US, but found in more than 850 colleges and universities across the world.

I’m incredibly pleased to be joined here today by a very special group of people, an incredible team from National University. Now, before I introduce them and bring them to topic, just a few things of housekeeping for everyone that’s here attending with us today. Today’s event, our webinar will be 45 minutes. That will include about 30 minutes of presentation and 10 to 15 minutes of Q&A. The recording from today’s presentation will be available after this as well. If you need to hop off for any reason or if you’d like to share this with a colleague, please feel free to once the webinar recording goes out via email after we’ve completed today. We do want today’s presentation to be as interactive as possible. Throughout the presentation, please feel free to participate in the polls, prepare questions, offer them in any way possible for any type of general discussion, things that you’d like to share with the group, any sort of documentation or support, you can use the chat for that. For any questions that you’d like specifically driven towards our three panelists here today, please feel free to use the Q&A.

Now, without further ado, I am very, very delighted to introduce and welcome Patty, Brian, and Melanie from National University. Now I’m going to ask them to introduce themselves here briefly, one by one and maybe we’ll follow that pattern you three, Patty, Brian, Mel, and then we’ll start with a poll question and get into the discussion here today.

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

I’ll start. I’m Patty Kirsch. I’m the Director of Assessment Accreditation Clinical Practice at National and have been using GoReact for a little over three years.

Brian J. Arnold:

Excellent. My name is Brian Arnold and I’m a department chair within the College of Education and I also have been using GoReact for many years and very heavily.

Melanie Facundo:

I am Mel and I work at National University in the school psychology department. I am the clinical practice coordinator for our program and I’ve been using GoReact for about five months, I want to say.

Pete Morgan:

Perfect. All right, so our group is fantastic here today. We’re really excited to have them here and for all the discussion that we’re going to be able to fuel. To get started, really to understand the group that’s here with us, everyone that’s listening in, we want to kick it off with a poll and we want to start with a poll of how familiar are you with GoReact. Now feel free to answer that, go about that question. Let’s understand from the group who here is familiar, is not, learning about it, investigating. We’d love to see that as we get kicked off to really understand what we’ve done together as a partnership with National, and how we can help that inspiration or that flow work for everyone that is listening.

Okay, beautiful. From our poll, a few that have never heard of GoReact before, so I’m just learning about it. Beginning to use and a lot very familiar, which is fantastic. We love seeing this though because there is so much information that will be gathered from this incredible group that we have here with us.

As we get started and kick off into things here today, the real inspiration from our collective partnership, the work that GoReact has done with National, comes from early investigation at how we can better engage students in skill development and competency-based learning. Everything from direct and deliberate integration of technology, custom work that we’ve done to help our assignment setup and course setups live perpetually, but giving everyone the exact same sort of experience. There’s so much that we’ve done here with National that has also helped us to replicate that beyond our partnership and help incredible customers gain leverage over these skill development opportunities. As we kick off the discussion today, I’m going to start here with Patty, especially to set the stage and gather everything out as far as what is and what’s going on at National. Patty, why don’t you tell us a bit about National, what you’re doing, where we’re headed, and all those things in between.

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

Thank you. Yeah, the first thing to understand is that we are huge. When I came on board at National three years ago, I don’t think I had any concept of just what it looks like to credential across an entire state and to pick a large state on top of that. We place in clinical practice over 2000 thousand students. That’s a lot. Many of them are placed in an A and a B course, so it’s continuum. Some are a whole year long. Then some programs like Mel’s have different aspects of their clinical practice work. It’s extremely complex.

When Covid hit, and I was first brand new, a couple of weeks, I met Brian and I was just, “We are one year out of accreditation. This is a nightmare. We’re not going to be able to gather the data we need. We’re not going to be able to share that with the stakeholders. We can’t even write our reports because we don’t have data from that spring 2020 that was required to go into that accreditation.” Brian shared, “Hey, I saw this really cool tool, let’s look at it.” I was like, “Okay.”

It saved us, to be honest with you, and it saved us in the way that we were one of the few universities that was able to stay on track and honor student teaching and internships that fall of 2020 and continue along, I can’t say as if nothing happened because much of what we saw was up was virtual and it was a shift for everybody. You’re all there, but we didn’t have to tell any student, “No.” We didn’t have to tell any student that they had to pause their program, that they couldn’t move forward. That was my first love and then I think we’ll kind of share how that grew and why we have expanded and keep improving how we use GoReact. That was the first love, was just this solved a problem for us on the fly and got us within two months back on track with every single student placed and still being able to do observations.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah, fantastic. This collective work came about, like Patty said, because of Brian. Now Brian, how did you first learn about GoReact. From the outset and initially, what was that trigger of interest and can you expand on that a little bit?

Brian J. Arnold:

Well, without throwing anyone under the bus, we were finding our previous platform lacking for our needs. I just started asking around it, looking at different institutions, the larger ones in particular, and the name that kept popping up over and over again was GoReact. I started looking at it and at the time, I was speaking to our associate dean about what would be the process of getting people on board and taking a look at it. They said, “Well, you want to do cost benefit analysis, side by side kind of a thing.” I conducted my own, I put it together and they didn’t even need an explanation. It was like, “Okay, this solves our problems, this meets our needs.”

Then from my own perspective, having a media arts background, the idea of being able to annotate video within the timeframe was just such a game changer and deal breaker. That ability to target things and make it clear for the students, was just so far and beyond what you could do in a traditional LMS in terms of feedback. That was the draw for me. Also getting a new cool piece of tech and a toy for the students to play with was good, but also just moving away from this wall of text’s mentality into an ability to do something that’s real time asynchronously, if that makes sense. Those are all factors that made me think like, “Hey, this is definitely worth looking at.” Then of course, just the warm landing and the warm reception we had when we approached.

Pete Morgan:

Fantastic. Well, it goes mutual that way with that warm understanding and relationship that was built. I remember from the outset, I guess my partner here at GoReact, my counterpart, Josh Beutler who was our VP of Business Development and Strategy, josh and I were so invested at this time around thinking, “How do we make learning opportunities as simple and accessible as possible?” Creating this perfect flow from a general student start point, into GoReact without ever feeling like I had to manage multiple tools or having to go through hoops and hurdles to do my simple skill development.

When we came together with National and started having these discussions, it fits so perfectly into where GoReact wanted to go in creating this great implementation, this perfect integration of a tool like GoReact into the learning opportunities that National had envisioned and had put together, that Brian had sought out that way and that Patty was ready to put into place. Now Patty, let’s jump back to you here really quick. Why don’t you tell everyone, Patty, tell everyone about your use and adoption of GoReact, the implementation, the adoption, the data model that we’ve created. Let’s gain some insight into that really quick.

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

We launched it in places where we were no longer going to be able to do onsite observations obviously first, and that was mostly the teacher prep programs. That was a hard uphill climb because it was so quick and yet within four weeks, we had pretty much everybody on board with the training. Again, thank you for that. Then immediately started thinking about, “Okay, we are still required for accreditation to monitor different state standards and national standards.” We embedded those into the rubrics in GoReact and through a lot of problem solving meetings and trying to figure out exactly what that works like, I think we may have been your first test market in terms of how do you pull data and present it in different ways out of GoReact that can be then used for accreditation.

I know that the first and foremost way you designed it was as a student interface, feedback, feedforward and all those kinds of things which are awesome. We wanted to take it one step further and say, “How can we pull this data out because students are being assessed multiple times and students are doing self-assessments on those same rubrics?” We had some really good data opportunities and it nailed it. In terms of the accreditation, both state and nationally, it was just incredibly well received and that was a great thing.

In looking back, there were a couple of things that I thought were kind of the silver linings. The first was the first year into using GoReact, we had had a budget for people to travel around the state and do observations, and we were paying their mileage. We were sometimes paying their hotels when they had to stay overnight in remote areas. All of a sudden we didn’t need that budget anymore because nobody was traveling all over the state of California to do onsite observations. That Brian, back to your model of side by side, how are we going to use this and not cost anymore, was fantastic. That was one piece.

The other piece was the student perception and the student feedback and not just getting feedback from their one course instructor in some cases, but as we started to play with the model and use it towards peer review and peer analysis and self-reflection, and started to key into how students watch themselves, which does not happen in a face-to-face model when you’re sitting there. They don’t get to see themselves doing what they’re doing. Not only that, we had to really coach the annotations and look towards an attribute model like, “What are you doing really well,” and then, “How can we coach you to do those kinds of pieces going forward?” I think it grew in so many ways that we didn’t anticipate from, again, a business model but also from the perspective of how students use it.

My last thing I wanted to talk about was the tone. We found recently that the little microphone you can use where you want to say an annotation and you want to say it into a microphone. Rather than type something out, the microphone adds that element that we all have noticed is missing in text messages or in email sometimes, which is how your inflection and how your excitement shows up when you actually have a video recording. Now, we’re coaching our assessors to use that microphone and share your enthusiasm and make it apparent, not just, “Good job,” which we don’t want as an annotation, we want you to share when at this point in the video, this is exactly what we’re talking about with this standard, the way that you do this and the way that you bump up that higher order thinking using these two verbs, it’s just incredible. The tone is what really matters there.

Pete Morgan:

Patty, you hit on such a perfect point here of we got into this implementation off of a need that everyone faced, which was the pandemic. Through the early experiences that we had together through those trials of implementation, through understanding how data worked and the best way to present those things, we together formulated kind of the perfect pathway on how to manage expectations and create powerful learning experiences. Little things like that, like utilizing the microphone, the video and audio feedback functionality, coaching on annotations, setting those expectations as to what is expected of students and self-reflection, it really, really went a long way and it’s done a ton for us over the time. Which brings me to this next point that I want to ask you about, Patty, is that post pandemic, why do we continue utilizing these things? What is the power of GoReact even when we’re going back face-to-face or leveraging these tools when it’s not this requirement to be separated like it was during pandemic time?

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

I guess I can answer that with where our USPs, our university support providers are in that, they are now allowed to go into the classroom setting in some instances. Again, we’re trying not to have to pay those millions of dollars for travel anymore. Even when they go in, we’re still recording because we found it to be so effective for students to be able to go back and look and they’re still uploading to GoReact.

Even given the opportunity to go back to the way things were, our students and our faculty have chosen, “Nope, not doing it, we still like this model. We love seeing each other face-to-face in times when we’re able to, but this tool affords so many other features that we cannot get with the other model and it allows the coaching to happen in increments.” Let’s face it, when somebody’s trying to coach on the fly and do it in 15 minutes and share their information really quickly, this affords those university supervisors to go back in and look at things repeatedly and then respond to the student perspective, which I know is where Mel’s going. The back and forth that happened becomes essential to the feedback and the application of what you said last time and applying it to your next observation. That’s something that you don’t see in traditional models.

Brian J. Arnold:

If I may, just to piggyback on that really quickly, for some people that might be a little bit newer to the concept, the profound paradigm shift of no longer comparing subjective, flawed memories of what actually happened to having an empirical record of what happened, it seems so simple, but it such a game changer. Like Patty was talking about, maybe you don’t need to do it anymore in the literal, “You’re going to catch a cold,” kind of way, underselling that part, but it still has intrinsic value and does add to the experience in a lot of ways.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah, there’s a lot of power to this evidence that comes from video-based education this way or the competency-based education that we put together. There’s actually a pretty incredible individual by the name of Jim Knight that is a pioneer of video coaching that speaks so specifically to that point, Brian, of the conflict of competing memories and how do we avoid those things. One memory is tailored or biased to certain things because of the way that someone feels, is nervous too, or anything. Those that are observing have a totally different set of biases that way. How do we avoid the conflict conflict of competing memories in a very constructive way? That is video evidence to placing those things into play here. Perfect point.

Now, Patty also mentioned Mel, which is a perfect segue to go into here. As we started together inside of National University, we jumped full fledge into the College of Education. I mean not to tout ourselves or anything, but we put together probably more than 300 courses out of the gate, started, integrated, launching directly into GoReact to fuel this use case. We understood very early that it didn’t end there. There’s so much more with a university like National, driving competency-based education, looking for opportunities to include this video-based skills development and avoiding this competition of competing memories. That’s where Mel really comes into play here. Mel introduced herself as a part of the counseling and psych group National University. Mel, how did you hear about GoReact and what did you hear to start everything off?

Melanie Facundo:

Ironically, I heard about GoReact several years ago and somebody said it’s a video-based platform. I was like, “Well, what’s the difference between a student giving me a YouTube video or a video of a Zoom?” It was like, “no, no, no, it’s way better than this.” I kept thinking, “How can it be better? I don’t fully understand this.” I was like, “A video is a video.” Then it didn’t take long before I actually got in, started working with Pete and I was like, “Oh, this is a magic box of loveliness inside.” As soon as I started recognizing what the platform does and how it works, made for just pure magic, because then that lit my spidey senses to figure out, “Wait, wait.” We’re primarily an online program, which has been a bit convoluted when it comes to some of our programs like school psychology and counseling. I was like, “Wait.”

All of a sudden it just became this explosion of ideas of, “Oh wait, can we do this?” I kept talking to Pete, I’m like, “Wait, wait, wait, Pete, can we do this?” He is like, “We can do that.” I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, can we do this?” He’s like, “We can do that.” when I’m asking questions, it’s things like, “Okay, if I’ve got a student administering an assessment,” which in the real world, even when I went through my program, I had somebody on the backside of a glass. They were watching me through a one-way mirror kind of thing, but they never sat and watched my entire administration of assessment tool. This case allows me to watch the entire thing without stepping away, going to somebody else, missing a critical piece where I make a mistake, and I can give that direct feedback in that moment.

If it looks wonky, I can go back and I can watch it again and again. When I see that the video might be two hours, I can also go boop boop boop and make it go faster because I know what I’m looking for. The student’s voice turns a bit Mickey Mouse as they go through, but I can slow it down and I can pick it back up where I need to and give that feedback. I have my students go back and watch it again and give feedback on themselves, find their errors, and then their peers also go in and review. It’s like 20 for the price of one in terms of what we’re getting.

The feedback I’ve gotten from the students has been so incredibly helpful because they’ll go back into it and say, “Can you go back in and look at this spot? I don’t know if I did this part right,” because they’re going in and they’re watching themselves. That feedback piece really, really keeps it moving forward because it is immediately at that second when somebody goes sideways or they do something fantastic, I can literally highlight it, but there’s also these lovely buttons where I can just, comments I’m going to consistently make. I can just pop a button so I’m watching it. Pete and I worked together to make them all, it was like, “You didn’t follow this rule,” click. I don’t have to type it all in. Some of those things are just straight feedback. It’s phenomenal.

Pete Morgan:

Well, what it shows truly is that we got down into the very first use case with Mel of this idea of how we could leverage GoReact and it worked. We go through all of the process of defining that vision and putting it into a practical use case through GoReact. There is no greater pride on our end than being able to see clearly those visions that someone like Mel has or Patty or Brian and say, “Well, of course we can make that, but how do we do it right? How do we do it best through GoReact, creating efficiencies for the end user instructor and student and peer and all in between?” It’s been pretty incredible to see those things come to fruition and gain such traction, which I know with Mel’s programs and everything through counseling at National, we started with a single course and have taken off. Mel, would you mind explaining just a little bit where we are with the implementation, how everything’s going? What do you see from your perspective in the use of GoReact so far in counseling through National?

Melanie Facundo:

Sure. I would say it’s going extraordinarily well. With the new standards that came out, of course all programs we’re all in the same bubble on this. We’ve all been revising our programs. What we’ve done is as we’ve been building our courses, we are literally saying, “How can we use this?” Again, we have a primarily online program. “How can we actually use this not just for interactions in the field, but how can we use this in our courses to actually develop a better understanding, interaction, engagement and basically product, formed product to help us understand how they’re doing?” I’m so used to seeing just videos, videos, videos that people have made that they’ve gone in and they’ve edited and they’ve made them look real pretty. This allows us to see more of that true experience of how they’re handling their themselves in the community. When they do pause it, you’ll see they’re like, “Oh, I got to pause this,” and so you’ll see them pause it, collect themselves, and get back going again. It’s lovely because you can see the whole progression and when they find their mistakes.

We’ve embedded this into one of our assessment, well technically it’s embedded now in three of our assessment courses and one of the courses has already run. The student feedback from that as well as the staff teaching the course, they’ve all had the same feedback where it is, “I feel so much better now because I can actually see what the student is doing. I can now verify that they’re not faking or using AI.”

The world we live in now is a little bit different, but it’s allowing us to get a really clear understanding of where our student performance is, where their skills are, and then giving them the feedback because they’ll do one GoReact assignment, they will give feedback on their own performance, we’ll give them feedback, then they view another peer, give them feedback which doesn’t impact their grades. They have a rubric they can use that doesn’t associate any points. Students don’t get upset with, “Oh my goodness, somebody’s seeing me and they’re grading me. They don’t know what they’re doing, so how can they grade me?” It’s like, “Nope, they’re grading you for the purposes of filling out a rubric.” That rubric completion is actually them digging in to make sure that they understand the concept. Then we grade that rubric completion in addition. It’s a multifaceted piece, but I can literally watch the progression from one student to the next time they do an assessment.

When you’re doing something, you don’t necessarily recognize when you’re doing something. For example, if a student says, “That’s amazing, that’s amazing, that’s amazing,” and it becomes their tag phrase and they keep saying it, but they don’t hear themselves saying it when they go back and watch their video, “That’s amazing. That’s amazing,” they’re head slapping themselves going, “I cannot believe how many times I said that.” Rather than me trying to say, “Come up with another way to say that,” they pick up on it themselves because they see it because they’re actually viewing themselves. It helps them learn the strategies on how to navigate, how to do the work that they’re trying to do.

It has been extraordinarily helpful in me as an instructor ensuring that my students are learning what they need to learn, they’re doing things in the correct way, and now I have evidence of that feedback that then I’m giving them to show them, “Look, we’ve talked about this twice now. We’ve talked about this three times now,” and then that helps me design how I’m going to support that student moving forward. It has been extraordinarily helpful from all parties involved.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah. I remember Mel and I were chatting right after the very first course had just gone underway and completed. We were in the middle of developing our secondary course, in the initial stages of developing our third course. We from the back end, especially knowing the power of GoReact, were just anticipating that evidence of success, that very first thing that made that light bulb click to say, “This is totally worth the work that we’re doing.” I remember Mel mentioning that one of her student reviews came back and said, “In the beginning of the semester, I thought, why do I have to do all these things? Seems like way too much. By the end of the semester, I looked back at the work that I had done and said, I get it. I know exactly why I did those things because I am more in tune now with what I’ve done and what I’ve learned than ever before.” That was so powerful to hear, so incredible.

Melanie Facundo:

That same student came to me later, after she went into the field. She started doing her fieldwork, her first step of fieldwork, and when she got into the field, she came back to me again after the class was done and said, “I know I complained about this.” She’s like, “I understood it.” She said, “I have to tell you, now that I’m in the field, I feel so much more comfortable because I had all of that feedback. Now when I’m going in, I feel like I’m talking the same language with people.” Instead of just learning a concept and moving forward because she keeps getting hit with that concept and the actual terminology that goes with it, then when she’s in the field and she’s talking to people and they’re saying things like the reversal rule or the discontinuation rule, instead of just knowing it and doing it, she’s actually knowing the language of what it is. She came back several times. She’s still coming back, telling me that she’s super grateful for that support.

Pete Morgan:

Great. Well, Mel, you also touched on one thing that I want to build on. It was a little bit before, but you talked about how incredibly busy instructors can be, right? There’s course revisions, there’s a fast-paced schedule through National. Patty, if I can point it back to you, knowing how busy faculty is, when we started, as we’ve gone through, and with this progress that we’ve had over our three-year relationship, have you gotten or do you get any sort of pushback for slowness and usage? Are there any best practices that you can offer to overcome this sort of thing? What do you see from your position?

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

I think in terms of the student. Brian and I laughed in the beginning when faculty would say, “Oh, how are you going to train students?” We’re like, “Okay.” We had two students, I think Brian, that asked for help out of 2000 because let’s face it, the students that we’re working with, they know every kind of platform there is on social media and everything else, and they’re on their phones and their iPads and their laptops constantly. They didn’t need any help. The people that needed help were the faculty that we had to train to use the tool. At the same time, because this is how it always happens in the universe, we were changing from Canvas to Brightspace at the same time. They were learning not only a new LMS system, but also learning the GoReact piece as well.

The one thing that I will say regarding the training is that I love having the history. I can go into a course and I can pull out random examples of really good annotations. I can pull out random examples of really not good annotations. It’s created a training platform and a professional development platform for us, so that when we do get together and work with our adjunct faculty or part-time instructors, we now have almost a database of what works well and what kinds of feedback we are trying to move away from.

Let me give you an example. Remember the good old days when somebody out there in one of our old accrediting bodies that is no longer with us, had the stems for feedback and, “Student failed to, the evidence failed to blank,” and you were supposed to fill it in, and the whole thing was just so negative the whole way through. Brian and I were coaching away from that because no one had stepped in since that time to coach the positive types of feedback and feedforward that are inherent to learning. Pete, to your point, we definitely used it as a tool on the side to be able to draw those examples in non-examples and develop our professional development pieces and show what good feedback should look like.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah, definitely. Well, and that plays right into where Mel is going in outcomes, actually seeing things come across. Patty, if you don’t mind expanding, from an instructor’s standpoint, from the end user standpoint, what sort of impact is GoReact making on that student outcome, the evidence of their growth as they move along through this program?

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

Importantly, everybody starts out with a rubric and everyone’s scoring homogeneously down the the top level because everyone’s so doing such a good job. Once Mel mentioned it, we took away the object of that being a grading rubric and we made it a skills rubric. That changed the game, Pete. We even have a disclaimer, “This rubric is not a point value that goes to your grade.” The point value goes to my database so I can create the charts and graphs and things to share with faculty and close that loop.

The students themselves are now coached. We do see the use of level two, level three, and hopefully level four or not by the end of the first and second courses. I’m able to show graphically then what the student perspective looks like per student or overall as a group, in the way that we present the data in graphs with overlaps of observation one through observation seven. We then color code the student self-reported, and our faculty as well as other stakeholders can really see what that growth looks like from point A at the beginning of the clinical practice, till the very end, which is awesome.

Pete Morgan:

You touched on a perfect point of when we think about this in the form of skills, we go back to that foundational basis of skill development. Anywhere that a student should be performing or demonstrating their competency, that’s a GoReact experience that fits perfectly into this flow. Mel, from your perspective just here for a moment, what is the importance of having GoReact available to all students then? Maybe more importantly, what if GoReact had just said, “No, we’re only going to be in the School of Education, no one else gets to utilize it,” what sort of impact does that make on you with your current course and where you’re going now?

Melanie Facundo:

It would totally change how we are doing things. We would most likely be looking to find random locations throughout the state to have students go to a facility in order to administer their testing and to do things. It’s just not convenient for students. It’s not convenient from a fiscal perspective and an environmental perspective. It takes people out of their natural habitat, if we want to call it that. Putting somebody in a situation like that is not beneficial for anyone. It doesn’t allow kids to be comfortable. It doesn’t allow the breaks to happen that they need to have happen. This has been a complete game changer for how we do what we do in a very positive way.

The fact that the pandemic hit and forced several people to really learn online aspects and really focus in, has really flipped the whole script on how other institutions that don’t want to use tech in this way. I feel like there has been a bit of a shift now where people are going, “Oh, wait, this actually makes sense. Oh, this might actually benefit our students. This might actually help them generalize their skills, reduce some of the anxiety that they might have trying to do these tasks because it’s happening where it needs to happen, not in these sterile environments that are not super useful.” We at National use Zoom since the inception of Zoom, it feels like. When the world flipped to the pandemic and everything had to go online, people were like, “what is a Zoom,” and all these jokes about Zoom? I was like, “Oh, it’s old hat, man. We’ve been doing this forever.”

When the world flipped, I feel like we had a significant advantage because we had already kind of investigated these avenues. We had already looked into, sorry, the bell’s ringing. I’m at a school. We’d already looked into these different things to help us be more successful. This aspect, this part of our program actually in my opinion, takes our program from what was a good program to an excellent program because it really allows us to monitor, develop, support, enhance, and encourage our students to do better. The positive feedback, as Patty was saying a bit ago, is what we have really struggled to be able to get out because we’re focused on, “Where do we need to make the corrections? What do we need to do to help you become better?” This really does give us those opportunities to go, “Double thumbs up. That was amazing. I love how you did that.” It’s game changer.

Pete Morgan:

The key of simplicity, awareness, understanding, those things are driving those use cases and is so applicable across the board in any of those disciplines throughout National. Anywhere that can be applied with skill development, it works. Now, before we jump to a Q&A, I want to make sure that we have more than enough time for people to ask their questions to our wonderful group here. I did want to bring things back to Brian here very shortly. Now, based on everything that we’ve talked about, we see more and more that today’s universities are prioritizing and developing work-ready students. Brian, from your perspective, how does GoReact fit into that strategy, specific impacts, seeing in terms of supporting skills that are needed post graduation?

Brian J. Arnold:

Well, do we have an hour, right? I’m going to build on the discussion before about the question about general use. Why is this just a generally good tool? First of all, if you start with the fact that most people fear public speaking slightly more than death and that all of our students will probably have to interview for a job after this, it’s an opportunity to be forced to go on record and to be seen so that you can get feedback on the things you don’t know you don’t know. You don’t know you say, “Um,” all the time. You don’t know you touch your nose too much, whatever it is.

Regardless of the discipline, having that on record and having that practice is invaluable. In terms of moving forward, let’s just take a snapshot right now. We haven’t really talked the AI thing going on, but text is a little highly suspect right now with what’s going on. For now, being able to have video evidence can be a powerful tool for just sort of ensuring that we’re dealing with something that’s authentic. That being said, also just moving people from a mindset of text into a real world synchronous way of thinking and modality, it’s just a little bit of a shift in the way that we think and a little bit more applicable for the types of challenges that the students are going to face when they get to the real world, the virtual real world that they will inhabit shortly. That’s my short answer to your very complex question.

Pete Morgan:

Beautifully put, Ryan, I mean, because truly stepping into the real world and having someone in my face tell me what I need to be doing better, I don’t get that reading it off of a text. How do I prepare myself to not just receive feedback appropriately and understand true meaning behind it, but when it comes time for me to perform the action in return and give feedback, how do I do that better? Those are all basic points that are provided in that space. Really, really well put, Brian.

Now, our group is phenomenal. You’re all so fantastic and such great discussion here. We’ve got some good time to answer a few questions. I know I haven’t seen any come through the Q&A, but through the chat, Manuel did actually set up a question that wanted to ask, and I’ll leave this open to the group first and then I can expound on some of the GoReact principles. The question through the chat was, “What are the curriculum activities that work best for GoReact? Can anything be designed for GoReact or how do you approach curriculum design for a GoReact activity?”

Patricia Heydet-Kirsch:

I work with all departments, so I can take this one if you guys are okay with that. Basically, if it’s something that a student can do where it would help them to be able to see themselves and for you to give feedback on the skills that they show during a verbal/video upload, that’s where we use it. Let me explain that. We used to have a lot of discussion boards. I’m sure you’ve used that, whatever tool you use, the discussion board, a person was asked to respond to a certain topic and the feed would go on and on forever. As a faculty member, you had to kind of follow the feed and add your two cents in where appropriate. The specific feedback on how that person was, what they were saying. They always did short little snippets or a sentence or two, very few put in a whole lot. Additionally, again, you’re missing the tone.

In some of our courses where they’re not necessarily responding to a state standards kind of a thing, they’re using this instead of a discussion board and they’re uploading a person’s perception or a person’s opinion in a short five-minute elevator speech kind of a thing, where they’re offering their perspective and then they’re posting that and other students are coming in and adding on to their comments whether they agree or disagree. Having a discussion around a topic and having different perspectives, especially when people are in the field. I’m giving one example that might be for aspiring school leaders where they do have experience and they are sharing what’s happening in their region or their area, and that’s the essential piece that they share in person speaking and they’re learning how to present themselves in that way, different than presenting in a classroom.

Pete Morgan:

Definitely. Now, Mel, you also touched on this a little bit when we talk about where does GoReact apply best use cases versus, “What can I think of, what’s this vision that I have for a great learning experience and can it be applied to GoReact?” Mel, we had a couple of these discussions, but just from your perspective, how did some of those visions come to fruition from you? What did we do together and how did you feel the process went taking your vision and applying it into functional GoReact?

Melanie Facundo:

I think one of the biggest things for me was understanding what it could do and then not just looking at it through the single lens of it does video and you can give feedback. When I opened up that door, that gave me the opportunity to start thinking about my curriculum, my instruction. I’m all about engagement. I want my students engaged, I want them to feel connected. I don’t want them to just be checking into their thing and marking off tasks.

I kept working with ideas and there were a couple of things that I said to Pete. I was like, “Pete, what about this,” and he’s like, “Interesting. We’re not there yet, but we could probably get there.” It was always this idea, it’s like you build it, they will come. You start just being incredibly creative in terms, if you want something that has feedback but it needs to be interactions or even if they’re trying to construct something or build something or do something, it gives you the ability to give that feedback and have them verbally express what they’re thinking while they’re doing that given task. You could even do an ethical dilemma where you’re having people kind of talk something out.

When you’re typing it out and you’re writing a paper, you’re kind of trying to make it very pretty and sometimes you lose that brainstorming piece in the middle of it. It gives you the ability to have an interactive conversation. I mean, I’ve used Polo before and while I’m doing a Polo, I’m actually solving my own problem and I’m like, “Thank you for listening to me problem solve my own problem.” I really appreciate that. There’s something to be said about that flow that goes back and forth in a person’s own internal thought process. I’ve used for students administering assessment tools and then for giving feedback on each other.

I also make sure that the points that I allocate, they don’t feel punitive. If a student even administers something and they do it incorrectly, they’re still getting a point because I want them to understand, “I’m not really here to nail you on what you’re doing wrong. I need you to attempt every one of these tasks, so that we can then work with you.” Even when they’re doing those tasks, they realize how quickly that they should have prepared themselves more for the given activities. The more you think out of the box and the more you think about engagement and creative activities, just take assignments and try to figure out how you can make them more interactive. The second you do that, that’s where GoReact comes in and just really helps you kind of narrow in your idea and then make it work.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah. Brian, let me flip it to you here quickly. I mean, how would you approach curriculum design in the form of GoReact?

Brian J. Arnold:

Well, I’m almost going to build straight off of what Melanie was talking about. Let’s say you have a traditional course where you have several papers or some essays. The students write them, they submit them, and you can give granular line by line feedback. If you simply design your rubric so that they can either write the paper or they can present a video, which concludes all of that content, now using the GoReact tool, you can give that same level of granular line by line, minute by second feedback into the video. A lot of the students will lean into that and do a whole lot more even cognitively with the opportunity of doing it in the form of a video. Having that choice allows them to flex both skills. Having the tool allows you to evaluate it in a very similar way.

Again, I’m trying to think generally across disciplines. For me, that’s the best thing. The other piece that I’ve found very useful in my own programs is sort of culminative, summative work where they’re presenting everything that they’ve done and you can give them feedback. Normally if you get a YouTube video, you’re like, “Maybe next time record the video without the dishwasher running behind you,” real general stuff. You can really get in, “Here at this point, this was going on,” and duh, duh, you can really give that targeted piece.

Pete Morgan:

Yeah, really well said. You three are more than phenomenal. Thank you so much for all of your information, all the context that’s built here. I hope this has been incredibly informative for those that have been here listening and participating today. For everyone that is here, remember this has been recorded and will be shared out through the same modems I believe that we have the invitation and the signup process come through. If at any reason you want to reference this video again and hear back to what Patty, Brian, and Mel have been able to share, pass this along to anyone else within your departments, other colleagues, please feel free to do so.

We appreciate you all so much. Thank you all for your participation, for being here with us today. If you ever have questions on how to make GoReact work in your disciplines, how we can grow within a current discipline, or expand into multiple throughout the course of a university or college, never hesitate to reach out. We are so ready to listen and understand and take those visions and translate them into practical GoReact application. Thank you so much everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your day and we look forward to you on to the next webinar. Have a great one.