- All right, so I think we're a minute or so after the top of the hour, so I just wanna say welcome. If there are people on this webinar who can't hear me, then you should let us know and you should see a note in the chat. But, so I'm delighted for today's webinar. Thank you for coming. We're here to talk about summer bridge programs and how to launch an effective personalized summer bridge program. My name is Ahrash Bissell, I am the president at The NROC Project, which is also the host of the EdReady platform that you'll be hearing about today. I guess just a couple of things to say upfront, and actually, I'm not sure we are, are we recording? I think we are recording, yes. So we are recording this webinar and we'll be posting an archive of it later as we do with all of our webinars. Also, we have the chat section where you should feel free to drop in comments and such. We would encourage you to use the Q&A section of the Zoom panel to put in questions to our panelists and to anyone else who's here. Actually I can move on. So Q&A area, already talked about the archive. You can contribute to the Twitter conversation at #NROCpd And if you need any help as this meeting unfolds, free to get in touch with us. So I, am gonna tell, explain a little bit about NROC for those of you who are perhaps unfamiliar with us and our work and our connection to this topic. And then we're gonna turn it over to our panelists who are gonna talk about their specific program, the Eagle Start program out of Wake Tech. And then there will be a final chunk of this webinar where we'll turn it over to one of our NROC customer success team members, Jason Gipson-Nahman, who's going to describe a little bit about the process of setting up a Summer bridge program using a personalized tool like EdReady. And as I said, feel free to drop in questions and such as this webinar unfolds. So the NROC Project, we are a nonprofit mission oriented project. We are actually in our 20th year this year, and we were launched 20 years ago with a real emphasis and focus on what was then a new idea, an emerging notion called Open Educational Resources or OER. The idea being that the internet and digital materials made it possible to build perhaps cutting edge, perhaps sort of differently structured learning opportunities and then distribute them at virtually no cost to whomever could get them. And that certainly spawned a whole plethora of projects, including ours, that started to explore what does this mean in the world of education? Are there new affordances that we can tap into? Are there new kinds of media that we can use in classrooms, outta classrooms, et cetera, et cetera. And so within that frame, we, over the years built courseware, including courseware in math and English. We also have another site you may be familiar with, called HippoCampus, where we distribute a lot of open educational multimedia resources. But what really became our focus over time was we realized that there were these specific challenge areas that affect people quite broadly all over the country. And you can think of these as any place where there are these transitions. Most notable transition being the transition from high school or high school equivalency into post-secondary studies, whether that's for a credential or a degree-seeking program, workforce development, what have you. And in particular, core math and English skills are key to making that transition successfully. We zeroed in on this because so many students were being impacted by placement testing practices or lack of readiness. And it was both keeping people out of post-secondary studies, but also making it so that many students were trying to move on to post-secondary studies without really having all the skills they need for success. And partially in service to that mission, we decided to build a tool, EdReady, which provides the means for having a personalized and adaptive approach to addressing the needs of these students and changing process and practice to help those students be more successful. That has been the emphasis of many of our engagements in our partnerships of all shapes and sizes ever since. And so I already explained, EdReady is an adaptive learning platform, has now been adopted by districts, systems, and states to personalize math and English instruction and to empower data-driven student success decisions. We work in a lot of different problem areas, but they all generally come back to the same kind of underlying theme. And so in today's webinar, we're focusing on a particular instantiation of EdReady's usage, which is kind of broadly captured under grade to grade transitions, as well as college and career readiness. And specifically it's this idea of implementing an effective personalized summer bridge program. So with that, I am going to, oh, actually I should say some of the says that went out about this webinar, we were gonna also showcase another partner of ours here in California with the California State University system. They ended up running into some conflicts in terms of who was gonna be available. And so we've postponed that. So this webinar, we are gonna focus entirely on the work going on at Wake Technical Community College, and their Eagle Summer Bridge program. And so with that, I would turn it over to Dave, who can then give us a description of the program and we'll dive in.

- Thank you, Ahrash. Appreciate that. So as you can see, the name of our program is the Eagle Start Summer Bridge program. The website is eaglestart.waketech.edu. Certainly, anyone can go take a look at that. You wanna go onto the next slide, Ahrash. This is what you'll see, at least part of it anyways, when you go to that website, i it goes through some of the benefits that the students are gonna gain from being in the program. We do have free tuition and fees for the last three years. Now they're gonna get free laptops, they get access to all of the Wake Tech resources, tutoring, coaching, career coaching, and then connect with faculty and staff and administrators as well. So the program itself, actually you can go on to the next one, Ahrash. The program itself, this is our third year and the first year truly was a pilot. We came on late in the game for that one and we wound up with 11 students in the program. We ran it for eight weeks and we learned a lot from that. And this gentleman in the black and blue shirt, he is Quentin, who was quoted in that last slide on the website. He was one of the ones in that first year. And we just, we learned a lot from that first year. One of the things that we realized was that if we're gonna draw on high school students, we needed to have it after high school graduation. And in Wake County high school graduation is middle of June. So we had started our program initially that first year at the beginning of June. So obviously we left out all of the high school graduating seniors. So we made adjustments for the second year, which was last year. We cut it down through some feedback, we cut it down to six weeks instead of eight weeks. And again, started it later on in the year. So high school seniors could participate. We initially did try to do two different timeframes. One for non graduating seniors, non-traditional students or people who are already outta high school and then one for high school seniors. The one that started earlier, we just didn't get very much traction for people signing up for that. So we went ahead and canceled that and just ran the later one that started in later June. And we had, we wound up with, we had 96 students who committed, but we had 71 show up on the first day for the orientation. And we actually ended up the program last year with 70. So we only lost one student, which was we thought, that was a huge success. So who is eligible? In North Carolina or Wake Tech especially? Excuse me, I'm sorry. Sorry, I'm not feeling so well today, so bear with me on that. Students who come to Wake Tech with a high school GPA below 2.2 are required to take developmental math and English and a a student success course, so those are the students we are targeting. There are some other things that, other ways that students do test into those courses, but that's the one way that the is most popular and the classes that they're gonna be taking in the Summer Bridge program, like the first year we ran just a math, our developmental math class and our student success course and we ran them as they normally run for a semester course for in eight weeks. We realized that that, again, that was another part of that first year, that didn't really pan out so well. So the second year last year, Sharice Millsaps, one of one of my colleagues and somebody on the line here, suggested what if we use a modified set of courses instead of offering the actual developmental math, developmental English and student success course, we just do a modified version of those three. And the problem with offering all three of those as they are, the real courses, they're 15 contact hours for all three of those. And so there's no way in a six week session that we'd be able to run all, the students would be in class 40 hours a week. So we realized that that wasn't gonna work. So again, taking on Sharice's idea, we decided to run a modified version. And in our developmental math and English, they go by tiers, and I'm not sure how many people are familiar with North Carolina, but English has a two-tier class, English 002. And of course the old joke is math has three tiers 'cause math always has more tears. So the program is just trying to get students through the first tier in each of those courses. So we're trying to get through the first tier in English 002 and in tier one in in math 03, as well as offering a modified version of the student success course. So we're not actually offering the technical courses, the official courses, we're offering those modified courses. And because they're developmental, we have the ability to just give non-course credit for doing that. We get a lot of more leeway in offering credit for those since they're not credit bearing courses or transfer courses. The program is offered on our two largest campuses, North Campus and South Campus. We, last year most of our Title I high schools are closer to the north campus. So we had three classes running up there and we had one class running on our South Campus. The funding comes through Summer Bridge was part of our strategic plan and which has started a few years back. And so funding came through that plan and the president decided to give us a fair amount of money to run the program. The one thing about not offering the official courses and running those modified courses is it actually is cheaper. We are paying our faculty stipends for running those courses, but we don't have to pay for the tuition for those courses any longer. And again, we talked about some of the benefits. We do have enough funding to offer tutors. Again, last year we offered tutors in the classroom. All of the classes had a tutor embedded in them. That was one of the things that didn't really pan out as well as we had hoped it would. So we pulled back on that and this year we're gonna just put the tutors available during the lunch hour and we'll have dedicated time for students to go over that. We do offer, speaking of lunch, we do offer a free lunch for all the students. And again, they get a laptop. The cost per student was $625, and that's again, what the school paid out of all the things that we offered through the program, instructors, the kickoff, there's an end of course or end of program celebration, which is what this picture is from, and all of that, and the paying for the instructors and the tutors and we actually gave them a backpack as well. So all of that told, it came up to roughly $625. Again, last year, we wound up with 71 students. We're hoping for 100 for this year. All right, Ahrash. This is every one of the advertising palm cards that we put out, again, it's just something that helps the recruiters when they go out and talk to students. It gives again, the eligibility that they're at the bottom 2.2 below that, or again, I talked about the other, the way they could get in GED score of less than 145 on any part of the exam. So I'm gonna hand it off to, I believe Kate at this time.

- Hi everybody. Thanks for having me. If you could go back one second to the previous slide. I'm sorry. Thanks. So I know this was kind of mentioned by Mr. Cooper already, but one of the goals of the Summer Bridge program was to ensure that students at our college were co-requisite ready. So instead of presenting a full math course or a full math English course, we pulled out a lot of the topics that we felt would help them be ready for their next course for math. For example, if students finished the summer bridge, there were a few different options they had as far as what their next math class could have been. So making sure that we hit those skills that would help them be successful in that area. Yeah, you could go to the next one. Thanks, so I just wanted to talk a little bit about math. So I taught one of the math classes on North campus. I met with them every morning at 9:00 AM bright and early. It was a really awesome group, I think, we kind of would break up the class and I'll go through my bullets here. But basically before the class started, a bunch of us got together that taught math and we looked through all of the things that we currently teach in tier one, and we pulled out the things that we felt would be beneficial for students if they were either going into our math 143 class next, or some of them would come back and do tier two of math 003. Some might go into statistics with support. So there's a few different options. Or they might take math 110, which is a non or non-transferable math. So there was three different, I guess four different technically places they could end up after the summer bridge. So we tried to find all of the topics that would be covered or help them be better prepared for those four classes. So we made a modified course in EdReady. I will say that everyone at NROC with EdReady was very helpful. They were able to meet with me prior to the class starting and help me get everything set up and ready to go, which was great. So that EdReady was kind of like one of the tools I used as far as how I would present in class. So I started my class, I sort of broke it up in three parts. It was a four day a week for 75 minutes. And in the beginning I would lecture a little bit and do some, you know, typical classroom lecture, go through some of the topics that I think they might struggle with. Then we would do some practice. I did a lot of group practice. The one thing I really loved about them meeting together four days a week and traveling together from class to class was the comradery. They really became friends, a lot of my students and they would work together and help each other. And that's obviously with from my experience, you know, community college students come and go. So sometimes it's hard to make those connections, but I felt like it was a really nice group where they just saw each other every day and they were really able to establish some relationships. So they would do group work. And then we spent the last part of class always working on our computers in EdReady, which I will say it was great that Wake Tech gave the students' computers because that would've been a hurdle if we didn't have that access. But students had access to their own computers, they would log in. And the nice thing also about EdReady from my side of things with math is students would often be working on different skills because everybody sort of has deficits or gaps in different areas. So I really enjoyed having that platform to use in class to help students where they were at. We did also create a pre and a post-test. The pre and post-test were paper based, but what we were looking for is just to see increased mastery. We wanted to see how students were doing at the beginning and then where they sort of ended at the end of the semester. Did they learn a lot of those co-requisite skills we were hoping for them to learn, or I should say, did they learn the skills they needed to be co-requisite ready? And you know, I know from my class, I can only speak from my math class that I did, I saw a lot of improvement on many of the things that they struggled on in the beginning. Another thing I'll just mention about EdReady is, I really did like the learn feature in EdReady, if you're not familiar with the platform, it has learn is basically it's really geared to teaching the students material. Obviously like it has videos and it has worked out examples. And what I like about it is, as you know, all students learn differently. So if a student did miss a class or came a few minutes late or maybe, I don't know, maybe my approach didn't work for them, they had additional resources through EdReady to also get a second opinion or a second view of a content. And I again thought that the program went really well. The students I had, I know Mr. Cooper said it was geared towards high school, well it's geared towards both, but I did have a mix of high school students and students returning to college later in life. Everybody was really accepting of everyone and as I said before, like really had that nice connection. So it was a good experience overall. And I'm gonna pass it off to Melody. Thank you.

- Hello, my name's Melody, and I did the English portion of the Eagle Start program at Wake Tech. And I operated on South Campus. The majority of the students that I ended up with were mostly fresh out of high school. So they were 17, 18 years old and they were coming to higher education for the first time directly out of high school. And so the way that I had done the summer bridge program for English is in the beginning of the semester, myself and the other instructors who were working with the English portion came together and looked through the content provided by EdReady and NROC and created, much like Kate said, a customized course for the students pulling out the most important pieces of information that we thought that they would need to be successful in the co-requisite course for English 111. So unlike math, the English students usually only end up in English 111 with 011 as the co-requisite. And so we wanted to make sure that they had those foundational skills that they needed in order to be successful in the gateway course for English. Students were able to really form connections with myself, the tutor and each other by using small groups. And so they were able to speak with me and the tutor on an individual basis and we were able to do that through using the like pre-made lessons through NROC and EdReady. They came with the most important skills distilled down into things like grammar and mechanics, context clues and comma rules, and just basic sentence level things that all students need to have a full grasp on before they can move into higher education. And that's what helped with the interactive education experience. So using those lessons, they were able to have a flexible way to work with the more complex parts of grammar and mechanics. So they could talk to me, they could look at the lessons that were provided, and because EdReady was a single sign on with math as well, they could log in at any time and go through any of those that they needed to. They were able to self-evaluate, again with grammar and mechanics, because I feel that that was probably the most important thing to touch on in Summer Bridge just because it is so foundational to the actual pieces of writing. So grammar and mechanics was a huge portion of what we covered in our Eagle Start program for English. The metacognitive questions that are provided by NROC and EdReady were really important for myself to help present these things to students so that they could see why what they were using in Eagle Start was so important and how they could see themselves using it not only within the Eagle Start program, not only within English co-requisite and gateway, but also why grammar and mechanics would follow them throughout their entire college careers and into the workforce as well. They were able to do practicing without any sort of punitive results. So we would use the exercises that were created by the EdReady team to help focus on things like comma splices, sentence level errors, misuse of punctuation and other nuts and bolts pieces of English. So that way students actually had the time and space to sit down and practice and see, okay, this is how I have to do this and these are the ways that I can and I can see this visually and also the instructor is telling me and then we're also doing it together. And so they were able to practice without any sort of penalty or being told that you're wrong, but more that they could be more effective with their use of language and punctuation.

- Thanks for that, Melody. Excuse me. We do have some questions that are coming in and I guess, yeah, so here we are. I would actually suggest that maybe we hop back into the video, four of us and we might, it might even make more sense to stop sharing the screen so that people could just see us talking for a little bit. So with that quick background, I mean there are a few questions that have come in and really would turn it over to you, any of you on who feels like you want to answer it. So one of the questions pertains specifically to EdReady as a, you know, as kind of a diagnostic component if I'm understanding the question right. In your program. So to what extent were you using it to really kind of ascertain, as you said, Kate, those particular gaps that you could identify that students would probably be wanting to work on over the course of the term, and then I guess, tracking that improvement over time. You already spoke to that, but how does that sort of diagnostic personalized component fit with your programmatic goals and then actually prepare them for what you imagined that you were gonna matriculate to in your co-requisite courses?

- Well, I can kind of try to answer the question twofold. So the pre and post-test that I mentioned before, that was a paper based created test and for me it was just helpful to see, and I will speak to the diagnostic too, but it was just helpful to see, you know, day one, this is low stakes, not graded, I just kind of wanna see what you know. I will say the one we made had quite a bit of application on it, which students don't always love application problems because it requires, you know, multiple steps and you know, reading comprehension and things like that. So trying to think of how to word that. But anyways, so it just kind of gave me a baseline. And one thing that made the Summer Bridge very different from what we do in our traditional 003 classes, in our 003 currently, most of the students when they come in they do take the EdReady diagnostic right away and they start working where they are. But we were really trying to make sure in the summer program that I wouldn't wanna say self teaching, like we were trying to avoid that though a little bit. We wanted to make sure we gave some delivery of instruction. So we, at least I know I started, I don't wanna say we, I started my classes with, like I said, a bit of lecture, like kind of get them going, ask some questions. I would even have students come up to the board, you know, just like a traditional setting. And I would look at the pre-test and post-test just to kind of see where some of the gaps were and common errors. A lot of the common errors though, in this level of math, in my experience, I could probably have told you what they were before I even saw the results because they're just things like issues they have with, you know, order of operations or students really struggle with fractions. So I didn't really even need to look at it per se to know what areas I probably needed to cover. As far as EdReady goes, that diagnostic though is very useful in my opinion because, and I've used other tools as well, but it shows students where they are, not where the whole class is. Remember when I lecture, I'm lecturing everything, whether you understand it or not or whether maybe you do find that easy and someone else finds it difficult, but once they take the diagnostic that was created in EdReady, it doesn't make them go back per se unless they choose to and revisit the things they already know how to do. It really helps them spend their time and focus on all of those areas they don't currently know how to do. And then they can use the learn feature. I didn't mention this before, but we did, as Mr. Cooper mentioned, we had tutors. So I had a tutor in my math class. He was able to help me answer questions students would have. I also, I did make, well it was made available that they could go get that specific assistance during their lunch hour as well. And so there was a lot of wraparound support in my opinion of things they could try if EdReady wasn't working for one, maybe one person needed me to like remind them a little bit more, we gotta log in now. But then another student really loved EdReady and I would say that they would go home and actually do more than I asked them to do, because they were really excited about filling in the holes and seeing like they wanted to be extra prepared for their next math class. So I don't know that I addressed that fully, but that's how I used it and what I saw. So the diagnostic was a great tool to help them work on content that they need specifically. And then the one we used in class was really geared towards teaching as a whole class in a whole class environment.

- Right. No, that's helpful. And I mean, so another question that came in was really clarifying the population, and it Dave did respond to that, so this is by basically the students who are eligible for this program are students who are falling below a certain threshold that you would typically deem to be college ready. So students have less than a 2.2 GPA, if I'm understanding correctly.

- That's correct.

- So, you know, certainly in our experience, you know, we often talk about how we obviously are in the business of promoting approaches and practices that utilize technology and allow you to take a more competency-based, personalized kind of an approach. But we often say, you know, the technology is necessary if you actually wanna do that, but it's not sufficient, not certainly for students who need more help, there are gonna be students who are stronger who might be able to self study through, but to your point, this is not that population. And so I think a lot of what you're describing is about this sort of what is the socialization that is happening in your summer program, getting students into the mindset that they can do this, that they can focus on the things they really need to focus on, that they're not wasting their time, right? And this is putting them on that path and I guess, I don't know if any of you wanna speak more to that side of things.

- Yeah, so students who come in with a below the 2.2, and I think this also addresses the next question that came in about replacing those courses that they need to take. So yeah, they're not technically, I guess by definition or what we sometimes talk about college ready. So we give them their, we make them take the developmental courses or pre-curriculum courses or what we call them at Wake Tech. But when students go through the Bridge program, again, we're trying to get them through that tier one of English one or English 002 and tier one of of math 003. So they have just enough to get onto their next level, the freshman level in most cases. And like Kate was talking about earlier, with that co-rack. So, but it does, if they successfully complete the program, they do earn the credit for math 003 and English 002. They do not have to go back and retake that. The only caveat to that is certain programs, certain majors require a higher level than math 003, they require tier two or tier three, whichever. And because we're only getting them through tier one, they may have to go back and retake math 003, but they would start at the second tier at that point. So they still have, they get the credit for tier one, but then they'd move on to tier two and that would then get them ready to take their higher level. The math class for those are associated science degrees or AAS degrees, one of the two.

- Right. Yeah. So the questions are coming in 'cause I think people are interested in this issue of how in a way you're converting students that you might have described as not college level material into students who not only are college level material, but hopefully have what they need to persist and thrive. So there's a couple dimensions on what you said that we'd love to dig into a little bit. So the first is maybe a little bit more about how you identify these students. So are these students who have already applied for admission to Wake Tech and so you already anticipate that they're gonna show up and you're able to catch them ahead of time, far enough ahead of time, that they can go through a program. I guess a second for me following on what you just said is we certainly hear from many of our partners that when you take this sort of an approach, it can convert students who might have actively avoided, for example, math intensive majors or writing intensive programs into people who start to think maybe they shouldn't do that or at least they don't have to. And so students who probably had written off, for example, more technical majors or careers as being something they wouldn't touch 'cause they'd always disliked math when they discovered that now actually you can do the math and there are ways of doing it well, it does a mind change and now you're sort of opening up additional possible futures where to your point there may be more math that they had originally anticipated taking, but they're already on the track and they feel like they can do it. And I guess if you could speak any of you a little bit to both of those things.

- Yeah, I'll just say first of all, getting them the confidence is a huge thing in anything you do. But in education for sure. And I'll speak to math specifically, 'cause I'm a math instructor, but students who get a little bit of confidence in math that really can propel them into a whole new realm of what they feel possible they could do. So this, to Kate's point about wraparound, this really does wraparound and gives them a lot of support in the bridge program to make them feel that they're not doing this by themselves. They're getting a lot of support but then they can do it, to the question about, I guess, recruiting, so Ahrash, yes, we do to some extent, if students are applying and we get a report each week of all the students who fall below the 2.2, we reach out to them. We also have recruiters that go out to specifically our Title I high schools, but then they're also reaching out to several other high schools as well. But they're going out into the high schools, as of February, March, and starting to recruit for the program at that time. So we are getting them before they even apply sometimes as well.

- That's interesting. Melody, did you have any thoughts on kind of how these ideas within your classroom?

- Yeah, so as you guys were talking, I was thinking about Kate's mention of wraparound support, and Dave talking about how student confidence is really the key and at least from the perspective of an English classroom, and from my personal perspective, I have, let me think of how to word this. I see a lot of the students that I saw in Summer Bridge on campus now, and so they're always very excited to see me and see familiar faces and that confidence and community that starts to build in summer I think is paramount to their success and probably their retention in the college, just because if you feel like you have a place to belong, you tend to stay in that place. And so I enjoy hearing from students and creating those personal relationships with them that I would not have unless we were in summer bridge together. I was able to form several important relationships to students I think and just be able to, even during that lunch hour, talk to them on a more like person to person level. So if this isn't Summer Bridge is not just getting them through what they need to move on to their gateway classes, but also bringing them into higher education as this is not a scary place, this is not a place where to be successful. You have to forego any sort of identity you had before you were here. But instead allows students to come as they are, much like NROC and EdReady's meet students where they are initiative. So it allows them to come as they are and get the kind of help that they need to feel that they are college ready and that they feel they're college ready I feel is half the battle of higher education, retention and student success.

- Yeah, that's excellent. Some other questions here, I mean, so were you able to evaluate, I guess in a more or less rigorous way, I'm not sure where you are in your evaluation, how these students did, so they went through this summer bridge program, I assumed some fraction of them matriculated to Wake Tech and then took those co-requisite courses that you were preparing them for. Like, what was your impression of how they performed?

- Yeah, so again, apologize. I had the numbers at my office, because I wasn't in my office the last two days I don't have them in front of me, but I can tell you for sure that students who came through the Bridge program and then also, well there was a higher percentage who passed their freshman level math and English than the students who went through math 003, English 002, and did the same thing. So it's a small sample size that we have for Bridge program, but the numbers looked a little bit higher than students who take the traditional courses. Because part of that is the students who are taking math 003 and English 002, they're semester-long courses, and not all the students make it through, frankly. So we had a lot, a higher percentage of students who were gonna make it through the Summer Bridge program because it's only six weeks, and then they were able to make it onto their freshman level math and English. So we had a lot more students moving into that percentage wise. So we're able to a lot more, we were successful at that point.

- That's great. Yeah, and of course we're always eager to get data and efficacy and impacts at the end of the day. That's what we're most interested in. So getting back to some of the questions. So there was a question about EdReady's cost and just generally how this works. So for The NROC Project, the way we work is we partner with institutions like Wake Tech. The particular cost depends a little bit on whether they've been long-term partners or not. So we've shifted our cost basis away from what used to be more of a membership kind of a model to something where people just can pay for the actual cost of access per use. But the amount then get sized depending on the number of students you use. So just for sort of earmarked purposes, you can say it runs roughly around $14 for unlimited access for the term of a contract per student. We work that out with each partner. Our goal was always to find that space where ideally none of those costs are passed on to students, right? That's for us, that's a big part of our access mission is to find that balance point between being able to pay to keep the platform up and updated and supply all the support and so on without having those costs ultimately get passed on the way that, for example, traditionally textbook costs end up getting picked up by students. Hopefully that helps with that. Feel free to get in touch with us about any of those questions. So there's some more specific questions about Eagle Start and let's answer a couple before what we'll do is then turn this over to Jason, who I think will also be able to answer some of these questions about how difficult it is to get a program like this up and running and you know, what is that process. So before we get there, I see some questions here about the total time requirements and I think this would be program specific. So for Eagle Start, what was the commitment that students made to taking the summer program and your associated attendance policies?

- So I'll answer that. So as it said in the question, yeah Kate said her class is 75 minutes, actually all the classes were 75 minutes. So the day ran from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and in there was a lunch, and then we had 15 minutes in between each class, Monday through Thursday.

- And did you find that students stuck with a commitment? I mean, did you have issues with students showing up?

- I could just, for math we had a, I don't know about English and ACA, but we had met, I think there were three or four math instructors in total, I'm trying to remember off the top of my head, but we kind of came up with sort of a grading system that we used. We did have attendance be 5% of the grade. I mean that wasn't enough to like, you know, make them not be able to move forward if they missed a few days. It was broken up for us anyways into a lot of different parts. We wanted to give them a lot of opportunities to be successful in the course. I didn't have too many issues with attendance. I mean my class also is the first one of the day though, so yes, sometimes students would come in late, but then they'd be there, for the most part I would say, overall most of the students that came in were pretty committed, at least in my course. But again, I don't think I would be able to speak for everyone else. But we tried to make EdReady part of the grade, attendance was part of the grade, doing that diagnostic in the beginning and at the end was part of their grade. Just give them a lot of opportunities to feel success and be successful as opposed to just saying like, if you don't do this one thing, you're not gonna move forward. And that was kind of like a big push for us.

- Make sure I was unmuted, but from the English perspective I didn't, for my class on South Campus, I never had any major issues with attendance. I was second after math, so after they had their 75 minute class with math and then the 15 minute break, then it was me, and then I think they went to lunch after that. So they were, the students who were there were there for math already. And so I had never had a major issue with attendance or anyone ever coming in late. They were always sugary snacks so they were sugared up by the time they got to me. But I had never really had any issues with attendance or participation. Most of my students were, were fairly interested in what we were doing. I know that sometimes it can feel like a lot to go through, but.

- It's great. Do you find, so I mean I think it's really excellent and interesting that there's this recruitment that tries to catch people before you even know that Wake Tech might be their destination, which certainly suggests that you could imagine some level of regional coordination where there's sort of an understanding that students from wherever in the region could benefit from taking a program like this and whether they think Wake Tech is their destination or not. And so would you say there's awareness among other schools in the region or you know, however that this is a program that has this capacity to take students who you would've said were at risk but pushed them into a place where now it looks more like a student that you could imagine stepping into college level studies or at least co-requisite studies more effectively?

- The last part, yes, for sure. I mean Wake Tech, we always say we take the top a hundred percent of all students. So yeah, so we're, and I think it's, well I'd like to think it's common knowledge around the county that we will take anyone who graduates high school, and we'll work with them and get them up to speed to be college ready. But as we're out recruiting more and getting more word out out about this program, we're getting a lot more interest. And it is interesting, we're even getting more parents involved this year, but even last year the parents were contacting us and asking about how they could help out, how they could help promote the program as well because they were so impressed by, you know, what was happening in the classes for their students or their children. So I mean, Wake Tech, we are the community college for Wake County. So there is not a lot of other options. They could go outta county to another community college, but I think the reputation stands for itself that we are gonna take anyone who wants to come through our doors and we're gonna help them be successful. But certainly the Eagle Start program is getting more popular and I'm hoping it continues to grow.

- That's excellent. So I think we'll turn it over to Jason to kind of help walk through those of you who have an interest in what this process looks like, at least at a high level. I know he said he's not gonna take much time and then we can pause and see if there are further questions before we wrap up. So Jason, I guess I can share my screen again.

- Yeah, that's fine. So thanks Ahrash, and hello all. My name is Jason Gipson-Nahman, I am a customer success manager with NROC Project. So all of our NROC partner institutions have a dedicated customer success specialist from our team that can help you plan and implement your summer program, or any other use case involving EdReady for that matter. I do wanna take this opportunity to shout out the wonderful Jessica Huffman who is the customer success specialist who's worked with Wake Tech and helped them with Eagle Start. So our team is available to meet with you and walk through a process where we help you flesh out a couple of key components, and I'll try to summarize those briefly. So let me, next slide. The first step is to identify what your main objectives are in terms of content. So what do you want your students to learn and or strengthen through your program? So our customer success team can provide worksheets for you and your team to look through our full curricula, that's both math and English, and decide which specific topics and learning objectives in our available content are most relevant for your students. So we'll work with you to set up and structure your study paths and goals to best fit your needs. And thinking back to the question that was raised earlier about the diagnostic, that includes the diagnostic. So without going in too much depth about EdReady, you can pick and choose the content that you want your students to work through, but also what is an important step is identifying which parts of that content do you want to assess upfront on the diagnostic? Because typically you don't wanna assess them on everything 'cause that could, you know, take a while and you just really wanna give EdReady enough information to build that custom study path for your students to get started. You can go through the next, probably the next two slides maybe. So secondly, we can help you customize the student experience. So our team will help you take advantage of the student facing messages that can help provide support and encouragement to your students as they work in EdReady. So we can think about and look at the student workflow and use the features of EdReady to optimize that. So this includes providing any important instructions to students once they reach a particular milestone in their study path or just providing them guidance along the way as they're working through EdReady. And lastly, we'll help you set up reporting access for any instructors or administrators who'll be supporting your students or anyone who needs access to view or visibility into your student progress, right? So hopefully you already know who your customer success specialist is, but if not, please reach out to us and let us know and we'll get you connected to the right person. Everyone on our team, everyone on our team is wonderful and we, we all will do our best to make sure you've got the support that you need to get your programs up and running. So we want to thank all of you for taking the time to be with us today and learning from our incredible panelists at Wake Tech. As Ahrash mentioned earlier, a recording of this session will be made available at nroc.org, but for now we can stay on the line for a bit and answer any other lingering questions that that may come up. I think I maybe see some more in the chat, but I'll pause for now and see if there's anything else for us to address.

- Yeah, try to catch up on, excuse me, on what all people are putting in here. Thanks for that, Jason. So I guess maybe the quick take on that is certainly for those of you who are already part of our partnership network, the gap between imagining what's possible for this summer and actually putting things in place to do it should be pretty small. That's a lot of what we've optimized over the years, how to kind of get things up and at least running to support your vision of the kind of program you wanna run pretty quickly. Let's see. So yeah, is the curriculum offered only for math and English? Yes, so EdReady at the moment is contained to math and English. The math is an amalgam of pretty much the entirety of high school. Algebra one is one body of material and then there's also what we would call developmental math, which effectively means all the math that they, you know, would or should have learned in high school and with an eye towards matriculating successfully to a post-secondary program. And English is a integrated reading writing approach and again, focuses on those critical English language critical reading skills, writing skills, and so on. That one would hope that students are ready to deploy when they take college level coursework that includes those English language arts expectations. We will be recording this, I mean this is being recorded so it will be archived. Everybody who is here and everybody who signed up for the webinar will get a link to the recording once we put that together and share that back out. And I guess I would open it up again for a last time if my panelists wanna come back on camera for a minute. And see if there are any final questions. Any final thoughts? Why don't we go through, I would just love to maybe push it back on you to just say a word about kind of your hopes for the program based on the experience you've had, but also what's planned in the future. You know, in a few words, and we'll start with you, Kate.

- On the spot. Well, I mean I teach math as you all know by now. And math, as Mr. Cooper said, is just a class that is such a hurdle and it causes so much anxiety for our students. So my hope would be that Summer Bridge would just continue to be a place where they can come in and realize that this is low stakes, we're all here to help them. Low stakes in the sense that, you know, we wanna see them successful. And as Melody shared also, I mean, I didn't get to interact too many times with my students after I've seen some of them, but not all of them. But I did have students that came in on that first day and even into the first couple of weeks that said, I can't believe I can do this. Like, especially my students who my, I had two in particular that came back, as I said, as adult learners. One was former military, one had just taken a really long time off to start a family and both of them were just always amazed at the ability that they did have and they would come in early, we would talk about life. So I just think making those connections and having an opportunity to keep doing that will help students, as Melody said, feel more connected and, you know, stay in college and realize that this is not a place where they're alone, but we're here to help them.

- That's fantastic. We love those stories. Melody?

- Yeah, I'm just gonna bounce off what Kate said as well that this idea of like wraparound support for students and having them have a place where they can get into college without, I think some of the, not high stakes, but some of the more punitive things that come with enrolling in a gateway course if they're not quite ready. So having the wraparound support plus this ability to practice these skills without being punished for what they don't know and having the ability to build these relationships and build up their skills at the same time, to keep them confident and get them prepared. And I'm hoping to continue to work with Eagle Start Summer Bridge Program and continue to implement new ideas as they're coming in as far as like the research and literature portion of the success of Summer Bridge programs start to, that body of work continues to grow and so to continue to implement any new information and other things like that into the program and for our students and continue to work with EdReady and NROC to make sure that students have a place to go and a place to start.

- That's excellent, thanks, Melody. Dave?

- Yeah, I think the one thing that Melody said that really I think is key is the relationships that the students had with each other. I saw several of them in, out and about on campus the next semester and they were talking with each other and interacting. So it's nice to have that relationship and again, you feel like you belong somewhere when you have relationships with people. But we will be growing this as much as possible. Again, we're looking for a hundred students this summer and our president wants us to get it to a place where we fill this arena, PNC Arena where the Hurricanes play. So at some point we're looking to grow exponentially. But yeah, we'll take it a step at a time. But yeah, we're excited about it to continue to grow and I'm glad to hear Melody's gonna stick with us for a while.

- That's great. Well, and we're excited to grow with you. Well that really brings us to the end of the hour, so thank you for everybody who came. Thank you Dave, Melody, Kate, and Jason, for your participation in sharing what you guys have done in North Carolina. It's exciting stuff. So again, just thanking the rest of you who are here with us today, and I hope everybody has an excellent rest of the week. Thanks all.