Brent Warner
This is the higher ed tech podcast season four, episode eight interview with class technologies

Tim Van Norman
welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So anything new preparations for Thanksgiving coming up?

Brent Warner
Yeah, trying to keep this year is going to be local. So, you know, we Yeah, not a lot. Not a lot. Nothing very exciting going on. Tim, how about you?

Tim Van Norman
Staying here, I’ve got a grandkid coming in. Being born soon is anticipated. So we’re staying close to home and doing all the preparations for that. So

Brent Warner
for the time being a grandpa first

Tim Van Norman
first time and you know, for those of you who know me, I’ve got gray hair, which I’ve had since I was 20. But you know, now it’ll finally be worth it. Yeah,

Brent Warner
no, no, you can justify reason. Justify your hair. Alright, so awesome. So Tim, what do we got today?

Tim Van Norman
Class technologies. So why don’t we go ahead and get started.

Brent Warner
Alright, let’s jump over.

Tim Van Norman
So today, we have Jason Bedford and Sagee Moyal. With Class technologies, we’ve been working with class technologies for a couple of months. Were you using it in fact, I’m using it for my office hours that I do. If anybody’s looking at the Tet, the tagline of my emails, and the signature there, it’s a class technologies class that is available on Thursdays come in and see me and stuff like that. And then we’ve been using it. Several faculty have been using it here for teaching their online classes. And in fact, in our teaching certificate class, we’re using that as well. So we’re we’re actually trying to use it quite a bit. learning a lot. Finding out a lot. It’s similar to zoom is an enhancement to zoom. I was gonna say an upgrade with it is an upgrade. But it there’s some other things that are a little different. So welcome, Jason & Sagee. Jason, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jason Bedford
Yeah, so excited to join you guys love the topics you you talk about. And it’s reflective of how I invested my whole career. So I’m Jason Bedford. I’m the Senior Vice President of education, here at class technologies and my backgrounds been at the intersection of Teaching and Learning and Technology. For 20 something years I started in the classroom as a as a teacher in K 12. Both in urban and suburban settings, got to design a curriculum early on called Exploring modern technologies in the late 90s, early 2000s. We took apart those Tandy computers did some circuitry got a grant for, you know, the first digital photography where you push the three and a half floppy in it. And you know, after after leaving the classroom, did an ad tech startup that was called alert now was acquired by Blackboard where I got to know Michael chasen and the LMS world pretty well. So we became some communication add ons to the LMS environment. And I’ve gone on to do some other cool projects in the, you know, with, with other universities, and in K 12 have really focused on the intersection of teaching and learning. The beginning of the pandemic, I was actually a managing partner of a consultancy. And we were working very closely with K 12 districts and higher ed institutions, on key projects, leadership development, personalized learning, and then the pandemic hits. And all of a sudden, we have to introduce all these responsive practices, and virtual learning walks became a big piece of that and so I was doing designing some of those with some of the largest districts in the country and got to see firsthand what was happening between between homes and trying to trying to unpack how our instructional models carry forward. One of my big aha was but that was that the platform was the impediment the social constructs of learning and the instructional models we had in our in our designs really worth awarded when we went all virtual, and reconnected with Michael chasen, who has was standing up to class technologies. and had the opportunity to, to come here as we think about the future of learning and how important interactions with video conferencing are and what the teacher moves and instructor moves and Professor moves are really needed to empower learning. So that’s kind of been my journey here and excited for the dialogue today. Nice.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. Thank you so much Sagee, you and I met as part of the purchase process. And so, since we’ve met early in this process, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got yourself a class technologies?

Sagee Moyal
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. And honestly, it’s going to be a funny answer. Because, you know, if you had asked me three years ago, am I going to be in education? Again, I would have probably laughed a little bit. But here we are three years later. And, you know, I’m working in class technologies, helping institutions think about sort of, you know, where does Virtual Learning fit not just as part of their instruction, but also as part of their broader students enrollment strategy, whether it’s for, you know, student support, whether it’s for assessment, whatever that looks like, and so I initially, I had a friend in an edtech company called for measure education. And they had asked me to come and join them and support their sales sales unit there. And, you know, ultimately, I really couldn’t fit in their in their vision, because they wanted me to stay at DC and I was moving to Denver. And so we stayed in touch. And out of the blue, I get a text message from, from from some random number, and another random number, and it’s, Hey, this is, you know, this is so and so. And here’s Michael, Michael Chase and starting a company, and he’s looking for his first sales rep. And I told him, I was like, I don’t really know much about education. Is that like, is that alright? Is that what he’s like? Yeah, well, we’ve no one really knows much about all my buddies. So it’s a little bit charity that we all figured out together. And so we chatted a few times. And the next thing I know, you know, here I am an AI technologies. And I think, if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last couple of years that I’m really excited about, and something that, you know, Jason, who’s on this call, and I’m glad he’s here has really emphasized is what he just said, right? It’s, it’s not just about, you know, selling technology to schools, it’s about really thinking about what the strategy of using this technology looks like. Right? It’s about how do we upskill faculty, so they feel comfortable in this modality so that they can provide the best possible, you know, teaching opportunity for their students. And I think that, like, when you think about it like that, it stops becoming like a, you know, like a, like a sales job and like a day job in sales, and more so about, you know, working with folks like yourself, Tim, and, you know, Brent, to sort of figure out what does the future look like? And how can we support as many students as possible as possible with class and, and, you know, I feel like in the last few, and I’m laughing, because I think about it, and the more I think about it, like the last, you know, six or so months, I really challenged myself, to work on the ground with faculty with these institutions, and understand where those gaps are, and see if I can not just facilitate our technology, but real learning and training. And, Tim, you’re actually gonna be joining us on our on our panel webinar, in a couple of weeks on active learning, because I’ve heard that that’s a really significant subject for a lot of folks, how do I get more engagement out of my students? And so long story short how to enter the class, I got a random text. And I …

Brent Warner
You answered a mystery call, right?

Sagee Moyal
Yeah, exactly, and I couldn’t be great, more grateful for it. And, you know, I’m surrounded by people like Jason are just really forward thinking people that have helped, you know, helped us make this more more than just technology and really just a mission to changing the way the world learns.

Brent Warner
I’m kind of laughing here because going like, you know, when I get those mysterious phone calls, or those mysterious texts is like, delete, delete, delete, delete, I just like, immediately they’re gone. And I’m like, oh, maybe there were a job opportunities or like something really good. But it could have come from one of those calls but

Jason Bedford
…and we’ve totally tweaked our recruiting strategy since then.

Brent Warner
It’s not just blind… blind texts out people (laughter)

Unknown Speaker
Now just now we tweet at them with Twitter handles that have just the egg. A little less, a little less anonymous.

Brent Warner
So I’m – We’ll, we’ll definitely jump into like some of the actual details of what you know, like the the many functions of, of class technologies and all of the parts that kind of work with it. But I kind of want to start off by saying that I you know, I was teaching online like everybody else. Currently, I’m not teaching online, but at the same time, these conversations about class started coming up and we’re like, Okay, well, what’s going Hang on with this. And I was looking at it because I’ve been playing with different platforms. So most of the school was kind of on Zoom and just kind of sticking with Zoom. And then I’m like, it’s not quite doing what I need, like, I’ve got this need, I’ve got this need, I’ve got this need. And so I was like playing around with all of these different platforms and trying to see which ones I could bring my students into easily, etc. Some of the ones that I was working with I liked, but then they started kind of moving in their own directions towards more business related things, or whatever else it was. And so it was like, you know, where something that actually understands what educators go through. And then finally, when I saw class technologies, I’m like, Oh, it answers this question, oh, it’s able to do this thing that we’ve been looking for, oh, they’re finally in. So it was like, it was just really, it was like, it was like my checkboxes of like things that I want. And I’m just like, wait a second, you have that you have that you have that. And that, like, that made me really excited about it. And to say like, oh, now this is something that really, we can get those, we can make those approaches to education that we’ve been talking about, instead of just kind of, you know, rigging it and hacking it together in weird ways, where we kind of send people off into 20 different locations to make something work. And it’s like, Okay, finally, this is all kind of consolidated into one spot. And I know Tim will break break down a lot of these different ones. And we’ll help and we’ll go through those conversations. But that was what really made me excited about classroom in the first place. And I kind of resented that I chose in classes afterwards, because now at the moment, I don’t, I don’t need to use it for my classroom time for my actual physical classes, but, but I’m kind of like, maybe I’ll jump back and see what it’s like this again, fairly soon. So. So I’m excited about all those parts.

Tim Van Norman
And it really has been a really neat tool for faculty who are teaching synchronously. Office hours are good as well. But it’s that synchronous education that really does make a big difference here. And it, I’ve just found it fascinating how you guys have taken care of a couple of the different things Brent was talking about. But before we get into that a little bit, could. Jason, you mind giving us just a quick? What is class technologies? The application that we’re talking about, which is, I guess I would call it your flagship application. Maybe I’m wrong, but it is the main thing that we know you guys for? What is it? What do people need in order to use it? That type of thing?

Jason Bedford
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to share a little bit here. Class is a video conferencing platform that is designed for teaching and learning. And we took some of the many, many frustrations and limitations for the classroom where videoconferencing was amazing for the boardroom, and has lots of vast utilities, the specifications for teaching and learning, were limited. And so we’re we’re a group of almost 200, academics and technologists that we wake up and think about how do we make video conferencing awesome to really engage learners and help teachers run through their flows to ignite learning. And that’s what we do every day. So we’re split across the globe class is our flagship product is, it is powered by zooms audio and video underneath. So it’s, it’s an application layer on top of it. And it’s work that that we get excited about, because we realized that there’s been a lot of fatigue, with videoconferencing, and a lot of frustrations. And so to be able to do something different that is designed really for a variety of users with flexibility in mind, and designing it to bring synchronous and asynchronous closer together. So when you were sharing before on on the synchronous learning side to him, that was I thought that was a really good segue into into this piece because synchronous and asynchronous have been really detached. And if all of our our content and our assessments live in an LMS. But our live instruction and interpersonal connections, we’re discourse happens happen in the synchronous environment, both but they don’t live together. It’s a frustrating or disappointing experience. And so a class we’ve been also really focused on how we have those live together, like they do well in physical spaces. But maybe even better, because all of its digital already. So happy to talk more about that later if that’s of interest.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And to one of your points. You just talked about the LMS and class. I know you have an integration into Canvas, I don’t know you came from Blackboard, so you probably have one there too. But you actually integrate such that a student can log into their Canvas class, click on Class for zoom, and click on Join basically, and it can be that fast for a student to get in. Not having to log in not having to We’ll do anything else they can be in the class. So do you have that for the other LMSs as well,

Unknown Speaker
We do. D2L/Brightspace, Blackboard & Anthology. So as you run through your, your top LMSs, we have done that. And we’ve done the LTI work for 1.1 and 1.3.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. And yes, it is very quick, very easy. I love also the fact that for students – for faculty, they can click on Set up the class, and it creates it. And then as students join, you actually get attendance. So one of the things that we’ve struggled with with just zoom, which by the way we do have included and add linked into our canvas is that it doesn’t seem to be as good about keeping attendance, but class really does. And basically, it keeps track of who is and isn’t showing up for for the class. And it has really been neat. And it’s one of the things that faculty came to me before we got class technologies, and asked for do you see that as a big selling point? Or are you what is your big selling point as you’re talking to customers?

Sagee Moyal
Can I interject real quick, just because I think that you hit on something that I think is particularly powerful. Tim, which is you know, you talk about all these all these things that you know class can do. And Brent, you touched on it, too, you’re like I have all these areas that I think this checks the box for. And I want to emphasize to the fact that that might be listening to this and might be overwhelmed or burnt out or intimidated by the idea of a new piece of technology class really isn’t here to augment what you’re currently doing. It’s not here to create an additional barrier. Really, what we’ve designed within this system is the ability for folks like at any level, right? To encourage them to try to use class to whatever extent they want. So say I do only want to use my Canvas instance, or my Moodle instance or my Blackboard instance, alongside class look great. That’s all you have to do. Class will empower you to continue doing exactly what you want to do. But the really important piece for all those faculty out there, who are saying my students are having a hard time getting engaged, I’ve been teaching to little black boxes. For the better part last two and a half years, it’s killing me, it’s making it really hard for me to stay engaged. Our goal is to make it really easy for your students to participate. So they feel safer to share themselves with Utah turn on their video. We’ve done that in a number of ways. But I did really want to emphasize that this isn’t just for the level 300 teacher in the online space. This is for everyone from the ground up. And please, Jason, I didn’t mean to interject, I just thought that was an important piece to highlight.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, that’s awesome. Sorry. I was gonna say as we thought about how to how to simplify workflows, and enhance the the experience of video conferencing, we’ve done hundreds of features, right, but they come into like three categories. And I guess the first would be visual layout. And so the instructor has a fixed position on a podium in the upper left hand corner. And you can move different cameras and images right underneath them. So if if you are the ESL teacher, and it’s important that as your, you know, any language acquisition, that as you’re writing those words or letters that someone can see where you’re speaking, though, all those things are interchangeable. We introduced this idea of a front of class, where you can have presenting students sharing kind of CO teachers, adjunct faculty, like you can have guest speakers in, in this fixed position that’s in the front of class. That’s great. And then a whole bunch of other things. The second major category we focused in, was that relationship, bringing sync and async closer together. And so how we integrate all the digital content, you know, from from video, to whiteboards to to your LMS and any other digital asset you might want to use. All of those can can live within class. So when you’re doing your lesson or unit design, you can just have those those assets right available and they deploy. But they’re you’re never leaving the environment. We built it so that learners stay in class. And so an iframe is popping up, right and the web browser, they can navigate it on their own there. And so they can do have an independent whiteboard. It’s not screen sharing anymore, as we think about how that content lives in the classroom. And then that third category is automation analytics and attendance is one of those what are the tasks we can take off and automate and do it reliably because Teaching is hard. And engaging your audience, especially remotely, can have new and unique challenges. It’s a pedagogical shift, or an anthropological shift depending on who you’re teaching. So and then how do we give you feedback after you’re done with that, that core session? How do you get analytics about what was student talk to him? What was teacher talk to him? What was? What did I expect to happen in this class? And did it happen from a level of participation, people coming off mic chatting with each other chatting with my TA chatting with like, and so you get these analytics back right at the end, at the end of your session in class, and you get to reflect really quickly on did that land as I hoped it would have for my instructional design. So those are the three categories we focused on. And Tim, thanks for bringing up the attendance piece, because that does fall squarely in that last one, what can we make easier?

Tim Van Norman
And it does.

Sagee Moyal
I was just gonna say just a couple of things right off that is like, you know, when we look back at the last two years, and we try to think about really hard what worked and what didn’t work. Right now, it’s really hard to do that for a lot of schools, they’re comparing apples to oranges, because one one teacher might be teaching on teams, and might be using. Another teacher might be teaching on Zoom, and using Poll anywhere, and a third teacher might be teaching on WebEx. And you see it differently, we gave them that flexibility to teach how they want it because we had to, but it’s the goal is to continue to expand this. And by all reports, it looks like, you know, students want this, they want this flexibility, then we have to extend it in a sustainable way. And that’s really where we fit into. And, you know, man, I started to get really excited when I talk about these things now. And I. So it’s really exciting to to be able to impart for me to talk about these things. And thank you temporary for hosting us. And just on a specific attendance piece I did want to mention to them, you know, I’ve seen a lot of schools lately talk about positive attendance for their workforce programs, and how that no way to track that sort of thing. And all of a sudden class makes it easier for them, so they can stay in compliance with that, you know, with the needs of the programs.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I want to point out, I want to point out the kind of the Jason, the first part of the you were talking about the visual elements of it. I felt the first time that I looked at it, I mean, there are parts to learn and figure out but but I was really happy that on the first login, I was like, Oh, I recognize this. I recognize this, because it’s all it’s built on top of that, you know, Zoom structure, right? And so for those of us who spent those years getting used to zoom and like going, Okay, do I have to learn a new thing, it really didn’t feel like it, it just felt like okay, like, I already know where this is, I know where that part is. And so that makes a big difference to that overwhelm Sagee that you were talking about where it’s like, Hey, are we yet another tool to learn in order to, to make this work. And so I didn’t, personally I didn’t feel that at all, with when I was looking at class technologies, I’m like, Okay, this, this actually, is just a smooth transition from one to the next. And you don’t have to be super techie, for all of those things. Like, I try and kind of keep keep in mind my own distinction of like, how much I know about different tools and how to work with things. And then some of my colleagues who, you know, don’t play around with technology very much at all. And I felt like, Okay, this, this is a smart way to do that, because it makes it accessible, adding a bunch of features on it, but accessible in a way that, that, you know, starting with a totally fresh or completely differently designed platform would have created a lot of headaches for, for so many of our teachers, I was really happy to see that the visual elements are, you know, real, clearly laid out and, you know, intuitive, right? In a way that makes sense for everybody.

Tim Van Norman
And along those lines, talking about the visual, one of the key features I love is the fact that as the teacher, you can click on the upper right, and change the setting for privacy. So you can make it so that all of the students cameras are only seen by you and not the other students. You can make it so that they’re all off. Or you can make it so that the student can choose themselves whether or not to have their camera on. And especially in our world. Now what you were talking about Jason were teaching to a whole bunch of black screens, black boxes, versus being able to see people actually it might have been psyche that said that but that option. That option is amazing as to offer that and it allows you to still have that view of people without them feeling like they are exposing their environment to the whole world. Oh my god. And a lot of times it’s a case of you know, I’m sitting in my bedroom taking a class. And do I really want my classmates looking at my bedroom? You know, I wouldn’t want that. And so how do I get past that? Well, hey, only my teacher can see and put up a blur or something. And it’s still okay. But but my teacher still can see me. Well, and I think that’s really important. And I really liked that particular one,

Brent Warner
how many hours did we spend having those conversations to them? I mean, oh, man hours and hours about students rights to privacy, how much we need to feel that we’re actually engaging with them, right? I mean, I’m sure, I’m sure both of you guys have, like, you know, been involved with those conversations. But I mean, it went on and on and on about, like, you know, you know, being the oppressor, saying, you have to do this thing that, you know, makes you uncomfortable, versus like, you know, me as a teacher, when I see those black boxes, it’s always just kind of like, you know, dispiriting in certain ways. And so, yeah, so finding that solution there. You know, I think it makes a lot of a lot of difference for a lot of people there as well.

Sagee Moyal
And this one is particularly, you know, important to me, because this actually, like, you know, I had a lot of conversations with my little sister who’s in school and challenges she faced and, you know, she was like, you know, going through college like her, her senior year of college, when this all kicked off. And for her, like, when I showed her this functionality, she’s like, that would make me feel so much better. If I could, if I could feel confident in knowing that my peers can’t see me, I would be much more likely to turn my camera on now, does this get every student to turn their camera on? Probably not. But if we can create a safe environment, where at least five or six year students turn on their cameras? I mean, how much of a world of a difference would that feel for you from an engagement perspective over communicate with your students?

Brent Warner
Oh, yeah, big time. I mean, it’s, you know, like, I would always make the jokes with my students, it’s like, I would say, you know, you wouldn’t sit in class with a paper bag over your head, you know, blocking blocking us off from your reactions, but like, those are part of the, you know, there’s so many nonverbal cues that come across, and that, that the teacher really needs to take steps and move forward. And so the, we struggled with that, because the intention was never, I want you to do something that you don’t want to do, right. Like, that’s never, that’s never the reasoning, I don’t think there’s any good teacher out there that’s trying to do that, right. But what they are kind of ultimately saying is, you know, I need we have, we have a dynamic relationship, and I need to be able to see what you’re doing. And you need to be able to see what I’m doing in order to make that work, right. And so, so being able to give that as an option. And again, you know, there can be any number of reasons, right, like I, I’m having a bad hair day, right? As simple as that is fine. And I want to respect that for the students, but like, this, lets me kind of say like, Hey, I’m not the one you know, like, who’s going to be judging you or, you know, like, that none of that stuff matters to me. And students kind of get that difference too, when you’re talking with the teachers. So, so I think they’re a lot more comfortable there.

Sagee Moyal
And then it’s worth noting that, oh, I was just gonna say it’s worth noting that even your, your nonverbal feedback can be private as well. So it’s, every form of communication can now be privatized directly to the instructor. So again, just continuously building that safe space, please go ahead.

Tim Van Norman
No, absolutely. That’s great. So one of the other things that I loved is, I hear from faculty all the time, how do I know if they’re actually paying attention? It’s true, whether whether their cameras on or not, and, and I point out that just because I’m looking at the camera doesn’t mean I’m actually not clicking on something else, checking my email playing a video game, watching YouTube, you know, you don’t know what I’m doing. And Tim,

Brent Warner
let me flip on that on the other side. So many teachers have their cameras here, but their screen is over here. And so it’s like, okay, I’m, I’m paying attention or students to write like, I am paying attention, but my camera like, it looks like I’m off doing something else. Right. So it goes in both ways, which can be

Tim Van Norman
absolutely yeah. And so I love what I I don’t know what the technical term is, but I call them the googly eyes that show up when somebody is clicking on something that’s not part of class. You guys putting that in place? It’s one of those fun things that faculty when I talk about class icon class technologies, and I say, hey, you know, by the way, this is their, everybody puts it puts a smile on people’s faces. And they get it. It’s kind of amazing to me, just the fact that it’s it’s so simple to see, but it really it answers questions. wasn’t, some of them haven’t expressed. And so I appreciate the fact that you guys put that in. But the one part that I really, there’s two parts I really, really like one is breakout rooms, we’ll get to those in a second. But before that, pushing content to the users, so you can, you can say, hey, I want everybody to go to this Google Doc, and put that Google doc on everybody’s machine.

Brent Warner
Inside Inside of class, right? So that’s a big part is

Tim Van Norman
exactly. And you know that when you push it to them, you push them to that. Now they can go off and do something else in class. But at least initially, they’re pushed to that content. And it’s been something that people have asked me about, and stuff. And it’s different than sharing the screen.

Brent Warner
Totally different. Yeah,

Tim Van Norman
I really liked this concept. You guys did a great job with that. What are your thoughts, Jason is, as you hear somebody say, Hey, you guys did great. But these are the types of things that really sell us on bringing you guys in.

Jason Bedford
Well, I guess first thought is gratitude, right, like just appreciate the things we’re building are being helpful. And, and the two sides of what you were teasing up before with the googly eyes, like we’re being more and more intentional about what are the in the moment, nonverbal indicators, we can we can present. So underneath, you know, on the left hand side, there’s a toolbar that has your class or course roster in it. And if people are in breakouts, you’re seeing who’s talking next to their name, you’re seeing who’s chatting, you’re seeing these googly eyes. So if they’re off task, if class is not their primary browser, you’re you’re having more like, when you’re in person, you rely on your like teacher spidey sense or right. And when you’re virtual, you lose a lot of that sensory ability. And we’re bringing it back to instructors. So I appreciate the shout out there glad it’s helpful, we’ll keep a built in capabilities there. On the, you know, the flexibility of the tool and and making sure that you can leverage classroom management strategies when you’re deploying content was the the impetus for this, right. And so a tabs gonna open up on each year students side as you deploy a new piece of content. And when you close that tab, that content closes for them. And so you have this ability in this push and pull capability while they stay in an environment, they don’t have to click on a I mean, it’s super frustrating to, you’re in a meeting, someone shares a document, everyone opens that document, no one’s paying attention to what’s going on in the meeting anymore. And so this is that whole idea of bringing, like sync and async tighter together. And so we’ve made sure that almost any virtual, like any digital tool that you’d want to integrate, you have at your fingertips, and will open as a tab for the learners, they don’t get lost, confused off tasks. It can be collaborative documents, it can be individual, it can be videos, it can be an LMS assignment, it can be a poll or a quiz, they’re all opening up in those iframe. And and learners, they have different paces that they move through things. So if you’re screen sharing, you’re always leaving someone behind. Or you’re always leaving someone frustrated, you’re not moving fast enough. When you’re able to share content, this way, learners are able to pace themselves based on their ability to process and understand and respond. So

Tim Van Norman
absolutely, it’s it’s great that way. One of the I would say probably one of the biggest selling points is your breakout rooms. And I don’t know if that is for everybody else. But for us. That alone pushes faculty to really want to use it.

Brent Warner
That’s for sure the main point when

Tim Van Norman
needed. Absolutely. And so a couple of different things with the breakout rooms that I really liked. Number one, you can see into every breakout room from your main screen, you don’t have to go visit the breakout room to see what’s going on. Number two, you still have those googly eyes to see who is and isn’t paying attention in the breakout room even when you’re not in there with them. So that’s really neat. Number three, what we were just talking about, we’re pushing content, you can push separate content to each breakout room. You the ideas here are like Brent said it was Check, check check. And some of them Oh, I didn’t even think of that. That’s even better. Which is great. And I mean, I love the concept that this allows and that is you can literally push a separate Google Doc for instance to every single day breakout room. And they each have their own, and they can all work on it together in that breakout room. And yet, you have it all back for you. And it’s not truly shared, that same document isn’t shared across all of the breakout rooms. It’s just individual. The whole concept there. What how did you guys find out about that, that was, it’s just such a huge win to me that that’s amazing.

Jason Bedford
It’s kind of the nexus of how all of these things have visual layout and content and automation and analytics, they all start to converge into this instructional model of like a rotation model. Why and, and so you use breakouts to have a conversation with just one student in your class, you can have them work in collaborative sessions. So rows sections around discourse, you might have learners that are still building foundational knowledge. So differentiation is super important that you can send differentiated content into into each group group of learners. But it’s all the things that that professors miss from in person. And, you know, we know our instructors and our teachers and our faculty, when you could just change your space in a physical setting. Yet, when we went to do it virtually, we feel like a I was losing all control. b I had no line of sight or visibility to support learners encourage them provide feedback in the moment. And it was random how I would have to do it, I just have to randomly drop in and drop out, it felt disruptive to anything that might have already been happening that was positive in that breakout room. And so we had to rethink breakout rooms all together to really align to the instructional models that we know are being carried forward. Especially to come up the Ark of rigor, and we’re bringing in, you know, more and more critical thinking more and more conversation. That’s that was the whole impetus for that. And the engineering team at class, worked through many iterations over and over again, because there’s so much we can still do with this capability when we start thinking about in high flex settings, and in other places moving forward. So it is a technology Marvel and how it works. But it’s really about working for the learning experience. So I’m glad you’re excited about it. Yeah. There’s one Oh, go ahead.

Tim Van Norman
Go ahead. Because I was gonna,

Sagee Moyal
oh, I was just gonna say it’s something Jason, it’s I feel like it’s the drum you’ve been beating all along, which is, do you believe learning is inherently social? Or is that or that students learn better in isolation? And

Jason Bedford
I would save in that line for later. That is great. I think that is the crux, right? Like, do you believe that that learning is inherently social? Or do you believe that we are better off learning in isolation? And you can keep rolling with this, right? Because

Sagee Moyal
you’re what Jason has, and this goes back to, you know, I spoke at the beginning of this conversation about how I’ve sort of tried to challenge myself, to better support our, you know, our clients and what our clients need. And I think the message like we’ve heard over and over again, and you know, every graph I look at, look at over the last 10 years for enrollment, let’s just start there. At our two year institutions, has trended downwards doesn’t matter if you’re in California and North Carolina and Mississippi and Louisiana, like across the board, it’s trending downwards. And, you know, I think, at the onset of the pandemic, we basically just said, Alright, let’s just go straight to zoom or WebEx or to teams. And we’ll just figure it out as we go. And I think now, two and a half years later, we have the opportunity to take advantage of this willingness to use, you know, online synchronous and high flex formats, to better engage our students in groups with their peers, so that they are able to learn from those around them and you know, their instructors, but we’re still using sort of that emergency learning approach. And really, the purpose of class here is to create that space for students to learn with their peers and to learn from their instructors. And whether it feels like they’re there, right, how much how much more likely to your students can be to control their success to stay around. If they’ve met with their peers, they feel like they owe it to their, to their group members to show up and do that assignment. Like, it’s, to me. It was when Jason started talking about it in that way that, you know, it really started to make me think about the vision of what online synchronous is and, and it’s more than than I think, just let me give you class. It’s about how can we make online synchronous is a real and replicable option for our for our students. So they want to keep coming back and they want to keep learning and that they’re learning in a successful way. Especially when we think about two year schools. And, you know, I’m going to talk about to your schools because that’s my, that’s my, my line of work, but especially to your schools, where a lot of our students are non traditional learners. And what does that mean? Well, a lot of them might not have even learned how to type, let alone how to organize an entire classroom. So when we think about all those layers of complexity, we’re adding to an online savings class, and how that’s adjusting from classroom to classroom. To me, that doesn’t feel like an experience, we can replicate over and over again, successfully. And that goes back to it’ll be smoke, you know, comparing apples to apples. Now we have analytics to help us guide our decision making to create an experience that really works not just nationally, and on what we’ve read on Inside Higher Ed, but what works for us. What have we seen what instructor like Brian, what does he do that works really well? And how can we build that experience? So I went on a bit of a diatribe there, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. So please, go ahead, guys. I didn’t mean to interject again.

Brent Warner
No, I love it. I mean, I think I think all of this this kind of this last part here with a breakout rooms and the options for making things work for everybody. It’s kind of coming into our, our last conversation point, as we wrap up here, which is a very contentious topic, which is proctoring. As you guys know, there’s been so much like, you know, student rights, and what’s appropriate, and what does it mean to be like, you know, proctoring, through AI versus, you know, whatever. And so, as we were talking about your breakout rooms, and your kind of your proctoring options inside of here. Again, I don’t know that there’s any perfect answer to practice, you know, like it gets, it gets messy, and all sorts of things. But I would like for you to share this a little bit about your approach to proctoring here as well, just so people can get a sense of it. Because to me, it’s a lot happier solution than some of the unnamed choices.

Tim Van Norman
Before you respond to that. I want to spread that out just a little bit. And, Brent, think about this in your class, what if you could have all of your students working on a paper or working on a paragraph, and you could actually see them typing it? How cool would that be when they’re online? Right? Right. So it’s not even necessarily proctoring tests, this same thing, although it’s called proctoring, the same thing can be used in that way, which is far more useful in a collaborative environment, right? Well, and it’s you collaborating with the individual, rather than, you know, in breakout rooms, they’re collaborating together, this is you as the teacher, you as the faculty member, working one on one with the student, even though that students 50 miles away, and, and working on their iPad instead of your, you know, in the classroom. So, Jason, go ahead, and

Jason Bedford
I just wanted to ring the bell, I was looking for the sound effect to go that ding ding ding like that was? That’s a beautiful description of how we approached it was because it wasn’t from a punitive fashion. It was for how do we help support aha moments in learning? And how do we increase visibility. So, so you described it beautifully, it’s, that’s, that’s exactly how it works, you’re able to see a student’s screen while you’re looking at them. And so whether you are doing small group tutoring work, and you are doing some algebraic equations and are working on a whiteboard, you’re able to have that feedback around that mistake and help with the problem. If it’s about writing, and you’re actually seeing the construction. And before you move students to a breakout, like you want to make sure that they each have a paragraph written before you have been in a constructive critique framework, right? And then you’re pushing them into breakouts to do a round robin, you actually want that quick visibility to make sure that everyone has a paragraph that they’re going to take them to the group with them. Otherwise, maybe there might be a few learners that stay with you, and then finish that right and so, so it lets you have those decisions on the fly. And for assessments, it gives you increased access and visibility, just like you would be walking around your brick and mortar spaces in your classrooms. So now you You nailed it. And I think one of the underpinning things for us is there was a quote from from Hugh Vasquez in the National Equity project. That was since we know that disturbance is required for change. And there’s no doubt we’ve all been living through disturbance for the last couple of years. Like, the real question is, are we willing to use this opportunity to create the kind of educational system that we want? And these are systems with more choice, more flexibility, more options about where and when how long it takes us to learn things, you know, we can talk about, you know, things that range from from microcredentials links to NF T’s and how we think about succession planning and human libraries and really about learning and applying skills and competencies. There is, as we think about really serving the learner well and link Faculty Guide and unlock learning experiences. Were have a new core capability in education with video conference, same works for teaching and learning. We’re best less reliant on the structures of education that we’ve we’ve leaned into, that might have been inequitable in the past, right. And so I’m just excited about the future designs and things we’re gonna learn from amazing educators around the globe, that are possible, and we’ll keep designing technology solutions around it.

Brent Warner
Awesome, I love it. So I think this conversation is pretty clear that both of you are, you know, passionate about what you’re actually doing and how it’s helping and thinking, not just like, hey, you know, you’re thinking beyond just kind of the basics and going into like, well, what is the future of these things look like? How do how are we planning for five years from now? Or for 10 years from now? And like, what are the changing situations of education going to continue to look like? And so to me, it doesn’t feel like it’s meant to be a band aid, it feels like it’s a whole construction with a long term goal, right? Have lots of longer support and actual, you know, caring about what’s going to happen to the students in the in the future, you know, because it’s, there is no back to normal, right where this is, this is the idea we’re trying to help people understand there’s there’s no return to normal days now. It’s like, well, there’s there’s new ways of understanding how the world and education is going to work. And so I’m really happy we had a chance to talk to you guys about these. Before we kind of wrap up and close out any final thoughts or ways for people to, to reach out? Yeah, and

Sagee Moyal
and I’ll just add one thing to what you just said, because I think it’s really important, we emphasize that there was an LA Times article that just came out, you know, I think it was last week, which said, for the first time, for the first time, in California Community College history, the amount of online students has surpassed the amount of in person students and the warmth for online learning is greater than the actual capacity that these institutions have. I think that to me, is the most. It’s just very telling. It’s indicative of where where we are and what what students want. And I think we are excited to continue to continue to meet our students where they’re at. And we’re happy that, you know, IVC joined us on this journey. And we are very, very excited to continue doing that. So it’s not the easiest path to restructure the way the world learns. But it’s something that we’re really excited about. I think that that’s just for me a closing thought in terms of how to reach us class.com, you can find all the information you need. If you’re looking for to reach out to me, I’m on LinkedIn. Reach out, I always love to chat education.

Jason Bedford
Yes, and for me, I’d love to, if any of your listeners here want to continue to dialogue afterward, anything we said was sparked some curiosity, happy to extend the conversation. I think my closing thoughts would be like synchronous, virtual learning can unlock possibilities and help us work in new ways to produce better outcomes for students. And outcomes aren’t necessarily a function of modality, but about the quality of our designs and implementation. So you gentlemen, make it happen every day in the students that you serve, and you make it more accessible for everyone listening. So appreciate everything on your show.

Sagee Moyal
Thank you guys.

Brent Warner
Thanks so much.

Tim Van Norman
Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we had an interview with class technologies. For more information about the show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you’ll find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com. And let us know your thoughts. And if you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link over there where you can give us your ideas

Tim Van Norman
for everyone and IVC that’s listening. If you have need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. And if you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by the new IVC Training Center. A 322 Just like other people are doing love that at or contact me directly at TVN norman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner. And we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody