The Next Generation Virtual Classroom: Transforming Teaching and Learning

Welcome to our next generation virtual classroom, transforming teaching and learning with LC TCS. My name is Michael Chaseon. The CEO and cofounder of Class Technologies, and I'm joined by Missy Leker, who's the director of new markets at LC TCS. But let me have Missy tell you a a little bit more about herself. Whoops. Good afternoon.

This is a great looking room. A little bit about me. As the slide says, I have twenty five plus years. I counted today twenty seven years in higher ed. I've spent my life in Louisiana.

Don't judge me. And I came to higher ed in nineteen ninety six, started using a a product called Blackboard in nineteen ninety eight. Got the bug, in early two thousand, using a product called Tegrity to deliver medical coding online, and the adventure has continued, since then. When you have that much experience, right? You get asked to do other things. And so I have the opportunity to also work with the group at WCET.

And in Louisiana, we have a task force that includes all of higher ed. A little bit about the Louisiana community and Technical College system. We are a a system of twelve community colleges, and we are, as you can tell, by this map, positioned all around the state. And so we have representation everywhere. Our colleges are able to then respond to the regional needs of their area, and hopefully having a local economic impact.

A little bit about student demographic. Our system involves our adult basic education folks. We, of course, have the community colleges, and then we have that unit that does what some of us refer to non credit, but it's workforce training. And so you can see here we have a little over a hundred and probably fifteen thousand. This number's a little higher here.

But that's the number of students we serve annually. A little bit about the context in Louisiana and what we're battling, I suspect that you guys are all familiar with this. This is some data that shows of the four point six working age individuals in Louisiana, about half of them are employed and half of them are not. And in the middle, when we move to that section, we show how many of them actually already have a post secondary degree, how many of them have some college, but no degree, How many just the high school diploma and how many are below that high school equivalency. And so all the way to the right, then we're trying to show what the current job openings in Louisiana look like in terms of what that need is We need, according to the data, forty six percent of our, working folks to have a post secondary degree in order to fill the jobs that are needed.

So, to you? Thank you, Missy. So tell you a little bit, about myself. As I mentioned, I'm the co founder and CEO of Class Technologies. Before this, I was actually the co founder and CEO of Blackboard. That's the product everybody used before.

They went to Canvas. Some of you may remember that. I've been in space for a while. Literally, that was more of like the quintessential startup. I started that at Brownstone in downtown DC with my roommate Matthew Bautinski from college, literally the two of us.

We ended up growing like three thousand employees at offices around the world. I have the very unique opportunity to take it public. I was actually one of the youngest CEOs on the Nasdaq. Before like Mark Zuckerberg, and everybody went public. Also, now I'm older and no one cares about me anymore, but I used to be younger, like, years ago.

So, I also have, three children. And, we were all, home during the pandemic, you know, probably, like, everybody else here. And, I I saw all of my, children were engaging in their classes all online, either on Zoom or or Microsoft teams. And I saw, the chat challenges, across the different grades, my my daughter was in third grade. My son was in high school.

My older daughter was in college, and yet all of their classes were around now full time in these synchronous, meeting tools. And when I asked our teachers, why are you having such a hard time engaging with these students? They said, look, products like Zoom and Microsoft teams, they're great for lectures, and they're great group discussions, but a lot of what we do in the physical classroom, you just can't replicate online, and we do a lot. We we take attendance, we hand out assignments, we give tests or quizzes, we proctor exams, we talk or one with the students. We have group presentations. We might use textbooks or electronic content or the internet or watch videos as well as tracking student progress and grading work.

And it's all of those things together that make it an engaging class. If you're limiting your online learning experience to just a lecture and just a group discussion, then you don't really have engaging environment for students to optimize their learning experience. Now as I said, I I had, twenty plus years of experience in the learning space already in Blackboard, my own, undergraduate degrees in computer science. And I actually knew that zoom and software development kit, so that you could actually take zoom and really cuss and utilize it and utilize their incredible back end, the most scalable and secure audio video back end system in the world. And, it was interesting because, of course, you know, during COVID, the real challenge that was meant for me learning was we were able to put hundreds of thousands of instructors and millions of students and every institution really in the world online in a live learning environment, and it worked, and it scaled.

And that was that was eighty percent of it. But we put everybody online in a virtual meeting room, and there is a difference between a meeting room and a classroom. And that was the idea behind, starting class. The company we started just over two years ago now, and we decided to redesign the virtual meeting room to be that virtual classroom. Last two and a half years, we've grown considerably.

We're up to a hundred seventy five employees. We work with over fifteen hundred institutions around the world across seventy five countries. And we are exclusively focused on what I think is gonna be one of the most exciting and innovative areas over the next few years, the synchronous virtual learning environment. And we now serve customers cost higher ed K twelve in the corporate government space. And our mission, the focus was to take that virtual meeting room and make it so that instructors and teachers could do everything they could do in the physical classroom in the online classroom and create that gauging experience.

And I really think that we've managed to develop some next generation virtual technology. So to get a sense of what I'm talking about, and then before you hear Missy talk about why she was excited to deploy that technology. Let me actually just take five minutes and show you what this technology is and why we think it really makes a difference. So, and I'm gonna go ahead and, this is the, real the, the students, aren't real excited if, kids waiting around all day for me to just give demos. But nonetheless, what you're looking at here is class.

In fact, class two point zero, which was just released last week. And if you're looking at it probably looks very similar, to you, very familiar to you because if you've used Zoom, and you've used an LMS, and you all really already know how to use this technology. You know, one of the unique things, that that happened during COVID was we gave every instructor in the world a crash course on how to use zoom. And if you know how to use that, then using our product is just as easy. Now the first thing though that we did was we took the instructor the grid view and we put them here at the instructor podium.

So they had a good central place to be able to run and manage the class. But then we gave you instructor, the tools they would need to run a class, whether it was a class of thirty, fifty, a hundred, or even three hundred. Tools like seating charts. So if I needed to find a student to interact on the video wall, I let me organize my class alphabetically by first name or alphabetically by last name to be able to then easily find people on the video wall to, communicate and chat with. Or I said, hey, you know what? Let me organize the students by the order in which that they raise their hand because if I'm holding a class discussion, I wanna be to make sure that I'm calling students in the order, so I'm not jumping around.

So now I know I should call on Lindsey first then Ty second then Jimmy third because that's the order they raise their hand. This is a simple feature, but instructors have told us this makes the complete difference of being able to have an organized discussion in their class. In fact, I can actually enlist students based on their participation. The students with the red bar next to them are talking below average. Students with the yellow bar talking average, and students with the green bar are talking above average.

And now I know I should call on either Kirk or Penelope because they really haven't had a chance to contribute in today's online discussion. Just like a real classroom though, we also have something called front of room. So if you were in a physical classroom, you might have students working on a project. And then you might ask those students come to the front of the room to present to the rest of the group to create this engaging type of learning experience. So I can go ahead and say, I'm gonna turn my front of the and I want presenters to go to the front of the room.

And then across every student's class for zoom zoom, those students move up to the front of the room. And just to show you how easy it is. I could say, actually, Tom, you don't need to present today. Let me go ahead and remove you from the presenting group, and I'm gonna go ahead and have Elizabeth also become a center. So just like in a real classroom, you can mirror everything that you're doing here in the online environment.

Now let's say that you're running a large class, a hundred or two and you have some other, TAAs that are also helping you, I can make my frontal room, my teaching assistants. And now the students know that besides myself, they can go ahead and ask questions to any of the other TAs or teaching assistants that they're seeing on the screen. They're not lost in the large hodgepodge of random videos that you might have just inside of Zoom or your Microsoft teams. If you act if you're doing hybrid high flex learning. Some schools set up a dedicated class cam.

So if you have students that are remote, it could get an overall sense of what's happening live in classroom to get that feeling as if they're there. But when I set up my classes, I like to just have my teaching assistants at the front. So I'll go ahead and set that up. Now, we also made it very easy for students to go ahead and raise their hand, and that just appears obviously in the corner, of the, the video screen there. And we've also done something special with reactions.

Now you're all probably familiar with reactions in zoom, but what's so interesting is we heard from a lot of instructors that when they were giving election, it was very difficult for them to read the room. They couldn't read the room the way that they could in the live class physical environment. And another interesting thing is that students are less likely to raise their hand in interrupt the class for smaller items because, of course, if you're online, it really stops the whole flow of the class and everyone has to stop because only one person can really be heard at a time. So we added re actions that only the instructor would see that the students could give. So if a lot of students are saying, hey, Michael, talk slower, or I don't understand this, they could go in head, head and select that.

I'll appear in the upper corner if I'm looking at it and a lot of people are telling me to go slower. They're not embarrassed because the other students don't see it. And now I can actually read the room in the same way that I did if I was having the class live and in person. But I'll go ahead and clear my reactions there. The the real power of the system though comes in the left hand toolbar.

So you can see here I have my participants list. I can see who the instructor is, the students are. In fact, we even tell you, who's absent from class today. No need to look all over the video video wall and figure it out. We'll just list the students that aren't participating in today's class, but the real power comes in our e learning tool.

So I'm gonna go ahead and click on learning tools. And what we've done here, and this is why I think this is truly the future of live sync in this learning is we've taken all of that great great content that you've developed within Canvas, with you we utilize LTI one point and it automatically loads all of the content here, for this teacher to then to be able to deploy and use the class. So I could say, okay, students. I want us to talk about the syllabus today, and it'll go ahead and actually pull up your syllabus materials right from canvas that you've already gone ahead and uploaded. Now the big difference between what we have, here at a class in your MS.

The LMS is very much, pole technology. The students themselves have to go click a link, and then it will load up the material. Here, the students actually teachers actually pushing the content. So, once, this, a slow internet connection comes up on the screen. I could go ahead and launch my course syllabus, and it's gonna go ahead and open that right within the class environment.

So you can be assured that all of your students are looking at this exact document that you were talking about. And it doesn't appear as a screen share. It really appears that the students the get the full document and they have access to that. So I can then go ahead and I can actually read the document or, scroll or me see. Yeah.

I could read the document or I could scroll. I could wait a while for it to load or, all of those things are possible. And, then, once it finally loads, if everybody could stop texting how great this is, that'd be great. You're slowing down the network for me. Well, while we're waiting for this to load.

I can actually, at the same time, I could go ahead and pull up, oh, there we go. So and then the students actually go ahead and get the, full, content they can actually scroll and read along while I'm talking about they have access to the full document. I could go ahead and launch an assignment or a test or a quiz. Here again, using LTI one point three is gonna pull up all of my quizzes, that you've already created in Canvas, and then I'm gonna be able to go ahead and launch that quiz, right within our system. And so here I have a quiz on the human body, and, I can let my students take it.

And then, of course, it automatically will then go into the Canvas grade book and take it. We could launch a survey or a poll, or, just link directly to the the the course, that you've already set up. Now you've also noticed that that, we've we've modified the UI, the virtual meeting environment so that, you also have tabs. So I can, of course, when I'm looking at a piece of content as a student or the instructor, I can scroll through and see my abbreviated student to the top, and I can go back and access that quiz that I just launched as well, but I can always go back and see the full pass at the same time. So you can always see what's happening in that overall class experience.

And the UI is also very flexible. Let's say that you were running a hybrid or a high flex class and you had different monitors around your or if you're just a student and you wanna be able to maximize the screen space, for the content that you're viewing. So if I'm taking this quiz and I wanna have more room, this is what it might look like as a student, I can just go ahead and shut down the sidebar and maximize the content that way, or I could even float the gallery view out. And now I have full room to go ahead and take that quiz. I have the full room to go ahead and be able to view that syllabus, or I can, as I mentioned, I can always go back to see the full class at any time.

But since I just have my small notebook computer, I'll go ahead and just, snap those right back in to the application. Now, we did more than just wanting to add the content and make that available to the class environment. We really wanted to make an engaging collaborative experience for the students. So if you'll notice down here at the bottom, right now, I have a, there's a screen share button I I don't need to explain to everybody what screen share is. Everyone here has probably used zoom.

I'm just gonna go ahead and guess. But we also have a collaborate button right next to it. So I can go ahead and click the collaborate button, and now I can actually do collaborative things with the students, like I could share Google docs that we can work on together or Microsoft Office docs or upload a shared file or a web page or use our wipe to share a video. Like, for example, let me go ahead and share a a web page for a second, and I have a couple that have, been bookmarked. I'll just go ahead and access this website on the, con circulatory system that I wanna use in my class.

And what this does is, again, it's not a share screen. It's gonna go ahead and load the actual website up on every individual student's computer. So now while I'm talking about it, the students themselves can go ahead and traverse the website and actually engage with the content. And I'm using websites as an example. Of course, this could be third party publisher content, an online textbook, or any online activities that you want your students to be able to engage Now you're still the instructor though.

So if I want to then, if we're all done, using this website, I could say, okay, everybody. We're gonna go ahead and go over to NBC news, and let me see what's going on. I can click the share with class button, and this is gonna go ahead and jump everybody to this website because now I wanna talk about what's going on in the news today. And, you know, and then as I'm talking about the news, all the students can be, reading or, traversing website, on their own, and we can find out, you know, what's going on with the hunter biden of the the other important news of the day and things like that. So, but we've gone beyond just, allowing you to share websites, I could go ahead and click on the collaborate button and let me load a a Google doc.

Let's say that you're teaching a finance class. And I would think that this is the future of collaboration in these classes, being able to work with the students, not just present to them. So I could say, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and share this Excel spreadsheet or this, Google sheet stock. Let me go ahead and click share, and it's just some recognizes. It says, wait a minute.

This is the Google sheets. Do you want your students just to be able to view it? Do you want them to be able to comment or should everybody be able to edit it? So let's say that I had a small class or I'm in a breakout group and I'm gonna go ahead and say, I want the students to work on this together. I'll go ahead and click open, and it's gonna open the Google sheets document and give everybody the ability to access this. We've actually gone ahead and loaded this in a class with over a hundred and fifty people. Now I don't recommend that.

It was, that was too many people to be working on the same document same time. But nonetheless, now I can show people how to go ahead and make formulas. We could be working on this together. This is a whole project that the group can work on. It's a way to be collaborative in the class you know, and of course I'm showing you Excel spreadsheet.

I could just as easily go ahead and load, a PowerPoint presentation. Let's say that, you wanted your students to work on their project together. They might be in a breakout room. We could go ahead and, I'm gonna make this editable as well. So again, the whole group can come together and actually work on this again in an engaging way in the, class environment.

And you can set it so that they can edit in the class, and then after class, they don't have access, or you leave the access open. So even after class, they can go ahead and work on it. And so you can see that students could even be on different pages of a, PowerPoint or a Google, a slide share, and then they can go ahead and, work on this, together live right within the, right within the system. So as you can see, you can edit there. And I can do a lot of other stuff.

I could go ahead and load a whiteboard, share videos, a whole bunch of things to make this a collaborative experience but we didn't just want to focus on adding elearning content collaborative experiences. We also wanted to make some fundamental proven so the way the teachers were using this type of an application. Like in the improvements we made in breakout rooms. One of the common things that we would hear from instructors was breakout rooms are commonly used in their school. I'm gonna go ahead and make breakout groups, but one of the big problems that they faced was that instructors weren't able to see what was going on in the other breakout rooms.

And I ruin this for everybody, but it turns out that a lot of times if you send students into breakout rooms and there's no instructor there, they just sit there quietly don't do anything. Now, not at No. Why? Not at your school, but at the other people's schools, this may happen. And they don't even communicate. They just know, like, if the instructor's not there, there's no one does anything.

So we have a view that lets you see what's happening in all the breakout rooms at the exact same time. Now not only can now you can't hear what's happening because that that that would be too disruptive too much to to to hear, but if I now look over participants list on the side, I can see who's talking, who's raising their hand, who's not paying attention, who's giving feedback back so I can actually get a sense of the activity taking place in all of these breakout rooms from the same spot. Now if I go back to my learning tools, again, all this content that I've created in Canvas or elsewhere. I can go and say, let me launch an assignment. So, again, it's gonna go ahead and pull up, my assignments.

But it's, good to do it just, really, really slowly. And, once it pulls up all my assignments, I can go ahead and select an assignment I can send this assignment just to very specific breakout rooms. So I can say, hey, I'm gonna send this assignment to the people in breakout room one and two. I could go ahead and say, hey, I'm gonna send a quiz. The people in breakout room three.

In fact, I can actually go ahead and send a Google doc to the people in, breakout room four and a different doc to the people in, breakout room two and three so they could all be working on those items, together. So I even I could go right here and so the collaborative. Let me pull up my Google, docs. And let's say that I had people in one breakout room that I wanted to work on some, different stuff. So I'll again load up those financials, and I'm gonna go ahead and make able and says, oh, what breakout room do you wanna send this to? I'm gonna send this to the people in breakout room one and two, and they can work on it together.

So from one central place, you can now watch everything happening the breakout rooms, you can get a sense of the activity and you can send the content to individual breakout rooms. Now if you're gonna give a test or a quiz though, oh, and then of course, we have a, in our chat, we automatically created chats for each of the breakout groups. So I can see what they're talking about in breakout room two. And I can say, hey, just launched a quiz. Please please take, and I can go ahead and send that message, or I can see you are doing nothing, and let them know that you're monitoring them, and, go ahead and, engage with them that way.

But of course, I can also just go ahead and go right into, one of the, breakout rooms, as well, and engage with them there. But if you're gonna give a test or a quiz, I don't really recommend that you go into breakout rooms. Let me go ahead and close breakout rooms, because the best place to be able to really, monitor gaming a test or a quiz is to use our proctor view. So this is could not be more simple. An instructor can just go ahead and click the proctor view button, and this is gonna all the students know that you're starting proctor mode, and they all have to opt in because they're gonna be sharing not only their face, but their desktop as well.

So you're gonna be able to see, not only of them just like you would in your typical, virtual meeting environment, but now we can see their desktop as well. And as an instructor or a TA, can just go ahead and, walk around the class like you would, a real classroom looking over their shoulder and actually seeing how they're doing. Now look, this doesn't stop cheating. Elevates bar a little bit. So you can see to make sure they're not copying and pasting from chat GPT or they're not answering the questions any kind of a weird order.

But more importantly than that, it's not meant to really stop cheating altogether. It's meant to give instructors the ability to be able to monitor the students and work with them. So what's so interesting is when we launched this feature, instructor started using that week, not for tests, but just for assignments, and work they wanted their students to do live while they were together so that the instructors could be there to help them. In fact, I could take any of these screens and I could go ahead get larger, see if the students are doing. I can annotate on it.

I could circle and say, what are you doing here? Or or I could send them chat and say, Hey, let me help you. So it's really actually meant to be more of a mentor ring and a, you know, or tutoring or an observing, feature and functionality, as well as adding additional level of security if you wanna go ahead and launch a test or a is. But then let me go ahead and then exit the Proctor view, and I'll show you the last, two things that, we are very excited about. So in addition to learning tools, we also, of course, have, a whole bunch of, class management tools. Your class roster, we have attendance.

We track when the students the class when they leave the class, if they're tardy, if they're late. And of course, all of that, is easily synced with LTI one point three with your Canvas attendant system. So all this can easily go right back into your, whatever you're using for your tracking, or even more important though than the attendance, we have a full dashboard of data. We're tracking how long the teacher class for, how long the teacher spoke for, how long all the students spoke for, how long every individual student spoke for, how long they weren't paying attention, how many times they raised their hand, how many chat messages sense to their fellow students. How many questions they asked the teacher, the grade they got on the exam, how long they took on the exam, and you can actually see this in our summary reports.

You can take the detail. You can even explore all this to your own server on Amazon and use whatever reporting tool you may use power builder or Tableau or whatever tools to really do some great analysis. Very excited about this because I think that this is gonna help institutions not only identify best practices for their most engaging classes and maybe even work to identify students that may be risk, but I think that this can be fundamental use to assess how we're doing with teaching and learning, not just online, but overall. We've never collected this type of data this level within the live class, before, and I'm very excited about not what this is gonna show immediately, but what this is gonna show a year from now. The last thing that I'll I'll end on something that's not yet, in the product, but, something that you can't get away without talking about, which is AI.

At the end of the summer, we're launching our AITA, in, beta. What our AITA does it, first of all, can be controlled at the institution level or the teacher has the option whether they want to deploy it in their class or not. And our AITA automatically transcribes everything that's not only said, but done in the class. So now the students don't have to take notes the whole time. They can take notes that are additive but they really can actively participate in the class because they can download a full transcript of the class.

But beyond just the transcript of the class, the AITA can now answer basic questions of the materials that are So if you're doing a class in science and the student doesn't understand photosynthesis, they can just instead of raising their hand and interrupting the class, which they may be apprehensive to do so if it's a basic question, they can now ask the AITA. Please explain explain photosynthesis to me. And the AITA will first base it to answer an everything said during the class and all the materials presented during the class, it'll complement that, which its own more broad knowledge base of information about photosynthesis and give the students an answer. It'll then say, did you understand this? And the students can say, no. And one thing the AI is very good at is about then redescribing stuff in a different way, and they can redescribe what photosynthesis is until the student can comprehend it.

Not only that, we actually do a lot of other cool tricks utilizing the AITA to make it very useful to both the teacher and the student. For example, if you show up for class ten minutes late, r a ITA says I noticed you were ten minutes late. Would you like me to summarize what you've missed in class so far? And it will go ahead and actually summarize that. No. I was never late for class myself, but I imagine that some of you may have students that do that, and now instantly can get them up to speed and allow them to better participate.

At the end of class, it says would you like a summary of this class? And would you like me to create some guides for you for this class. And the AITA will be able to actually go ahead and do that for any students that wants that. And now in the future, we have a lot of big plans and kind of even though we haven't released v one and v two, we're gonna let teachers actually rate the answers that the AI gave so you can actually better train the AI to really be a great teaching assistant. Now look, this is I'll go ahead and answer it. Correct? Yes.

I'm sorry. I just really Yeah. And then instructors see what questions the students Yes. So they'll be able to see, all the questions that the students are asking the, AITA. And, and then in the future, we wouldn't be able to have them even rate the answer to better train the AITA, making sure they're giving a good feedback.

Again, this is just entering beta, but if your school is actually interested, and you're using class, if you're not interested and you wanna, you know, get class and then use it. We're actually looking for more people to, do the beta. It'll be, beginning in, next month. Alright. Yeah.

Go ahead. A are are you able to customize which functions you will allow the TA to do, or is it just on or off? Yeah. Right. I know there's some some situations where you're discussing charged topics in the, social justice class, and people will not speak as freely if they know gonna be recorded that they might Yeah. I mean, so right now, we do have the ability to turn off the, AITA, for example, like, if you're giving a test, you'll wanna turn so the students can't use it during the exam.

But it's not yet kind of programmable yet, but we're just in the first version. So a lot of those good suggestions were were definitely be, you know, gonna be considering and how to incorporate that into the class. I'll take one last question, but then we do wanna get back to Missy and be happy to answer questions more at the end. Yes. Hey, Lindsey Mercer from the University of South Florida.

We talked to y'all last week, and we look forward to piloting. We're very excited. Fantastic. Pain point of our gravity that they have expressed wholeheartedly, is that these platforms are all about pushing Mations. They want assessment.

They wanna put a polling tool in there or some kind of activity that will write to the Canvas Gradebook so they can see where their students are. And then in addition to that, some type like Watermark or something, similar to what you showed here, but numeric don't say how many they've answered, would they gotten right, would they gotten wrong? Yeah. Well, that's all good feedback. We'll definitely connect afterwards because, of course, we're looking at look, we're a young company. These are the type of feedback we want to continue to improve the product.

But the thing that I'll tell you is through LTI one point three, if you're using third party tools like surveying tools or polling tools in canvas, those will all automatically load, go right through the LTI from Canvas into our product, and you can load and launch those to do exactly some of those things, but let's let's talk offline more detail about that. So look, so hopefully, we've gotten the sense of why actually so excited about this technology and why we truly say this is the next generation virtual classroom. But as I said when I started this, in COVID, was obviously crazy for everybody, but it proved that we have the infrastructure to put every institution in the world and allow students to learn the way they warn you in a lie learning environment. But the emphasis was on the technology, and we, of course, put those students in online meeting rooms. The idea behind classes to just take that last twenty percent, that last mile, and change the my meeting room to an online classroom to allow teachers to teach the same way they would in person now online.

And in some ways, I actually think we have a a couple of in improve options there. It may be even more effective, in certain situations to be able to to teach online. We fully integrate with Canvas. So you go into Canvas and you would launch this go into your biology class, everyone's in single sign on, you can fully access this and we fully communicate everything from the grades, the attendance, all back, right into Canvas, and we're very excited about, the partnership that have the timer at the conference. But now, so with that as a kind of a brief overview about a little bit of the background of, myself and Missy, as well as why we think this is next generation, virtual classroom technology and why we're excited about it.

Let me go ahead and hand it back over to missy to then share a little bit more about, why, LCTCS decided to partner with class. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Missy. Okay.

Probably gonna be obvious what I'm about to say. Right? A little bit about us that I could have shed earlier is that our mission at LCTCS is to improve the lives students. And so I like this slide because it gives a visual of what most people are trying to do with their lives and sort of stacks, basic needs, and then the hierarchy of other things in their life. Right? And so with the question of, what's the role of education in people's lives? We recognize that the people we serve are typically stuck in the bottom two tiers of this pyramid, and they're struggling there. And so we believe that education is an opportunity for them to do something to improve their life.

And so, we also believe that the important thing that happens at our colleges is the relationship that's formed in that classroom. We believe that the teacher makes a difference, and that that natural interaction that happens between the teacher and the student dollars. And so to be able to take a tool like this is amazing, I was getting even more excited even though we're using it, right? But listening to all the things that Michael said because this tool allows us to do what we do in the classroom virtually. So we recognize, of course, yes, during COVID, everybody pivoted. People were teaching online, students were learning online.

We all have different stories there, but what we noticed is post COVID, fifty percent of our enrollments were online. And when we did a poll to see who was doing synchronous online, it took in just about thirty minutes on a Friday afternoon, I got a resounding response from our faculty and noticed that a lot of them were doing synchronous online classes. The other thing is that faculty wanted to be able to have that connection with their students. So this was an exciting tool for us. We also wanted a solution that would allow us to do proctoring.

Proctoring became a much bigger deal, right, during COVID, there was a lot of conversation around it, and to be able to put the teacher in the role of Procter as another exciting opportunity and give them a little bit more control around happening with that assessment. The other thing, the breakout rooms, how cool is that to be able to see into the room, not necessarily here, but be able to tell what's going on. How cool is that? To be able to push information into that breakout room, when you can tell they're not doing anything. I'm really excited about the AI. Allegedly not doing anything.

Allegedly. Yes. I'm sorry. Terrible of me to presume. Really excited about the AI to, acknowledge students when they show up late.

But anyway, these are exciting tools that we were, very happy to be able to implement in our virtual classrooms. The other thing is, of course, to be able to integrate that in canvas, to be able to present this tool where our students are already coming to class was a great opportunity. That we're looking forward to using all these new features. And and again, being able to reduce any friction, right, having to send the students a link, put an extra something in the class, make sort of confusing for them of where are they showing up for class today. This was a great, a great, tool for us to implement.

Great. Alright. Thank you very much, Misty. Appreciate that. So with that, why don't we actually pause and see if there's any questions that either I can answer about, the product, the technology to the trends, her questions for Missy about her school's implementation and the work that they've been doing to really improve, virtual classes.

Yes, right over here first. Time do you have to spend on the front end educating your students and how to use this, some of the the technologies? I think it's a lot like some of the other tools we've implemented. You have service students who who have a knack for it. And and they're up and using it rather quickly because they've spent a lot of time with Zoom or some other virtual platform. We do have other students that we have to hold their hand.

The other really cool thing about this is I don't know about you guys, but I spend a lot of time one on one helping students And that helps me build a relationship with them, and it also helps me pursue some of their anxiety around teaching online. And so the product sometimes you have to use alternative means, right? To really get them into it, but but we have the ability to do that. Yeah. And that's a good question though. Although, we usually hear not about the students.

They actually usually pick this up very quickly, but more so the, the teachers themselves. You know, the interesting there is thing is, look, the one thing that COVID did was it gave every instructor in the world of crash course, for the most part in Zoom, which is actually a much more the more complex piece of kind of using a virtual meeting environment. So if you've used Zoom, and you've used an LMS. I mean, we have customized training that we do for all of our clients. We design three classes for them and get as many faculty through that as they want.

They can get a certificate, in this, and we even have training that goes on through the year. All that being said, if you're an instructor and you use zoom and you know about the l m s, usually just point out that it's a it's the idea of pushing content that you can see all the breakout rooms and we point them in the Proctor view, and many of our instructors just off and running. With just that little bit of information, but we do do customized training for each institution that deploys us. So you would help with training for the students if only say when I was just telling you that our students would know the elements, they would know zoo. But the I love the idea that you can look across and get that confidential, hey, where are you? Yeah.

There are a few things. And, yeah, we so we we have been setting up the training for that as well. Yes. Another question right here on the front. Yeah.

We talked about the use of see in your product. If a student had a question rather than looking at the dialogue whether it's for my talk to the students or that, I'd rather look at the tech book because maybe I love something aster. Well, I have a second question as follows on that. It's just that you're doing your work while I'm talking. Oh, gotcha.

Robot. Look at the students when you work in the students. Not yet. These are all great suggestions for kind I think the future, the power of AI, and all things that we think, you know, could be very helpful to really become an AI teaching assistant, the very first level of what we're working on though is just focus on having it be able to answer quest bit some of the basic questions of the of the class, but those are both great suggestions. I think definitely move in that direction.

Oh, yes. I have a good quarter. The first one is, does it have the ability to have a sidecar with disabled student within the classroom So, right now, what you can do is, I I didn't, of course, go into this detail, but, of course, we have an entire chat capability. And within that, the teacher can control live, whether no one can chat, you can only ask instructors. You can ask, you can chat with instructors and also live or students can chat with each other.

So at any time, you can actually just turn on the chat and have individual chats with a student. We don't have yet have the ability to have actually live communication. Know, audio video that's direct that other people can't hear, but that's actually on the road map for the future. Okay. Good.

And then we have a lot of international students, have had any issues issues with international, have you launched this with any, campuses that are not in the US. Yeah, we actually have institutions already around the world using this. So we're continuing to, knock out more languages. We're double byte enabled. We can do right to left, as well.

So happy to provide you with the list of languages. And give you some institutions overseas that are using us as well. Yes. How good is class at recognizing individual students bandwidth and computing power. Because I'm looking at what you're doing here, and I know at least where I'm from Zoom was a real problem? So look, look, if, we use the zoom back end.

So, really, what we've done is we've reconfigured and updated the kind of the front end interface. We used the zoom audio video. So hopefully, you know, at this point, people have gotten get zoomed to work on your computer, then ours works at that same level. Now that the thing that I could tell you, both about zoom and classes, it does automatically recognize what the bandwidth is and actually adjust individual bandwidth of the video upstream and downstream and the amount of simultaneous people that you'll see. So Zoom does do some of that, but there is a minimum bar in that bar usually being able to run zoom.

So you we've tested it for just under up to five hundred students in a class. I don't really recommend though. I I think, like, you know, a hundred is a good max, but we've run a hundred and three hundred, pretty easily, and we've tested it for just below five Yes. So right now, So let me explain this way. So we use a zoom audio video back end because that is the most scalable audio video back end that's just available out of all the different platforms forms.

If you have zoom at your school, what that means is though you can install class, and we just exist on top of your zoom infrastructure. If you don't have Don't worry. We'd actually just come bundled with, zoom as the back end supporting the audio video, and you don't even notice it. Similar you probably have some products at your school that either use the Oracle database or the Microsoft SQL database. You don't really know the difference there.

We talk about Zoom because so many people know about Zoom and the capabilities. So we let every that this version of the product does run on top of zoom. But whether you have zoom at your school or not, does it matter? If you do, as I said, it'll connect to your existing zoom license. If not, it just comes bundled with the zoom video that you'll need to to run the product. Yes.

So, great. So you the question was, how are we getting the class roster and can you record the class sessions? So, we use LTI one point three. So the auto automatically when you, if you launch this from your, say, you're in your Canvas bio one zero one class, it automatically has the roster from that class. So people usually log Canvas. They go to buy one.

They click in. It automatically has not only the full roster, but all the contents available for the instructor to be able to go and launch out as well. We also support sessions. So if you have a class that's multiple sessions, our system supports that as well. So you might have the whole class attending on Wednesday two o'clock, but Thursdays, it might be broken up into those, those sessions.

As far as recordings, you know, I didn't have time to showcase here, but you come by the booth. I'll be happy to to show you this. We have some very, very interesting stuff that I think is next generation that I wanna talk about. Of course, you could record the classes, in that you're used to recording all of your classes, and we actually support recording it either using zoom. You could use your own hard drive space.

If you have products like Panopto, that all works. We have our own recording storage well. And we're gonna be coming out next, quarter with what we call interactive playback. And what interactive playback does is you actually record your class. If ten minutes into the class, the teacher launches web page and ten minutes into the recording, a web page launches.

If twenty minutes into the, class, the teacher launches a test, twenty minutes into the recording playback, the actual test launches. It actually looks just like you're actually in the class environment. The only thing you can do is actually ask the teacher alive question because you're in a recording, but all of the activities and events as long as they're still available, meaning the test still has to be open for a student to take. But if it is, they could watch the playback and spin the class just like they would in person. And we're gonna be coming out that next semester.

So we really have focused on recording and wanting to blur the line between synchronous and asynchronous learning in the class environment. Yes. I have two questions. One, I know you have the tabs. If I had two screens, could I No.

Right now, you still have to the tabs can't float on their own. Just the this just the sidebars can. So the learning tools, the participants, the chat, and ITA can all, float out, but, the, the tabs right now are locked in. But that's a good suggestion. Thank you.

So, we have a special in structure, program, discount people that are using Canvas, but, it depends on the size of your institution. So it's actually priced kind of similar to the LMS, race. It really depends on the size of the school scope of your program, but it it's significantly less than the than the LMS, and, we're really trying to get this in the hands of as many people as possible because we think that this can really make a difference. So please come by the booth. We'd be happy to talk to you about your institution.

Yes. So you only show show the dashboard. Right? We actually report individuals time? Yes. Yeah. We we track all you can actually track all the individual students' talk time.

And, we we have, we also track the amount of time that they're actually in the app. So like, you know, if they might be playing games or doing something, so we have we we track that as well. No, again, you can control all this. You can turn off for your school if you don't like this. And you can export all those reports for a single class or cross classes.

We really have a huge amount of data that's available for you to run your analysis on. So for the spring, sometimes faculty deal with multiple springs, and then sometimes we want to spread the students' big hat, like, to many different screens. And sometimes we want to squeeze in to one street. How flexible are we? Well, you can control the amount of, people that you're viewing on the screen at, one time. So you can do that, and you can send, the gallery view to a, a particular screen, but right now the max number of simultaneous videos on the screen, I think is, right around forty five.

So that's probably gonna be your max amount of people that you can see, at the same time, opposed to having to scroll through, the, the, the student body. Yes. Up down the back. I'm sorry. Can you speak up a little bit? Can the student device be a Chromebook? Can the students can access this on Chromebook? Well, so it really depends on the chromebook.

So we have both a Mac version of the product, a Windows version of the product in web version of the product. We encourage people to actually download the the windows of the Mac version because you get a higher amount of, audio video because have the more advanced codecs in the web based version. For Chromebook, we ask people to use the, the, version that we have on the web. But there, just like Zoom, it does take a certain amount of memory and kind of space to run. So it depends on the Chromebook, but, yes, we have many clients that are running this on the Chromebook, but it would depend on the specific Chromebook.

Yes. With all the customization you've done on front end, have you designed around what CAG and how does this interact with, like, jobs. Yeah. So we've actually gone beyond this, accessibility that, Zoom has. So we've actually made sure that screen readers work.

We have the color differentiator. I think we're on, you know, this isn't my, exact air forte, but come by the booth, and we have a person who can answer more questions actually above the current Zoom in Microsoft Teams, and we've even done a couple of other things, like acknowledging that you might have a, sign language can, like, I can go ahead and, let's say they have, students that are, let's say that you have students that, are are hearing impaired in your class, you can even go ahead and set things up like a, a sign language interpreter right, under there, and we do a whole bunch of other things to span upon accessibility because we're since we're focused in the education market, this has been a top priority for us. Yes. The instructor and the TAs have access to all the functionality. And if you're for those of you that are wanting a student view look like? It really actually looks the same, but the student view doesn't have access to launch the content or launch items, but other and they just get things launched to that but otherwise the the UI looks the same.

So any teacher or TA can do the same type of, work and you can, you know, have your TA's launching content or, utilizing proctor view or things like that. Yes. Do you have, I don't think so. But I recommend you have, more students than TA I I don't think this is an exact exact limit. The student view is the student able to pull out the interpreter into a separate No.

That is a that is a setting specifically for the the class of the teacher, whoever the teacher puts below them, everyone sees. The teacher controls the front of the room, and the teacher controls what's seen below them. The seating charts are controlled dividually. So a a student can kind of, you know, adjust their seating. Yeah.

So that we do have, the ability to kind of adjust the, the, the sizes based on the, bars there, but only very minorly. Yes, all the way in the back. So, we do have an iPad version of the product, and we do, we are coming out with mobile versions by the end of the year for Android and phone. All that being said, because this is built on zoom, if you really needed to, a student could go ahead and just log in to the meeting ID and the class from their regular Zoom on their phone and attend the class, then most things kind of show up as linked to a web. So it's not the same type of experience, but it does get by if they if they need to.

And I know we're at the I know we're at the end of the time. So I wanna, first of all, thank Missy for talking about her experience with the next generation virtual classroom. We had a great discussion. I'll be around if people wanna come and just chat right outside, and also come check out our booth at six o'clock, about class, and we're happy to talk in more tell. Thank you very much, everybody.