Kara WylieEcho 360 Transcript11/06/12
Hands-on Labs
Presenter: Let’s get started and I can kind of fill them in as they get moving here. I’m the director of North American sales for the company called Hands-On Labs. First of all I want to thank Wit for arranging this this afternoon so I could have a chance to come and listen to what your needs are and see if we in fact are a match to being the solution… that could help you to drive some of those enrollments that could allow you to put some of those students through gen ed courses as well as well as through your master’s program… and give them that hands-on experience.
The company was actually founded eighteen years ago, well before most of this was kind of thought of in terms of moving online. And the company was founded by a chemistry professor who lived in Western Colorado. And he found that that in the winter, his students struggled to get to campus for his courses. And so he just decided that he could put everything in a box that they needed for their experiments for that semester and have them do all of their experiments at home. And, therein was born the company. Soon his biology friends and his geology friends and his physics friends would say, “Well do that for me. Do that for me.”
So today we have eleven different disciplines that we offer and I’ll give you information at the end of what those eleven different disciplines are. And we also have within each of those disciplines a number of choices. So we have things for science majors and science non-majors that are in those intro courses. So we run the gambit in terms of what types of experiments we would do.
Everything is in micro-scale amount. So it is safe to ship, it is safer for the students to handle, and I’ll address safety as a part of my PowerPoint here because that is always one of the foremost concerns.And we get that; so I’ll certainly address the whole question of safety, I’ll address the question of academic integrity which also comes up anytime you’re talking about online classes, and I’ll also address pricing because somehow that still comes up despite the fact we say it’s worth it (laughing,) whatever it costs. I’ll be certainly happy to address that. Are there any questions that you came in perhaps with, that you want to let me know that say, “Please make sure that you also touch on this or this? Okay. So let me get—yes?
Male Guest: The background of your company…I think it’s important for people to understand the scientific underpinnings of your company and the expertise that your founders and CEO have as well as your association with—I forget what it’s called, with the national—
Presenter: All of the different national boards. I mean, we belong with or are part of all of our national chemistry people, all our national biology folks, our national like, the Hacks group… all those different national organizations. And thank you for reminding me to say more about that. Our company is small: we’re located out of Englewood, Colorado. When I say we’re small, I mean we have about fifty employees. On staff, I think we have I think it is eighteen PhD’s, all in the area of science, different sciences. Over and above that, we have about ten master’s degree programs, master’s degrees programs people have, including myself.Master’s degree programs—Master’s that people will have, including myself. I have a Master’s in Education; I was a classroom teacher. I actually have been an adjunct professor. And I’m living in Dallas right now so I’ve served as an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, even though it wasn’t in the area of science.
But, our company believes first and foremost that we are educators. And so you will see that everything that comes out of our company has that as the focus. In fact, the newest hire which you haven’t had the chance to meet comes to us with is Barbekka Hurtt. Barbekka comes to us with her PhD in neuroscience and is a farmer-teacher at Yale, a professor at Yale. She also worked for McGraw Hill in their e-learning higher-ed science department. So she’s got an amazing mind. And those are the caliber of people that Hands-On Labs believes in hiring. So we’re not another vender. If you want to go and buy beakers or dissection models or anything else, you know what, you’ll find them at a lot of better places. We are really here for the educational aspect of this. And I usually actually say, we wrote the book on how to do this. Because our founders, Linda and Peter Jechofnig, literally were approached from the Josie-Bass online series of books and were asked to write the book called Teaching Lab Science Courses Online.
So we know that it is possible. We are also aware that probably eighty percent of the colleges and universities have put everything else online first before they dare to think about how to do science. And it is the lab portion that creates the issue. We have three choices: you can go virtual labs, you can go hybrid which means you bring the students on campus, or you can go fully wet labs like what we have. And we find that with the virtual labs, universities like yourselves do not want to accept those credits. Those students have never touched the microscope, they haven’t touched those dissections, and they haven’t touched so much that is a part of science. And our founders and current CEO believe that to learn science, you have got to do science.
So we agree that there could be maybe pre- or post-activities or tests that could be done through virtual, but that really shouldn’t be the bulk of how you’re getting your science lab experience.
The hybrid is another choice, a very fine choice, with one problem. Students have to live within a geographical area and that means that you have enough lab space to accommodate that. When in fact, last year when I was working in the Missouri area, Missouri State University, were in the process of renovating some of their labs. What were they going to do? So they had students actually coming to campus for lecture, but used our Lab Paq’s and all the students did their chemistry experiments off-campus, or in the dorms, or whatever it was. So when I started by saying, I’m here to listen, I’m here to solve whatever dilemma you might have, and it could be those kinds of questions that Wit mentioned earlier… you could literally put probably thousands of students through a lecture hall, but you can’t fit them all into your lab times. And guess what? They don’t want to come on a Friday night at midnight. To campus! Now they’ll do their labs at home at midnight on Friday night, but they don’t want to come to campus. So, anyway. Does that help to address that a little bit?
That’s one of the reasons that we talk about that we literally support serious educators. We’re not here at a high school level; we’re not here to say that we sell “stuff” to you. As I said, you could find that at a lot of other places. We are here to sell the educational value of what labs, hands-on labs experience. Because as a company, we are committed to the fact that science matters.
So I want to cover this afternoon a little bit is why we believe that it matters, what our solutions have been and how they’ve evolved, how others have made that transition, and then some tools for early adopters. We literally at this point have thousands of schools that are using this. And I know the gentleman at Kansas State where I’m heading this Friday to do a presentation was excited that I was even coming to Clemson.
So we have places like Pace University, we’re talking to Yale, we’re talking to—well actually, Florida State University’s already adopted us. So we have a lot of the four-year universities that are finally making that leap. And one of the things that they find is, if you aren’t offering it, they can go elsewhere. And that’s the sad part for you because people want that degree from Clemson, they want all of their courses to be from Clemson, and so they don’t want to be forced to go elsewhere, but if there’s a particular course and they’re on track to get their nursing degree and there’s no lab space that they can take the microbiology course here, then they’ll find it online.
Data suggests that in America, science isn’t necessarily a priority. I’m certainly—when it comes to Ted—talking to the choir aren’t I? Because you’re finding I’m sure that there’s something that happens between the time that students are elementary age and when they get to college. Because I’ve talked a number of times to elementary teachers and they’re going, oh my gosh, the kids are so excited about science! Well, what happens? Where do they lose that by the time they get to college and that they don’t want to major in science or go on in science? So we do believe that there is a solution that we are able to look that. And one of the ways in which to do this is by offering it online so that you are able to reach students that have science as their passion just as we as a company have science as our passion.
Many of the non-science students will love to do the virtual labs. It’s like doing a game, one of their video games. And that is one of the reasons we caution schools against doing the virtual lab as the only component for a lab or for an online course. Because the students don’t connect that what I’m doing here, which is just like one of my video games, is serious science matters. And that’s the piece that we feel is important, and therefore our hands-on piece is going to make that much better.
So who would you prefer to take care of you or a loved one?Someone who’s had everything virtual, or someone who’s actually had to do the microscope experiments and other things?
The practical lab experience we have found, and again, Ted could have written this list probably, there is higher engagement with the students if they are doing science, there’s better test scores. I jokingly say that I should be the poster child for this company because I wasn’t a science major, I stood around a table with four other people or there other lab partners and I’d say, “Not me; I’m not touching that! I’ll write up the report.”
Well guess what? If I had been forced to take one of our boxes at home and do all of the work myself, I would have learned it better. I would have gotten higher test scores, I would have come out of my biology classes feeling like a really knew it. And I didn’t have that experience. And it wasn’t that I had a bad teacher. I actually liked my teacher a lot and thought that she had done a great job. But I wasn’t as engaged and didn’t have to do all of the work myself. And the other issue I think is sometimes, as a group, we’d be doing something and someone on the other side of the room would call out… now I’m distracted. So people often say when they talk about safety, don’t you worry that your students are going to hurt themselves at home?Well guess what? There are a whole lot more accidents that take place on campus than labs than ever at home when they’re by themselves. Because they’re not distracted, they’re not trying to impress someone else at the table or in the room at all with them.
We also find that you’re able therefore to get a degree completed which sometimes again, because of either distance or times that the labs are offered, it makes it very challenging to get through the course that you need. And therefore you aren’t as employable at the end. Heaven know we have heard a whole lot today as we head toward election day about people wanting jobs and needing to be employed and one of the things that we find is that this does help employability if can you have those students that complete their degrees.
So in the past we found that online science courses need to mirror campus equivalents. And that’s still the same. And are you part of the accreditation? Southeast? Southern, okay. And so what you find in there is that they’ll say that if you are offering an online course—and here I can talk to my online people—you need to have something comparable to what they’re doing on campus in terms of their objectives, in terms of the outcomes of those classes. And we are able to do that.
That third bullet there, we also find that, I have Texas A&M because I live in Dallas. And one of their campuses—they were expanding and they had gorgeous, beautiful buildings. But they didn’t have the money to outfit their labs the way they needed to. And so by using our Lab Paq’s, they were able to get the same experiments they normally would have done on campus without spending millions of dollars that they would have spent on campus outfitting new labs.
Therefore we find that there are seamless transitions to their other courses and you can reach students literally anywhere. We have a large group that we ship to Afghanistan, to Iraq, so we serve the military. Where maybe they want to start here and then they get deployed, or they know they’re going to be deployed, so rather than start on an on-campus course, they could take the course and have it totally done online.
So what are some of the best practices that we’ve learned from our early adopters? Now, again some of you in the distance education world probably could have written this for us. But, and I’m going to go through this pretty quickly But you need to make sure that you’re holding the student accountable. You need to make sure that there are ways that the students can demonstrate their knowledge. One of the most common of these—our anatomy and physiology professors almost always require their students to video-tape themselves doing some parts of the experiment so that the professors can see the techniques that used in those courses. They can also look at that question of academic integrity to make sure that the right students are doing the coursework. And so today’s technology is amazing, and Blackboard is your LMS. So many features are built into that that make it possible for students to participate in chat rooms and discussion boards, for those students to download their lab report templates, any of their other work, and directly get it to their professors.
We also offer at no additional charge to you an e-cartridge. So we will send you the complete lab manual in an e-cartridge soft chalk format so you can drop that right into the Blackboard system. So that again is seamless; they’re able to access their lab manual either through Blackboard or the disk that we give them.
Instructors are the key. And again, I know I’m preaching here to the choir where I say, any of us that have been professors, any of us that have taught at any level, it still goes back to the teacher. So you really don’t want to take your weaker teachers and say, “Oh, we’ll put them online.” You’re only weakening then your online program, just as you would be weakening your on-campus program if they were teaching on campus. So the professor still makes a huge difference.
One of the things down there if you look at the third-last one (talking about the bullet-points) is to encourage the students to record themselves, demonstrate the ideas, all those things that get the students excited about what it is that they are doing.
So to implement our solution, your concern might be that student enrollment needs to go up but you don’t have lab space. So again, we can do that. Your next one might be offering science online efficiently and effectively. Again, we can do that. Acquire education solutions that can be customized. We can do that. Offer a safe and rigorous laboratory experience. We offer a 3 million dollar liability policy on any student using one of our Lab Paq’s, so the liability does not come back here to Clemson. The liability rests on our shoulders as a company. So that’s why we’re as picky as we are about every single experiment being done in the way which it is written and that we’ve written the directions clear enough so that students are able to do the experiment in a safe way. Eighteen years, 100 % safety record. Never one problem.
Level the learning field for online students. In this case, again, you never want to feel that your online program is weaker, or that your online program doesn’t offer what could be offered on campus. We can make that possible for that not to be the case.
And then lastly to stay competitive. As I mentioned, if you don’t offer the courses, someone else does.
Some of the instructors have encourages us—again I won’t go into a lot of this, but they talked about using the same type of techniques that you would use if you were teaching on campus. So invite guest speakers, have teaching games: move beyond a standard PowerPoint that you are using as a part of your class.