Student Success Beyond the Classroom: Prepping for a Remote Workplace

I'm doctor Brian Marchman from the University of Florida and also from Onnerlock. It's my privilege to represent both those institutions For about the last eight years, I served as assistant provost and director of online learning at the University of Florida. Florida's flagship university with about sixty thousand enrollments. That music is not part of my presentation. Oh, okay. Sorry.

No worries. Thank you for breaking the ice. So we will have to do an ice breaker. I do like to know who's in the room with me though. How many of you represent higher ed institutions, colleges, and universities? Okay.

Very good. K k twelve. No k twelve. Industry, vendors, partners, A couple of you. Yes.

Of course. Yes. Some of my colleagues are here. Thank you for your support. Very good.

And then roles within higher ed, how many of your instructional designers? Okay. Very good. Faculty. Okay. Great.

Some of you have a couple of hands going up. I know that feeling where lots of hats, administrators, higher ed administrators. Very good. Any anybody else yes. You tell us what you do.

Buying a tech support. Okay. A tech support. Thank you. Other tech support? Yes.

Sorry. Forgot tech support. Where would we be without we wouldn't. We wouldn't be here. Okay.

Very good. Any other any other roles? Alright. That's a good mix of folks. My role at the University of Florida, as assistant provost was to oversee all domains of online learning. Including distance learning, fully online, hybrid programs.

Before the pandemic, we were happily moving along with ten or twelve thousand online enrollments and managing ourselves quite nicely and moving at a pretty steady growth rate with about a hundred fully online programs. And then March thirteenth twenty twenty hit. We all experienced it. The world changed, and so did our work. And that relates very much to, how we serve students and, like we all have experienced, there were silver linings and unintended consequences of the pandemic that we benefited from And, not only did we benefit, so did our students, and we'll talk about that today.

So, again, I'm Brian Marchman and, proudly serving, now as an honor lock advisor, but, my day job is I lead a k twelve school in Gainesville, Florida at the University of Florida, thirteen hundred students. Toneca and I are on the same campus there. Go Gaters. Yeah. Hey, there you go.

Yes. And, we have a happy group of thirteen hundred students and a faculty of one hundred and fifty. But I haven't lost my love for higher ed and I was lucky to connect recently with honor lock because I truly believe in their solution and was a client of theirs for a number of years. And so you'll hear me, sing the virtues of honor lock without sounding like an infomercial. Really this is about the students and, our shift to online learning during the pandemic.

We were with another solution provider, the University of Florida in March of twenty twenty, and they were taking care of about eighty to eighty percent of our volume for online proctoring. It was a live proctoring outfit. We were experiencing student, delays of anywhere from ten to twelve minutes in terms of connecting a student with a live proctor. We all know the anxiety associated with taking a high stakes test. We're waiting.

The last thing we wanna be thinking about is an extension, meeting another human, trying to get into another application. We're thinking about the content and the course and wanna perform our best on an assessment. And so, we were looking anyway, but when the pandemic hit we really needed something that was much more seamless, was provided for a much greater student experience, that had a nod towards equity and access. And thankfully, they say that, necessity is the, mother of invention. We we found honor lock.

We had been doing some work with honor lock on a pilot basis. And so we already had some relationship But as a result of, the pandemic, we move quickly from that eightytwenty relationship to almost overnight with just a couple of weeks as we put, sixty thousand students online. We went about eighty percent volume with honor lock and our rates of use increased about five fold overnight. And we were not disappointed. It's not an overstatement to say We could not have kept continuity and operations at the University of Florida had it not been for honor lock.

We didn't miss a beat in terms of our course delivery. Our students, kept, their course pacing. We didn't have, time away. We made an easy shift. We were already, a canvas university.

All of our grade books and course announcements and course scheduling was already done through Canvas, so there were shells in place and ready to go and to be populated. And of course, honorlock integrated right into that. But the, thrust of this presentation is really about the silver lining of the pandemic in terms of the faculty perceptions and the student perception of online learning. We all know in working in colleges and universities. There was a lot of reluctance by students and faculty to go online and many of them, we we know them had this epiphany that, we've been twisting their arms to try online learning and discover its virtues, but it took them having to go online and this forced experience for them to to gravitate towards it.

Now students tell us almost half of them that they would prefer and given the choice between a face to face experience or an online, fully online experience or a hybrid experience, forty nine percent of them according to a recent, report by Barnes and Noble's college insights would prefer a hybrid experience. And when you dive deeper into that data and ask students, well, what do prefer about hybrid, they like the interaction with other humans in a face to face setting. They like the interaction with a faculty member when it is truly interactive. But on things like, performances, whether individual or in assessment situations where you're not interacting with anybody. There's really no need to come together, and in a place like, Gainesville where Students are, often driving their, moped or scooter or bicycle or walking.

In the evenings or in the rain. It rains just about every day in the summer. It's an inconvenience. And I'm sure, like, my campus, your campus you have parking issues. And so, you know, to create an efficiency, students are, asking us more and more and in a environment where we're listening to students and their experience and trying to meet their needs.

We are moving more and more our, assessments online. So again, forty nine percent are telling us that they prefer a hybrid experience. This, along with a recent survey from chief online office further makes the point that, online is is where we're going, due to its flexibility, convenience, and ease of scheduling. One of the, great things about the honor lock solution compared to our previous vendor is that, there is no need for advanced scheduling. So students who often have part time jobs or other commitments and may not know where they're gonna be two weeks or a month from now in terms of their schedule.

Don't need to advance schedule to take their exam. Within the window that their faculty prescribes, they go in. They seamlessly integrate in through Canvas in our in our case and go right into their assessment while the online proctoring work seamlessly behind the scenes without any jolt or, any interruption in their experience when they're focused on their assessment. We also, while we obsess about the student experience and students, we're also very mindful of the faculty experience And this is something again when we talk about the silver lining or the unintended positive consequences of having lived through the pandemic and having to go remote and discovering, honor lock at scale, our faculty really benefited. Faculty want to, in our case, at University of Florida really focus on their research and on their teaching.

They wanna be very efficient about it. They, tell us over and over. They don't want to spend hours creating assessments, monitoring assessments, monitoring reports about assessments. These are not why most of us went into higher ed, became academics or became faculty members. These are things we have to do.

So if a, technological solution can create those efficiencies, our faculty are very happy about it. Eighty nine percent, when surveyed say that, assessments in general take a lot of time to develop. They take a lot of time to, validate and make they're reliable. They have then they take a lot of time to monitor. One of the big values that we saw at University of Florida in terms of using an online solution provider like Onnerlock is it protects the sanctity of the exam.

After faculty members spend countless hours developing an instrument. They want to be able to use it or parts of it again without it being distributed to the universe. And so by, monitoring the student behavior so that exams and their sanctity are kept intact in the system, this, ensures that exams don't leak out into the universe and and can be kept, valid and reliable. We also consider our institutional requirements in terms of, Sure what happened there. Technology's great when it works.

Well, pardon me here. Talk amongst yourselves there. I think I just lost the connection there. There we go. Yes.

The, you know, in the administrative function of a university. You have lots of considerations, and you think about the students that we talked about, you think about the faculty, but you also think about the needs of the institution, the reputation, the, perception about optics, about, how seriously, the institution takes, academic integrity. And being familiar with multiple higher ed institutions, it does vary about how seriously institutions take integrity. I I can report at the University of Florida. We we don't just talk about it.

We really want it and need to work. We we have been working for about a decade on reputation, and we've been on a sort of meteoric rise into the top five public universities, in the country. And one of the pillars of that ascent was really our reputation and our standards and academic integrity. And so I had a lot of pressure from the provost and the president Brian, make sure this works. You know, it's not just to have the solution and everybody act like it works, but there has to be efficacy And, as my honor, lot colleagues know, we, were obsessing constantly and always doing studies about whether or not the solution truly worked.

And one of the reasons I got so excited about partnering with Honor Lock is because I wholeheartedly believe in the solution that it that it did preserve and it does ensure academic integrity. Okay. So, we we talked about the ability to meet the students needs and expectations and that, another sort of silver lining or unintended consequence of the pandemic is that we, had this discovery that it was, when we moved fifteen thousand to sixty thousand students online that a lot of faculty feedback were, things like, well, I can get more instant results from my exams, using more you know, auto graded technology driven features, or I can use more computer generated testing where they can get random items and less than the time of the student experience, for the students, which was a positive This should come back on here. Which was another benefit for, faculty to improve learning outcomes. And so it wasn't just the process that was, valuable.

It was also the fact that teaching and learning outcomes could be improved. And lastly, and this is, something that I speak with my Erlock colleagues a lot about is that having this in place is something that preserves, financial aid, federal financial aid assurances from the federal government that we have to know first and foremost as an institution that we have the student of record in front of us and that we have way to validate that beyond just a single sign on username and password. The accreditors are increasingly looking at us in terms of knowing that the student that's receiving financial aid is indeed the student, having the experience And, the honor lock solution helps in that by, having them show government issued or school issued ID, making sure that there's a match between the student who's having the experience and those that are taking the exam, and then making a document of that. So the accreditors were really appreciate that. So, you know, lots of advantages in assessing online, as noted earlier, it provides for tremendous student flexibility.

It's infinitely scalable. Again, we I told you briefly our story in Gainesville about going from fifteen thousand to sixty thousand students overnight and four or five x volume of assessments almost instantaneously. Again, we didn't miss a beat on that because you don't have, you don't have the scale issues that you might with other considerations. Saves faculty time. I'm gonna talk specifically about a study about that.

That, increasingly is something that's, increasingly important as faculty have more and more burden in terms of their responsibilities. And at the thrust of this presentation, really unintentionally, we we were preparing students for, being more successful as remote workforce, candidates. I have some data here in a minute that shows you how much of the world, by the year twenty twenty five, just two years away will be remote work. And while this wasn't a central thrust of, assessing and teaching online, we are noticing the positive effects of, students being more individually accountable and having a higher sense of agency managing their own time better. You know, scheduling themselves so that they're more independent and not reliant on a course schedule.

So again, lots of benefits. Working collaboratively across networks, remotely, These are all things that many of us do. How how many of you just, out of curiosity are remote work, folks now? Yeah. So a good number in this room. And sure.

And that number will increase according to the trends that we're seeing from the research. And again, you know, in terms of accessibility, in equity, there are a lot of advantages for a university for having assessments at a distance. It limits our tendencies, you know, all of our implicit biases that we have face to face are, human interactions during tests. All those, are go away during online, assessment because a level playing field is created with an AI plus a human if you need it, but it's a judgment free context in which, the student is being assessed. So there's lots of equity and accessibility issues.

Not to mention the obvious about folks with mobility issues, not having to, get to buildings and, into auditoria and classrooms. It's there accessible on their terms where they are when they need it. And of course, most importantly, it has to work, and this is the tool to uphold integrity for not only that class, but also the institution. So again, just, a plug here why so many of, my colleagues and so many institutions are choosing honor lock. It enables an honest humane way to test and uphold academic integrity.

Just a few stats. Four point five, four point five out of five on g two software review. One point six million chrome extensions have been successfully installed. Three hundred plus, college and university customers, twenty four million exam sessions proctored. Two hundred and twenty two thousand courses proctored.

Thirty thousand exam administrations. Otterlach has, a couple of hundred dedicated team members many of whom are here today. And, proudly in the top two hundred of, Inc magazine, in terms of the impact in the southeast. So, very reputable company growing and doing great things to, help colleges and universities. Scalability, of course, is the key.

We talked about that earlier, with all of the plans that presidents and provost and chief academic officers have, with the future, this fits right in with Canvas and, with the LMS in terms of being infinitely scalable. I talked a little bit about this at the outset of the talk, but this is a study done recently, with over eight hundred exam sessions. And, one of honorlox partners. Again, with being so sensitive about faculty time, for every one hundred exam sessions, it would take a faculty member going through each of the flagged incidences where there was a possible breach of academic integrity, about five hours for every hundred session. That can be reduced when the technology can bring just to the faculty's attention, those that are clear violations of academic integrity.

So not just that there was something that was possible or suspect, but something that really needed to be brought to the attention of the faculty to be addressed with a student. And take a look at a particular instance. And when that service is provided by our lock, it drives down that five hours to less than an hour for faculty members. And so extrapolated over the course of a semester, honorlock has found that it saves each faculty member about eight and a half hours of time per semester. Well, that's about three weeks' worth of class sessions.

That's a tremendous amount of time. A day's work that could be done on research or meeting with students or developing more engaging lessons. So that's not an insignificant, amount of time that's given back to the faculty. In terms of what they're saving. That represents an eighty seven percent reduction in review time.

Again, we spoke about, the strengths that Underlock has in supporting equity and access, it helps to support an equitable access for students, in all sorts of ways, and and we talked about that. You know, physical disability, the, you know, the phobias that students have about being in groups and crowds. Not not to mention the, issues in play when you have people that don't know each other have relationships that are often called on to be proctors and grad students, those those all go away and it's turned over to the professionals. What what we said we liked about it the most at at Florida is that, you know, proctoring and monitoring of academic integrity was not our core business, you know, being outstanding researchers and instructors. That was our core business.

And so we'll turn that over to the pros to, let them partner with us and take care of that aspect for us, and we will reap the benefits that it has for equity and access. So again, looking towards the future and thinking about our students, and where they will be working and serving increasingly. We're preparing whether we know it or not for a remote workforce. Here here's some statistics that you might find interesting. I certainly did when, we put this together.

Company this year are rapidly increasing their investment in technology and digital tools to support a hybrid workforce. We weren't really ready for that in a lot of cases and a lot of industries during the pandemic. But now that we've gotten a breather and assessed and made strategic plans and learn from the virtues of the pandemic, you, Boston Consulting group tells us that increasingly, companies are going to invest in this. Between, the pre pandemic levels and two thousand and twenty five, just two short years from now. There's expected to be a four seventeen percent increase in remote work.

And again, Think about the student experience in terms of setting their own schedule. They are managing their own time, They are remotely connecting with, their peers and their faculty at a distance These are all transferable skills to those of us that have worked remotely. We know that this is the way the the world works. So in summary, we're really doing students a disservice by continuing to teach in traditional classrooms like this. And then the world is the data shows us it's going to increasingly expect that they be remote or hybrid and, many of the, tools that we're putting in place, including online proctoring are benefiting students, even though that might not have been a primary aim of it.

It's certainly helping, develop a competent skilled and confident workforce. Eighty nine percent of companies have already introduced work, remote working and have developed around this according to KPMG. So student preparation is fundamental. The work habits that they develop, the fostering remote collaboration that we talked about and mastering, tech skills and software, both hard and soft. Are are key.

Just some tips, especially those of you that are instructional designers in terms of helping prepare your students the, you know, the more that we can put students in the driver's seat and in charge of their own learning and, you know, in charge of their own destiny in terms of their education, the better off, they are and the better off, higher ed and and our institutions will be. So you know, fostering this sense of agency and independence for students is key. And developing collaborative partnerships among students, you know, not many of the world's problems, not many of, companies or or higher ed's problems are solved in isolation. They're about people with different skill sets working together and, promoting this kind of, arrangement among students will certainly benefit them. So I really appreciate your attention to this.

And, thank you for, your enthusiasm around the subject and and your care for students Oh, thank you. Thank you. That's kind. That's kind. That makes me feel good.

Are there any questions or comments or insights that anybody has to offer? We'll be happy to field them. And I've got great honor lock colleagues here. If you have any questions about the solution. They can help answer it too. Yes, ma'am.

Yes. That one hundred and seventeen percent increase is a You know, this was a Forbes study. This was I I believe Fortune five hundred companies. So it was large industry fields. It was where that number derived.

Yeah. I don't think it was a sweeping across all industry number, but it represented represented the biggest companies. Yeah. Yeah. Great question.

Any other questions or insights? Well, again, really appreciate your, attendance and your participation If you have questions about honor lock, I'll put my contact information or you have several several representatives in the room. I'll be happy to stick around, and maybe some of them will as well, and, we'll tell you more about the great things about Underlock. Thanks for being here, and have a great evening. Thank you.