Webinar: A Data-Driven Approach to Sexual Violence Prevention Training

Transcript:

Michele Collu:

I'd like to say hello to everyone, and welcome everybody to today's webinar where we'll be discussing a data-driven approach to sexual violence prevention training in the field of Title IX compliance, of course. And again, I'd like to thank everyone for participating today in this event on behalf of Get Inclusive and, of course, of myself. For those of you who don't know me yet, my name is Michele Collu. I have recently joined a team here at Get Inclusive as a senior compliance advisor.

In a former life, I used to be a corporate attorney in Italy, but I've worked in the US, focusing on the higher ed Title IX/Clery compliance space since early 2015, first with CampusClarity, where we helped hundreds of campuses get up to speed with the Campus SaVE Act and then later with EVERFI, where I led webinar campaigns up until about a year ago. And throughout this journey, I've been always focused on organizing, promoting, and hosting informational webinars on topics that are important to all of you.

So here I am today launching the first higher ed webinar for Get Inclusive, a company and a team that I am very excited to be working with again, and I'll give a little more detail about that in just a second. The promotion of this event has also given me the opportunity to reconnect with many of you that have been in contact in the past in my previous endeavors, and also make some entirely new connections. I have to say, and this very sincerely, that the responses I have received to my communications in the last few days have been truly heartwarming. So please allow me to thank you one last time for attending our first Get Inclusive webinar today.

And now let's jump into it. Right on the screen right now there's a number of housekeeping items that I would like to walk through with you. We will send a recording of this webinar about 24 hours after the live event. We say it now, because we know it's one of the most frequently asked questions, so there it is. All the resources that you see referenced during the presentation, including the slide deck, will be shared with you after the webinar. We will also be running polls, and we will share the results with you. We do encourage you to participate, it's a pretty cool way for us to engage with you and also for all of you participating to engage with the rest of the audience, and so that's the reason why we do them, and again, you'll see more of this later. And number four, please do submit questions.

If you've already been on our webinars, you know this, but on the right-hand side of your screen is a chatter box. You can type your questions there, please feel free to plug them in at any time. We will try to address the ones that we can during the webinar, but should we not be able to do so, they will be addressed shortly thereafter. So by all means, please type them in. And last, I would like also everyone to know that the last 15 minutes of the webinar will be dedicated to a brief product demo, and we obviously hope to see as many of you as possible over at the end. I think we're ready for our next slide, here it is. And so I teased a little bit about this in the introduction.

I am very excited to be introducing these three people on the slide right now. The four of us have worked together previously in the past at CampusClarity and EVERFI. And I will start, of course, left to right. Dr. Carmen Poole. Carmen Poole is a director of content at Get Inclusive. As a researcher and writer, Dr. Poole develops curriculum and assists in the design of inclusion-oriented compliance programs. She earned her PhD from the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Then there's, of course, Jeremy Beckman. Jeremy has spent the last 10 years telling stories, designing, and coding instructional interactivity, and leading teams in the creation of award-winning learning experiences that strive to change behavior and improve job performance. He and his team have built courses for some of the most incredible organizations in the world, we're listing a few here that you may recognize. There's Stanford, Airbnb, Yale, Guidewire, Namely, Harvard, Coca-Cola, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

And last but not least, is Preston Clark, whom you may have heard a little bit during the intro and soundchecks. Formerly assistant general counsel of the University of Miami. Preston led the team at CampusClarity and LawRoom before becoming president of EVERFI's higher ed division in 2016. Preston recently joined Get Inclusive as president of its higher ed division. And onto the next slide. Great, so as said, the webinar today is hosted by Get Inclusive, so I just wanted to quickly say a few words about us. We're the fastest-growing Title IX compliance training company in the country.

Our product team, whom you see featured here and from whom you will hear today, has built award-winning prevention and compliance content used by hundreds of colleges and universities, as well as Google, Amazon, and other very well known companies. And here is just a quick overview of the comprehensive Title IX training solution that the company offers that we will provide further detail of next. So that's, I think, all from me, and I'm ready to kick it off to you, Preston.

Preston:

Awesome, Michele, thanks so much. It's been a while since you and I have done a webinar together, my friend, so thank you so much for hosting today and for promoting this event on our behalf. Thanks, everyone for joining. For context, there are about 150 or so folks on the webinar today. As Michele had mentioned, we're going to be doing a couple of polls throughout that are helpful for us, and hopefully helpful for you. We'll share the data back. The entire program should run about 40 minutes, so we might give you about 10 minutes of your day back. We know that summertime is an interesting time in higher ed.

It's a time and opportunity for all of you to catch up on things that you don't always get to during the course of the academic year, but we know that even that time is limited and valuable. So it's a big deal that you would spend your time, valuable time, with us today, we'll try to make it very much worth your while. Here's the agenda that we're going to talk through. A brief history and future of Title IX compliance training. This is information that maybe you didn't know you wanted or needed, but I promise it'll probably answer a bunch of questions for you about what courses are available in the market.

This isn't about Get Inclusive today, this is about what's available to you. So we're going to get to the heart, or the meat, of the webinar, which is a data-driven approach, but we wanted to start with a foundation of the state on what's available to you in the market today, how it's being used, how it's evolved. We're going to talk about where do we go from here, 'cause we see some limitations in how the markets evolved and how the training content has evolved as a result of the market.

We're going to talk about a data-driven framework, which is presumably why many of you have joined today, and talk about ways that either within the existing programs you have now or with other programs that you may be building internally, or partnering for, can just have a more adaptive approach, more impactful approach to sexual violence prevention, both at the student level and at the faculty-staff-employee level. And then we're going to hear from Jeremy Beckman and Dr. Carmen Poole, both who were involved early days in some of the most widely adopted prevention programs in the country, including Think About It, including anti-harassment training courses used by Google, and Amazon, and others.

Truly when Michele said it was an honor for him to be working with this group again, it's certainly an honor for me, as well. These are two of my favorite human beings on the planet, and certainly two of the most talented people I've ever worked with from a prevention and compliance perspective. Jeremy is a bit under the weather today, and his voice was cracking when we were speaking earlier, so hopefully, we'll get some insights from him. Dr. Poole, I think, will be leading the fourth section of the agenda. I'll then sort of do an intermission, this will be the last 10 or 15 minutes, where we'll talk about some of what Get Inclusive is doing.

By no means do you need to stay for that, if you all need to take off, you can. I'll make it clear when we've transitioned into that section, and then we'll talk about other ways we can help you to close out. So first things first, I made a mistake, I'm going to own this right out of the gate. When all of you registered, we asked, we were curious who you all are using for Title IX compliance training. The reason why is that as we get into this first section and talk about the history of how we got to the place we did, and how the products how evolved that you are using today, this was valuable and important information to us.

I didn't give you enough options, and so I'm sorry, when 55% of the people select other, we know that whoever designed the survey didn't design it very well, so if it's okay to kick us off, I'm going to do this survey one more time in the form of a poll. I'm going to open it up to you, and then we're going to dive in to more meaty content. We're getting off to a slow start here. So let me open up this poll, really quickly, I'm going to leave it open for about 45 seconds. If you're at your computer, or if you're multitasking, if you can just come back and engage with this really, really quickly, and then we have one more quick poll and then we're going to jump into the substance.

I left off Get Inclusive, so I know many of our customers are on here today, but we are, though fast-growing, we're still new to the market, we're only in 150 campuses, and most of the people we engage are not our customers, so this is very much an awareness event for us. We're going to, we're about 63%, thank you, means a lot when we can get that level of participation. So I'm going to close this in five, four, three, two, awesome, okay, and let's take a look at where we're at. Okay, so I did it again. So 45% of you are using other. Not surprised for a multitude of reasons we'll talk about, EvERFI is the leader in this space from a product-adoption perspective.

SafeColleges and Student Success, which many of you may now is now under a single umbrella, is 11%. For those of you who I didn't hear from, or who didn't have the other option, or who want to actually tell me what their other is in the comment section, I'd love to be able to speak to that. I realize that many of you are probably doing this on your own, not using a vendor, which of course is great. But let me just take a look at the comments and see. My Student Body, that's great. Let me know who else, thanks to Aaron for that. Who else you're using, Spark, EVERFI, oh that's right, yeah, the SUNY/CUNY has its own, couple others of you have built your own, which is great.

STI, trying to figure it out now, that's great, no problem. Okay, cool, so that's super helpful, we're going to do one more really quick one that relates to challenges. So part of what we're going to talk about today is where we see the inherent challenges and limitations of whatever solution you're using, whether it's internal or external, I think a lot of the problems are shared, and we'll talk about that today, ways to address them, ways to improve your program using a data-driven model. As a foundation, if you'll bear with me for one more poll here, we're going to do what are your biggest challenges. Going to launch that now, we'll leave this open for about 45 seconds. Measuring and demonstrating the impact of training. We know that this is a big deal.

We're several years in now, so for most of you, I realize that there's lots of change in higher ed, and there's a new Title IX coordinator every day seemingly, but for many of you, you've existed around the prevention programs and probably are underwhelmed by some, overwhelmed by others, but we know that measuring impact is a big deal. Training fatigue comes up a bit as we see repetitive the need to be training sophomores, juniors and seniors and whether or not that content is too much the same as what they would have gone through as an incoming freshman. I'll let you sort of read the rest there. The compliance mandates that we're seeing with Me Too legislation in California and New York, and other states, is we know keeping some folks up at night, as well. Okay, we're going to close this out. We'll share the results. Okay, so pretty even distribution, this was multi-select, hence the percentages totaling more than 100%. I don't know if there's a mass of insight, because this is such even distribution, but we will cover as many topics today as we can.

I really appreciate you participating in that. A brief history, and future, of Title IX compliance training. The information that you may know, so I suspect that I'm going to share some things you know and some things you may not know, but I promise it's going to be relevant to you in one way, shape, or form, is that we know that 2013-2014 is when Campus SaVE Act emerged and became a part of our new permanent reality. That was something that in many ways corporate America is facing now for the first time with massive increases in legislation under SV1343 in California, under the Stop Sexual Harassment in New York City Act, and as well as the New York State Harassment, where suddenly there's this ongoing, and in many cases, annual commitment to training an entire population.

It is a permanent workflow from a management perspective, it's hard to do it in a dynamic way that keeps changing and evolving, and so it's fascinating to watch corporate America now face what higher ed did in 2013-2014 through 2015 as a very expansive mandate came out, in this case around sexual violence prevention. What we then saw was a number of vendors enter the space, some of whom you've used, I realize that there's more options than this available in the market, but as a general note, there was a sort of a land grab, for lack of a better term, of Title IX coordinators, and deans of students, and VPSAs, and VPs of HR within higher ed, trying to figure out how to meet these new mandates, and a lot of vendors emerged very, very quickly.

Jeremy, Carmen, and I, and Michele were at CampusClarity through those early days, and then through EVERFI, and then we were a part of the acquisition of Campus Answers, so we lived through a lot of this and saw it firsthand. But then it got really interesting, and I don't know how many of you know about this, but I'm going to tell you why it's relevant to what's available to you today and maybe some of the limitations that you're feeling as you sort of navigate the market and your options to meeting and exceeding the Title IX compliance training requirements.

So what we have is we had TPG make a major investment in a partial acquisition of EVERFi. We saw Vector Solutions come in and acquire SafeColleges. And then shortly thereafter, Vector acquired Student Success and then shortly thereafter that Golden Gate Capital, another private equity firm similar to TPG, came in and acquired Vector Solutions. Why does that matter? it matters because what started as a well-diversified marketplace for a multitude of approaches to sexual violence education, which I think is in the best interests of higher ed, right, there should be lots of options available for you, there are conservative colleges, there are liberal arts, there's Jesuit, there are land grant institutions, there are large public, I went to law school at the University of Miami, there are privates that are out there, and it's not a one-size-fits-all market, but we are in a one-size-fits-all era, and it happened in this very, very quick way that is not well-publicized, we don't talk very much about, but effectively two private equity firms control now the entire sexual violence prevention market, which is just a fascinating thing to say out loud.

I don't necessarily think it's bad or good, I think it has some negatives and some positives we'll talk about, but I think what it does, and the reason why it's important, is that underneath the timeline, underneath the actions of what occurred there's another cycle that I think is worth talking about, because a lot of today is what's next, where do we go from here, and so Think About It is a course that Jeremy headed and built, which many of you may be familiar with, which I personally, and maybe very subjectively, of course, feel is one of the best courses ever built, if not the best course ever built for sexual violence prevention, and it was built a long time ago, actually started building it in 2012, but it saw rapid adoption, '14 through '16.

Numerous alternatives emerged, which is also good. So as much as we love what we saw with Think About It, it was important to have diversity in the market and that enabled course flexibility, and it enabled competitive pricing, certainly no one wants a monopoly in any market, and so the idea that there are other solutions that could push innovation, push price competitiveness was important. And then the consolidation chapter was problematic in my perspective for a couple of important reasons. And that is in part because what EVERFI needed to do, and love the people at EVERFI, had a great time when I was working there, but effectively what EVERFI needs to institute, as many of you have felt, 'cause over 50% of you work with them, was a one-size-fits-all efficacy model.

What I mean by that is that the pre- and post-model that is EVERFI necessitates that there be a single locked course format, which is great if it's a perfect course for all institutions, all sizes, which is impossible, and is also great if the world doesn't change, which it does. And what I mean by that is that whether it's social media, or the emergence of the post-millennial era, the student experience, whether it's community college, or four-year, or two-year is so quickly and rapidly changing that the notion of a one-size-fits-all approach is hard to swallow and is arguably not the best way to address it. And that's not a problem when it's just one option of many, but the consolidation meant that now almost 2,000 colleges and universities needed to sort of fall in line with a model that they may not have, quote-unquote, bought in to.

And then I think with Golden Gate and that acquisition, I don't know if it necessarily signaled the de-investment as it states here, I think that what it does is it's a centralization of two providers that had different approaches and if anything, it's a reflection of Golden Gate owns a holding company that is a training company that does literally every training you can imagine under the sun. So I think that nothing about that expressly is negative, but what it means is that the independent provider of prevention and compliance training in this space largely no longer exists. And that was, again, because of the rapid adoption. I think that that's an important context for all of you.

Now, the question is, where do we go from here? Because certainly, this is a topic that's important to all of you. It's important that we figure out how to continue to evolve and adapt, and we think that there are great ways to do that. The challenges that, as I mentioned, the consolidation presented, and so many of you, again, as more than half of you, or if you add up the percentages, let's say 70% of you on the webinar today are with one of the vendor providers that has been consolidated, the challenges are you have legacy content, there's no diversity there, and it tends to be that the courses exist for a period of time, and there's fatigue that comes with that.

You have reduced vendor influence and partnership, again, that's not speaking negative, it's just the reality that when your partner has to serve 1,400 other campuses and universities, it becomes harder to have influence over what the next iteration, of course, might look like, etc. It also becomes less adaptable, because frankly the network effect, what it really does, is that there's going to be a push towards the singularity. There's going to be no vendor wants to manage 750 different versions of a prevention program or a compliance program. The economics aren't in there, it's complex to manage, it's hard to maintain the customer relationships. So all of these things equated to less adaptability, which many of you may have experienced.

And then the technical debt and the disconnected systems that result as well just become problematic and that's the result of how this thing has evolved. The benefits, though, are clear. Sorry, one of the challenges I forgot to mention was pricing power, you also have less influence from a pricing and negotiation perspective when there are fewer options. The benefits of consolidation are, though, clear and they're very strong, is that what you have available to you now is a broad catalog. So your ADA course, you have your protecting minors courses, you have a sea of content that might meet very nuanced or niche requirements that your institution has and that wasn't always available.

For those of you who were looking at different solutions two years ago, three years ago, it was harder to find a vendor that literally checked all the boxes you needed to, well that's not the case now, with the consolidation that has been addressed. You get continuity. Listen, it's painful for you to even come to a webinar to hear about a new vendor, right. We don't necessarily want a lot of change, especially with vendor relationships, because you have to go through a sales process, and you have to get approvals and go through the chairman, and so continuity saves us a lot of time and energy. As a former assistant general counsel who got to negotiate those agreements, I appreciate that a great deal. Integrations fall into place, and things get locked in, which is great.

Data trends, for those of you who are looking closely at your impact data, having longitudinal data, year-over-year trends, that's an undoubtedly clear benefit to the consolidation. And then perceived network effects, and I put perceived because the idea of a network effect, similar to Facebook, I won't use that as a great illustration necessarily, but the idea that every new member improves the product experience. I think in some ways it does, in some ways it does not, which we're outlining here. But I think that's another benefit of the consolidation. So I pause now, the reason why you're here is to talk about where we go from here, and what some of the challenges are given the current model and the current consolidation.

So the reason why I spent 10 minutes walking through that foundation was that it needs to be understood why both we believe that a data-driven framework is the right one and why we think that that's probably universally agreed upon, maybe not everyone, but we think a lot of people agree that data-driven anything, applying a scientific method, applying rigor to your decision making to improve something over time is a relatively noncontroversial concept, but that there are lots of reasons now with the solutions that are available to us that that is harder to do. We think that there are ways that you can do that within the solutions you have, so this isn't meant to be a commercial about what Inclusive offers, or any other vendor or provider out there, but as much as to say that it's important that amidst the few options we do have available that we push in every way we can to take data inputs to improve it.

Candidly, I think that we're too many years into what was previously the Campus SaVE Act and the Title IX compliance mandates, we're too many years in now to have not evolved further. And I don't know if other people share that sentiment with me, but I think we were surprised that the market evolved and shaped the way it did. Granted, I was in the middle of it, Jeremy, Carmen, Michele, we were all in the middle of it. We were at CampusClarity, we were at EVERFI, we were part of the Workplace Answers and Campus Answers acquisitions, so we felt it, but we were still surprised that the seeming consolidation also limited innovation, and I think that that's been a negative downside that unfortunately many of you have had to bear. And so now we're saying we need more data inputs and we need to do then do something material with those.

Just to make this very, very clear and very brief at the same time, it's this idea that what are the data inputs that we have available to us as a campus? And as part of the webinar registration, many of you asked questions, for example, about climate surveys and we see those as something that very oddly became these separate entities that maybe you do every two years or every four years, but didn't actually influence the training, which we think is really, really unfortunate, because you have an opportunity to identify patterns, to identify gaps, to identify risks, to identify opportunities most importantly to reemphasize parts of your training. More emphasis on bystander intervention, more emphasis on opioid abuse, more emphasis on whatever topic is driving the risk and opportunity within your unique institution.

And so we go back with this idea of what it means to have a one-size-fits-all approach, and it doesn't allow for a lot of external data outputs we are a big proponent of including surveys and assessments both inside the training experience, as well as outside, and then leveraging that data in a very systematic way to influence your training year over year. And that may seem overwhelming, but if you have a partner that is able to support you in that, and this shouldn't be one person's initiative, right, the idea is that the training partner that you have should be adapting the content year over year, maybe in subtle ways, maybe in profound, and deep, and material ways, but the idea is that this should be getting better. Real-time usage analytics, usability studies, user customer feedback, focus groups.

We've seen that EVERFI's done some of that. We know that some of the other vendors have. We just think that there needs to be a lot more because we're not seeing enough iteration year over year. I know that iteration brings its own challenges because you can't wholesale change a course that has just gone through an entire student government approval cycle, and others, but we do think it's important to be very deliberate about what changes do occur year over year. What that allows for is that the process outcomes and Jeremy and Carmen will speak much more eloquently on this than I will in just a few minutes, is it enables you to update content, of course. It enables you to have an enhanced user experience.

It enables you to have scenarios, right, so much of the training and so much of what you all love about partnering with a vendor is to have these real-life scenarios that are showing student interactions, or faculty-student interactions, or whatever it may be, but they're doing it in a way that resonates with your population wherever you may be in the country. We see that as something that should not be built in a vacuum. As talented as Carmen, Dr. Poole, and Jeremy Beckman are, I think they'll be the first to tell you, as they probably will here in a minute, that so much of what they do is based on the data and the feedback that they're getting from students and from people like you on this webinar today, and so it's not composing the great symphony locked in an office somewhere, it's the idea that this is a data-driven approach.

And then I think the thing that I'm most excited about and Dr. Poole will talk about it is something that we're spending a lot of time thinking about, it's probably difficult for a school to do on their own, but the idea of adaptive learning. Meaning that at the institution level, the training is evolving over time based on data feedback, and even at the individual learner level. So adaptive pathways, this isn't for those of you who have been in the digital learning space for a while, this is not a new concept, but it's one that, for whatever reason, has not been well adopted in the sexual violence prevention arena, in a place where, quite frankly, it may have the most value. And so we'll talk about ways to do that, but we see that as maybe the final frontier, rather the next frontier, from an instructional design perspective.

I covered these, so I won't belabor that. So now the question is, where do we go from here? What's next, what's the furtherance? And with that, I'm going to pause here and hand this over to Dr. Poole. The idea is that what we're building at Get Inclusive, and this isn't exclusive to Get Inclusive, so I think the points that Dr. Poole's going to make you can hopefully adopt and bring to your own campus, but they've just spent the last several months building, and iterating, and planning for 2019 and 2020, and I think that the idea of both adaptive pathways and a data-driven approach within individual courses for an individual institution, we see that as the next frontier. I'm going to pause now, Dr. Poole, I'll let you kick this off. We would love to hear about your perspectives on what it means to integrate data into a prevention program, a compliance program, how you're thinking about it, and maybe what's in store for Get Inclusive in the future.

Sure, thanks Preston. Just listening to everything that you're saying, I'm sort of re-energized, this is really exciting stuff, and I'm really excited about the future. And I'd like to be clear that I'm speaking from the perspective of a maker. So I apologize if I get into details a little quickly, but I would like to speak sort of specifically to the question of product evolution within the data-driven framework that Preston has been talking about. I mean I don't want to go too far back, but I think it goes without saying to say that Think About It was informed by then-current best practices and research, and it was definitely ahead of its time as far as instructional and interaction design was concerned, which is really why the higher ed market took notice of it.

But as Preston had mentioned, Think About IT was released in 2012. And even though it was subsequently updated in 2014, it has since sort of remained largely unchanged. And so speaking specifically about bystander intervention, the modeling and the material around it, which is, I think, really important, especially given what we're talking about today, Think About It actually contains some bystander intervention content, but it was largely conceived to raise risk awareness that was associated with giant, huge, challenging issues associated with alcohol, and sexual violence, and drugs, and how to build healthy relationships. Now we know as part of the scholarly research that bystander intervention, one of the key determinants is being able to recognize what you're seeing is problematic.

In that vein, Think About It definitely provided valuable information and definitely provided modeling, opportunities, and practicums to help assist in the development of creating a functional knowledge base when it came to the kinds of issues that students experience on campus. Since Think About It, and I'm sure many of you already know this as a matter of course, but bystander intervention training has been accepted as the main, most effective method to encourage behavioral change on college campuses. When we look at what's necessary for active bystander behavior or creating that, or engendering that in an individual we were thinking of Voices for Change as bystander intervention training instead of prevention training that contains bystander intervention information or modeling.

So even though it addresses a lot of the same topics, but it does include other topics like hazing, it uses the topics as sort of vectors to explore active bystander intervention, and in a way that is intended to help learners figure out how they might go about adopting the kinds of things that are being expected of them. And this is a space that we spend a lot of time talking about philosophically, and sociologically, and psychologically, which is it's one thing to be very clear about what the expectations are, but it's definitely something else to get someone to that point where they're actually willing to meet the expectation. Getting back on track, sorry, I get really excited when I talk about this topic, Voices for Change was created to evolve the concept of what prevention could mean with an eye to this ongoing practical core values-based perspective.

As Preston intimated, we discovered that creating as many feedback loops as possible, that was also actionable was key to ongoing development and improvement. It's one thing to have the feedback loop, it's another thing to be responsive to the feedback loop. We're always, always, always talking about not just making a difference, but how to make a difference That's where thinking about responsiveness, and willingness, and flexibility, and adaptability really come into play for us as creators. So Voices for Change was and, I am happy to state, will continue to be informed by a broad spectrum of external and internal insights as Preston has described.

But a really quick, sort of easy example is in this bystander intervention space. So again, we know that it's effective in reducing rape myth acceptance, in increasing individuals' intention to intervene, but since 2016, 2017, 2018, there has been a great deal of research, scholarly research, and studies, and surveys, and interviews, and secondary and primary research that has suggested that one of the key barriers to bystander intervention is the social cost and that this is a very stubborn barrier. The research is telling us that if we want to actually move the needle in this space, we have to assess and acknowledge the fact that the social consequence of intervention, of bystander intervention, is significant and weighing heavily on student bodies.

This is what the data is telling us. While this is just a very narrow example, this is a great example within the scholarship realm that if we're not addressing that particular issue, then we are not creating the best program possible. So to be as obsessive as possible in this specific subject space, and I do want to sort of underscore that this is a very important, a very fraught, a very challenging space, and we have very unique and diverse audiences that we need to be willing and able to take a collection of data from a variety of sources and find ways to integrate it into existent content and ongoing learning experiences.

With Voices for Change, we spent a lot of time looking at bystander intervention psychology and digging into developing greater expertise in the space of curriculum development in this space, behavioral theories, sexual assault prevention research, and also instructional media best practices. I don't want to get ahead of myself here, because Voices for Change obviously it's mobile-friendly, it's optimized for accessibility, but when we talk about the feedback loop, we're not just talking about words on a page, we're not just talking about content from that really specific context, we're also talking about seat time, and making sure that we're making shorter experiences that are also engaging, concise but also servile. These are, especially in this space, we know that these are balancing acts, but all of the feedback goes into just a variety of different domains in the creation of a program like Voices for Change.

We also want to increase and maintain learner engagement with what we did was increase the video richness in the learning experience overall. And I feel like I have this need to share the whole idea of the research behind the eight-second attention span and qualify that by saying that, yes, we all have very short attention spans, but it's not really about retention, it's that we have a very short period of time before we actually choose to engage in a particular thing more than another particular thing. So it's not like we lose attention after eight seconds, its that we have eight seconds to engage somebody and get them into what we're doing and that kind of research, again, those kinds of insights are top of mind when we go into creating anything that we make here, and definitely went into the creation of Voices for Change.

Before I sort of hand this back over, I do want to say that the information that we are integrating, the information that we are seeking to integrate really does go beyond the superficial updates or aesthetic updates, but it also includes, obviously, ongoing legal updates, content updates, and just best practices across the board. We know that the early products in this space were information first, and that's because they were the first products in this space, so lead with increasing knowledge in the world, and that's an extremely valuable thing to do and it's just an extremely valuable contribution.

But now we believe and accept the fact that when it comes to creating the kind of change that we need for the problem spaces that we're all working with and navigating within, we need to explore and create emotional, and aspirational, and truly motivational experiences so that students feel that they are at the center of this engagement and that they themselves feel empowered to become agents of change when it's, not in general, but when it is necessary, and when it matters most. And I think that's super key in this Title IX space.

But in order to create this kind of experience, and to create it in a way that is truly effective, and I think that's worth underscoring again, we need to collect as much information from as many sources as possible, and this is something that we feel is extremely important and extremely valuable in this very particular space. So in my view, being data-driven in this capacity, in this space, in this manner is a best practice when it comes to learner engagement and learning experiences. That's all I have to say.

Carmen, can I ask you one, I will not ask you a, I won't necessarily put you on the spot here, but you said a number of interesting things. I love the eight-second rule. I love the fact that this course is shorter, I think in particular because I go back In time and I think about Think About It, and that was the strongest sort of feedback that we received was, we love 10 parts of it, but my gosh, it's so long. But inside of all of this, you said something, and again, I'm probably putting you on the spot a little bit here, and I apologize, but the notion that you can have a shorter course and it can implement a feedback loop model such that it can evolve and adapt over time, my experience has been that that was a nonstarter for other courses because of the way that they were constructed, or because of the way they were built, which effectively precluded you, 'cause you very, I'm not going to say this as articulately as you did, but you sort of said, it's one thing to listen, it's something else to be responsive, which is super insightful, but to be responsive is hard especially when it requires you to effectively break open a course or something that was packaged and reconfigure it. And so I'm not super technical, hopefully, there's an answer that sort of gives a quick understanding for all of us, but what's different about Get Inclusive, or what's different about the courses you're building that allows for that type of iteration?

Well, the quick answer from my perspective, and I don't know if Jeremy can jump on from a tech perspective, but at least from my seat aside from having an ongoing and, I would say, fairly rapid iteration conversation/discussion about what we've done and what we are finding needs to be done, from my seat it's, we're in a space where things are easier to change, and I mean that from a very material perspective. If we're getting feedback that is, I don't know, let me get an example, that a scenario is not realistic, or a scenario is problematic from a double-negative perspective, and I don't mean just from an editing perspective, but maybe there's a fundamental issue with that interaction or that scenario.

I think internally we are nimble enough and lean enough to be able to look at the thing, discuss the thing, and determine the extent of the edit, the change, the amendment, the update needs to be, whether that things need to be universal. And that was something that wasn't uncommon if there was an insight from a single source, but the insight was so valuable that the question then ended up being is this something that would make the entire experience better for everyone who uses it. I mean there's just this sort of list of considerations that we have to go through to evaluate, not just the veracity of insight, but how we might best employ it either at once or over time, or maybe it is significant enough to do it immediately.

From my position, there's an ability here to immediately react, and immediately respond, and sort of develop an immediate plan to address whatever issue, whatever new insight. I think the example that Jeremy and I had been talking about once upon a time was if you have a product pre-Me Too, and then Me Too happens, you have to look at what's going on in the world that students are living in right now. And so how much do we add? How significant is this change? How significant is the news? How significant, specific, and obviously meaningful to this space, it's not just pop culture references and creating evergreen-type content, but to actually say we're listening to the things that you're listening to, and we are responding to the needs as they evolve, and that the needs are not singular, and the needs are not static, nor are they in a vacuum. It might not be the best answer, but I'd say that there's a great deal of latitude, freedom, and agility that we get to use to do the best work that we possibly can for the most number of people that we can.

And Preston, if I could add real briefly from a technical and design perspective, we've architected our course offering environments for variability, specifically to be able to vary across industry, across audience type, and to be able to do this in a way that minimizes the need for engineering and development assistance on an ongoing basis. So we minimize that as much as possible, so, therefore, authors, designers, writers such as ourselves, myself and Dr. Poole, can actually go into and modify to a significant degree what we've made on the fly.

We really have at the core of the systems architecture the ability to evolve a system as author time. And I want to add, just very briefly, is that what we're also evolving our system to be capable of doing is providing the ability to tailor the experience at runtime, as well, in real-time. For example, if say in an assessment someone consistently gets the correct answer in our assessments, we have the ability to determine that maybe perhaps we could exclude a certain amount of information and therefore shorten the course, as well. Conversely, of course, if there's actually assessments that are providing an insight into the fact that maybe perhaps the user, the learner has not learned a concept that we previously taught them about, that we might actually add a little bit more supportive material to make sure that they do get it.

That's great. And I know through lots of late nights with you, Jeremy, in particular, years ago, that there were just some technical reasons that that reality, conceptually it's not a new idea, but there were just some limitations, especially at scale, across hundreds of campuses that precluded that. So just really super exciting to hear both of your perspectives on that. Jeremy, thanks for jumping in there, I know you're a bit under the weather today. And Dr. Poole, pleasure as always, thanks for that information. I think that we want to be sensitive to time, I told you that I was hoping to give you 10 minutes back everyone who's on, looks like that's not going to happen, so I apologize for miss-setting expectations on that. I think that the goal for this webinar was to introduce conceptually what it meant to intertwine data for the benefit of improved training year over year. So if I were to put a bow around this, I think we can all agree aspirationally that the training courses that we're deploying and implementing around important topics, like sexual violence prevention, should not be static.

I think we can all just generally agree that we need to move into a world where they improve. And maybe for you, and for your campus, that means using what you have now, but adopting other programs or complementary events, be them online or otherwise, that add value and supplement. And for others of you, it may be a wholesale change from what you're doing now to enable and allow for that, but I do think that the reason why the history of the market was so important to me, and the reason why that context was so important is that, I think for Dr. Poole, and Jeremy, and I, we wish that we were further along. We wish that the market was serving you better than it is today, and we'd love to partner with you to help that.

Whether you use us a vendor or not, we would love to assist you in accomplishing that type of data-rich environment where the courses and the programs are getting better. With that, I'm going to take all of three minutes, this is not meant to be a full product demo, but this is where I'll just sort of cut it off and say those who need to jump, you can. If you'd like a demO, I'll give you an opportunity to raise your hand in about three minutes for that. If you'd just like more resources, you can let us know. Again, this is not my goal to pitch you on anything today, but what we do, what Dr. Poole and Jeremy have built, and are building, with their teams for a full suite of both student and faculty-staff catalogs, modulized builds, version control, database, undergrad, NCAA, community college, grad students, this is a market that we understand. We understand the needs analysis. We understand everything from accessibility requirements, integration requirements, mobile-friendly, etc.

So this is just a space that we know really, really well, and we've built for that purpose. I won't go into detail, this slide is an eyesore, but I'm happy to share with you the bystander-centered focus that Carmen, Dr. Poole, mentioned today and how that manifests in the courses. Voices for Change is the student version. The videography that Jeremy has built, you've seen before, probably in other courses. It's engaging, it's dynamic, it's world-class, it's award-winning categorically. And from a technology perspective, we are head and shoulders above where we've ever been as a service provider before, so really happy about what we're able to do at scale. I think that that's mostly it.

The last question for those of you who would like to learn more from us, or those of you who would like to schedule a call, who'd like to see a demo, whatever you maybe, I'm just going to open up a quick poll that enables us to get that information in a fluid way back from you, so I'm going to launch that right now. I would appreciate even if the last answer is nothing at this time, that's totally cool, totally understand that many of you this is not a priority or that there are other things going on in your world that supersede this at this time. But would love as many of you to participate as possible. If you're looking for a new vendor, whether it's this year or for the spring, and you'd like to schedule a meeting, effectively we'll do a 30-minute call, understand what you're doing, walk you through what we have available, if it's a good fit we can take it from there. We do weekly group demos.

I know some people are like, ugh, I don't want to be on a sales call, which is fine, so we do group demos, which are effectively webinar formats like this one. If you'd like to be invited to next week's, or the week after, or the week after, let us know. That's a great way to dive deeper, to ask questions without necessarily being in the sales process. If you'd just like information, I know, again, you may be at a point in time where you're in year one of a three-year contract with a vendor, or maybe you're new to a role and not sure if this falls under your purview, we're happy to send information and again, if none of the above, let us know that, as well.

Things to expect from us next, we're about to hit the top of the hour, so we'll be doing another string of webinars more focused on the faculty-staff side, so if you have counterparts that are interested, we're going to be diving into specifically reconciling the New York and California, Connecticut just passed a new law around harassment prevention, how to reconcile those with Title IX requirements for your employees in the mandated states. We're also going to be publishing through our partners the 2019 Title IX compliance vendor guide.

We're probably not a good fit for every institution, and there are lots of vendor options out there for you, so we'll be sending that out. It sort of gives you an apples-to-apples comparison of the market and different ways to approach this, and hopefully, for those of you who are wearing a buying hat for products like this, that will be of use. And there'll be others, we'll be having guest presenters and others, so look out for emails from Michele for future webinars. We hope that this was a value to you today