Corina Santoro

The Evolution of Digital Learning: Crisis Breeds Resilience

Sr. Product Director, Milady

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Chris:

Now that’s quite the bio. We’re all super excited to have you, Corina. Thanks for being with us.

Corina:

Thank you for having me, excited to be here.

Chris:

Well, I’m going to turn it over to you. Here we go.

Corina:

All right. Awesome. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I am really excited to be here with you. Obviously, I’m Corina. So let me just share my screen and we will jump right in here. All right.

So we are going to talk today about the evolution of digital learning, crisis breeds resilience.

If any of you have heard me speak over the last year, you’ve heard some common themes. So we’ve talked about crisis opportunity and radical transformation. And in the last year, we’ve touched on the fact that crisis is really hard, but if we can dig in and reframe our thinking about it, then we can see the opportunities that it brings.

We’ve talked about the fact that our students are graduating into a different world, and we need to do things differently to prepare them for this new world. We’ve talked about the transformative power of authentic leadership and how we can really bring change in our schools by bringing our authentic selves to work.

We’ve talked about the fact that you don’t just wake up and become a butterfly, but you have to commit to going through that painful process of radical transformation. And, we’ve talked about the power of that little word, “yet.” I don’t do digital in my school, yet. I don’t do distance education, yet, and how transformative that can be for us.

And it’s really exciting a year later to be talking to you again, because wow, how you have dug in. And you’ve committed to getting through this transformative process. And just to show you some numbers, pre-COVID, about 20% of schools were really using digital. Now, we’ve got more than 60% that are fully using digital solutions.

Pre-COVID, only about 5% of you would tell us that you were doing hybrid programs or that you were planning to do future distance education. And you can see where that’s at now.

We are just across the board using digital, doing hybrid, having plans for future distance education. And I think it’s safe to say that digital is really here to stay in this whole space. And I want us to just take a moment and acknowledge, this has only been a year.

We have gotten through and embraced this transformation in not even a year. And so at Milady, we don’t even really see this as an evolution. We see it as a revolution and kudos to all of you for embracing it.

And while you’ve all done the hard work that you’ve had to do in your schools, we at Milady have been doing our own hard work. And we said to ourselves, digital platforms can’t simply be just enhanced. We need to really completely rethink them, so that we can give you the tools that you’ve told us that you need.

And we really believe that we’ve met those needs, and then some. And so today I’m excited to just give a quick sneak peek of CIMA, beyond better, our brand new digital platform that’s not even available yet. We’re actually releasing it to the general public on May 1st.

So you’ve told us that you need us to cater to your visual, creative students. And we’ve said, “All right, we’re going to give you a visually appealing, beauty industry focused, fully customizable, digital learning solution that you can add your own photos, your own colors, your own brand, even your own login URL, if you want to go that far.”

You’ve said to us, “I need my teacher resources all in one place. I can’t have you logging in everywhere to find the different things that I need.” And so we’ve said, “We’re going to give you lesson plans, instructor support slides, chapter teaching tools, transition guides, all in one place, all inside the CIMA course.”

You said, “I need collaboration tools to keep my students engaged.” And we said, “How about chat, messaging, group chat at the course level, message boards, assignment notes, groups and forums, and school announcements.” Those are just some of the engagement tools that you have to use with your students.

You’ve said to us, “It would be amazing if I could integrate my web conferencing tools.” And we said, “Zoom, Google Meet and MS Teams all integrated. And you said, “Well, what about attendance? Can I take attendance?” And we said, “Yes, you can take attendance.” Course attendance is integrated into CIMA as well.

You’ve told us, “My students want to create, I have creative students.” So we’ve made it easy for students to upload videos, PDFs, PowerPoints, anything they’ve created through CIMA so that you can then just grade them. And you can also break your students into virtual working groups through the platform.

You said to us, “My students get bored.” So we said to you, “Let’s use gamification.” Gamification will allow you to award badges and points for the completion of activities. And there are leaderboards. So students can see how they stand compared to how other students stand.

You said to us, “My students forget things. They miss class.” And so we’re saying, “Use the calendar and schedule events.” You can post announcements and reminders with the announcement and to-do widget. And students can sign up to receive all of these announcements on their cell phone, on their email, and within the platform.

You said, “I need ways to prompt my students.” And you can use all of those collaboration tools that I told you about to prompt your students, but you can also take advantage of CIMA’s robust automation tools to nudge your students. When they’ve completed things, when they’ve forgotten something, when they’ve been inactive. So you set the rules and forget about them, and let the platform do the work for you.

You said, “All right, all this is great, but I don’t have the time that it’s going to take to make the course what I need it to be. It’s clunky. It’s too hard to navigate. It takes too long to work with.” And we said, “We heard you. We understand. So now CIMA is configurable in minutes with simple drag and drop functionality.”

You told us, “I need my school’s content to count toward my student hours when it’s in the course.” So you can now seamlessly integrate your content into the learning path. It will show up as part of the course, and it will count towards students’ hours.

You said, “I need an easier way to add content.” And I’m saying, “Can you add a file to an email?” Because if so, you can use the building content management tools that allow you to build out activities and pages in just minutes. You have full control. You can add whole chapters, you can add content to existing chapters, you can make the course be exactly what you need it to be, to meet your schools’ requirements.

You told us that you need to build tests quickly and easily. So we’ve provided exam libraries that not only have Milady’s content, our course management guide and licensing prep content, but also allow you to upload your own test banks so that you can easily recreate and use exams across your schools and across your courses. And there’s a master library. So all you have to do is make changes to that master library, and then it will sync and push out to those courses.

You told us, “I need digital to work on all devices.” And we agree with you. So CIMA works on any modern device, any operating system. There are no technical requirements, other than having an internet connection. Plus, there’s a mobile app with full functionality for the entire course. So that’s pretty sweet.

You told us, “I need more languages.” And we said, “You got it.” CIMA supports 40 plus languages. We still need to build out the courses in those languages, but the platform now does have that capability.

You told us, “I need an easier course enrollment process. My students get so confused when they’re registering for a course, looking up the course key and the codes, and the PACs. And it’s just way too much.” And we said, “We get it. We hear you. Let’s just get rid of PACs because it’s not the 1990s anymore.” So now you can bulk enroll your students instantly into CIMA. You can add data like SIS ID, their legal name, anything that you need to have associated with that student’s record you now control. You can bulk enroll. You are empowered to control your entire enrollment process.

You told us, “My students are always forgetting their passwords.” And we get it because we all are forgetting our passwords, but with CIMA, you have the power to reset your students’ passwords and your instructors passwords—

Chris:

Hey everyone. It looks like Corina is frozen. We are calling her cellphone right now to hopefully get her back on. I know everybody was really excited about what she’s talking about and CIMA. So we are going to take a quick break and see if we can get her back on.

Corina:

All right. So now you get to see my green screen and you get no slides, but we’re just going to keep on going. All right?

Chris:

We’re going to make Slavic a panelist and he’s going to share the slides.

Corina:

Oh, fantastic.

Chris:

Yeah.

Corina:

So you know what? This is about digging in, right? This is what we’re dealing with working from home.

Chris:

You’re doing great. We’re happy to have you back.

Corina:

Oh my goodness.

Corina:

All right. Okay, there we go. Perfect. So let me know when Slavic is sharing the slides. I’m not sure if I see them. Oh, there he is. All right, Slavic. I need better control of my data. The slide before that, one more before that. All right, here we go. We’re back in.

So you also told us, “I need better control of my data. It’s too hard to get my data to send my reports to FAME, and Smart and Genesis.” So we said, “We’re going to give you one click, pre-built reports that will give you the exact data that you need.” And we will continue to build out the report library as time moves on.

You also told us, “I need my reports more often.” And we said, “Welcome to self-service, anytime, anywhere reporting. You can automate your favorite reports and run them whenever you need them daily, weekly, every hour, if you want to. You have full control over your data.”

You told us, “I want to integrate with my student management systems. And we said, “We can do that too, because with CIMA, we support API Integration. So any platform that also supports API Integration, we can integrate with. We also support LPI and SSO Integration.

You told us, “My instructors are always changing. I need more control over their accounts.” So we said to you, “You can add, and you can delete instructor accounts as needed. You have full control over that.”

You told us that you need the time in the app to count towards your hours. It’s confusing for students that when they go to try to use the MindTap app, those hours don’t count. So we now have improved time tracking that counts hours on all devices.

You also said to us, “Guess what, our students cheat.” So, while we can’t stop all cheating. We are excited to bring you some tools that can help with that. So, you can password protect your exams, and you can change that password as often as you want to. You can take it a step further and you can enable safe exam browser. So, this will not only require a password, but it will also lock the browser down while they are taking the exam. You can also set IP restrictions and we do not allow simultaneous platform log on. So, those are the tools you can take advantage of.

You also said to us, “I wish I had enterprise level roles and permissions.” And we said, “Now you do.” CIMA has multiple roles that will allow you to meet the needs of your schools with different permission levels.

And of course, you’ve said to us, “What about data security?” And we say to you on that, “Data security is absolute table stakes. You should not even be in the digital learning game if you don’t have data security. But we are a hundred percent cloud hosted on the Amazon web services. We do have redundancies built in, we’ve got copies in multiple data centers with automatic sale rollover. We’re designed for fault tolerance. And there’s automatic daily backups in multiple locations. So rest assured that your data is secure with CIMA.”

You’ve also said to us that sometimes the customer support team doesn’t seem like they understand Milady. I call them and they’re just confused. And we have felt that pain point. And so we’re very excited that we have added to the Milady team, a dedicated CIMA support team, and they’re actually on my team. So, we’ll be very integrated in supporting you with the CIMA system.

And now quickly, let me just tell you what hasn’t changed. What has not changed is our content. Our commitment to superior content quality is absolutely unchanged. Our content features that you’ve told us you love, like Readspeak and animations and PowerPoints and flashcards, those haven’t changed. Those are all still there. Our relationships with you and our commitment to those relationships with you, that is also unchanged.

Our pursuit of excellence and continual evolution, that remains unchanged. And lastly, our commitment to radical transformation. As our industry continues to change and evolve, we will continue to change and evolve, and we commit to you to continue doing that.

So very quickly, what’s coming? New videos, because we know that our students love new videos. Answer keys for the digital assets. Of course, digital activities are auto graded, but you’ve still told us that you want answer keys and we’re providing those. New partnerships; watch for these because we’ve got some exciting things in the works.

And then also, when is CIMA available? So it’s available on Cos today. We’ll be really it out officially the first week in May. Esthetics in May, and then you can see nails, barbering, massage, and professional educator, which is the evolution of our master educator title, will be coming mostly throughout the summer and the fall.

So I want to leave you with, you stepped up and we stepped up, too. Our industry has moved forward, and we are excited that we’ve been able to move forward with you and bring you CIMA; sleek, sophisticated, and super smart. And so if you’d like to learn more and get on the waiting list to get an invite, to see CIMA, please feel free to go to milady.com/cima. And thanks for bearing with me through some technical difficulties as the power and the internet went out.

Chris:

You know what? You nailed that. It’s perfectly on time, power outage, somebody else getting the slides going, well done Milady and my Oozle team. That worked out great. With that challenge, so, well done. My goodness. I can tell from the chat that people are really excited about this new product, CIMA.

Now, this is just my own personal question. Is this replacing MindTap? Is this the new MindTap?

Corina:

Yeah. Eventually, yeah. So this is the evolution and the courses that we’re currently making available are courses that exist on MindTap. And when we released the 14th edition of Cosmetology in December, it will only be available on CIMA.

Chris:

Got it, got it. Okay. Again, a lot of people are saying, “I want it. I want it. I want it.” They’re excited for it. milady.com/cima. Corina and Slavic. Thank you. Well done. Thanks for being with us. We’re happy to have had you. Thanks so much.

Corina:

Thank you.