Webinar on Clean Cities University (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Webinar on Clean Cities University presented on Nov. 25, 2014.

ERIK NELSEN: Hello everybody. Today we're going to talk about Clean Cities University and we're going to walk you through a new platform that we have for the University. With me I have Matt Rahill I want to give a shout out to and Matt has done a lot of the work that you're going to see today. And also Andrew Hudgins who is helping me with the live meeting software. So thanks Andrew for getting me connected so we could have this meeting.
So I'm going to move to our Login screen and I'm going to walk through it just as you would as a first time user of CCU. So first I'm going to give you a little bit of background. As you'll hopefully recall we took the old Clean Cities University down on about the 11th of this month following the last performance period. So any of you that had the complete courses for your LTI contract I'm going to make sure we had everything available for you to complete that.
A good time to take it down November is also a pretty slow month so it gives us plenty of time to move everything over to the new system. So what we've done in the meantime working feverishly is moving all the courses from the old platform to the new platform as well as all the user files. So that's your user files and also your course completions. So not only should you have an account on the new system if you had one on the old system but you should have all the courses that you completed in the old system available.
We're being told that those will all be available by the end of this week. So if you do go in and try to pull up some courses that you've completed in the past and aren't seeing all the completions that you had give another few days and if you aren't seeing what you think you should see go ahead and send us an email and let us know and we'll address those case by case.
Several coordinators helped us test in addition to internal people so I want to give a shout out to all those folks who helped us test over the last few weeks. I got some very good feedback from those folks and made some changes to the system. So everything should work well and we're going to continuously improve the system going forward to make sure that you have a good experience.
Most of the courses within CCU haven't actually changed so if you go in to see some of the ones that you've seen before you won't really notice a big difference. We have redesigned a few of the older courses that didn't play very way. So if you remember going in and giving—getting some sort of Java script error in the old system those are the courses that we have worked on and switched over to a new platform redesigned updated so they'll look pretty new when you go in and look at those.
There's also a new format that I'll show you so in the old system we started—we got to the point where we're adding courses in a couple of different formats webinars that we added quizzes to and videos. So the look and feel wasn't real consistent depending on which course you entered and that should be a lot better now in the new system. So the big news is that at the end of this webinar we're going to go ahead and send out an email to all the users.
So if you have an existing account for Clean Cities University at the end of this webinar we're going to send you an email and you will get an invitation and a link to the new platform where you can just go right in and enter a new password and start browsing. And the new system is actually live now but we'll consider it to be live at the end of this webinar. We didn't want to send it out too early because I'd rather have you watching me and paying attention to me and not going in and exploring on your own at the same time.
So I apologize for that but we thought it would be little bit better organized this way. If you don't have an existing Clean Cities University account you can go to ccu.cleancities.org and that'll take you to this page we're looking at right now. And as you see here in the middle you can request access to CCU. So that's where you'll be able to create a new account. Also when you do get the email from Clean Cities University if you don't have time to go in right away no problem and we know everybody's busy and it's a holiday week and you're probably trying to get some things finished up.
But save that email because it will have that quick link into the system that will avoid a couple of steps for you. And also when you get to this page bookmark it because this is the new place you're going to want to go to go to CCU and not the old one. We do have a redirect there so it'll eventually pop you over here but it's best to just bookmark this new URL.
And also the platform works best in Google Chrome or Firefox not so much in Internet Explorer it does work but some of the functionalities a little bit clunky in the Internet Explorer so we recommend Chrome or Firefox for the PC. It does work well on the Mac so if you have Safari on the Mac you won't have a problem with the software.
So I'm going to go ahead and Log in and we'll take it from here. So the first time you log in you'll see this little welcome message just kind of telling you how to use the system in a real quick way. And we also have a Quick Start Guide that you can access. It's a two pager PDF great way to just kind of remind you with the different parts of the system and how to get to what you need. And as you'll see down here this message is something you can turn off so if it gets annoying after your first or second visit you can just click this box and not have to deal with that anymore.
And you can turn it back on if you go to your account and reactivate it. So if you do want to have that nice little welcome with your name on it, it makes it feel real personal you can turn that back on.
Okay now the first page you're going to see here is your Home Page and this is Courses to Do. So what these are, are recommended courses or courses that you've already accessed. So you can see here I've got a few that I've started or partially completed and they're in this list. Now what this list doesn't include is any courses that you've completed. So that's the big difference between this list and the course library that we'll talk about in a little bit. And again the Progress Bar kind of shows you where you're at—where you at man—where you are in the course.
It's not real detailed so you'll see it's usually 66% or 33% because there are three main modules within each course and so that's all it's tracking is where you are with those modules.
So and then when you want to click and enter the course you just click it and you go launching right in. And I'm not going to do that right away but it's as easy as that. So the next thing I'm going to show you in the Course Library. So the big difference here is that these are all courses. So the entire library for Clean Cities University is here including courses that you've completed. Now we do have the library filtered a little bit. So if you're not a Clean Cities coordinator or Clean Cities staff we have limited courses just to those people.
These like Running a Coalition, Boards and Committees, Developing an AOP. If we have stakeholders in here for example we don't need to tell them how to run a coalition or develop an AOP. So we do filter this library just a little bit for that reason. One cool thing about the Library also is that we have popular categories here. So you might recognize some of these from the old CCU. The good thing about this new tool is that you don't have to find the category to find the course you can go by category or course and you'll also know—notice that there are multiple categories.
So if you're looking for something on natural gas you're not sure if it's under fuels and technologies or fleet topics chances are you'll find it under both. So that's a new addition that wasn't available in the old system. Okay. And I apologize for my hesitation I'm just making sure I don't skip over anything in my notes. We also—so we also have a search function right here. You can enter a topic a part of a course that you know is in the title or even in the description and you can get results that way.
Okay so we'll go ahead and enter a course. Now actually that's not the one I wanted to enter so I'm going to go back. I'm trying to find a course that I haven't completed yet so we can see what that looks like. So within a course you'll notice a real consistent look and feel. You'll see a course description which tells you what the course is about. So real quickly you can decide whether this is what you're looking for or if you want to go back out and try a different course.
And then real quick instructions on how to complete a course. If there are attachments to the course you'll also see a note about that and those attachments will be down here in the lower right hand corner under Additional Reference. So every course is going to consist of basically three pieces a learning module, a challenge review and an evaluation. So that's when I talked earlier about how courses are very consistent those are the three elements that you'll see in any course.
Now in some courses our—like our longer ones you'll see more than one learning module but otherwise you'll see these three elements in every course.
So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go ahead and launch this learning module. So that's what many people will consider the course that's kind of the meat of the course the part where you'll see pages and learn things and take quick little knowledge checks and page on through. So just a caution I'm going to go ahead and click on that now.
You'll see it can take a little bit of time to launch a course and depending on your connectivity your bandwidth and the size of the course this could take anywhere from a few seconds you can see this one launched pretty quickly to maybe even a couple of minutes. So be patient but also if it doesn't launch after a minute or two you can hit the Refresh button or Control R on your browser and it should reload it pretty quickly. So just a word of caution to be a little bit patient when you're trying to launch a module.
So I'm going to go ahead and page through this one a little bit and I have to scroll just a little bit to get down to the Navigation buttons just to show you what a learning module is like. And I apologize I can't get this on the entire screen because of my laptop screen size. So the—some of the coursers will play automatically and some of them you'll have to hit the next button. So you're probably familiar with that. Read some text there's actually audio. I don't know if the audio is playing on your end because I have mine turned off.
But you can kind of see how that goes. This is something you're probably pretty familiar with. I'm going to go ahead and fast forward to a Knowledge Check. One quick not difference between a Knowledge Check and a Challenge Review Knowledge Checks are within the course so they're just to kind of make sure you're paying attention and learning the things you're suppose to learn. And then the Challenge Review which I'll show you in a minute is actually the part that's scored.
So the learning module doesn't score anything it's just to give you the content and help you learn what you came here to learn. And then when you proceed on to the Challenge Review that's the part that scored that will give you pass fail result. So I'm going to go ahead and do that as much as I'm sure you're excited to learn about reaching out to the media we're going to move on.
So there are two ways I can do that. I can go to the next module which will take me either to the next learning module if there was more than one or it'll take me to the Challenge Review if there wasn't another learning module. If I hit Exit it's going to take me back to that main page with both the other two modules there. I'm going to do that just so I can show you we're back at that page. You'll notice here I've completed the learning module even though I didn't actually go through it all the way.
Some of the courses will let you complete it ahead of time and some of them you'll actually have to page through all the slides. And don't count on that as a way to cheat because you still have to pass the challenge review before you're going to pass the course. So I don't recommend you try that.
So that module is complete and once we get a Green button here for all three of these modules you will have completed the course. So just to show you what the Challenge Review looks like. It's going to be a series of questions it's going to show you a pass mark is the percentage of questions that you need to get right to pass the course. And multiple choice I'm going to—we'll get one correct here and it'll just take me onto the next one. And then if you get one incorrect you'll get a little message that says oh sorry you got this question wrong and here's the correct answer.
So that's kind of the way the Challenge Review works. All right I'm going to scroll down a little bit. I apologize if this is flickering on your screen. So the last thing we entered that I want to talk about is the evaluation. The evaluation is something that I've been wanting to do with Clean Cities University ever since I took over the program a couple of years ago and that is just getting your feedback.
So let us know what you think about the course whether you thought it was useful whether you thought the content was appropriate. It's a short five question survey. I'll go ahead and launch that to show you. And real quick again let us know, you know, was the information relevant to your job was it an effective to learn the subject matter et cetera. The last question is a fill in free text so you can just let us know anything else that we can do to improve that course.
So again I'm excited that we have this functionality now. I'm a little disappointed that the only way we could do it in this platform is to make it a required element. So I apologize for that. I hope that having to fill out an evaluation doesn't put you in a cranky mood and make you give us bad feedback because you're in a cranky mood. But we do value your feedback. We like to have that information so we can continue to refine courses and make them more valuable to you.
So when you get to a course that's complete I'm going to go ahead and find one that's complete so you can see what that looks like. And by the way if you have questions please hang on to them and we'll address them at the end and we're actually not that far from the end. So soon we'll be able to answer any questions that you have. I could have so am I looking in the right place? Yes I'm in the Course Library. I tell you what I'm going to go to Achievements because that's going to show me where all my completed courses are.
So Achievements will give you a couple of important things. It'll give you a quick list of all the courses that you've completed and it will also give you access to your certificate. So if you've completed courses for part of your contract requirements and you need to or want to have a certificate that you can send to your regional manager to show that you've completed courses you can do that here. I'm not going to open the PDF but you can see that it pops down a little PDF. It's going to have the date on it and it's also going to have your name and the course title.
So I want to get back out of that. Now again when you go into the system and it might not be today but within the next few days at least you should have all the courses here that you've completed even in the old system. So if you have a list of courses that you've completed over the years and you want to make sure everything is up to date go on in here and check and make sure everything's here and if not go ahead and give us a shout out and we'll look into that and make sure that you have that history correct.
All right I did want to show you a course that I have completed so let me go in here and see if I can find one real quick. Here we go Electric Drive Vehicles. So when you're in a course and you complete all of the modules you'll see this list of buttons each one will say complete. You'll notice that the graphic here is gone and the Continue or Start course is also gone. And what you'll see here is another short cut to download your certificate.
So at the end of the day if you're able to complete a course all in one sitting you'll click through each of these modules and you'll get right to your certificate to be able to download that. And I think that's about all I had.
So Operator if we can go ahead and open it up to questions I'd be happy to entertain any.
COORDINATOR: If you would like to ask a question please press Star 1 from your touchtone phone. Please unmute your phone and record your first and last name as this information is needed to introduce your question. Once again if you would like to ask a Question please press Star 1 from your touchtone phone. If you wish to withdraw your question please press Star 2. One moment to see if we have any questions.
Our first question is from Jonathan. Jonathan, your line is now open.
JONATHAN: Good afternoon Erik.
ERIK NELSEN: Hi Jonathan.
JONATHAN: Or morning where you are perhaps. Just the one—everything makes pretty good sense to me it's looks pretty nice. The one thing I noticed is you were just talking about one you had completed. And I think you went back Home and you were looking through the list and most of them were none or 33% but there was one showing 100%. I thought you said earlier that the ones that were finished would not show up in the Home.
ERIK NELSEN: Good catch and actually I didn't go Home if I had gone Home that course wouldn't have shown up. I went back to the Course Library.
JONATHAN: Got you.
ERIK NELSEN: So in the Course Library you'll see courses even that are complete and that one is here Electric Drive Vehicles. I'll show you in the Home if I page down to E there's no Electric Drive Vehicles. Now there is one exception and that is if we have updated a course it will repopulate in this Home screen.
So it's kind of a reminder to you that if you haven't seen it in a while there might be some new content on there you might want to check out even though you've taken the course in the past.
JONATHAN: Okay but otherwise ones that—so we should be able to find the ones we've completed and I can't thank you. A course—under Course Library or Achievements?
ERIK NELSEN: Yes the short list will be under Achievements because that will only be portions you've completed.
JONATHAN: Got you. Course Library is everything and then Home is just the ones we have to some degree started or the other particulars you said like something has been updated or.
ERIK NELSEN: Right and also what I said was recommended courses. So the way we get courses into that list we assign them to people or to teams. I don't like that term assigning your courses because that sounds a little too much like school. So I would just call it recommended courses. So it's courses you haven't completed courses you're in the process of completing.
JONATHAN: And are there any recommendeds sic in the Home area right now?
ERIK NELSEN: Sure.
JONATHAN: I just don't remember from you being there.
ERIK NELSEN: …right and it'll be different for everybody because it's not going to include any that you have already completed.
JONATHAN: Oh and the Courses to Do title is the recommended per se?
ERIK NELSEN: Yes.
JONATHAN: Got you. Okay. Thank you.
ERIK NELSEN: Thanks, Jonathan. Good question.
COORDINATOR: There are no further questions in the queue at this time.
ERIK NELSEN: Okay well I figured this would be a quick webinar. I welcome you to go in and play around with the system. I believe Matt has already sent out the email so you should be getting something very soon from Clean Cities University. There's also a link on the Home page at the very bottom.
I'll scroll down there. If you need help and it's just ccu@nrel.gov so that will send an email to both Matt and me and actually Judy who's here in the room. You probably remember Judy Deitchel from the old Clean Cities University.
She's the one that does all the hard work and gets the reports out and also troubleshoots any problem you're having along the way. So we will monitor that everyday and one of us will respond to you at that email address and Matt also has it on the screen right now. So please do that. If you have any questions we'll be glad to jump in and see if we can fix the system and make it a little bit easier for you to use or just help you through any issues you're having at the time.
And also don't forget the Quick-Start Guide from the Home page so that's kind of a real short guide that kind of walks you through what I did today.
All right and I think we're good.