Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Performance Assessment and College Admissions – How Students Show What They Know and Can Do. The webinar is being held as part of the Reimagining College Access Initiative, a partnership with Education Council and Education First, which believes that high-quality performance assessment, if organized in an easily reviewable form, could be used as an additional source of information about students' achievements and potential for post-secondary success in college admissions, as well as for placement decisions or advising. We are excited to see so much interest in the use of the performance assessment. We have over 300 people registered, from admissions officers to high school counselors to teachers, principals, nonprofit college access staff, researchers, and more. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, we give a few minutes to make sure everyone gets logged in and online. We'd love to hear from you all who have already logged in, and we'd love for you to just kind of experiment with the chat function to let us know who you are, your name, your organization, region you're from, state, or even if you attended the webinar we held last time. You can engage in the discussion in the chat throughout the webinar, just not right now. Right now we're playing with it. We'll be listing resources in the chat as well. If you have questions, please submit them using the Q&A functions. I'd also like to let you know that the webinar is being recorded. A video recording along with a summary of the webinar content will be emailed to you in a few days. The slides are currently available in the link in the chat box. For those of you who are new to RCA, this is the second in a series of three webinars on reimagining college access and success. This webinar is intended to build on our first webinar, Beyond Standardized Test, Using Performance Assessment and College Admissions, which introduced the use of performance assessment and higher education for equity and highlighted the evidence of using performance assessment for college access and success within CUNY. Today's webinar will provide you with the how to's and the lessons learned on using performance assessment in the college application and admissions process. We will conclude our three part webinar series with a webinar on July 21 that will address how to align K-12 performance assessment systems for use in higher education decision making to advance college access and success. I'm just going to look at the chat real quick. Happy to see Dan Gordon, David Ruff, Chris White, Lisa from Ithaca College, and a lot of folks, Duke from New England, so just want to kind of give a shout out to all our New England partners at Great Schools Partnership and the different higher ed organizations we've worked with up there. Just want to say a real appreciation for all of you joining. My name is Monica Martinez and I'm the director of strategic partnerships where one of the initiatives I support is reimagining college initiatives on behalf of the Learning Policy Institute. RCA began in 2017 when LPI with Education Council brought together a group of individuals and organizations simply to explore interest in and the value of using K-12 performance assessment and higher education admissions placement and advising to improve the quality and equity of these decisions by providing better information. Generally speaking, performance assessment refers to the spectrum of opportunities for students to demonstrate and receive feedback on their knowledge skills and abilities in meaningful contexts. Basically show what they know and can do, hence the title of our webinar today. High quality performance assessments are designed to surface students' facility with core modes of inquiry in the disciplines such as scientific investigation, mathematical modeling, literary analysis, or social scientific inquiry. RCA has been evolving over the last couple of years with the network of interested individuals and partners from both the K-12 and higher education sector. There were task force that were formed to shape the initiative and they made recommendations that would address anticipated challenges of using performance assessment for admissions. Today's webinar will address a few of the original RCA task force recommendations. Help admissions officers understand the value of performance assessments and how they can uniquely define and reflect accomplishments and potential contributions of an applicant. Help support a deeper admissions review process that can be used to integrate information from performance assessments and create or adapt the higher education admissions application system so all students can submit their performance assessments to a higher education institution. We are proud to be working with a broad-based network of K-12 and higher education policy and practice leaders, including NACAC and the American Collegiate Registrar's Admissions Officers, State Department Leaders from New Hampshire and Colorado, school networks like Linked Learning and Visions and New York Consortium. We're also working with the Mastery Transcripts Consortium who is supporting a network of public and private schools who are using digital high school transcript that shows in detail evidence of what students have learned and accomplished. The Coalition for College, which created an application with a digital locker that students can store their work and other application materials to apply to 150 colleges committed to access. And making Caring Common a project of Harvard's Graduate School of Education and a coalition that's focused on reshaping the college admissions process to promote greater ethical engagement. That was a lot that I said, but basically the point is there's momentum towards a holistic admissions process and using diverse admissions materials to reimagine college access and success. And we are excited to be part of this momentum and support success in the work from K-12 and higher education. Another one of the recommendations of the task force was for RCA to work through local and regional partners to pilot the use of performance assessment and higher education admissions. In states or regions where there was state policy supporting the use of performance assessment and where there's a set of diverse higher education institutions interested in holistic admissions. This brought us to New England for this reason RCA was launched with five higher education institutions that are listed on the slide with Common App as a partner given they had a platform through slide room where students could submit performance assessments as part of their application. MIT engaged with this learning group, even though they were an early trailblazer in this work incorporating performance assessment into our application process through slide room for almost seven years now. The five colleges that were part of the RCA pilot were provided with support from RCA in developing their descriptions of performance assessment for the Common App, preparing communications for high school seniors and counselors, helping consider how to incorporate performance assessment into the admissions review workflow and supporting their collective learning through monthly meetings among the piloting sites. So that is the context that brings us here today, and I'm really proud to introduce Stu Schmill, who's the Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lovingly called MIT. Stu will discuss why MIT began using Maker portfolios a form of performance assessment and how they integrated performance assessment and application and admissions review process. Our next speaker is Judy Wheaton. She's the Director of Admissions at Wheaton College. She will share with us Wheaton's experience in participating in the RCA pilot to include student work and their admissions application submissions review. Our final speaker, Scott Anderson, he's the Senior Director at Common App. Scott will address efforts by the Common App and its partners slide room to expand the admissions application system or platform for students to be able to submit performance assessment to be fully representative of all parts about their work to higher education. Common App has been a partner with RCA for over a year and without them we could not have piloted performance assessment with these five higher education institutions. We'll then open it up with questions and answers, a discussion among the panelists about 20, 25 minutes into the webinar. We'll conclude with me sharing some collective lessons learned from the piloting sites. And as a reminder, if you have any questions, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. If you'd like to engage in discussion, you may click the chat button and type in the chat box at the lower right hand side of the screen. It'd be great if you identified your institutional affiliation when possible. Next meal is the Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at MIT. Today he will share how and why MIT has evolved to a holistic admissions process seven years ago that incorporates options for students to include full-blown portfolios. Great. Thank you, Monica. I appreciate the introduction and appreciate the chance to be here with everyone. A college admissions application is designed to allow admissions officers the chance to review and evaluate the characteristics that are important to them. And one of the things that is central to the MIT experience is the hands-on learning that students participate in. And it was fairly clear to us some time ago that our application didn't really allow our admissions officers to evaluate students in that context. So if hands-on learning is important, we want to understand students that have had the chance to participate in that to allow them to show us their talents there. And the traditional college admission application really isn't designed all that well to do that. And that's where portfolios have come in. So we have traditionally had portfolios that we've been reviewing on students for quite a number of years, things like music and performing arts, art portfolios that students might submit. And those are important and those remain. But one of the things that we recognize is that there were a whole set of students who were doing projects and project-based work either in their high schools or outside of their high schools, who didn't really have a platform in our application to be able to demonstrate what they've done. So using the slide room platform that we've used for our music and performing arts and art architecture submissions, portfolio submissions in the past, we developed a maker portfolio. Portfolio at which students could tell us about these technical projects that they've done. When we first started, we essentially had the portfolio up there and it was a very open-ended question. Basically, we just asked students to tell us about their project and they could do it using text. You know, they could write narratives or they could submit photos or videos, but we weren't very directive. It was basically just tell us about it. And what we found was, after a year or two of reviewing these submissions, is that students weren't always telling us about the things that we wanted to learn about their projects. It was a little bit frustrating sometimes for our admissions officers to want to know something about the students' motivation, some of the challenges that they've faced, and not to hear about it from them. So what we moved to after a couple of cycles of this, we made a change to the portfolio submission and we started asking some more direct questions. So you can see here we ask students, you know, first of all, what kinds of things you make and we have that as a drop-down menu and I'll explain why we do that in a moment. Then we ask students a little bit more of a narrative about what they're making, but then we ask them a few other questions because we're trying to get at the context in which these students have done their projects. And that context, as you'll see in a few moments, has made all the difference for us in the value that we're getting out of these portfolio submissions. So let me explain a little bit about the process. So students will fill out this form and what we've done on our end is recruited a number. It's somewhere between a dozen and 20, so some about between 15 and 20 faculty members and alumni who are reviewing these portfolio submissions. And that's important for us because one of the things that we are finding or found was that our admissions officers weren't always equipped well enough to understand the, to be able to evaluate these submissions just didn't have the training, the technical training. So we've recruited a number of faculty members and alumni and instructors who have the technical expertise to be able to evaluate the submissions. I have to say it is enormously labor intensive and recruiting external external, you know, having faculty members do this is it's a heavy lift, both for us and for them. But one of the reasons we ask this drop down menu of what kinds of things do you make is so we can actually direct the portfolio to the faculty member that has the particular level of expertise, you know, in the different subject area. So if it's a robotics program or software or if it's a textile work or a chemistry project or some other kind of project, we can direct them to the experts in the field. So what we also do is spend a fair bit of time with the reviewers, calibrating them on what we're looking for and what we want them to comment on that's going to add to the admissions application review. And I want to go through I have a couple of examples of things that we get from the reviews that I think illustrate why they're so valuable for us. So. Okay, so here's the first first slide. This is one particular students portfolio. And you can see that the projects that they've decided to talk about in their submission came from some of their classwork. There were classwork submissions, either a direct assignment or some extra credit assignments that they were particularly proud of, and that we could therefore review. And you can see how our this is a quote from one of our faculty reviewers that added to the admissions review ultimately is, you know, they're looking for signs of motivation, grit, resourcefulness, problem solving, self teaching ability, things that really are going to signal that these students are going to be very successful students at MIT. Let me give you a couple more examples. And this is just a couple of more excerpts from reviews that we got. And these are the kinds of things that are coming out in in the reviews and these are the things that we're learning about our applicants that I don't think we had a real place for them in other parts of the application.  And, and that's the kind of stuff they're going to be doing once they're in college. So our ability to evaluate them is really important. You know, things that we value this collaborative process, again, resourcefulness willingness to take risks. Even their communication skills, you know, their ability to explain what they're doing. And here you can see, again, it's a lot about context. So I think that's just an overview of our process. Maybe I'll leave it there. And then if there are questions, we can come back to that at the end. So Monica, back to you. Thank you. That's great, Stu. It's almost like it's just a trailer, right, for a movie, because you guys have been doing this for so long and you have so many lessons to teach us. But you did get a comment on that chat that somebody said they really like the question you ask about what's the most meaningful thing you have made. And I really appreciate your focus on evidence of a learning and expanding admissions process. We're now going to move over to Judy Purdy, who is the director of admissions at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Judy has been working at Wheaton for 34 years, and every year she continues to improve on their admissions process. Today, Judy will share how and why Wheaton decided to use a form of performance assessment in their admissions process. Judy. Thank you, Monica. Welcome, everyone. And so what I want to be able to do is tell you a little bit about what I'm about to talk about. Just the context and background about who Wheaton is, our history list portfolios, and our partnership and goals, the process and the value. There's a lot to this, so I'm going to go through some of it very quickly. Just wanted to have you have a sense of who we are. So that's Wheaton College in a nutshell. And then historically, applicants to Wheaton have been able to submit portfolios for faculty review in various departments. So when RCA reached out to us, it was a very easy decision for us to say, yes, we want to do this. We knew that we would get to know our applicants better. It would allow students a little bit more of the traditional provide context to their applications. And we did one other little thing with this. It's not only did we want to learn about the students during the application and some of the things that they do, we very much use this as a yield opportunity. We are one of those colleges that I would say I feel very lucky and very blessed to work with the faculty and staff that we work with here at Wheaton. Our faculty never hesitate to work with us and to be able to want to reach out to students. So when we first started the process part of the prompt was working with everybody. It was an optional Wheaton admission portfolio because we've already been working with Slide Room. So we already had students who were submitting portfolios about music, theater, dance, visual arts, writing, and we were always sending those to faculty members who would assess them. And the faculty would always reach out to those students as well. We also use some of that once students decided to enroll or as part of the yield where we would write to them and let them know how some of what they were doing would contribute to the kind of life they would have at Wheaton. And faculty used it as an opportunity to say this student, very similar to what our coaches were doing, would make a huge difference in my department if we can admit that student. So when we were looking at it we had a working draft and so we have now changed it. What we learned the most about the whole process is that this we wanted to make sure that students understood the difference between a traditional portfolio and what now we were asking for with this whole new approach with RCA. So a lot of it was, again, we wanted them to show passion for subject area. We were now trying to create additional work. We were trying to give the students the opportunities who had already through their high schools and through some of the schools, especially that RCA was initially telling us about that it done some of these projects. It was seen on their transcripts that just said an internship or their senior class project, but we didn't know a whole lot about it. And they didn't have a real way of being able to show it. We didn't want them to have to create something brand new just for admission to make even more work as much as to be able to take something they'd already done. Where they could show us their leadership skills or their expertise that were developed through an internship or job, commitment to the community through a community service portfolio, unique skills, something else that they did through a short video. But again, it was mostly about creativity, collaboration and passion, what they really wanted to do. What we found last year is that we didn't ask the right questions. We didn't prompt. We were brand new to this. We knew how to do portfolios. We didn't really know how to ask this kind of question. So a lot of times the submissions we got, we weren't even really sure what they were. We weren't even really sure what they were trying to tell us or what we were going to learn about them. And we didn't always know what their role was in this work. Through a lot of meetings with our colleagues in through RCA, they helped us to really think about how to talk differently and communicate the information that we wanted them to submit. So we changed our portfolio site so that in slide room they could see the difference in what they were doing in the traditional. So what we didn't want is somebody who's putting together a music portfolio or an art portfolio of just lots of different work. That will stay the same. We didn't want them to change differently. We wanted it to be the students who had created a particular project. So we were more project based or more community oriented based or something brand new that they had done through school through their classroom. So that was a little bit of the difference of what we were trying to create in here. So they were now called supplemental materials. They focused on qualities and skills that they could convey other than just simply listing them. So examples of submission, types, requesting brief student reflection, these are the things that we made the biggest changes for. And we believe that what we will see this year will be even more impressive than what we received last year. And a lot of it again was us learning how to ask the correct and appropriate questions and give better direction. So we had the reviews were, they were 19 to 20 that we did during one small thing. There were two to three person committee review. This was done just with leadership. It was me and a couple of the associate directors. So we started to do that and we because it was brand new, we wanted to first figure it out ourselves. Moving forward, we're going to have the entire counseling staff to review these submissions during the application review. Most of them only take a few minutes to review, but they are only used to help the students. They are not used to decide who would be admitted and who would not. It's an extra texture. It's a little bit more context, us getting to know the students a little bit better. And again, using it for yield and using it for how we could help them once they enroll at Wheaton to achieve the goals that they wanted to be able to do. With the review with the staff, what we discovered as we were going through this, unless we were also looking at their full application, we didn't have enough of a feeling about who the students were, which is why we're bringing it back to the point of looking at it as you are reviewing the application. And we will make sure that we're all doing it consistently and all doing it the same way. So we'll have many opportunities to come together as a staff. I'm going to show you a few examples. The first one was a 12-page research paper. It was a submission. It was very strong because it was a research. I'm not going to read through this, but you can see from looking at it that it was pretty much a scientific type of thing. But it was well done. We enjoyed reading it. We learned a lot about it. They told us what it was, et cetera. The second example was, again, you can see that they created something that was called a Thousand Splendid Suns. It was after they read the novel and the teachers asked them to do something as a creative partner-based project. So again, it was a little bit from reading it that they created something. And this is something that the students submitted to us. It was easy for us to evaluate it because they had basically told us what it was they were doing. The third one was an exceptionally produced five-minute video. And it was somebody who was telling us about what they were doing. They partnered with a rotary club. They had the privilege of going to study abroad to meet some of these amazing women. So again, they told us a lot about this. Obviously, I'm going through this all very quickly because you have the opportunity to go and look at all of this later. So this is the team I worked with. This is the Wanda Sorrell, who's our Senior Associate Director. And Jay LaPierre, Associate Director of Admission. We were the ones, and Jay and Wanda have done a lot of the work as we are now changing our website and changing the verbiage and the wardage that we are doing in the Common App. So with our team, and then they will be taking on some of the leadership as we then train the rest of our staff. So thank you very much. And I will now hand this back to Monica. Thank you so much for this, Judy. And I think what Judy and Stu both shows, they're constantly at their institutions iterating on the process. A few questions have come in about, are these supplemental? And right now for MIT and for Wheaton, they are supplemental submissions. And Judy has really helped us learn a lot about the use of language too. So, you know, I've seen a couple of questions come in about the word portfolio. And as you guys are familiar with, a lot of our institutions, architectural design companies, they ask for a portfolio of work. And it's very specific, like what Stu was talking to a certain skill. But we're talking about a broader set of student work that can go into a portfolio that shows students strengths and how they can apply their knowledge and their skills. So we'll turn back to that a little bit more, but I want to just provide that clarification since I saw a couple of different questions come in. But right now we're going to turn to our next speaker, who is Scott Anderson, and he is from the Common App, where he serves as a senior director for access and education. Scott supports partnerships with educators, researchers and designers to create services, programs and resources that enable student success. Scott is the lead for the RCA partnership and has been instrumental in this piloting work. So thank you so much, Scott and Common App. I'll turn it over to you. Great, Monica. Thank you so much for having me here today and thank you to all of the attendees for joining us. Just trying to, there we go. Oops, advanced the slides. I want to talk a little bit about Common App and who we are because I think it's really important to understand why RCA approached us to be a potential partner to advance the work that they are doing promoting performance based assessments and the college admission process. Those of you who know Common App and webinar of educators, I'm sure many of you have heard of us probably know us for the tool that we have which is an application to apply to college. But what many people don't know is that we are actually a not-for-profit membership association that is mission driven and our mission is the pursuit of access, equity and integrity in the college admission process. The membership of the Common App represents the full diversity of higher ed, four-year higher ed in the United States. We started in 1975 with 15 small liberal arts colleges. And we over the years have grown into an organization over 900 member institutions, public and private, single sex and coed, urban, rural, large, small, religious, secular, you name it, you can find those institutions in our membership. Collectively, those member institutions direct to the Common App over a million applicants each year. The vast majority of those are first year applicants, although we also have a transfer application and that population represents about 10% of the pool. The applicants very much like the membership itself is extremely diverse and perhaps one of the most important statistics that we like to point out is about a third of the applicants who use the Common App are the first in their families to go to college. That percentage is a little bit higher for the transfer population than it is for the first year population, but together it represents about a third. And collectively those students are submitting over five and a half million applications each year. I put these numbers out there for context. What is important is not the numbers themselves as large as they are, but rather the reach that they represent among the college going population. And that I think that along with the diversity and number of members Common App has is what led RCA to reach out to us to begin with. One other aspect of Common App that is really important to point out and speaks to the mission of the organization is that as of January 1, 2019, former first lady Michelle Obama's reach higher initiative is a campaign of the Common Application. They joined us because they recognize that membership or rather membership but a presence within the Common App would be a way for them to advance their own mission of building confidence and inspiring students to think about college and to recognize that there's a the college and post secondary study in general can be something that is attainable for them. So if you think about the confidence that Common App that reach higher inspires and students Common App was able to take that confidence and channel it into the tangible tangible action of applying to college. Slide room has been mentioned a few times on this message, or rather on this on this webinar, and wanted to tell you a little bit about the work that Common App does with slide room. We've been partners with them since 2013. So for several years now, we partnered with them as a means of helping our member colleges gather from their applicants supplemental information that went beyond just writing and certainly grades and test scores and other things that you would find in an application. We supported a portfolio we wanted to make sure that we were able to help our members who wanted that the slide room partnership is important to our member colleges because it allows for a seamless integration of the students Common App and the slide room accounts and I'll show you what that looks like in a moment. It also that partnership supports a lot of flexibility for our member colleges who can receive the portfolios that students are submitting through the Common App as as data, they can get them through our automatic process that they receive on a daily basis, and and a tremendous amount of flexibility, which allow us and not just to get the information but then also facilitate the review. One other thing that's really important is that Common App has a fee waiver built within it and any student who indicates eligibility for the Common App fee waiver. That fee waiver also carries over to slide room as well so the students don't need to pay a fee to use slide room individual institutions can choose to pass that fee along to the students if they wish that but the vast majority do not. Judy talked a little bit about the language that we can has used and how it's changing within the Common App. And I wanted to show you what it looks like from a student perspective so you have a sense of that. Here you see last year's or I should say the current year language that we use and there is this explanation and then a yes or no questions you intend to submit an option of an admission portfolio and the student answers yes over on the left. A student will see opening up for that particular college, the instructions for a portfolio. And I should say here that each of our member colleges has the ability not just to gather the information that's collected within the Common App proper but also within their supplemental information something that we call the member screen and the portfolio would be part of that member screen. If a student were to click on instructions, they would be shown a login page or screen rather where they could enter their slide room credentials if a sliding account already exists for that student or they could create their slide and recount there. And then they would click login or sign up and they'd be directed over to slide room. In fact the on the bottom here and I think this is going to be put in the chat as well you will see that the link where rather a URL, where you can see from both the college perspective and also the student perspective, what that integration process looks like I won't go through the steps of that here with you it's just important for you to know that it's a seamless process. So RCA approached Common App. Last year, recognizing that given the reach that we have among institutions of higher education and the reach that we have among college going students that we would be potentially a good partner to help advance the work that they were trying to do with incorporating performance based assessments into the admission process. It made a lot of sense for us it was building on existing integration integrations and familiar tools that that students and that colleges themselves were using. But more important than that it really resonated with us because of the mission alignment so going back to how I started here, we are a mission driven organization and the main tenants of our mission or access equity and integrity. And so we are always asking ourselves how we can use our reach to help members collect meaningful information that assists them engaging potential for student success. As we think today at this moment in particular about how the sands are shifting underneath the feet of students and in terms of whether tests are going to be required or what kind of information that they are going to be able to provide to colleges to help give appropriate context for their academic work and their lives, both in and outside of the classroom. So we saw RCA and the work that they were doing as an opportunity to help our members, if they were ready and interested in doing so, gather that information from students and to do it within the framework of a common app which is a tool that everyone is familiar with. So that is some basic information about how Common App has worked with RCA and Monica, I will pass it back to you and we'll be happy to answer any questions that might come up. Yeah, no thank you thank all of you and we're going to move into our discussion section. So we're going to put everyone on screen, a lot of really good questions coming in and we're not going to be able to get to all of them. And while we transition Scott I'm just going to ask you a real quick follow up question from from you know you guys have 900 members so what are the skills and competency areas colleges look for from students and how do you get that information. Oh, you're on mute Scott, but I bet it was great answer. It was yes, you know presenter spoke on mute you can all check that off of your bingo cards now for resume. Yeah, what I was saying is you know we do have 900 members and if you ask them you get 900 different answers. I think one of the benefits of membership in in the Common App is the ability to marry shared information that students present through the main application with the institutional specific information that is really important to the colleges themselves. You know the question if if if I before I joined the staff the Common App as a counselor and I would often tell my students you know if you want to know what colleges care about, look at what they ask on their admission applications. Certainly is is true of the maker portfolio at MIT and and and what Judy has pointed out for what you know the sort of the range of things that that that would be really interesting to we find those exact same things at Common App member colleges across the spectrum. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Thank you. And it's very similar to the conversation I had with Stu as well. Building on what Scott just talked about and both Stu and Judy you both touched on this a bit. What, what did you learn most about students when you started accepting the maker portfolio and student work. Maybe I can start and then Judy after I would say the thing that we appreciated most about this portfolio work is it allowed us a fuller picture as to the students we were evaluating. You know the college admissions process is it's imperfect in that it's a, we're trying to learn about students through this medium of you know looking at transcripts and essays and evaluating what they've done and letters of recommendation I mean we're getting as full a picture as we can but it's still really incomplete. And I know, I mean most students will tell you that they are not the, you know that they're, they're not their college admissions application they're more than that and that oftentimes students will feel like they can't really it's hard for them to get across what their talents are and and what makes them special and I think the portfolios is one more avenue for students to be able to express that. So I think that is something that we've really appreciated about it. Judy, would you like to build on that. So I think what we understood is a little bit more about a little bit more with the texture and who else they are and what their passion is. We didn't get enough of that just through the application itself or even so once we started to see portfolios we could feel it and we could sense of the things that they really had strong interest in. And you could see that it made more sense to also see why they're in their transcript. It looked like they had a little bit more emphasis on the arts or a little bit more emphasis on writing or it helped to explain the classes that they were taking. And maybe they didn't like their essay about that but we were able to see it. So I think we just got to see a little bit more of the holistic view of who a student was. It also explained at times what a counselor was talking about when they would say that a student excels in some particular area and the student never told us that they sang on stage or they were part of theater. Because they didn't feel like they had the right place to do it in the application but then you would read all about it from a counselor or teachers. So I think we just began to figure it out and learn a little bit more about the whole student. Appreciate that. And so what are the challenges about accepting performance assessment for admissions from a process point of view. The question came up on our last webinar we had CUNY you know which is one of the largest systems in the United States for higher education, but people are very concerned about how do you go to scale with this right. So what are some of the challenges about accepting performance assessment for admissions from a process point of view. And Judy since you're on the phone let's start with you and then we'll go over to Stu. And if Scott has anything to add to from common app. I would say is that we do pretty holistic view anyway so it might add a few more minutes to the process, but not anything extensive. And actually what it does is it helps to clarify it we don't end up with wondering so much. And we do a lot of communicating back and forth with students but I think that for us I see it all as a positive. We are not one of those schools that is trying to read 60 applications in an hour we are we're trying to read 35 to 40 applications in an hour. So, I mean, in a day not an hour I'm sorry. So to be able to add this extra time and texture and not every student is doing it. And I think that it all it can do is enhance it for us and make us better at understanding the students and making it help us, especially for the students who are on the fence and we are on the fence and just thinking, what is it special about them this will help to sway some of the conversations as we're deciding whether to admit or waitlist deny etc. And we never use it as anything but in the positive. Thank you. So do you want to add to that and then we have a couple more questions we want to move to. Yeah, we, I guess because the nature of our portfolio which is a little bit more specific towards prod technical projects a little have to be technical but basically hands on kinds of projects. Outside reviewers that are reviewing them in the same way we have music faculty that review our music portfolios we have our engineering faculty or science faculty reviewing some of the submissions that students and, and so it's a lot of work to coordinate all that it's a lot of work for for those faculty members. It's a lot of work to coordinate and calibrate the faculty members to make sure they understand what they're looking for. And therefore it's not that much more work for our admission staff because we have, except for the one person who works with the faculty group. One of the things that we found is that for these kinds of projects are admissions officers were not really able to fairly assess the work because they didn't have the expertise in those areas and what in what an admissions officer thought was really neat project might have been a relatively standard one and something that one of our admissions officers thought was kind of boring. We would have faculty members jumping up and down saying oh my God this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. And so that's, I think that will make it hard to scale and that needing to get some kind of expert review. I'm not sure that that is always necessary in every case but at least in some of these. Figuring out that review, I think will be important to allow this to scale more broadly. Yeah. Yeah, and we appreciate that we get to learn from you and part of LPI's, you know mission is to conduct research and we're going to continue to garner and gather as many of these lessons as possible to help folks understand the systems and structures that have to be in place. I'm really excited to see that like we have a lot of questions about equity that have been coming in. So I'm going to ask kind of a two part question so one's going to kind of be the upside around equity, the potential upside, as well as some of the challenges around equity. So the first part of the equity question is how do you feel performance assessment can support admissions policies and practices around issues of access and equity, and then we'll do the flip side after this and we just have about five more minutes or so. I'll chime in on that. You know, I didn't go into depth when I was speaking about our mission but the concept of equity is incredibly important. We, you know, it's interesting. The Common App is an online form and but there's a PDF version of it and if you look at the front page of that today's PDF and you compare it to the front page of the first application from 1975, they are almost identical. And a lot has changed in those years. And it really, I think is incumbent upon all of us who work in this in this profession helping young students get to college. And especially those of us who are orchestrating things, if you will, in the admission office and in organizations like the Common App to try to figure out how to help students see themselves in the application. And the flip side of that is how to make sure we prevent students from not seeing themselves in the application. In other words, we don't want students to encounter aspects of the application process that said signals that they're not welcome here. It really is all about being welcoming. And at the Common App, we're going through a process right now where we're really trying to put an equity lens on the entire application itself to see who is included, who is excluded, whether it be actively or inadvertently, to make sure that the tool that they're interacting with as they're trying to convey who they are as whole people to colleges like the ones represented here to make sure that they've got that ability. Great. Thank you so much, Scott. So Stuart or Judy, how do you feel performance assessment can support admissions policies and practices around issues of equity and access, Judy? Yeah, so what I would say is that it's really incumbent to on how savvy the student is, whether especially for first generation, if they're not getting help from their counselors or their teachers. So with us trying to promote and send out messages to, especially on our website, encouraging and explaining to students what these mean. If a student has been very interested in dance or really in the visual arts, I think it's a little easier for them to understand how to go to the slide room and to present that. For us it's more of this other one where they've done the projects and that they've done these senior internships or projects that they're not really sure how to showcase those. And so sometimes for us, again, that's why we spent so much time working on our language to help explain to students this is the opportunity for them because if you're at a school where it's not an inner city school, you've got a lot of connections and a lot of contact. Your families know how to help you with this. It's easy for them. It's for the students who really don't understand how to explain something that was really incredibly meaningful that they did and to be able to present that. So I think the more we can do Monica to help especially on our website and also through the language on Common App. That's incumbent upon us to make sure that those students have the access or at least know enough to then email us or call us and ask how they could present this. Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate the message both you and Scott are saying basically how do we signal that this this is what we want we want to know more about you so thank you both. Stu, how about you wrap up this question and we'll probably move on to our final. Yep, just completely agree with both what Scott and Judy said there. And in fact it's one of the reasons why we added more contextual questions to the portfolio to try to draw some of this out, because we don't want to simply be rewarding wealth and privilege and resources that students have we want to be rewarding the talent that students have. And yet you have to understand the context to get at the talent right and, and it's not just the resources that pile on to that you want to strip that away. But instead, it's still true at least what we're finding is that students with more resources are more likely to be doing these projects and I think some of that is just for obvious reasons that they have more opportunities. Some of it also is directly related to what Judy said around our ability to communicate. I think we have an issue with low income students. First generation students and even women, we find women are less likely to submit make portfolios, even if they are have projects that they have done. And that would fit this very well. There's just a higher barrier and we're trying to figure out what that is. So I just want to, you know without going on too long because I know we're going to need to wrap up to just acknowledge this is an issue that we're thinking deeply about, and we haven't solved it. I think there's potential, but there's more work that we need to do there. That's a great, that's a great sentence to end on Stu. Thank you very much. And it really is at the heart and soul of what reimagined college access and success wants to be about is to ensure there's equity. So we're going to have to wrap up the Q&A and I'm just going to move into some closing comments given we just have a few more minutes. So you can see by by this slide that just came on your screen. You know we've certainly learned lessons from folks like Judy and Stu and the other higher institutions that participated. And really it's like you know what you're you have to know what you're looking for to develop the right ask. And we can go into detail about what performance assessment is and right now these are some forms of student work. So we have to know what you're looking for to develop the right ask. And then what you're hearing now about admissions counselors and everyone else they have to be proactive in cultivating relationships with K-12 schools and their counselors that use performance assessment to strengthen the pipeline. Within these schools performance assessments are just themselves a learning tool that builds students abilities to apply knowledge and complex problems, while also helping students develop co cognitive skills, such as collaborative collaboration grit resilience. And we also have to consider admissions as only the beginning. You know I had a lot of conversations with Judy where she talked about how she was going to use student work in the yield and how to connect students to other people. So what are other implications. And then what you've heard from both of them is you have to anticipate iteration that you're not going to get at the right the first time you're going to continue to develop structures and systems for this. And we're learning with these folks we know this work is nascent performance assessment has been in K-12 schools for some time and this opens an access for other schools to be able to use performance assessment and develop the kind of teaching strategies for critical thinking as well as other skills. So I'm going to move to the conclusion and as you can see we're just starting to understand and develop these structures and systems and processes to be used. In addition, you know evidence is now starting to emerge about the potential use of using high quality performance assessment and admissions. Next month RCA will publish a study assessing college readiness through authentic student work how City University of New York and the New York Performance Standards Consortium are collaborating towards equity by Michelle Fine and Karina Priyomka. They're both from the CUNY Graduate Center and essentially the pilot program that use performance assessment for students who do not meet the cut score on the college entrance exams are successful in their first year of college outperforming their peers in the first semester grades and credits earned and persisting after a year at higher rates than other students. An embargo draft of this report can be found at the link in this chat. We have to find a way to ensure we have a pipeline of schools where students produce high quality performance assessment. If you'd like to learn more about or begin to pilot performance assessment, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. We're developing a tool to help higher institutions consider how to use performance assessment information in ways that are both meaningful and realistic by helping them connect purpose to performance assessment and artifacts. I want to thank you for coming on this last side. You can see that we're going to have another webinar. We hope you will join that. You can also see where we have our different resources. We will publish a summary of this webinar in addition to a video recording. The slides are already on the on our website, but the next webinar is actually going to start focusing on some of the K 12 questions that came through. How do you best capture students work so colleges can see it and use it. How are colleges getting this information about using performance assessment out to parents and students. How can high schools calibrate with higher education so that we know our students are leaving with the necessary skills. Thank you so much for taking your time today to join us.


Okay, I have something I want to talk about. Cool. I have an issue with team self-selection. So I have this hypothesis that people who choose to be on the same team with people who are more like them could have the potential to actually decrease diversity in an organization, is that a risk? Absolutely, and that's why I never just let people go and self-select without any instructions, without preparation, without talking about diversity and what makes a good team and giving some guidelines for how they could choose, what to think about. Is there coaching included? Like, do you coach people during the events or is it more or less a free form activity where people are guiding themselves? It's not as much as coaching but I'd say more facilitation. Where I ask people, we ask people about their choices, if that's the right choice for them, it's the right choice for the company, if that's the best choice for the team. And people actually quite good seeing that being, just choosing people they like to go out with, they have a beer with, or just exactly like them is not a good idea. And this comment about how trusting people, and I guess maybe I'm discovering, maybe I'm guilty of some of the lack of that in thinking like, oh, I know better. Maybe I need to reflect on that a bit. Yeah, but I think it'd be a really easy case because it goes through iterations.  That describes my personality entirely. Totally, yes. But what would happen is we'd have a conversation, asking if that is the best combination of people. If you have thought about, if that would make the best team, about what you can learn, what you can teach, and if that's overall the best idea for the company. And I'm pretty sure that you would be smart enough to think pretty quickly. So one of the other things I think Heidi was talking about with dynamic reteaming is sharing or getting to know more people across the organization. So building relationships across the organization. So is that something too that people, I guess, could be thinking about when they're doing a self-selection event? Am I just going to work with people who I already like and then I'm not building new relationships? There's a danger that people do that. I have not observed people doing that either. I think they are actually quite reasonable in their choices. They do think about how they learn and what they get something out of. And that's not just sticking with your mates. So you've written this book and you've been talking on it a lot. Is there something new you've been working on or something, what's next for you? What's next for me? It's taking the idea of self-selection and actually looking more at organizational design. I'm currently experimenting with sociocracy and holocracy. Awesome. I still don't know what I think about it, but I'm five months into the experiment and I'm still withholding judgment. Okay, well, I think I'm going to look forward to talking to you maybe in a year or two and find out how that went. Me too. Awesome. Okay, well, this has been a great conference. This is your first time in India? Yes. Do you think you'll come back? If I get invited, absolutely. Awesome, yeah, I'm hoping to come back for Agile India 2018. Yes, I hope to see you next year. Yeah, maybe we'll see you there. Awesome, thanks. Cool, thank you.


back to the independent investor channel for what is always aimed to be somewhat of a neutral approach but is becoming all too often a response to the greater landscape out there in covering highly unholding's corporation. This was the latest article that I've come across from Chris Marcoach. It was actually a pretty good article. I give credit where credit is due. Chris has been a pretty staunch critic over highly unholding's over the last year, year and a half anyway since the SPAC was announced and rightfully so. Absolutely a lot of lessons to be learned here in how a lot of investors really got caught up in a lot of hype here with Hylian and the run-up into the upper 50s behind the excitement which partially was justified, I think mostly unjustified with regard to the Hylian stock. I think the only problem that I have here is in the title Hylian is starting to look so bad it's good. I think I would have inserted Hylian stock is starting to look so bad it's good because I have found nothing with the Hylian holdings company, their timeline, their build out of their team, their current cash position which I will give credit is alluded to in this article has been nothing but good. Nothing but good and the progress that's been made over the last year and a half has been incredible. Process improvement initiatives across the board response to new and emerging markets with regard to their re-rack of their hyper truck ERX but I do want to take a couple moments here and just highlight a few things that I picked out of the article even the bearers have to concede that Hylian stock looks oversold. Folks it does not look oversold it is okay so let's just speak facts here when they are facts there is just shy of a 20% short interest still on Hylian it is oversold and for value investors who are looking at strides being made in the company I have a hard time considering this to be a speculative company just because it is pre-revenue okay I compare what's going on in the industry and I just think that Hylian is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition here. There's a few things I want to note in the article and I can certainly link Chris's article in the description of this video before I think an educated investor is one that is a powerful investor I think for the most part I would give somewhat of a double thumbs down to investor place. I think there's so many pundits on there that are writing very very opinion angled articles because I think there's just statements that are riddled and Chris's article here is no different than making just vague assumptions as to Hylian and I question the motive I really do for a company that they feel like or at least has felt like hasn't provided any type of investing opportunity going forward they sure have been quick to bash the stock specifically for its performance in the past and I think there's a real disconnect there between what real retail investors should be looking at to make impartial decisions when it comes to their more speculative element to the portfolio speculative I say as a broad stroke to how you fit in what should be a drastically smaller aspect of your portfolio if you're looking to take a little bit of a position in some of these speculative companies which I encourage you're right I mean it becomes a lot less predictable on the year over year performance like the S&P 500 you know rendering 10 to 12 percent for the last 10 years but the potential to go after some greater than average capital return could in fact be a nice strategic angle for any retail investor out there and that is absolutely who I look to advocate for I don't expect anything different Chris says this time around alluding to the quadruple bounce off of the low support it did break the 790 mark and and kind of overshoot that mark and then quickly bounce back after that to settle at the closing price at around 0820 or so is where it closed as a Friday I'm shooting this video a couple days after the close of Friday although the company isn't going to be delivering revenue anytime soon it's kind of comments like that that are interesting enough the company's just come off its third beat in a row which is interesting enough and when we call this company a pre-revenue company it absolutely is but I think there's some undertone that needs to be discussed with regard to their interest surrounding their their product their actual over-the-road testing of their hybrid product as well as the excitement around the hyper truck erx which will get into both of those in this video in this case the product is the hyper truck erx I disagree with this as well the hyper trucks is going to come after the the hybrid and it's the hybrid that I really want to get into and focus in on for your guys's benefit during the deliberation of this video welcome all investors out there you know I put out these Hylian videos I do want to premise this at the top of the video just like I always do I am a stock owner in Hylian I invest in the company not the stock okay and I find all too often I am part of the Yahoo finance Hylian thread I wouldn't invite you guys to come over there it's a lot of gossip but there's also a lot of very fine investors on there who are truly interested in the company and can kind of put the emotion aside with the dismal performance of the stock over the last year or so even since the company has gone public even in light of all the good news that's going on with Hylian holdings so with that said the title of this video is sell now okay and this is my my direct charge for Hylian and if I was going to cover the stock and put a price target most of the price targets right now the lowest being $12 all the way up to about 18 has an incredible implied upside and that's really looking at all the implications for the stock stock stock is it not right now okay what I mean by the sell now is a direct message to Hylian to begin on this path to commercialization and I think the real elephant in the room is their hybrid system it's one that I'm very very excited about if we actually have Thomas Healy as a guest on the channel which I've alluded to many many times I'm a little more bearish on the retrofit for existing diesel trucks and CNG trucks for installation after an older truck has been put out on the road I'm not so excited about that and if somebody can change my mind in the comment section out there I just think that the the cost of taking an existing product and and trying to retrofit to that usually carries with it about 100 markup it's about double the price to take existing trucks that will be out on the road and this applies really across the board in all industries to take and try to fit things around things that were originally turned out in its original condition off the OEM and then to take that a few years down the line and and try to retrofit a hybrid unit now that's not to say that I don't believe that there's a viable option there in other words if that retrofit is complete and where the shoe fits for companies that actually do opt for the retrofit option that that it's not going to be beneficial and the product isn't going to perform as prescribed in other words the two-year payback once installed the APU providing the ability not to idle the diesel motor more comfort for the driver and I just want you guys to think about this when we're talking about the hybrid product itself whether it be on the hybrid diesel side or the hybrid CNG side it really kind of comes down for me a bottom line cost saving yes to the the owner the fleet owners okay but I really have taken a read and a reread on the due diligence that I've done initially I'm fascinated by the Hylian opportunity but I think it really comes down to driver experience I really do and I think from the perspective of a lot of different things I don't think Hylian needs to dominate the entire trucking market I think a step in the way in the direction of Hylian for let's say the hybrid diesel product is an acknowledgement to put that supplementary battery system on board to provide that fuel savings to the bottom line to provide that idling acknowledgement which could save upwards of 10 percent alone on the fuel savings per year I think this is a no-brainer right so my charge to Hylian is sell now sell now and it just goes back to the V2 hybrid option that they're looking to fine tune and get these incorporated because I think this is a slam dunk now I've already mentioned my concern with the retrofit option but if you're forgetting out there that I am of the thesis that diesel's not going away okay and and I'm brave enough to just put that out there I don't think diesel's going away and that's why I say there's still going to be a continued market out there for fleets that look to rotate over that four-year cycle of their trucks which was alluded to on the last Q2 earnings call by Thomas Healy right that four-year cycle there's always going to be that continued push on the OEM to continue to supplement with new trucks to replace the old trucks what a slam dunk to put a $30,000 hybrid system on those new diesel trucks right off of the OEM to improve driver experience i.e. horsepower to provide some bottom line dollar benefit back to the fuel savings initiative to provide comfort in cab when the truck is being hoteled right to avoid the idling up to x number of hours per day that are required for a truck driver to enjoy now for all you truck drivers out there I am not a truck driver if I'm wrong in this application please correct me in the comments below it just makes sense to me from an investor's perspective that fleets wouldn't be looking at this as just an easy $30,000 bolt-on two-year payback etc the units paid for increase the value of the truck with the Hylian system and the third element is that they get to fly the Hylian flag and basically it's a $30,000 cost to advertise real benefit to the bottom line real benefit to driver comfort and retention I might add in other words if the trucks are more comfortable to drive aren't they more apt to keep that retention on the side of the fleet owners which is exactly what we want right the heart of these drivers and I'm not talking autonomous right now that's a whole other conversation for another day but right now we have physical asses in the physical seats driving these trucks across the United States and abroad we need to keep them as happy as we can I think that's a step in that right direction and I think it's a real leap for the comfort in the cab when we're talking about the hybrid system directly okay driver experience actually driving the truck and making sure that that extra algorithm and technology system the onboard dash display system really provides a lot more data and analytics to make sure that the power is being utilized as efficiently as possible to provide that extra little bit of oomph and I you say well Ryan this is all your opinion no it's not I'm from the northwest the northwest grant program that was provided for the three companies up in the northwest that provided all positive feedback on the experience and a lot of people are saying well what's the bottom dollar what's the bottom dollar saved we're going to understand that a little bit later the real takeaway there is the actual positive feedback it wasn't negative okay this isn't one of those things that came back and said Hylian's products don't work now it's not what was said they didn't come back and say that the driver experience was negative in that they had problems and they were able to outline those problems it was all positive here's the irony in that anybody who's ever driven in the northwest knows that that route from canada to mexico on the i5 corridor is a critical critical transportation network and it's a tough it's a tough drive anybody who's ever gone into the great vine over the great vine into los angeles anybody who's ever gone through the pass the pass anybody who's ever driven that road knows what i'm talking about and knows that driving in the northwest at least even off the i5 corridor is a hill climb right so that extra a little bit of of horsepower really does add to the driver experience that's why i say to hylian sell now sell now it seems to me that this is a slam dunk across the board and it's interesting to me that it's a 30 000 dollar add-on to the existing orders for diesel truck and i don't think again back to my point that fleets need to be committing to a hundred percent hybrid diesel i don't think they need to be doing that i think what is going to be the most encouraging for highly unholdings specifically and also highly on stock owners is that companies say you know what this is interesting let's put an order in for 15 or 20 hybrid trucks to start start to integrate that start to get that data captured right remember how i talked about the algorithmic technology that's put on board is also captured to make sure that processing improvements can be made based on the data that's turned back and collected from each of these units that these fleets are putting out on the road so i i think it's a win-win i think it's a slam dunk across the board for hylian to to sell now okay and that's why i'm really really encouraged and i think all too often the articles that come out always want to just focus on the hyper truck erx and i think we're really really jumping the gun on the the other opportunity that hylian has i don't consider highly on a two-trick pony i don't i consider them to have multiple product sets within each of their offerings both on the hybrid side and the hyper truck erx side initially we didn't have this information initially it was the hybrid diesel hybrid cng and the hyper truck erx now we're talking about hyper truck erx pointed specifically to the california market in response to the fuel credit requirement there needing to meet that 75 miles of of bev service without the need for when the need is to go full electric right in the cities things like that so san francisco los angeles okay so that truck and the solution can be put to work right away i i think it's incredible but i i think when we're talking about the cost of total ownership which tomas haley mentioned multiple times on the earnings call i think what can really be extrapolated from that is the very confident capability of hylian to sit at the table across from industry and say hey look listen there's a three-tier benefit to this thing driver experience bottom line fuel savings and the ability to take a $30,000 bill you pay that in a one-minute ad spot right to advertise for your company you spend that $30,000 in a ton of different ways within your company just keeping the company alive what a great way to fly the environmentally uh the the environmental stewardship flag by opting a certain and i do believe that it may be a small percentage and if it is i'm going to do back flips when hylian is able to sell these fleets now the interesting part about it these are presumptions on my part but i actually think that these conversations are going on behind the scenes look who am i i'm just a regular retail investor that's why you guys tune in to me and watch my unique take on hylian because unfortunately even with chris's article with investor place i always read through it and i'm like well he missed this this this this this this this and this when really looking at the industry in its holistic total perspective okay there's no comparison whatsoever to the nicola orders that have been pulled right off the books they said that themselves they cannot produce more than 100 trucks and not to expect those trucks by 2023 i don't understand why nicola hasn't gone out of business honestly right but the stock believes and as a forward pricing mechanism they would that they will in the future realize some of those product initiatives and development i don't see it happening i've looked at it specifically and i just do not see it happening whereas hylian it's happening now it's happening right now the product the old v1 hybrid version have been put in the hands of the fleets idealize it's been put in the hands of those northwest properties that i talked about it's been put in the hands of debt mar logistics all of that feedback and proof of concept if you want to call it that has already been provided it's already been provided we're in the eighth inning nicola is in the first inning okay they can't even get a truck out on the road they haven't even secured any orders at all from the best that i can see nobody wants to put their their uh stamp of approval even with hylian at this point okay nobody wants to put that stamp of approval on a product that has not gone through the rigor of proof of concept it's that simple and i understand that i'm totally accepted of that the question you need to ask yourself as an investor is where do you think hylian is in the uh evolution toward that end right in other words do they have product where are they in the process improvement has there been data turned back to hylian to provide them that the the real scrutiny that's necessary within industry to say hey take a look at this this this and this guys we have the v2 right that was the very response that we needed on the hybrid side to make sure those process improvements will be made okay now we've just talked about the hybrid diesel now we talk about the hybrid cng the hybrid cng is a completely different approach now my assessment and my presumption still stands with the retrofit and i would love somebody to to debate me or tell me that i'm wrong or my application is wrong on retrofitting of a bolt basically a bolt-on unit on an existing truck that has incurred damage weathering rust everything of the sort and you're looking to take and put a brand new unit on to that furthermore the cost is is going to actually be more than just putting it on at the oem because everything is accessible everything is open you can identify processes before they come forward on the line you can troubleshoot logistics beforehand but when you get each individual truck on an individual basis that are going to be retrofitted i'm not so encouraged by that and i'm not sure what data highly unhas to show that there's a market there or an interest from companies that are looking to take a fleet the only thing i can think of is maybe some smaller fleets out there that are solvent smaller fleets maybe 50 or less 25 or less 10 or less i don't know that that might make some sense there to go ahead and take some of those and retrofit those it's either that or existing companies are looking to take some of their older tractor trailers and they're looking to gather some data on highly on certainly that that could be an in but i'm a little bit more skeptical over that product than i am the oem install right now the cng initiative is is very very simple looking to add horsepower to an industry that is under horsepower what is the definition of solution right identifying a problem or providing a solution that works an additional 120 horsepower uh to the bottom line uh driver retention okay is really really tough within the cng fleet they have trouble retaining good talent within the cng fleet because the consensus across to the fleet owners is such that the cng uh tractor is underpowered so the solution is very very simple to take and where we would look to integrate the highly un solution in again the four-year cycle when companies are looking at their order book they're looking at projections for growth the following year they're starting to make those decisions with regard to how many units they're going to order it's a very very simple cell and that's why i say sell now highly on it's ready to go it's a very very simple solution and i don't know if it's going to be a a magic combination between highly on's ability to to sell as a standalone or if it's going to be an industry acknowledgement to be just knocking down the door to highly on to get after these products or it's going to be a combination of both and i think i think the final third option is probably what we're looking at here and this is a question that i will talk to thomas heli about again if he's on the channel with regard to the sense of urgency um let's be real the company stock is a publicly traded company there are certain responsibilities on behalf of highly unholdings to keep the retail investors up to speed to keep analysts and large institutions that hold this company up to speed to the best of their ability and although i do give proper credence to the fact that highly has improved their outreach i still give them a subpar mark on their forward application i still have questions and i don't speak alone in this there are a lot of stock owners and non investors in highly un that still have questions with regard to the specific data surrounding the positive feedback well what does that mean right how many units are we looking to push out through the innovation council okay i just did a deep dive of the innovation council visited every single one of the websites there were certain websites out there that were part of the innovation council that did not mention highly in one time on their website now in all fairness Wegmans warner agility which is probably the biggest advocate and i will promise this agility is a share owner in highly un so the thousand truck pre-order that we're going to talk about here and next with the hyper truck erx kind of lets me know that look it's in their best interest to be forward leaning with highly on and be a little bit more forward with that but what is coming out of it the only thing that i heard on the on the last earnings call was that there were multiple meetings well what's coming out of it are these companies really chomping at the bit to get to work how many demo units will anhyzer bush get i don't know how many units will agility get right in reference to their thousand pre-truck truck order what is going to satisfy the pallet of a warner or a rider or a pinsky what is going to satisfy their pallet to make sure that they're getting the best amount of sample pool but also not breaking the bank here with highly on because the best of my knowledge are they getting paid on these demo units yeah i don't know this could put a lot of investor sentiment at ease and a lot of investor angst at ease if highly on could just come out i don't think there's a day that should go by where we don't hear word on highly on because i can tell you what investor place is certainly aggressive on constantly putting out new content every two to three days i find it hard to believe that highly on as a 1.5 billion dollar company can't be a little bit more forward leaning with news releases news releases on progress being made on a lot of different fronts i don't care if it's battery management system related i don't care if it's driver experience related i don't care if it's innovation council related i don't care if it's hybrid system i don't care if it's hybrid diesel or cng i don't care if it's development in the marketplace that could deem highly in solutions that much more applicable i don't care okay i just want that information i'm always hungry for it it's a lot of the reason why i come out and just advocate for highly on holdings myself because i don't really see them advocating as well as they should on their own it's a lot of investors out there that would share in that exact same sentiment there is a flip side to that argument thomas healy has talked about being conservative to the vest if you do go on to highly on dot com read their governance and their actual company kind of their company pillar goals it's really in life with doing the right thing in all things that they do and in defense of of thomas healy the information that's released is actually true right but we don't have a trevor milton type of situation the one that is going on with nikola and nikola's decision to retain trevor milton as an outside advisor is an absolutely idiotic decision it's stupid it's an absolutely asinine and idiotic decision to keep somebody on that was indicted for federal charges onto the board it makes me and i guarantee i'm not the only one to question the decision making of nikola look if that's the decision that they're looking to make i would question their decisions that they're making out there with industry i would i would question all of the integrity i would question all of the facts declared because it seems like to me that they're actually condoning that behavior and i know they're not i've read the the articles on it the ceo of nikola has come out basically saying look we don't condone the behavior but but but by nature of the actions that you take people perceive that to be an admiration and and an acceptance of the behavior that's gone on i would cut all ties if i was a shareholder in highly on and somehow thomas healy was mixed up in something like that i would expect them to cut all ties with that and or it would affect my decision to cut ties all together with the company i don't want to have anything to do with that nothing right so it makes me question the integrity of the company and i will give some fair acknowledgement to healy and is that they they have taken a very very integrous road on this journey in in in offering what it is they do offer to the greater investor community about progress being made at the company look back look back at the progress the v2 interpretation of process improvements the solidification of the of the fev process improvement company based out of um an arbor michigan very excuse me not an arbor but arbor arbor hills michigan which was the place of the last uh defense secretary visit there and the show off of the hyper truck erx all these things come together the improved battery system charging announcement that's been made the improvement to the hyper truck erx at the 75 miles the eligibility for the fuel credits etc etc i can go on and on and on and if you're quick to come to the table and actually focus on highly on holdings the company you would be hard pressed to find some bad information out there or bad news on the company that isn't false based that isn't an accusation without facts or without and just an outright hit on highly on altogether or an acknowledgement that highly on is a formidable competition and that they are named in certain articles as formidable competition uh in in an attempt to boost up additional offerings or product offerings out there to the greater commercialization or commercial market okay in the class 8 space and so all is fair in love and war we have to kind of accept the goods and the bads here i just offer an exclusive individual opinion on highly on when i come on and i do these long videos because i have a lot of passion on it because it's generated from the lack of information that i have um i'm i'm so hungry that i go on and i read the highly on dot com website just to make sure that i haven't missed anything okay but i think their focus is where where it needs to be i could just um i could use more i could always use more and i think the um you know the information that's put forward um it can never be enough okay the last thing i will mention here with the hyper trucker x a lot of people have come out and said well they need to sell they need to earn revenue they need to do all these things that just aren't physically in the cards right now and that's a technique that's used let's be real if your expectation is the highly on needs to earn revenue and you're using that as a thesis to buy or not buy the stock don't buy the stock it's it's very very simple but if you're making that as an assessment that highly on needs to earn revenue to survive or they need to earn revenue to justify your investing position or they need to earn revenue to not go out of business again i just need you to step back for a second and analyze what has actually happened with this company over the last short year and a year and a half as they've been looking to build out their portfolio of workers build out their portfolio of customers and and and build out their order book which is expanding okay now if nicola were to come out and they were to say look we've got 1550 orders i think the stock would go to 20 okay now let's break down the order book for highly on in the hyper truck erx we have yet to see any renderings on the new initiative for the fuel credits okay i think there's a lot of people out there that are extremely interested in the product that's a presumption on my part but the writing is on the wall with regard to what's going on in california and the other states that are going toward the tax on diesel and the omission standards that are going to need to be complied by by logistics companies right so if you're in root on i5 and you're downbound through washington state in oregon listen you're going to have to comply once you hit california and i do suggest that perhaps maybe even washington and origan will align with these environmentally driven types of policies to make sure that they're they're governing the amount of missions that are are going out the stack in their respective states that's just how it is on the left coast okay i'll just leave that one alone but the hyper truck erx let's talk about the biggest order on the books thus far that of which initially highly on on the hype got all kinds of credit for from agility logistics this is for up to a thousand pre-orders it's up to a thousand on agility's website it is in their best interest as the as the world's third largest logistics and transportation company if you want to get bullish on highly on and start to understand and not just recredit agility that's just a fun name go look at how enormous and global agility logistics is they they are big and for highly on to get i've said it before zero credit zero credit for the relationship that they have with agility logistics just plays in a very very small and multiple part as to why the company right now is extremely in in in the basement it's extremely oversold for multiple reasons and agility logistics is one of those reasons okay now if you think that for some reason and i thought it was one of the smartest moves actually in many of the process improvements that highly on come out with in solidifying the and and codifying and defining their order book status i think companies should be able to make a pre-order to get themselves in line but i think they should be able to cancel at any time with no penalty that i thought that was brilliant it's freaking brilliant if you want the product get in line if you don't piss off you'll come back in five years anyway right this is a confident bold move on highly on's part to say look there's going to be such a demand on the product that people who have made their place known in order of precedence with highly on will get their place in line but you better get your ass in line otherwise you're going to be stuck waiting while we look out to look to build the capacity in our in our order book this is where the oem hubs are going to really come in line because they're going to be able to really expand their reach and dig deeper into that inline precedent of their order book and satisfy those orders quicker but to come out and say that they need to put in a binding order or something that requires somewhat of a deposit down on the orders that it was super smart and i have no reason to believe that agility if you read their website read how much they're investing in the green energy space 18 million infrastructure offering from agility logistics and i come back to talking about look if if if these companies start with the innovation council opt to align themselves with a highly on holdings limited think about the amount of publicity that they're able to enjoy open ended publicity for x number of dollars we know what the bottom dollar cost is for the hyper truck erx about 220 thousand dollars which is about 100 grand more than a traditional diesel truck at about 135 thousand dollars okay now the key there that gets missed is the total cost of ownership over time significantly goes down when you're talking about the hyper truck erx run on rng okay as opposed to an engine a diesel engine truck that's bought at 135 that's going to tack on about that much in fuel bill over the life of that truck so the cost of ownership goes up over time on the diesel side and it actually goes down over time the longer the truck is put into service on the hyper truck erx but the thousand orders okay i have no reason to believe that agility put that on the books and basically to solidify their place in line i do now if if that order on the onset ends up being 10 i'm happy with that right because it what they're trying to do is they're trying to step into that integration okay and what that'll mean is that there's 990 on the reserve order book for agility that they can come to the table and say hey look we want to put in an additional for the following year of 25 right we want to put in an additional the year after for 50 100 and so on and this is where debt mar comes into play with their 300 orders interesting enough debt mar logistics has really been an interesting vein to the bullish thesis on highly on as a product installer of the hybrid units and then such a positive feedback from those products being put into place that they just went ahead and secured the order for the 300 to get themselves in line remember this is not a member of the hyper truck innovation council they just love the product so much that they stepped to the table and said look we're going to align ourselves with the highly on solution we're going to help them we're going to become an advocate and a partner in this process so i think that 300 it is a real interesting 300 truck order it's an outlier it tells us a lot each of these orders kind of have their own pedigree and makeup when we look at the bullish thesis and this is why i find it funny when people come out and they're like they need to sell they need to sell they need to sell they do in due time the title of this video is sell now sell it get those orders on the books here and start to build out that robust order book right now according to my knowledge they have three they have three accounting for 1500 and 50 orders of the hyper truck erx that's exciting that's exciting those those are reservations you think that these companies make these reservations willy nilly allow it to go out to the public that they are aligning this early in the process even before the demo units are prescribed to the fleets oh man come on like it's amazing to me how there are people out there that kind to see it my way because we're forward thinking in our application where is it that what we know in the information that we know now could take us into the future we don't know i think the x-factor with highly on is their opportunity to scale up without the assistance of of government grants and i think that's another thing that gets forgotten all the time i think the bev community and the bev investors and even the hydrogen fuel cell investors they are working on a false precedence that that industry can stand alone without the assistance of government intervention highly on is the only company that can boldly say that they can survive with or without the government incentive now with those government government incentives just come a further incentive to fleets to provide the highly on solution to their customers and just make it that much better of a bottom dollar investment for them if they can get a hold of some of those government back grants right some of those fuel credit initiatives that are coming out highly on a said very explicitly they do not need that support and i think as a stock owner in the company i think that's that's music to my ears right they could come and with the value proposition alone to your payback i'm a hybrid that's just what it is okay to your payback okay could be a little more could be a little less i don't know that's what's declared right now as a two-year payback that the the question is and and the real takeaway is that the product pays for itself pays for itself fleets are going to know this once they put these initial units in place you don't think that they're going to be doing their own internal validation 100% 100% you said it was 6% it's actually 6.2% or you said it was 6% fuel savings it's actually 5.8 thank you highly on we're very very satisfied that our internal data turned back after the product validation and after the purchase of our initial products of the highly on solutions have been put into place we validated that congratulations you've got a customer for life okay we're gonna up as we scale up our fleets to step in that direction of of really enjoying that cost savings to the bottom line and again it's a three-tier benefit three-tier benefit okay these companies these companies want to be called upon with those environmentally environmentally friendly and they want to be able to improve their environmental stewardship scores going forward it's just that simple the question is who is it gonna be who are the ones that are going to be stepping forward to say I put my mark with highly on okay and when we look at the two broad categories of the products the highly on offers look at the progress that's been made through product validation over the road testing actual fleet feedback that has been provided and being integrated into the v2 element and then with the hyper truck erx look at the orders on the books look at what highly on has done to basically acknowledge and solidify fortify those relationships with those companies that don't mind getting their early place in line the time is to sell now the time is to sell now and the elephant in the room is the v2 hybrid version which are going to be commercially available here in the coming months within 2021 get ready the pressure is building behind the dam it's only going to get riper and riper on the vine until that catalyst comes out and this stock is going to have nothing else to drive it down on it's just going to run out of options and I think the only thing when we're referring to sell it now with regard to highly on is the stock at these eight dollar levels it's silly it's funny and by chris's admission in the investor place article even bears are kind of wondering what the hell is going on with highly on stock is it's been absolutely crushed it's been absolutely dismal performance and the disconnect between highly on stock and highly on the company couldn't be more wide in aligning and the stock market gets it wrong a lot of the times highly on holdings is just another example of the market getting it wrong guys thank you so much hopefully we've struck up a dialogue leave your comments at the bottom of the video I will continue to roll these out once the stock gets up above ten dollars eleven twelve thirteen I will pull off and I will not be doing highly on videos anymore except for the updates that I provide okay when I come out with these videos I come out with them because I find it ironic how people bag the stock right now when I think it let's say the stock ends up going up into the future there's too much potential there to be looked upon at this juncture with the stock trading at eight dollars a share and not deeming this a potential opportunity of a lifetime guys if you appreciate the content coming through and make sure and subscribe to the channel share the message with anybody out there my handle is in-depth invest on Twitter you can find me if you want to tweet Thomas Healy I'm kind of done soliciting if they want to come on the channel it's an open invitation I've already sent two solicitations to them I'm quite certain that they're busy I will continue to beat the drum on highly on holdings.com trying to provide a more neutral holistic opinion from a retail investor's opinion that has done his due diligence on highly on holdings and I hope you find value in that as an investor in the company or somebody who's looking at as a potential to take a stake early on in the development stages of this company as we look toward scaling up mass commercialization going forward in response to my sell now charge to highly on holdings guys thank you so much for tuning into the message and good luck in your investment future