I'm going to get right into it because we have a great panel here, and I'd like to leave times for Q&A with all of you, so I hope you won't be shy when we open it up. But I'm the moderator here. I'm Paul Fain. I'm a senior reporter at Inside Higher Ed, which is a digital news publication that covers Higher Ed. And the folks on this panel and some of you have kept us extremely busy of late. I would say the busiest of my career as a Higher Ed reporter. It's been an exciting year so far. So I'm going to just very briefly read the names and titles here so you know who these folks are. And then I'm going to let each of them talk very briefly about what they do and why they're here. So directly to my left is Sherry Lieder Kelly, vice president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, which we call Cale. Then we have Mika Hoffman, who is the executive director of the Center for Educational Measurement at Excelsior College. And then we have Joseph Tebow, director of academics at Strader Line. Then Mark Singer, vice provost, Thomas Edison State College. And finally Devin Ritter, director of special projects at the Saylor Foundation. So I actually have written about each one of these institutions I think in the last month or two. So this is all very exciting for me. So just to very briefly kick this off, I was actually at a Cale conference a couple months ago, like Time Flies. And we were talking about prior learning assessment, competency-based education. And I said kind of jokingly to the panel, it was the night of the State of the Union, if you could get the president to address these issues, what would you ask him to say or do? Little did I know the President Obama in his State of the Union and the supplementary materials actually addressed these issues and encouraged higher ed and accreditors to speed to market these innovations, which was pretty shocking because it doesn't usually get that sort of airtime. And then Marco Rubio, in his response, in addition to the water thing, which I may do later, actually was even more explicit, I would say, in supporting prior learning assessment. So exciting time. So I'm going to start with Sherry if you talk about what you do. Sure. I'm Sherry, obviously. I'm vice president for learningcounts.org. And we are a nonprofit currently foundation-supported online service that helps adult learners align their experiential learning and knowledge, what they might have gained at work, maybe in a MOOC or volunteer work. We have them align that with college courses, currently a course match system, which is really kind of backwards in our view. But it's what higher education recognizes right now. They align their learning against the learning outcomes. And then we have an assessor who's a subject matter expert and a faculty member review the electronic portfolios and decide if college credits can be awarded. So students can come through. They learn how to align their learning, demonstrate their learning, and earn college credit, which helps them to significantly accelerate degree completion, get acknowledged for what they know, and to also save money. Turn it to Mika now. I'm Mika Hoffman, and I work at Excelsior College, particularly in the Center for Educational Measurement. We are kind of the prefab version of what Sherry does, which is that we build standardized assessments in areas where there are a lot of people learning that amount. Those standardized assessments are pegged to typical college courses, so interest psychology, or criminal justice, or bioethics. We have a number of these exams. And essentially what they do is they, it's the same as what Sherry does. You take an exam, you pass an exam. The exam content is pegged to learning outcomes for typical courses. And again, we translate performance on the exam into what would be expected if you had taken a course. That's worth college credit. We do, because we're a college, we transcript it directly, but you don't have to be enrolled in the college to take an exam. You can use that as credit anywhere that will take it. I was tuning out there for a second. Apologies. So next up, Mark. Oh, sorry, Joe. OK, I'll go. Sure. Joseph Thiba, the Director of Academics for Straterline. We offer the typical college courses for $99 a month plus a small or nominal start fee. And I'm happy to say that we're partners with everybody here. So do we have some very low-cost options from Sailor and others that can, student can take. It's a kind of more likened to a traditional online college approach, though it's self-paced, so students pay only for the time that they're using. And they can transfer that to either the American Council on Education Credit Network, or to one of our three dozen or so partner colleges. Mark, now it's your turn. All right. I'm Mark Singer. I'm with Thomas Edison State College. I'm the Vice Provost in charge of the Center for the Assessment of Learning. And what we do in that area is just try to figure out all the different ways we can give students credit for what they already know, whether it's through exams assessments, whether it's through portfolio development and assessment, or whether it's through an evaluation of the training programs or licenses or certificates that those students have earned outside, either in corporate training or military or something like that. And so we really see ourselves at Thomas Edison as kind of like the, within the college is like the Department of Flexibility. We're just trying to figure out all the different ways we can map what students know to our degree programs and to sort of be as creative as possible in evaluating what they do. And we've also been working with the Sailor Foundation for about a year. And as part of our whole flexibility thing, we're developing exams that will align to sailor courses. So that's a student who finishes a particular sailor course and we can then take our, a TCEP exam, that's the name of our program. If they pass our exam, they get credit for the sailor course. Devin? I'm Devin Ritter. I'm the Special Projects Administrator with the Sailor Foundation. So all of my colleagues here have kind of spoken to the fact that we have a working relationship with them. And we kind of see ourselves as being the learning piece that fits in with the flexibility of their assessing that learning. So through various means, we are taking our content and matching it up to the colleges and universities and organizations like KIL and organizations like Straighter Line, who can benefit students by allowing them to take what they've learned with Sailor and actually transform that into college credit and hopefully into a more affordable college degree, which is something hopefully we'll start talking about a little bit more. So yeah, our first theme is credit worthy assessments. If someone wants to disagree that the college credit is still the coin of the realm, please have that. But let's start with assessments and because I'm the moderator, I'll talk for a second because I'm allowed to do that. So as you all may have heard, in California, there's a bill that's been floated to create a pool of online courses to serve students of public colleges. And the way that the legislature has proposed making these credit worthy is through direct credit. So basically if you take, let's say, I'll just pick one randomly, a Straighter Line course, you would receive credit through the AC credit recommendations that you could then use, as I understand it, at the community colleges or Cal State or potentially University of California. And by the way, for context, the California community colleges turned away 600,000 students during their recent budget crisis. So we're talking about a lot of capacity. So on the other side, we just discovered yesterday that there's a bill in Florida to do a similar but different thing. And the details are still a little vague and we're still trying to figure them out, as I think some folks are here. But to encourage colleges to use a pool of courses from outside providers, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but where the credits would actually be through assessments that I believe the colleges would manage, which is more of a direct assessment. So could you all talk about those two methods and what you see as potential upsides of each method? Who wants to try first? Sherry? I'll try. Well actually I think that what we're seeing, especially in California, is that policymakers and taxpayers are just tired of business that is usual with higher education. And although the California model is actually one that a lot of states wanted to emulate maybe 20 years ago, it became just so expensive and onerous that now, and you're seeing a lot of governors do this, are trying to find a way that they can somehow enable students to be able to kind of bypass the entrenched part of higher education and come around and still get the credential that's going to be recognized by the entrenched part of higher education, which is kind of a challenge that we face at Learning Counts in that students come to us knowing what they know and what they can do and then we have to retrofit them back into the course match credit our model so that it can go onto a transcript and be recognized by all the colleges and universities. If we were able to move the other direction to simply competencies and competency assessments, that would actually serve the students better and I think that's kind of in line with a lot of workforce development people are really asking for at this point. Sure. Someone else want to jump in? Devin? Yeah, well personally, my view on those two models, I think the California approach is more efficient and actually ties in what more people are doing. One of the benefits of that approach is it allows for a student to take online courses such as sailor courses or straighter line courses or hopefully a lot more courses where students can be able to master the learning objectives that are needed in college course. But the second part of that is it allows for the assessment of that by various means. So hopefully they can take courses that could then be assessed via Excelsior or Thomas Edison or a straighter line exam or a kill portfolio and California will then say, yes, we will take that assessment because we've already had leaders in education prove and validate that you did that. The Florida model to me is great in that they're allowing students to save time and work on their own pace and learn online, but they're taking a burden upon themselves of having to do the assessment which is understandable in some means because academics like to have some of that freedom to test themselves. But I think hopefully and seeing, and Miga can speak to this probably, the incredible detailed approach they go to exam development, that Florida doesn't need to do that as well. They can trust that Excelsior can handle the weight of that or that Thomas Edison could handle the weight of that. And so you might want to speak more to that. I would like to speak to that. As an assessment nerd I have to say it may not be rocket science, Michael talked about rocket science, but I don't know that assessment science is quite that hard but it is a science. It isn't just I know the subject and so I know how to ask people questions to find out if they learned it. It's more complicated than that. And in my experience people who are experts in English literature or calculus or algebra aren't necessarily experts in how to assess what people know about all those subjects. So I get very concerned when I hear about well the colleges are just going to assess it themselves because the quality is going to be variable. Some of them will do a great job. Some of them are going to have people who really understand how to pull out the important things that the students need to know and they're going to be able to capture that, they're going to be able to do it reliably and that's going to be great. And then other places it's going to be random where the people are going to build bad tests and nobody's going to be there to check on them. Can I ask, is there any quality control when colleges do their own challenging exams or who's looking over their shoulder? I have no idea. Now it's possible that the accreditors do but in my experience accreditors aren't assessment experts either necessarily. Which isn't to say they should be. I don't think that's necessarily their job. The job of an accreditor in my opinion should be to make sure that the pieces are there to make sure that the institution is doing its job. But I think something like challenge exams tend to pass below the radar of accreditors because it's such a minor part of what goes on. If it now becomes a cornerstone or a mainstay of how education is going to work it's going to need a lot more attention. It's going to deserve a lot more attention and I'm not sure that accreditors or people out there know how to tell if it's being done right. And so to get back to Devin's point I think there are a number of organizations, not a large number, but there are a number of organizations that really know how to do assessment and a lot of the assessments that are done are at scale. And by at scale I mean our exams tend to be machine scored. So they're at scale in the sense that any number of people can take them and it doesn't cost anything particularly to score them. They're at scale in that sense. What LearningCounts.org does is at scale in the sense that they have very well thought out standards and procedures and rubrics that have to be gone through so that they have that assurance that even though it may be an individual level assessment the process can be trusted and the process is transparent and the process is something that experts have vetted and know is a decent process. So those are the experts. It's not an exclusive club. Anybody can join that club. You just have to know how to do it. And so what I would call for is we need to make sure that in California and Florida there ought to be standards how do you do assessments. If the schools choose to do it themselves that's fine. I think it's a waste. I think if there are assessments out there for intro statistics you don't need to school to do a challenge exam. They can take an intro statistics exam. There are plenty of them out there that are done by reputable organizations. Sure. Anyone else want to jump in on this? The only thing I would add is that in either scenario California or Florida in a sense it makes my job easier. Because what we're trying to do is allow students to earn credit for low very low cost. So if you are going to draw a line in the sand and says this assessment will get you that credit then we can work with experts to build a course to help students pass that assessment. Or vice versa we're going to say it's these learning objectives that make up this course. So you have to achieve these learning objectives and competencies in order to earn credit and the institution that does that just has to jump through a few hoops and become accredited either by the state or some other agency that also makes it easy because we have a recipe to work from. So if we could all get together, if all states got together I think they would come into agreement in some cases of what college algebra looks like. And that's I think is one of the problems currently is that it's an entirely fragmented marketplace where everybody has their own ideal version of college algebra which is incredibly inefficient and causes all sorts of redundancies. With the Florida model the only thing I would worry about is redundancy in what the student has to pay. So I have to pay to learn potentially or I can do it for free but for free still may need some additional resources. I may need to go spend time. I may need time and effort but then I also have to pay for this test which could be a high risk test.  Whereas in a course way you can learn towards mastery. You can stop and say I don't get this concept yet. How do I learn that? So just so folks are clear because I often am not when it comes to what they're actually talking about here because it is complicated stuff. We're talking about challenge exams that students take to prove their prior learning for credit. And couple of the most common ones are Excelsior's exams and the CLEP exams are offered by the college board. And we're talking $80, $90 a pop so a pretty affordable way to credit. But you all brought up a point I think would make for a fun lightning round here. When we're talking about standards where should the feds get involved and help set standards for that? Everyone loves that question. Anyone? I don't think they're the right people. I hear that often. But I think that gets to the question of encouraging innovation and preserving quality which often seems to be at tension with this. Do you agree with that? Yeah I think one thing that the feds could bring that individual schools couldn't is data collection and if they're collecting data appropriately and actually giving statistics on when meeting certain learning outcomes translates into having certain skills and success in certain areas then they can potentially better kind of reverse engineer what a good course is and what is a needed course. And they have a much larger sample to pull from but then they can count on the people who are actually experts in developing the courses and the assessments to actually fit those models and perhaps. But there's a lot of bureaucracy and there's a lot of people not getting the right information so there has to be a lot of teamwork. So let's switch gears and go to open educational resources so we are here. In the place that it has in this you know I talked to a student who used open educational resources to prepare for a CLEP test. He said he spent two weeks it was free obviously because it was open and he passed the test for $80. Where does fully open material play a role in being paired up with these assessments? And where does it not? I guess I'll start with the lighting round. 30 seconds or less. Well increasingly I think prior learning assessment has been around for almost 40 years and it has kind of a connotation of being really old and stodgy and conservative but as more and more people gain access to the web and web resources and see the foundation courses I think we're going to see younger and younger aged people, persons trying to take advantage of this. Like right now our average student is probably in their early 40s. But there's definitely going to be somebody at age 16 that's going to say I want to be able to align what I've learned on my own because I was just interested in it to something that's going to be meaningful to an employer or to my future at college. I think the OER, there's just so much potential and right now it's a matter of kind of helping us all to align and be able to raise awareness around all the opportunities for demonstrating that learning and getting credit for that learning beyond the constant authentication of who took the Zaylor course or not. That's a matter of demonstrating the learning. That's a good point. In the California model they're looking at about $140 for these courses that would be in this pool. So let's say Coursera has a course in there or Udacity. That's no longer a mook. It might be a mock. Just so people are clear that's not really fully open anymore. I wanted to follow up both on what Sherry said and then also something to have said in response to the last question. One thing I would say about OER we do align our exams with OER as fast as we can but it's changing so fast that we can't really keep up in the sense of do we know everything out there that's open that aligns with something in our exams. One of the reasons why we love working with Zaylor is because they talk to us and we go back and forth and if they're going to change something they let us know and so we have a relationship but most OER is just kind of random and it's really hard to say if somebody says hey if I went over here and took this OER can I pass your test. So the second piece of that is what Joe was saying earlier which is the learning outcomes are really crucial to all that. It's the triangle. You've got the learning outcomes here. The OER are addressing learning outcomes from this direction. Assessments are addressing them from this direction and as long as everybody is clear on the learning outcomes you should come out okay. So what that means is it's incumbent on providers of assessments to say here are the learning outcomes that are associated with this assessment. You pass this assessment this is what it says about what you know and then at the same time providers of OER can say here's what you're going to learn using these resources. This is what we're trying to get you to learn using these resources and that way the consumers, users whatever you want to call them the learners can say okay if I want to get credit for and I'll say statistics. If I want to get credit for statistics I can go to the exams content guide which is freely available. This is true of most of the large scale exams or you can look at the content guide and see what the learning outcomes are. So I can see what I need to know. I can use these OER resources and they should be telling me what the outcomes are so I can learn those. And then as long as all of that is clear and open and transparent then I think everything works out well. I think the problem is a lot of open resources are just hey I put this up because it's cool and nobody's doing the extra work that it takes to put up clear learning objectives which is fine open should be open and there shouldn't be extra regulations on it. Openness is part of the charm. But that's those learning objectives are what's going to enable people to do the matching. Getting back maybe a little bit to your question. I think that OER works very well with certain higher ed models. One that's really learning outcomes based on what you're really thinking about in granting a credential is something like well the person who's got this credential is able to do this, this and this and has these skills and has this knowledge it doesn't work very well with the more traditional model in which a college or university sees itself as somehow branding or leaving its stamp on its students. So you don't come out of Harvard if the majority of your courses were through OER a Harvard man in the way that you might have if you'd set through all those lectures. So that's something that's missing and I guess people can decide whether or not there's a value to that and I think for some people it's out of their reach or it's not practical, it's not what they want. What we do with OER is something that's more the learning outcomes focused model where our students are all adult students. That's really what our focus is and there are a few schools like us mostly in the northeast that are only open essentially to adult students and so we assume that they come in with a certain amount of knowledge that they've picked up from various places. However what we find over and over is that the knowledge that they've come to Thomas Edison with is not neatly packaged in three credit bite size pieces. They might know two credits worth of a subject or seven credits or they might know the practical side of it but not the theory side that overlays it and so what we're thinking about in regard to OER is saying to a student, alright well this is what you've brought us. Here's the gap between that and the courses that we offer, the curriculum that we offer which is still very much course based. So you can turn to OER to color in to fill in those missing gaps. Now it does change rapidly but we're thinking more and so the thing that we thought we knew was true of that particular move is no longer true but we're looking at it as more of a just in time model. So you're coming to us now and you're saying I've got this knowledge and so we will research what's out there and say well here's something that might fit. It's not itself the final product that we want you to have but it'll get you ready for an assessment which will then measure your skills and knowledge. So some of the sailor courses work very well in that regard for us. Can I just add one more thing to put in a plug for OER University? I don't know if people have heard of this but it's a consortium which includes Thomas Edison and Excelsior that's committed to providing credentials primarily based on OER where the members provide OER but then they also commit to trying to find ways to get credible assessments for that OER so that you can build up a degree that comes from your home institution but that's based on assessments which are in turn based on learning that was gained through OER. So that's a neat initiative to look at. And they've kind of mentioned this but I wanted to reinforce what I kind of believe to be one of the strengths of sailor courses and why our courses work so well with the assessment models that they have is one nature of openness in that the courses themselves are transparent and individuals who are looking to build assessments have a much clearer picture of what our courses teach to and also the fact that we've taken the approach of, we've designated the learning outcomes that we think are needed and even if we change the content we're not going to change the learning outcomes. We're going to find the best open content to continue to teach those learning outcomes so that even if our courses change and our courses do change because we have now a mission to be 100% open resources that we know that our students can still take that same course and still pass that same assessment that is really validating the learning outcomes that we're building to. So it kind of makes us more flexible and able to work with these individuals on a long term scale. So I think it's probably fair to say that a lot of the energy for all of this is the interest in adult students, but traditional age students too to be able to be tested for what they know and receive credit for it and to basically test out of courses or to learn at their own pace is driven in part by concerns about the cost of college as we've heard and the time to degree and training our workforce. It might surprise you all to hear though that some people are not that excited about all this and I encounter people who are very skeptical every day actually wrote a story today about Thomas Edison having a really interesting partnership with a community college in New Jersey, Warren County to create a degree track for veterans and it's a really cool story, not the story that I wrote but what they're doing but they basically allow veterans to qualify for credits from their training and experience up to 45 even if it pairs directly with courses. So I knew what would happen immediately people began criticizing this and one of the first critiques I saw the community college actually sent its president to boot camp on Paris Island for a week to kind of get a sense for what the training was like and what the training was like in terms of credit and the Marine Corps basic training under A.C.E credit guidelines is eight credits, eight college credits and they were impressed with the level of depth, the learning outcomes in the Marine Corps training. Some of our readers thought eight credits for the Marine Corps training, come on, pull ups, what's up with that? I don't think that's fair but I'm just saying what do you all say to critics who don't believe that non-credit learning should count for substantial credits? How many pull ups? Probably a lot. Well often that comes from ignorance, I mean I'm not trying to put any red flag words out there but a lot of it comes from ignorance and it comes from just not even really knowing what we're talking about or the science that goes behind what we're trying to do and it comes from wanting to maintain the status quo to be able to keep higher ed the way it is where you have the experts, the sage on the stage, you have the things that you have to do to pre-rex to be able to get into the course and all of the different gatekeepers along the way and it's concerning because that particular model which actually up until maybe the last year or so is the one that most of our policy makers in Washington and even in state government, they had all gone through the traditional way like they may have gone to Harvard, they may have had elite education and therefore they never once gave a thought to people who don't always go down the same pathway and so I think when you see that kind of criticism, when we are trying to help people to get validated and move forward and have pathways, I think it's really unfortunate. I think if I'm not mistaken, most of that training was reviewed not by us in this case but the American Council on Education and their members include 1600 geologists the big one too, the elites as well as everyone and the concept behind that maybe this is a group that already knows this but is that they've already learned through this training whether it's military or otherwise something that they would only have to duplicate in a classroom and I would say there are some people who would say that learning that you get through experience is really of more value than something you get in a classroom I'm not sure if that's the conversation we want to have now but because they really internalize it and they really know it so to have that person come out of that training and then sit in a classroom and go through the textbook version of what they just did seems pretty silly and so all this program and all ACE is doing is just acknowledging that for them they do it by mapping this training to learning outcomes and other standards that they find in college courses it's a pretty rigorous process I would say Part of the problem and the stigma and the lack of adoption is schools and individual teachers not really understanding the process behind ACE credit recommendation and CCRS credit recommendation and not knowing the fact that it's their colleagues it's actual college professors and subject matter experts who are validating this learning are just doing it on a wider scale so that they don't have to do it again and if you look at regional accreditation and some of the things that go into a school being regionally accredited it has nothing to do with the actual quality of the individual courses and what's being taught in those individual courses is saying that the institution is being trusted to teach good courses but they're not necessarily always speaking to their courses whereas with ACE and CCRS they're actually looking at the individual learning that is taking place and making a valid judgment on whether or not any schools should accept that for credit and I think once that becomes a little bit more widespread and I know our colleagues here at Tina are doing a really good job of kind of spreading that message but I think that's an important thing that needs to be reinforced is that who is kind of doing that making that recommendation and why other people should trust it. Would you actually explain briefly what Tina's shop does so folks here? I knew this would happen I think all of us probably can in some aspect but I'll speak specifically to three courses that we put through review so we kind of reached out to Tina and CCRS to see what would need to be done with our courses to have them reviewed and recommended for college credit and we spent a good amount of time kind of beefing up those courses and building strong assessments for those courses and ensuring that students would be learning what needs to be learned in the equivalent of that college course and being assessed appropriately for it and when it came time for review, CCRS came to the actual Saylor foundations and brought with them professors of these courses to kind of go through our entire course and our assessment with a fine tooth comb, asked us questions about why we did certain things and looked at all the exam questions and asked us about how they were assessed so that they could understand that material that we're teaching to and the assessment that is being used to validate that learning is just as strong as end course in the classroom that they gave so that they could feel safe saying yes this course is worth three college credits and luckily we've had partners like Thomas Edison and Excelsior who understand that process and now allow our students to take that course from us and transfer that credit to those institutions and say significant amount of money. So I want to open up to questions in a second but I'm going to ask another really easy question. I think a lot of these innovations challenge the credit hour and I think a lot of people view the credit hour as a barrier to going further with self-paced learning. What do you all think? Do you think that it's time to revisit the credit hour and its application to higher education? So there was an easy one? I was being sarcastic. So we field a lot of calls at ShareLine where students ask what's the average time it takes for a student to finish a course and in general we say around 40 days. That's kind of indicative of any of our courses many will take longer, some will take shorter, but it all really depends on the student and the student's prior experience, their aptitude to learning, their aptitude for online learning, the quality of the resources that we're providing their ability to use to leverage some of the support resources that we're providing. It really is all dependent on the learner these days, but the semester credit hour is based on this kind of number picked out of the air that's hundreds of years old and it says you have 16 hours of classroom time and that's what three of those equals a semester and you add all those up and you get 120 and you get a degree. So it's arbitrary in a sense but there's not a good alternative currently and to be honest, if it were predicated on some other thing, learning objectives, they being, I think if we were to come to agreement and put people on this table and say come up with an alternative would be based on the semester hour. What's the number of competencies or the quantify what's learned in a semester hour and then let's turn that into the new currency and I don't have another alternative. Yeah, I would just say that it's not the credit hour that's the issue as much for me as the fact that the credit hours are designed to measure courses. You know, as Joe's saying if you could tie those credit hours to competencies or the kinds of things that you want somebody to know when they've completed a degree, that's fine. But right now our degrees are based on the fact that somebody got a passing grade in 40 courses and I don't know that that just knowing that is enough to tell me that that person has any skills except that they know how to cram for tests and things like that. And to me, that's where the issue is with the credit hour. Each of those is worth three credits and it's not really building toward anything. I think that's really where the drawback is because anything you replace credit hours with is going to also be arbitrary in some way. You know, it's just going to be all the little building blocks like the sort of Lego pieces that add up to the degree. You know, you have to count it somehow I suppose. Sure. Sherry, did you want to? Yes, I think one of the things that's been a reinforcement of the credit hour is Title IV funding. You looked at the numbers on the screen around student loan, student indebtedness when they graduate. Many of our, what we do here, because it's based upon assessment, it isn't eligible for Title IV funding. So in order to kind of help to really truly innovate and move to more competency based show us what you know, show us what you can do, kinds of degrees where employers can really actually see what they're hiring beyond the brand name of the institution, then it's going to continue to be like this. We need to have, and I know we have a lot of think tanks that are considering this, how would we be able to award financial aid for students who are going to be taking an exam, or students who are going to be going through learning counts for an assessment. I saw a very interesting outcome of legislation in Tennessee where they've gone to performance based funding for all of their public institutions and community colleges, the Board of Regents system and the UT system. And because they've gone to performance based funding, they actually get additional funding for students who are making progress, who surpassed milestones. And by getting credit through examinations through learning counts, by actually acknowledging prior learning assessment, faculty members who really weren't supportive of that before are becoming supportive. Deans and administrators are getting very interested in that because they could take a funding dip if they aren't actually moving people on to degrees faster and being more productive in terms of the output. So that's another, I think the whole incentive system is weird right now for credit hours. I'm sure it's kind of briefly touched on this speak up your microphone. But one of the other important aspects, I think, is from the employer end. Part of the reason why I think there's still credit hour and degree base is because employers continue to take a degree at face value and they look at a resume and see, oh, this person graduated from this college, that must mean something if they kind of try to flip that on its head themselves and start saying no, I need to see a more detailed report of what these individuals have actually learned that you're sending to me, then that can force it to be broken down into some more competencies and re-evaluate the way from structure to degree and also be able to break down courses where there's overlap so that if you're taking one course that or two courses that cover half the material the same, then perhaps don't view that as six credit hours, view that as one and a half courses worth of information learned and kind of be able to detail those learning outcomes. That could be more useful but I think a lot of that effort needs to be done on the employer end of saying these are exactly the type of employees that I want and universities and colleges have been around for a while to serve the economy and the employment force so they kind of need to have back and forth conversation on that. So I want to turn it over to the audience here in a second but I'm going to be a big stickler on this lightning round so I really mean like ten seconds here. You kick off I think an interesting question, how big can this get? You know in the context of I think most people don't realize this 20% of American higher education ballpark is the traditional residential college student. The norm is the non-traditional student but how big do you think these innovations can get? And it's hard for me to call them innovations when they've been around for 40 years but prior learning assessment competency based education where do you see the movement going to a normal store with Sherry? Actually because the movement's been around for so long we say we're finally in the spotlight. I think as long as we really take advantage and work together to you know whether it's the badging movement or competencies or credit hours or say the foundation courses examinations I think that we could really, this could go very far actually. It's making people think about learning differently. I would agree with Sherry, California's a big place. I think as people start thinking about competencies rather than just seat time that's going to be the key that turns the lock. To be honest I think what's the indicators going to be how many students have transfer credits and we can hope for 100% of students in the future having some transfer credits that they either got for free or for very cheaply that would be a mission accomplished. I think there's really two pieces to what you said but I'm just going to give them five seconds each. When we talk about competency based learning professional schools already do that. This is really an innovation only for the liberal arts. Our nursing school does that at the applied science school. This is not an issue for them. The other piece as far as prior learning assessments concern I think it's really going to take somebody doing some studies somebody who gets a degree that's primarily accomplished through prior learning assessment what do they then go on to do? How skilled are they? How do they compare to people who... Yeah, I think we're taking steps in the right direction and California is proving that by even considering this bill and the other one that they have on the table of having a fifth type of university system of just going for assessment. Which actually if any of you were at the summit last year Michael had that idea and told Virginia to do it but California I guess came around to do it at first. But as Mark said we also need time and we need data in order to support these models so California goes ahead and does it and then they start producing a better caliber employee than other states than that is a marketable thing and that will kind of hopefully resonate. I'm sorry, the thing about California I just want to mention the things that are going on in California in Tennessee, Wisconsin and Florida they're really based on money though they're not based on improving the quality or making things more accessible to students they're just like how do we get them out cheaper? And that's a very different... What more capacity that's not being met in California? Well yeah and so rather than build new campuses let's do this. And that's not really addressing the same issues that our institutions are. Alright so I'm under spotlight I can't really see you too well here but Hi I'm Doug Mellinger I've heard a lot about what you guys are talking about I'm on the board of two colleges out in California. One is a nationally accredited board certificate and associate degree program and the other one is a bachelor and master's degree. One of the things that we've seen out there is that the vast majority of the students that are applying are quickly unprepared to come to medial math that has to be given because of what they're getting in high school is absolutely staggering what we've had to do out there. When I think about what you said Mark in particular was actually because when I think about this country the number of people who ever stepped foot in a college and the number of people who actually ever get any sort of degree is absolutely ridiculous. I'm not really hearing about how are we going to deal with the vast majority of people who really never are taking access to education and the outcome of actually preparing people for jobs where we've got millions of jobs in this country that are available with nobody to take them because the skill sets are not much and so I just think the whole system is completely broken and I haven't heard a lot of the real fundamental problems coming out of this. What do we need to do to actually start solving some of this problem? I think this competence is very interesting. How does that match up? Well in my opinion one of the problems that colleges and universities taking on the burden of remedial education themselves there are tons of resources out there that students could use to learn remedial courses but what usually happens is students will go to college and be forced to take a test and then be told that they then have to at that college take a remedial course which if they don't pass they can't move on to take other courses instead of colleges and universities directing those students to free alternatives to better prepare themselves for those resources and then be able to back when they are prepared and do have the skills necessary to actually achieve what the college wants them to achieve and I think that's one of the big issues is that so much money and so much time is getting spent on colleges not doing what their actual major skill set is which is the higher level learning and the other resources that go around it and reteaching what is being taught or what should have been taught in high schools so I think they need to spread out some of that and make use of the free education providers and other resources that are available to them and kind of better guide students in order to better suit their needs and set them up to be more successful. Anyone else? Yeah, sure. I know the again two parts to your question but the second piece the AAC and you has done a number of surveys I guess with the Peter Hart of employers asking them what kinds of skills they want and those surveys never say I want somebody to have 12 credits in math. They say I want somebody who knows how to communicate effectively, ethics, global perspective and things like that and it's a question really it's something that can't really be addressed by the current system it's something that some of these more competency based programs or ones that are focused on those specific learning outcomes are the only ones that can get close to that it's hard to convince people who are used to teaching their specific subject and their specific discipline that what's really needed is a better alignment with what students are going to be doing after they finish school. As far as remedial work is concerned Thomas Edison State College offers no remedial courses at all. We consider our students to be self-directed adults that's the phrase we toss around all the time but we've been looking at OER as an option especially OER that's self-paced where students can take as long as they want and kind of focus on different areas as they prefer and then once they've gotten that to a place where they feel comfortable then they can enter I'm not sure that would be the solution for everybody but as Devin said there are all kinds of open resources out there that address those kinds of things. A bridge to success is the one that comes to mind right now whether there are dozens of others. I see a hand over here. Isn't one of the problems to get to the first part of that question of what you were addressing just a complete lack of interaction or collaboration on curriculum and development certification between the employer and the educational system. It seems like the bubble of OER or the bubble of educational resources still gets caught inside its own thought as opposed to making that connection with properly employable workforce. I know Coursera was planning to work directly with employers to develop courses that would address these specific issues I wouldn't know if others are but I can throw in there. I was just going to say that certainly community colleges work all the time with their local employers to figure out what they're looking for and what they need but what they need I think for me anyway the bigger issue is we certainly wouldn't be talking about MOOCs if they weren't being offered by prestige institutions. A lot of us that have been in the field forever if one of our colleges or universities put up a massive open online course that had maybe a 10% success rate we would be left right out of higher ed and would be really on the fringe and I think what it points to is this huge digital divide in our country of the haves and the have nots and our aspiration to be able to taste a little bit of MIT or Harvard through MOOC but we have students who come to us, one in particular I can think of right off the bat who is homeless living in a shelter, she's driving to a library to get internet access. When you talk about the disconnect with developmental education because the K-12 hasn't done its job we really have to be more than just lip service think of the P-16 system and better align the quality of education throughout the system and we've been so decentralized and have so many feet thumbs that I totally agree that it is broken but I think we have a lot of smart people that are really trying to think about ways to make it better. So let's do one more question and while we're doing that this is not an endorsement but we haven't talked about two of the big players in digital. The University of Phoenix I hear from a lot of employers does some of the best work in terms of structuring degrees around competencies that employers prefer as do community colleges and Pearson has been working on digital developmental products for a long time as well. Any, okay I see one back there to the left. John Edelson California State University Monterey Bay I think I attended some of those faculty meetings in California that the first speakers spoke about. Also the e-portfolio California project we were an outcomes based campus that really moved away from high states testing to outcomes and portfolios. I see the movement with MOOCs and something she described is really going more towards high states testing and limited testing that doesn't provide as rich of an understanding and high state testing as we're so well with no child left untested. What are your thoughts about other alternatives to high state testing and portfolios? I think high states testing it sounds like when you're talking about high states testing you're talking about the heavily standardized testing. I would consider testing that leads to a college credential to be high stakes whether it's a portfolio an essay, a term paper, anything like that. But to get to what I think you're asking when you're talking about a multiple choice machine scored exam determining the fate of a student versus are they doing a portfolio or are they doing something more interactive. I think there are all kinds of good assessments and there are all kinds of bad assessments and it's possible for just about any type of assessment to be either good or bad. There are a lot of bad multiple choice tests out there. There are a lot of good ones. There are a lot of bad portfolio evaluators out there. There are a lot of good ones. So part of the trick is not to make sure that what you're assessing is really what you want to be assessing and that whoever's designing the assessments is finding the right way to get what you want to assess. If you want to assess whether somebody can marshal a bunch of facts taken from many different sources and write a coherent argument right now the technology doesn't exist to score that by machine. So having somebody try to do a machine scoreable essay or multiple choice test is not going to be a good way to assess that particular competency if that's what you're interested in. Then you have to get to something that's more expensive that probably involves humans but even there just because it involves humans doesn't mean it's high quality because then you have a reliability problem. So I think the trick is to have an increased awareness of the appropriate and inappropriate roles for assessment and to make sure that people who understand that are designing the right assessments for the purposes that they're purportedly for. We're going to wrap it up on that. Please join with me in thanking our panelists for an excellent session.


Now we're back, we're live for the four o'clock block. I'm Jay Fidel. I love doing this and I love doing it with Ian Linn too. He's the reporter's reporter, investigative reporter. What a guy. I admire you so much. And thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. We're going to talk about the evidence coming out of the MISCII case. That's the Michael MISCII case. Michael, Michael MISCII case junior, as I recall. He's a junior. That's correct. And he got into some trouble with georganized crime and a whole crime ring using his Kama'aina termite company as a cover and they got him. They got him and they're prosecuting him. And the prosecutor here is Kenji Price, a Trump appointee, but a terrific prosecutor. Good experience and motivated. And you've been covering it in a number of stories. So can you give us the thread about what's going on in that prosecution? Well, I'll try. Here's the quick once-over. It was in July of 2020 that FBI agents raided a house in Kailua at 4 a.m. and along with several other locations in Honolulu, they arrested Michael MISCII, owner of Kama'aina termite, Kama'aina plumbing, and a host of other companies. They were indicted on a 22-count indictment. The broad umbrella is a charge that they were part of a racketeering conspiracy. There are 11 defendants. 10 of them are alleged to have been part of this racketeering conspiracy. All of them were then alleged to have taken part in one or another of a series of serious crimes that are charged in this indictment, ranging from murder for hire, kidnapping, armed robbery, bank fraud, you name it, it's in there, extensive drug dealing from methamphetamine and cocaine to opioids. There are four capital offenses, I believe, that Mike Miskey is charged with. That's a potential capital punishment case. The government has not decided whether it's going to pursue that Hawaii's estate without capital punishment, and it's would pose political problems. But anyway, that's the seriousness of the charges. Well, let me just offer a thought about the environment for all of this. Hawaii, low crime rate. Hawaii, people follow the rules in general. Hawaii doesn't have or it hasn't had in a while any organized crime that I know of. And here's an organized crime ring happening in our midst and doing the worst things that organized crime, that organized crime, arguably, allegedly, the worst crimes that organized crime does. Right here, right here in Hawaii, that's very, that's very threatening, and especially at a time when at least the county prosecutor, city and county prosecutor, and its office was in a black hole for so many years under the K Aloha scandal and prosecution. So here we find that I guess it must have been the FBI investigated, and maybe other agencies too, and we find that the prosecutor is finally prosecuting. But what it tells me is that this has got to be a series of crimes, those 22 indictments, that have been taking place over a long period of time, and we really didn't know about it. And the government alleges that the overall conspiracy directed by Mike Miski has been going on since the late 1990s. And if that's so, it would have been with a succession of partners or associates he worked with. What I see this case as is an opportunity to open a window onto what is the state of organized crime in Hawaii. It's something that only comes along maybe every 10 years or even more. There's a big federal case like this, and they go in and we get a trial and we get to see the evidence that's been collected that tells us what's been going on in that last decade. And this is our, this is our chance for this decade I don't clearly these things were going on we just didn't know about them. And one of the problem is that local police and local prosecutors, they're dealing with a crimes committed the police are called someone is arrested they sent to the prosecutor the prosecutor decides if there's the evidence, if there is they go to court. Whereas the federal government can look and say, here's a problem. Let's investigate it. Let's see who the players are let's take our time. In this case, this investigation has been going on a minimum of six years. I believe it had to have been started by around 2014. In the, in the course of that, the government recently disclosed they have collected and turned over to the defense attorneys now 450 gigabytes of digital files. And some 30 something DVDs containing recordings, video recordings audio recordings wiretaps photos and so on. So it's a huge accumulation of evidence they've made in the course of this, of this investigation.  A whole slew of offenses, as I say that are not charged but are alleged. The whole enchilada why would they allege them but not charge them. I'm sure it's because they don't need to they have the serious ones that ones that are going to count. And the other charges would just be wasting their resources I guess. But they'll I assume they'll use them to show the pattern of conduct. In this case much of a violent conduct undertaken by this group of people, allegedly under the direction of Mr miski. So just cut off the head of the snake I mean let's assume. And I do want to explore it step by step but let's assume that this puts them out of commission closes them down. This is this alleviate the problem for the community or does this suggest there are other organized crime rings out there that are doing the same thing. You know, always a town where there's a lot of money flowing around sloshing around in various private and public projects. And I just don't think that you get that concentration of resources without someone figuring out a way to make a quick buck or an illegal off of it. So, no I think it could change the picture for a while. It's probably put a crimp in the drug supply for a while, but it, you know, just like previous drug bust major drug busts here. It doesn't put an end to the drug problem. The other thing it seems to show is that is that one of these things go with the other in other words if I find that there's drugs for example. There's all these ancillary crimes, like the murder for hire and you know the, all the fraudulent stuff that was happening around. It's never just one thing. We talked about organized crime we're talking about all kinds of ancillary other crimes. Am I right. Yeah, and traditionally, this the current case is somewhat different from traditional Hawaii organized crime. You know traditionally what did you have you had crime groups that control prostitution. They control gambling, they control drugs, and then they fought over what territories they would, they would hold. And in this case there's no evidence in the record so far that the miski group was involved in prostitution, or involved in gambling, except in. They were the government alleges a series of cases in which they attacked the operators of gambling operations gaming rooms or gaming activities and made off with their money. They attacked other drug dealers and made off of money in one case allegedly with the five pounds of methamphetamine that they took and then split up and sold as their own. So it's a. It's a traditional group and it's untraditional in the sense that his companies were well known. Right after every, your newspapers came with it wrapped around the newspaper or in your mid week and comma on a termite. Everyone knew it. The government alleges that behind that they use the company, both as a headquarters for their criminal activities, but also to provide, for example, in one case, government specifically alleges that one person got out of prison was working and he had to report to his probation officer or parole officer. And so they jimmied up fake paychecks to show that oh yes he's employed and working here and where he was really doing was furthering the work of the this conspiracy. So what kind of crowd do we have here I mean, are you able to say what brought them together what with a high school chums. And where do we know each other and where do they come from and who are they. Well, the core is really. Miski miski's father dive and he was only six.  And they, then the family ended up in my Manolo a bunch of relatives are in my Manolo. And as a young man, you know, 1920 21 year old. He was arrested with one cousin, another cousin was sent away for 25 years on drug charges. The organization that's been charged includes one brother includes several cousins. Someone who was married formerly married to his aunt. There's a lot of family relationships in here. But then also he worked he lived on the streets as a young man. Came from came out of one Manolo lived on the streets in Kailua got into trouble there right away was a repeat offender as a felon before he was 21. So, how old is he now. He is about 40 47 some of the top of my head I can't say but I think it's about 47. And was he the founder the organizer of the termite company. I mean, is that his company. His company. He, while out on probation. In the late 90s, he got a job with another termite company, a lot of termite company. He was a kid. He learned the business, apparently, from a lot of termite. And when his probation was up somewhere, it's still not clear where he got the resources to start his own termite company, which he did. And in pretty short order turned around and began trying out other companies. So I say he must have a list of 15 18 companies that many most of them started never went anywhere and close they may have been fronts for something they may have been, you know, hiding transactions for one particular deal. But most of them faded away but the termite company stayed and the plumbing company is still alive. Actually his businesses are dead. They've lost their licenses their businesses are closed their business records were seized by the federal government. They're not coming back. But that's many of the some of the people involved who ran those companies. They are still licensed and in business. You know, one of the issues you mentioned that which was in the last article I saw that you wrote is this whole thing about how the government may turn over its evidence to the defense, which it has a legal obligation to do but not to the media, not to the public. Can you talk about that and what's the balancing of equities on an issue like that. Well, eventually, as I'm learning now researching related cases that from the past, eventually when these cases go to trial a lot of evidence becomes available. And some of it will will leak out in other ways along the way. And in this case what we're seeing now is the federal government has spent the last three or, well, let me let me back up. Originally this was a drug case. There was a first indictment in 2019, a year before the indictment when he was arrested that first indictment charged simply Mike miski and one other person with financing, a major drug deal. Allegedly he put up $400,000 to buy about 20 pounds of cocaine in California and bring it back to Hawaii. That indictment was kept secret. That indictment was then used though, to begin to work on other people who were part of his drug network, and they, the government has now produced at least four. I think maybe five people who have now pled guilty on drug charges originally, and then they have entered into plea agreements that recognize their role in his criminal organization, broader criminal organization, and at least one of those people had been had been arrested in 2005 served 10 years or so in federal prison, got out, got a new job with Mike miski, and was given a lot of work to do, including attempting to organize and arrange the murder of several people. Only, only one of those people was murdered. In fact, but he has now turned states witness and reached a plea deal just a month ago to testify for the state. So that's, they've been very busy at finding people all the way up the chain from lower street level people to middle dealers to top level people who had access to him and can testify about miski's own conduct. It's just like in the movies, just like in the movies, trying to flip the witness. And you started the outer circles and work your way in and that's what they've done very successfully so far. And they imply the government implies there are more people who have not yet been identified who will testify who have and well testify. So that that is one of the considerations I suppose and the balancing of the, the equities on whether to reveal the evidence they have accumulated with the media with with the prayer with the public seems to me that with that would be against distributing it, publishing it because then they're not able to follow that track of flipping witnesses am I right. Right. We're pretty far along now. At this point. Information has been buried in relatively obscure court filings I mean their filings in this case and in related cases in which the government gives some details about a number of these episodes both things that are charged and things that are not charged but are alleged. And in those documents where I it's where I found things. You know I started just looking up anybody he had associations with in court cases, going back 10 or 12 years. And so it brought me to finding the people who've been flipped in the last three years, getting arrested on drugs and then worked into confessing their role in the, in the miski organization. Yeah one of the things you mentioned this. I don't know it's troubling I think to just an outsider. I mean every man is the thing about murder for hire and I wonder how, how that works here in Hawaii I mean there have been strange murders over the years and I'm sure that murder for hire is not a complete stranger of the Hawaii criminal community but I just wonder how that works for example, you what you offend somebody. You have a bad deal with somebody you owe some money and didn't pay it. And then, and somebody hires somebody like, like miski or allegedly doing the things miski does and goes after you and tries to tries to murder you with impunity. I mean, who, who are the targets of this kind of activity. In his case, the government has disclosed one target was someone who he suspected of being a government informant. And in that case several people armed, hid outside the person's house, waiting for him to come out so they could kill him, and he didn't come out. But then after that for whatever reason, it was not pursued. And we don't, you know, we don't know why. Another case was in the news in the last, actually last summer, Lindsay Kenny, who had worked on the movie sets were miski who had worked and several of his other insiders worked. In this case, he miski allegedly approached Lindsay Kenny to kill Jonathan Frazier, who was the his miski son's best friend. They were both in the car that crashed in November 2015 miski son eventually died four months later of injuries from the crash, Jonathan Frazier survived. With no evidence. In fact, counter to all the evidence that was available, alleged that Jonathan Frazier had been the driver of the car and then so it's responsible for his son's death. And the government alleges that as a result, miski arranged or paid for his his kidnapping and murder, and the disposal of his of his remains. At least that's that's the allegation on the others. I think it's three other cases where there are no details have been provided so far about who these were that had been targeted to be killed. I suspect most of them at that point were were people who he suspected were helping the government and and putting their case together. The government records show that since at least 2015 the end of 2015 around the same time his son had this car accident. There was already active federal pursuit of him. By 2016, he had he hired a high, high powered defense attorney, and in court filings. Her attorney has claimed that his banks were saying they're working to do business with him anymore apparently because the government was subpoenaing records. The IRS was part of the investigative task force. I involved the IRS, the ATF on drug drug agents drug enforcement at FBI, and who else. I'm sure there's somebody a homeland security. So, it's been an extensive investigation but here we are. Where are we in so evidence has been accumulated accumulating and they have been accumulating. At some point it's going to be a trial where are we on the continuum to that. The trial because of COVID what has been post continued until I believe it's September of this year, but you know that's not going to happen. Everything else is backlog. This is going to remain backlogged as well. The recently there's been a skirmish over how much access. Mr miski should have while he's in the Federal Detention Center to computers and other things that his lawyers say he needs in order to review the 450 gigabytes of records to assist them assist in his own defense. That skirmish is still ongoing. And that would delay the trial anyway even if COVID didn't. Yes, yeah, it's just, it's a mass, a massive complex prosecution. That must just put put real pressure on the defense attorneys to to cope with all its angles and all its factual allegations. Well, it sounds like he has miski has enough money to hire high high price attorneys and they can handle it and they will whether the storm I suppose in the end and go through the trust any suggestions to the commentary, the country. Yeah, when, when he was arrested and they swept in they, they confiscated the business bank accounts as well as his personal bank accounts. There's been nothing in the record yet about which personal accounts might have been released to him, except there was a discussion of his and money in an escrow account from the sale of one property, which would net him a couple $100,000. But apart from that is, it's unclear the government says that he must have lots of money at his disposal. It sounds like though they haven't found all of it. They've, but but they have closed down his businesses where much of his money was. So it's unclear how much, how much remaining he still has a house that's worth six or $7 million. And a number of other real properties that are in his name. And on the government side, you know, I recall in the in the stealth bomber case, I don't know if you covered that at all back about 10 years 12 years ago, this fellow stole the plans for the US design of the stealth bomber to China. And he actually never got paid. We had the prosecutor on think tank and he told us the prosecutorial, you know, a view of all of that is very interesting. But one thing was clear is if the United States attorney wants to go after you, he has unlimited resources to do that. He has all those agencies that worked on the investigation. You may have an assistant US attorney that is brought in just for the trial from Washington, whatever. And he can spend as much time as he needs to. It's, it's not the same as an offense council. Now one of the things that is unanswered and disappointingly so. I was one of those who hoped and saw hints that it would happen that that this prosecution would disclose the relationships between those and political and and social power in town and groups like miskeys operating below the surface. As I say, there have been hints that along the way that there were these ties and these relationships with the KLO is for example, but none of that is yet in the record or any hint of that in the files. So whether there will be a new superseding indictment that takes us farther into the heart of that political world or not remains to be seen. Well, I mean, just following the movie culture on it is likely if you have an enterprise of any magnitude you have to buy off some politicians to protect yourself may find it and you may not find it until the last minute because I'm getting from this discussion that the government does not have to disclose indictments. It can be secret, essentially no. They can until until they're actually acted on. So, you know, this all reminds me and I wonder if you covered it at the time of the Rothman enterprise back 2030 years ago. My time. As a reporter, at least. Okay, but you remember the case I'm talking. Oh yes. So what's what's the. Yeah, well, you know, he was doing a lot of stuff for us, but I don't know what happened to him. He was alive and well on the North Shore. I'm told, did he escape the escape prosecution. Serious prosecution. He's not like, like some of miski's friends who have gone away from the long term. Yeah. So, at a trial of this nature, it sounds to me like these these witnesses who have flipped they're going to be testifying. It sounds like there'll be a lot of witnesses, it'll be, you know, months, months long trial. Sure. And it'll, it'll be a previous process and the jury and be a federal jury and paneled on it. And they'll be told that they're going to have to spend months listening to the evidence and, and so forth. That is a major, major experience isn't it. We don't have too many trials like that. We don't know we don't. For obvious reasons. Yeah, it's just, it's a organizing it both for the prosecution and the defense is just a horrendous job, even just explaining it. Like it's very much like the klo case, their original mailbox case went on for a long time this is going to dwarf it. Yes. Yes. And it's much more serious because it involves capital crimes. The other thing is, you know, from a political point of view, Kenji Price is a Republican. I believe he's a good US attorney. And the likelihood is, I don't know if you've studied this but likelihood is that he'll be replaced with a new administration because that's usually what happens. It'll be rare that an incoming administration, you know, stands by the appointment of the previous administration, especially when the parties are different like this. So it'll be someone else. And my guess is, well, likely it'll be somebody from this community and may not be the same kind of personality as Kenji Price. I don't know if that is likely to change the zeal with which the US attorney approaches the case. Any thoughts on that. You know, Kenji Price is the administrator up at the top. He's not one of the US attorneys handling the case. So I thought those people, those people aren't political appointees. They stay in place. They're doing their jobs. I think whoever comes in is going to ride that horse to the end.  It's too far into the public domain right now for it to be dropped. From a career point of view, seems to me like a case like this is really a critical case for the careers of the individual prosecutors who are involved. And they will make or break their careers depending on the results here. It's important for the careers that they win to say, you know, I don't know what winning is in a case like this, but that they arguably win. Well, I'm told that in federal court, the defendants rarely win. It's by the time it gets to trial on a federal case. 9598% of people are convicted, if they haven't already pled guilty along the way. You know, trying to beat a case like case like this is going to be difficult, especially for the central players. There may be some of the people who are more peripheral in the group who could, you know, they could walk away. But I don't see any of the, any of the central players. You know, unless there's been some, some huge mistake that is not obvious. I mean, it's not going to be good news for anybody's sitting in that courtroom. Now, and what about, you know, the possibility of copying a plea here. My guess is that the government is not likely to do that if it has a good case it's not going to, it's not going to entertain those negotiations is that is that possible has it been discussed is it is it on the horizon. Oh, I think they very much like to avoid having to go to a complicated trial if they could get everybody to plead. And I mean, at least the rumor mill says they've been trying to get miski himself to flip against someone higher up than him and I don't know who that would be. But, you know, rumor mills follow that talk. And whether that's true or not, you know, your guess is as good as mine. They have flipped several other people, including some who were clearly potential defendants in this case. And there may be some among the defendants named in these and this indictment, who have agreed to testify at a future date. That's the government says that maybe the case. Well, you know they can use him to flip against someone higher up on the chain, or maybe a supplier maybe the supplier of the 20 pounds of cocaine from California. Maybe somebody, some politician who took money from him, whose name is not come out yet.  Right. But in this case, you know, I'm getting getting something in return is not going to mean anybody's going to walk. I mean, some of them might only get 10 years instead of 40 years. You know, we're talking relative, relative benefits here. We're not talking freedom. Any chance of a pardon. Well, you know, I doubt it very much. I don't think he's on that list. I don't think so. So in the federal in the federal criminal practice usually the judge is assigned to the outset and in the federal system and he stays he stays on the case throughout from the beginning to the end. Who's the judge. Who's the judge in this case. I think these are going now to judge Watson. They have made some they did change a little bit along the way and some things have gone and much of it's still at the magistrates stage at this point. There's so there's still the pretrial things that are down, haven't come up to the judges yet filtering their way up. Right, you have the magistrate makes all the evidentiary rulings and discovery rulings and so forth. I've been covering this over a period of time how long have you been covering it how many articles have you written. What what aspects of it have you covered. Well I started following misci several years ago when someone called me and said he was lighting up a tree and Hawaii Kai and it had the Hawaii Kai residents up in arms or some Hawaii Kai residents up in arms. That was my first introduction to him. I started, you know, the, because there was a potential crossover to the kloha case which I'd also been following carefully. I started digging into this one as soon as indictments came down. I counted recently and I think I counted 38 articles or blog posts, describing some aspect of this case. You know, just peeling away trying to explain what's happening and what's happening in court or what's happening in the evidence and still trying. I'm still trying to go back and look at the growth of his business empire how he could have financed this. There's evidence of in the in his real estate career for example of money laundering, you know, the often will be the case with real estate transactions. There's a lot of stuff to dig into some of which some of which I'm holding my ammunition for later. Later means that you'll keep on covering it. My guess, you know, from the point of view of what we discussed and the track of this, you know, the points that have come out into the public here. It gets more interesting all the time. And when you get to a trial it's going to be really, really interesting. And so I can't imagine you not continue to come. Without someone to do in my retirement. The gift that keeps on giving. Exactly right. So okay, you know, just to go back to the the principle thing is how worried should we be about this sort of thing. It strikes me that the the murder of his son's friend is very troubling, because it's a vanity murder, it's without any good reason, and all the worst reasons and it means if he doesn't like the way you this kind of criminal, if he doesn't like the way you part your hair, then he could be sending people after you right here in Hawaii. I call it vanity because it doesn't base it's not based in any reality. And so you wonder if that kind of thing exists and we should all be a little concerned you know, like not getting into arguments with the wrong people that sort of thing. If I had known some of these people I would not have wanted to get into arguments with them. But it all, it all affects the public ultimately, whether it's that's because your streets are unsafe or your kids buying dope from somebody who buys dope from the next level who eventually it trickles down from Bob and somebody's organization or someone else's organization. I'm looking at the case now from a few years ago, where it, you know, at the bottom of the chain was a 17 year old high school students still in high school. And he'd been, he'd been working with someone buying buying drugs from someone who got it from somewhere in the miski chain for a year and he was only 17 at the time. And I'm told that's, that's the chain that comes down in neighborhoods all over, at least all over a while. That kids get in trouble kids swander their money and don't pay kids get beaten up kids get threatened families get threatened families get broken up. I think we see the damage all over. Amazingly, to me, miski's defense attorneys made an argument that he should be out on bail and what one of the arguments was they took the murder that you thought was so troubling of his son's best friend. And they said, Well, look, that doesn't show he's violent that's a very special case. You know you got to understand this is a father, a very special emotional case that doesn't show his dangerous generally.  The court rejected the argument. But I thought that signaled what they'll try what their plan to try as one one layer of defense when this gets to court. Yeah, I don't not all first degree murders are the same. So my last question for you and is sure is is the question out of Dustin Hoffman's marathon man. Is it safe. Are we safe is he in jail is his hydra, you know, tamp down in non operating right now or are there elements of it that are still operating. Is there any part of his enterprise that's still alive. I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are parts of it. But now they're sort of like the Ronin samurai, they're leaderless. I'm sure there were also rival elements in the organized crime who are glad to see him going down and are offering assistance where they can. That someone who's been ripping off other people's gambling games or other people's drug supply networks has made a lot of enemies along the way. So some of that I'm sure is in play as well. But are we any less safe than when it was all organized. No, I don't. I don't think so. I think people are probably laying low at this point in time. Well, it'll make a great movie on cable I can tell you. The question is only whether whether the producer has to change the names. That's all. Yeah, that's a heck of a story. As I say it's a window into the world we don't see normally. And it's an education we need you and I and everybody else watching this. Yeah, very valuable discussion. Thank you. And thank you for covering it. Thank you for in advance for covering it in the future and I hope you can come back from time to time and give us a pricey on and how it's going. Have no fear I'll be here. Thank you. Extraordinary investigative reporter in Hawaii doing us all great service. Thanks.


You know, the goal of this is to be able to find students wherever they are. We've got two male, two female. We've got one from North Carolina State, one from LSU, one from Texas A&M, and one from UAM right now in our first class, with four students. So they come from a real diversified background. It's to find students that have that love and that passion for the outdoors. They've done their academic work in the undergraduate, kind of in between graduate, maybe doctorate, but this gives them a chance to continue on with their academic work, but also get the apply side. Get out on the dirt, get out on the land, figure out how does a duck lodge like Five Oaks operate? How do we manage the habitat? And not just here, we're able to go to other properties as well. I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I grew up hiking, camping, that sort of thing. I got my undergrad in biology and environmental science. I was looking at trees in Colorado, conifers mainly, which are very, very different than bottom land hardwood forest. And coming out here, I knew I was going to be looking at tree inventory, which I had a lot of experience of in conifer forest, but I had no idea the extent that like hunting was involved in it and waterfowl management. And I'm hoping with this master's program, I'll be able to work towards forest management in the future, conservation. I know this program here in particular is going to set me up for success for that. As an education and research center, we're in the mission of creating the next generation of waterfowl and wetland biologists. And so we can keep teaching them in the classroom all we can from the books. We have to carve out time for these students to get them in the field, get their hands there to get mud under their fingernails and on their boots. And so the best thing that they're getting out of this really is time on the landscape here with people that's been managing five oaks for a long time. And so getting opportunity to spend time with Jody Pagan and Daniel Duke out here learning the stuff that I can't teach them in a classroom. That's a really important thing for our partners to make sure that these students are going into these jobs ready to do what the Game and Fish Commission, what Ducks Unlimited needs, what the Fish and Wildlife Service needs. So I'm trying to learn opportunities that I can also provide to these students to help them be better prepared for the jobs and the careers. Our field is, you know, you don't go into Wildlife Financial Resource for a job, it's a career and it's a passion. And so I'm looking for students in this program that are as passionate about this stuff as I am. And getting them out here, getting them opportunity, getting them in front of the people they need to meet and working on getting them into our field.


Hello, my name is Miroslav, I work as a software engineer at ST Micro Electronics. In this video I would like to present to you our Uniclo GUI application. The objective of this application is the demonstrate functionality of ST sensors and algorithms, which we provide in the XCubeMems1 and XCubeMems XT1 software packages. To be able to test this solution you will need a hardware. You can use a nuclear board, one of these, which is displayed in the list, plus motion-memes and environmental sensor expansion board. You can also use a sensor, which is soldered on DIL24 adapter. The sensors in the DIL24 adapter are supported only by the XCubeMems XT1 package. You can download the Uniclo GUI from the ST.com. After you download the application, you can execute the installer. The installation is very simple. You just need to accept the license agreement, select the location of the application, and optionally you can install a virtual comport driver, which is needed to use the application. And that's it, now you are ready to use the Uniclo GUI. The Uniclo GUI looks like this. It is divided into three sections. The first one is the horizontal toolbar. The first part of the horizontal toolbar is the selection of the comport, where your nuclear board is connected. When I connect the board, it will automatically recognize that the board is programmed with a firmware, which is compatible with the Uniclo GUI. So it will offer me only the port with the proper nuclear boards. The next section is buttons, which allows you to connect and disconnect the board. So I can do it. And then there are buttons to start and stop data capturing, the button which opens the settings, and of course the button which closes the application. On the left side, there is a vertical toolbar, which content is automatically adjusted to the firmware, which is programmed to the nuclear board. So right now I have a simple data log firmware in the nuclear board, so it offers me to see the data coming from the motion and environmental sensors, and also see the data to the file. The main section of the application uses the tabs, where you can find several information. The first one is the info tab, where you can find the version of the Uniclo, version of the firmware, which is programmed into the nuclear board, a version of the library, if it's used, and the expansion board, which is compatible with the firmware. Next tab is a firmware management tab, which you can use to program the nuclear board. You have to place your firmware into proper directory, if you do so, then you can directly program your nuclear board using this firmware management tab by simple double-clicking on the firmware, which you want to use. Next tab is called user messages, where you can see all the messages coming from the nuclear board to the application. And last tab is also adjusted to the firmware, which is used. Right now it allows me to adjust the parameters of the sensors connected to the nuclear board. Right now I have programmed the nuclear board with the data firmware, so we can have a look what it allows us to do. So we can enable or disable each sensor. Right now I have the motion and environmental sensor expansion board connected, so we can enable accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, the pressure sensor, humidity, or the temperature sensor, and we can also adjust the full scale if the sensor has this capability, and we can also set the ODR, which means output data rate of each sensor. If your sensor is correctly configured, you can press Start, and the firmware will start to send the data to the application. We can display the data in charts. There is a dedicated chart for the motion sensors, which is accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, and second chart for the environmental sensors, which is temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor. You can enable or disable autoscale functionality of each chart. You can also do a zoom in the time domain, and you can use a cursor to read the data at the selected time. There is one more possibility for each sensor. You can read or write to any sensor register. You just need to write the address of the register, and press the get or set button. Right now I will try to read who am I register of the accelerometer, LSM6DSL, so I will write the address, which is 0F, press the get button, and the application reads the register, the content is 6A, which is correct. Unicloud UI allows to demonstrate functionality not only of sensors, but also of motion libraries, which we offer in XCubeMems1 package. Right now we offer 19 libraries, which can be used for the sensor calibration, motion tracking, and activity recognition for mobile or wristworn devices. As an example, we can try to demonstrate functionality of sensor fusion algorithm. So I will program the nuclear board with the DatalogFusion firmware. I will double-click on it, and right now the program is downloaded to the nuclear board. After that the Unicloud UI will wait for the response of the board, and then it should automatically connect to the board. So the board is now ready. I can press start to execute the sensor fusion algorithm. The sensor fusion algorithm captures the data from all three motion memory sensors and calculates the position of the device in 3D space. The output of this algorithm are quaternions, Euler angles, gravity vector, linear acceleration and heading. You can display the position of the board as a 3D model of the t-bot on your screen. Thank you for watching this video. For more information, please visit st.com.


What's up everybody jcm for jazzy's case breaks calm twenty twenty one penny prism basketball three box hobby break number 15 pick your teams Just sold out all-card ship And here we go. So we had a little team filler for the remaining eight teams So if you have a little character sign that means you want those and a little filler and Everybody else.  So that's another from the same case Number 16 will be the last three boxes of the case After this guys we got to do a little filler and then we got a two box random team break and Then another filler after that and then we're caught up guys pretty much Richard Kevin Knox and Robert Covington blue to one Um We're still got to do probably two more of those vanilla, but I can email you whatever email we have on file Or something like that Kyle Kuzma Jason Taylor in downtown Jordan Clarkson dorks Toppin Freshes Tim Duncan and Terence Davis Chris Davis I was like, yeah, I don't know how you a phone call You know you're something Kenyan Martin our Frini Simons and our first auto is Mike Miller To 99 remember when he shot a three what is like shoe off or something like that with the heat Mammy heat going to Roy Rajivulak and Isaiah Stewart Hoku Devon Veseal Hyper Michael Bridges to 175 Denny to buy his hairs Aaron Holiday Steph Curry silver The Angela Russell fireworks retro flashback Drew whatever Peter whatever marks cards is still offering is that's the only thing we offer whatever they're offering which I believe is just super What is a super express 300 bucks or walk-in that's the only thing they're offering Caleb Martin and Kevin Yeah, if you if you're submitting those specific cards for I believe so, but I don't think we're gonna hold it until Till he's back up one till PSA is back and we're running, but Desmond Bain that is to 49 and Devon Vasell rookie signatures Emanuel quickly Yeah, I don't really take care of that Nathan, but you would have to use a support button if it doesn't feel tonight But I'm sure it will We're pretty much almost done with the first filler. So I'll be good to sell Terrence Ross and Josh a coji Yes, Joseph Kim was box one guys Russell Westbrook and og on a nobie the red to 299 Paying for injured silver very nice Sean Maddock, there you go, buddy Jordan pool and a Kyrie Irving retro silver. That's awesome Brooklyn that's Margot Sol and Marvin Bagley the third Zion second year D'Angelo Russell and a Nico man Russell's to 199 and Nico manion is an autograph Golden State war is gonna Sean Maddock and here we go. We got one little LeBron little off-centered but Still a couple hundred bucks right there Demontus of bonus Anthony Davis Ruby waves. I am fearless. All right, you guys still another half box At least another one more autograph here precious Vasell Steph Curry and Bojan Volcano number 299 Obi-Toppin Xavier Tillman silver Brandon Ingram and Trey young Jalen Brown, Jacqueline Hayes Danila Gellin are Lou Williams polka Veske And a Devon Vasell Purple ice very nice looking car I don't want 75 and Markel's folks Really a land of magic That's Robert uncle Denny Daniels Jr. Kelly over a downtown LeBron and Arizona one-point game over Stanford Three minutes left national championship. All right, last box here guys. Okay. It's good luck. Luka Donchich. Oh Oh, wow. No way. We have a black gold rookie. That's a green Jordan Nwara. Whoo That is a beautiful looking card Five out of five for the Milwaukee box. That's going to Gary Prescott That's awesome Centering looks pretty strong as well Very nice and Anthony Davis. Whoa, what the hell is that? I have no idea what that is Drew, but Looks like paper got stuck to that or something It's a silver So I'll throw like a pack for you or something and if you need the little skew box That's already on the card And you got LeBron James right there as well Tony's now Zach Collins Anthony Edwards rookie Doug McDermott and wow more Jordan Nwara. That is a red the 299 Jake layman and Calvin Murphy for the Houston Rockets Houston Rockets that is going to Wayne Tyrese Halliburton Silver Michael Porter Jr. Chris Dunn. All right guys half a box left. Good luck Terry and Prince and Michael Bridges Lamello tonight center base Magic Johnson Silver Jamal Murray Silver Marvin Bagley and Robert Wood are Wonder quarter junior and Joe Angles to 60 our last stack right here guys. Good luck Austin Rivers and Elijah Hughes Pogovsky Roblova's Trey Young Danny Adija and there you go All right guys, and there you go So you got LeBron James there you got Anthony Edwards Jordan Nwara Calvin Murphy Tyrese Halliburton Anthony Davis Remember it came a little defected on top right there Jordan war black gold to five LeBron James Prichard Silver Kyrie Irving Nico Manion Vasell Foltz a sail Mike Miller the mental ball Elijah Hughes You can email their support and then you can probably call them email a call But I don't think emails by the easiest you can attach this video show them proof that it came out of a pack like that They might want you to send in the car with like a wrapper or Something like that and then hopefully they can get your replacement or give you something of similar value So I appreciate you guys. This is break number 15 Number 16 in the store Jasper's case breaks calm