ATU675 – ProStudy with Sam Cock

Hi, this is Sam Cock here and I’m product specialist at Pro-Study. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads at beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 675 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on May 3rd, 2024.

On today’s show, we’re super excited to welcome Sam Cock, product specialist for Pro-Study, and he’s going to tell us all about Pro-Study and the amazing tools it has that can help individuals with long papers, research, and so many more things. We’re also joined by Amy Berry from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning. So let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

[inaudible 00:01:16] here at the INDATA Project are pleased to host a web accessibility webinar for programmers and developers on Wednesday, May 29th, 2024. Attend and join renowned web accessibility professional Dennis Lembree for a full day of training. Training starts with a background on disability, guidelines, and the law. Many techniques for designing and developing an accessible website are then explained. Basic through advanced levels are covered. The main topics include content structure, images, forms, tables, CSS, and ARIA. Techniques on writing for accessibility and testing for accessibility are also covered.

If you’re involved in web design or development, don’t miss this wealth of practical knowledge. Our speaker, Dennis Lembree, is a senior accessibility consultant at Deque Systems. He was previously director of accessibility at Diamond Web Services, and worked several years on the PayPal and eBay accessibility teams. He also has experience at several startup companies, and contracted at large corporations, including Google, Ford, and Disney.

Dennis Lembree published articles, led webinars, and presented on digital accessibility at many conferences, including HTML5 DevCon, CSS DevCon, CSUN, AccessU, Accessing Higher Ground, Accessibility Toronto, and Paris Web. Dennis runs a blog, Facebook and Mastodon account on web accessibility called Web Axe. He created an accessible two-time national award-winning Twitter app, Easy Chirp, which is now sunset.

So remember, if you’re involved in web design or development or want to learn more about web accessibility, please join us for our web accessibility webinar for programmers and developers on Wednesday, May 29th, 2024. We’ll put a link down into the show notes that will get you over to more information as well as our registration page. There is no charge to attend this webinar, but you do need to register. So if you’re interested, please check out the link in our show notes.

Listeners, up next, we are very excited to welcome back Amy Berry from Bridging Apps to the show with an app worth mentioning. Take it away, Amy.

This is Amy Berry with Bridging Apps, and this is an app worth mentioning. Today’s app is called Be My Eyes. Be My Eyes is a crowdsourced app that partners a person with vision to a person who is blind or visually impaired. Using video chat, the person with sight tells the other user what he or she sees. For example, the person who is blind or visually impaired may ask, “What color is this shirt?” And the volunteer answers, “Blue.”

We trialed this app with a 21-year-old young man with a vision impairment. The app was easy to use and super user-friendly. It took us about a minute to sign up and get started. The volunteer that aided was very professional and helpful. She assisted with questions and nothing more.

This app is a great tool for someone transitioning out of school and will be experiencing independent living. People who are blind or visually impaired do an amazing job of navigating their environment, but we think this app could be a great resource for when they get into a pinch and need quick assistance. Be My Eyes is free in the iTunes store, and it’s compatible with iOS devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, today we are super excited to have Sam on the show and he is here to tell us all about Pro-Study and how it can help individuals with a bunch of different needs. Sam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Josh. I’m very excited to be here.

I am excited to have you. I’m excited to get into talking about Pro-Study, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, yep. So I’m Sam Cark. I am the product specialist for Pro-Study, which is a research organizing and referencing tool. I’ve been looking after this product for over three years now, but I’ve been involved in assistive technology for probably over a decade. I started out in … as you might be able to tell by my accent, I’m from the United Kingdom, and during my time before this I was an assistive technology trainer. So I used to work with students who had additional needs at university who were given assistive technology programs on their computer. I used to train those on a daily basis, and that’s where my experience of assistive technology comes. And I’ve gone from training on assistive technology to now working for one of those projects I used to train on. So that’s kind of a little bit about me and my background.

Nice, nice. Well, I guess that kind of brings us on to talk about Pro-Study. So I guess just start us from the top. What is Pro-Study?

That’s a good question. Where do I start? When people ask me what is Pro-Study, I think it’s sometimes quite easy for me to reply back because we kind of say what it is underneath. So it is … underneath the logo it says it’s a research organizing and referencing tool. So Pro-Study is a web-app-based application that allows students to create a centralized approach to gathering research. So that’s kind of it in 50 words.

Oh, gotcha.

We could start with-

And we’re going to dig in just a little bit more into that. So I guess, where did the idea come from or how was Pro-Study started?

Pro-Study was started by a gentleman called Jonathan Webb who, a bit like me, also kind of worked in the same industry of assistive technology of students at universities. So I was an assistive technology trainer and Jonathan ran an assistive technology training company, and we weren’t actually at the same company. It’s funny how we both from the same background, but one of the things that they noticed was there wasn’t really much out there for a student who has difficulty in collecting and organizing their research.

So from those issues and being overwhelmed with research and things of that nature, they decided to create the product which is Pro-Study. That started off as a Windows-only program, and then there was a Mac version, and now we’ve kind of melded those together as an online web-app-based solution, so you can use it on any device and even as a companion app for your phone, as well. So I think it’s over seven years old now, so it’s really kind of grown, which is great because obviously technology goes that way. But yeah, it kind of just all started really from the need for students to have something that would give them help with the research process.

For sure. And I know trying to … and this is just personally, trying to keep research together and keep it in its different places and how do I cite it, how do I keep all these things together is a challenge for anyone, with or without a disability, I would say would definitely be. So how does Pro-Study simplify this research process? How is it able to, I don’t know, collect and organize things to keep them together?

Yeah, that’s it, exactly what you’ve said, the kind of issues that everybody has.

So we wanted it to be able to collect from all types of resources. So the way Pro-Study kind of works is a student will have projects, an essay, a dissertation maybe, a paper to write. They can then create a project for that. We call them Projects in Pro-Study. So they’ll create a project, they’ll then break it down into manageable categories so they can start to put areas in which they want to go and conduct research in. Obviously, a lot of research is done online these days, so through the web-app browser and the extension, once your project has started, you’re free to explore, start reading and finding everything, and then to capture your information, you simply just kind of highlight it, right-click, and then you can save it to any of the projects that you’ve got working into the exact category you’ve put it in. So that’s kind of what the collection does. Should I keep going?

Yes, keep on going, please.

Keep going. So obviously we can stay focused on the task in hand, which is collecting research, so we’re not going back to our projects. We can just stay on the screen that we’re working on, not getting distracted by other things, collecting what we like. We can again right-click and save images using the extension that way. And every time you collect something with Pro-Study, what it will do is it will capture the key information, so the link back to the source, the web address where it came from, the date and time that you took it. It’ll also gather metadata in terms of things like who wrote it, the publisher, so you don’t have to keep going back and forth to take something, go back, find the notes. As you mentioned before, citing your work is difficult because you need all those bits of extra information for the reference inside of things.

So Pro-Study is … one of its main features is to alleviate all those steps, do that for you so you can concentrate on what you need to find, find it on there. And that’ll do that on web pages, it’ll do it on journals, it’ll do it … even physical items, for textbooks, you can go into that. We might talk about some more features as we go along.

Everything which you’ve captured with Pro-Study, you can then obviously collate that and organize that yourself. Once you’ve captured everything, you can then export it into a Word document, which comes out in a concise report, which will reference for you. So yeah, that’s kind of all little bit about what Pro-Study does there.

Nice. And I love that you can actually export it. I’m not just copying and pasting things that I’ve already kind of done into something. What is the export process look like? And you don’t have to dig too much, but is it pretty simple, clicking something, or how does that work?

That’s it, yeah. I mean, we are skipping to one of the main features towards the end of this, but I’ll certainly like to speak about it now. The export process is simple. It’s choosing which project you want to export. You can even decide which categories if you didn’t want to export them all. Then it’ll give you a few other tailoring options for the way your export report’s going to be like. So it’ll make a content page for you, making sure which bits of information you want going there. It will also do your referencing. As we’ve mentioned before, with all that citation that’s needed, Pro-Study will automatically create your citation bibliography for you, but it has a choice of nine and a half thousand referencing styles to use. So it’s not just one size fits all. You reference in Harvard or you reference in APA, for example. You can choose the exact one or even your own institution’s referencing style in there.

And that will go in the format of a Word document, but you can also change that to be a PDF or even an Excel type file too. And it also has the ability to kind of link to your cloud drives as well, so you can link it to your Google Drive, your OneDrive, your Dropbox, into there as well. So yeah, it’s simple, but there is a lot of options of customization there.

Sure, and that’s always important because everybody has different kinds of needs and yeah, I’m just sitting here thinking about all the reasons I could use it and keeping that in the back of my mind. So Sam, I know … because we talk about assistive technology on here a lot, and I believe this has actually been approved as an assistive technology software. Can you tell me maybe some different needs or disabilities that Pro-Study can assist with? Or maybe just the ways that it assists some folks with some different kinds of needs?

Yeah, no, exactly. If we think perhaps students with neurodiverse conditions such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, even levels of autism as well, any condition where there’s an impact on the student’s ability to organize information is where Pro-Study is going to be really useful as well. We even go into areas of overwhelm, mental health conditions, anxiety, where they find the whole process of research overwhelming, you know, where do I begin? How do I start? That kind of blank page syndrome. We find that those users get great satisfaction of obviously just adding things bit by bit and that snowball effect that’s kind of getting there as well, which has that satisfaction of using the product, too. So yeah, there’s quite a few different ways.

Nice. And as far as … you may have already kind of answered this, but can it keep all of my research? So I think of, especially if you’re at a college or university, the paper I write my very first year of studying, some of that information’s still probably maybe going to be helpful in my very last paper, my last thesis from my very last class. Does it keep track of all that information and then if it does, how am I able to go back and get into it?

Yeah, no, that’s a really perfect question. I love how you’ve figured of … these are the issues that we have when we’re studying at university, and these are the things that we’ve tried to alleviate as well. So we call Pro-Study a centralized database of your research, so anything that you capture in there will be saved in your projects, but your projects are always searchable as well. So there’s a search bar at the top. You can search for keywords, like you said, something you did in the first year of study, you might be doing at a deeper level when you’re finishing off, and you type that keyword in, press enter. Everything’s laid out in what we call research tiles in Pro-Study. So that tile will come up and you can easily hit a drop-down menu and copy that or move that tile to any of the other projects you’ve got working on. You can do that with a whole category of information, not just one tile if you wanted to as well, so you can easily move things between projects within Pro-Study.

Sam, you mentioned I can get information from the internet, but you also said textbooks as well. How would I bring the information from textbooks? Do they need to be digital? Can I scan them in or what are the ways that I can capture and bring information into Pro-Study?

Yeah, so we have some pretty powerful OCR features. For those of you perhaps don’t know what the acronym is, it stands for optical character recognition. And we have two versions of that tool. So one of them can be for when you are web browsing on your monitor, you come across some text that isn’t particularly accessible. You can’t copy and paste it, you can’t highlight it. You can draw that. It’ll convert that into accessible text for you. The other way we have is with the Project Assist app, and this is a great one for perhaps when the students are in the library. You can have a textbook open. There might be a body of text there that’s useful through your project. Inside the app you can take a photo. It will then convert that into editable text so you can make any changes or add any extra notes. And once you’ve done that as well, another cool part of that feature is you can flip the book over, scan the barcode of the book, and that’ll take all the referencing information out of the book for you too, so you can attach that. So your research has its citation there, too.

Sam, where were you when I was in college? I swear I spent more time trying to make my bibliography and work-cited page look correct than I did actually writing a paper. So that is great.

That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what … a lot of students still to this day have that problem. It’s the alphabetization of your bibliography, you’re making sure you’ve got all the fields correct, and those with organizational difficulties will spend as much time doing that as writing the assignment. And we’re trying to level up students so they’re more productive and have a fair shot at it like everybody else. So yeah, it’s a good feature.

Yeah, no, that’s an absolutely great feature. So Sam, I know we talked about some of the basics of Pro-Study, but I’m sure I can dig in a little bit deeper. Are there some advanced organization or project management features? How in depth can I get with Pro-Study?

Yeah, I think it has got a good scale of the in-depth in terms that you can do with your projects. Once you start a project, you do break it into categories, and that kind of level can be enough for some people. But if you are perhaps doing a bigger project, you might want to take that to the next level. So one of the useful things you can do is you can, as I mentioned before, they are called research tiles, which is the visual way of looking at what you’ve captured with Pro-Study. These can have comments added to them, so you can give yourself a quick note, particularly if it was like, maybe just reminding you that even though you capture that into the introduction category of your project, you may want to mention this as part of your opening sentence. So these note features are quite good to give yourself a quick reminder of why you took it, but also they get exported over to Word as Word-based comments on the side so you can see exactly what to mention with those.

And there’s also a tagging feature, as well, that can almost create subcategories within your categories that you can put keywords to tag on, if you want your diagrams or images to be separated from your text, then you can tag them up differently. There’s even just a quick pictorial emoji option as well, and that can create a filter to filter out to see all the ones … I quite like the head, the exploding head one. These might be the ones that are useful to you, but you’re not sure about them, and you can filter those, and then if you’re having a meeting with a tutor, at least you can show them those bits of research really quickly.

So yeah, there’s a nice deeper level there if needed, and I like to think that people just take what they want from the software, from being something who just needs to get started or somebody who really wants to analytically organize everything. You can still do that within the program.

Oh, for sure. And I figure folks, just depending on the needs, some folks probably really want to dig into it and get all that, but I like that it’s customizable. You can use as much as you want or as little as you want and what you need to make your needs. So that’s great. Well Sam, I’m sure you probably have a ton of these, but could you share a story or two of maybe a student’s success with Pro-Study or how it helped them?

Yeah, certainly. We’ve had a few case study students. We’ve even had them on doing similar things like this before as a guest onto there. Now I’m trying to wrack my brain for what his name was from one of our last ones. But yeah, we had a student who has dyslexia and ADHD as well. What he would find is he’d start a project and then you’d be copying and pasting information onto a Word document, but then they would obviously need to go back and get the link, put the link there and go back and take notes. And then they would do that with the second bit of information they find. And then sometimes they’ve accidentally put the wrong link next to the wrong paragraph that they were taking and it would even have that document saved and then perhaps a week later, forgot that they even started it and they’ve started again, and then the research was in two different places.

But being able to use Pro-Study meant that every time he collected the item that he needed, it was going into the exact project exactly where he knew it was going, not getting confused with files and folders and downloads and things, and was able to organize and write his dissertation, which is like … I don’t know if you have a similar thing in the US, but before you finish university in the UK you kind of have this big final project you have to do. It can be like 10,000 words, which seems … I’m so glad I don’t have to do one of those anymore. And yeah, he basically found Pro-Study integral into completing this monster dissertation.

Nice. Do you have another quick story you might be able to share?

I’m trying hard to think of names because again, when I was an AT trainer, I used to see students a lot and I would train them, and then we’d still have a few sessions and come back and would describe how good these kinds of things were. So I have another student who has dyslexia, who gets fatigued from reading quite a lot. And one of the newer features in Pro-Study is a thing called Auto Tiles. Now I mentioned tiles a little bit before because everything that gets saved in Pro-Study becomes this nice little graphic research tile, which if you go and watch our videos, you’ll be able to see what they look like. But what the Auto Tiles feature does is great for a student who is researching and they’ve found something, but they might not be sure if this is … it’s on the kind of cusp of what their research limits are. It might be useful to them, it might not be, but having to read a whole academic paper would cause them to be quite fatigued and they’d have to stop reading because, due to the dyslexia, reading for long periods of time is just something that doesn’t happen and processing that information is very difficult.

But with the Auto Tiles feature, what it does is it analyzes the page that’s there and brings up highlighted information that it thinks is worth reading first. So you can gain snippets of information from the document without having to read the whole thing. So they really appreciated that feature because they used to say to me, there was nothing worse than reading halfway through a paper, then realizing this isn’t actually what I needed, but now I’m kind of fatigued, frustrated, I need to take a break, and obviously that makes the whole research journey a lot longer. So yeah, that’s another example of features being really useful to a student.

Nice, nice. Sam, you mentioned the videos, so we can go and look at the tiles and find out a little bit more about Pro-Study. What’s a good way for our listeners to find out more about Pro-Study or access those videos and really check out some of the features and the way it works for themselves?

So you can go to pro-study.co.uk to learn a little bit about Pro-Study there. Even on the home page there, you can scroll down, see a animated explainer video, which talks about student scenario, but then there’s also the quick video overview video that shows the product, the research tiles. And then … there’s actually three videos on that page. There’s another one that shows the Project Assist mobile app as well and how that works, too. So that’s a great place to get started to find out more about the product, but the videos are on YouTube too.

Okay, awesome. Awesome. We’ll put links down in the show notes so that folks can easily access that information and go check out, dig a little bit more in for themselves. Well Sam, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about Pro-Study and all the great things it can do to really help students with needs that, I think, as I said earlier, with or without a disability, it can definitely be a help and really maybe just remove some of that anxiety, especially from the big research papers, from maybe deep in-depth research that you need to do for different needs as well. So thank you so much.

No, Josh, thanks very much. Pleasure to explain Pro-Study to everybody and as I say, come check us out. And I think we might put my email address somewhere too, and happy to answer anyone’s thoughts from listening to this, as well.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.