Posted by amy at May 22nd, 2006

Capstones are the final project requirement for my Master’s program at Marlboro College Graduate Center. My sponsor is The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Department of Continuing Education and Outreach, specifically their Green School. The Green School is offered once every two years. It is a 60-hour program taught at a hotel easily assessable to people from all over Massachusetts. Students come from the nurseries and grounds departments and there are two tracks - horticulture and turf grass studies.

Successful capstone projects are ones that attempt to solve a real world problem - rather than just create interesting products or demonstrations. The problem I am trying to solve is how do you take a 60-hour, face-to-face program and redesign it to be online? What defines online? This is a content rich course where student achievement is assessed solely by quizzes which are not returned to the student, where students do not tend to be highly technically literate, and where cheating is a primary concern for the instructors. The instructors themselves, even the most technically literate ones, are resistant to a program that doesn’t have face-to-face interaction and are suspicious about what going online means.

I will use this space to work through some of the challenges I face and document the process as I go.