Capstone Presentation

Ahh … My first two months in a new, demanding job have coincided with the last two months of my graduate program and I felt that actually working on my capstone project was a higher priority than writing about my capstone project, until last night when I was reviewing my component map and saw I my blog was worth 10% of my deliverables. It seems dishonest to create a bunch of new entries and backdate them so I’ll post a few remarks here and take the hit.

Just a quick reminder – the project was to provide a blueprint for my sponsor to move one of its continuing education programs online. Once I had done that and handed in draft versions of my final proposal, I sat and waited, and waited and waited and then, as I was preparing to head off for the 4th of July fireworks, I encountered some of my own. The one factor I didn’t include in my needs analysis was a readiness assessment. How ready was this group of instructors to begin building an online program. The answer was that they weren’t ready at all and the blue print – no matter how good in theory – would never work without the staff buy in.

Not understanding online education was an overarching problem, but concerns over cheating were the most pressing issue. At first I wrote off the problem because I didn’t see it as a problem – I thought that a properly designed course wouldn’t really give an opportunity for students to cheat – but because my sponsors couldn’t envision what a properly designed course might look like, they didn’t feel their needs were being met or that their concerns were being heard.

Even if I had delivered everything I promised to deliver on my first meeting, I wouldn’t feel as though I had completed my mission if I didn’t in some way move this group along on the readiness spectrum.

I went back and reviewed all the relevant literature I could find on cheating in an online environment and then began to think about building an online class in WebCT for the staff who would someday be teaching their own classes. I modeled the class in the same way that I modeled the turf selection class I included and most importantly, I added a meta conversation to each component explaining exactly why I chose one element over anther or what I was thinking when I built my syllabus for example.

I believe, now, that if they work through the Academic Integrity unit before they view the sample Turf Selection class, they will be far more ready to listen to the ideas I present in the blueprint and then process their own thinking about their class design. And if I can change the way they think about online education, then I will consider my project a great success.

I’m off to the post office to send off my final deliverables to my sponsor and am looking forward to closing this chapter of my education.

I learned a lot of details – little things like building classes in WebCT, how to think about the growth of online learning, how to identify a specific piece of grass – but I think the biggest lesson I learned was without the readiness component, change won’t happen – gauging and addressing that will be the horse I put before the cart as I work in an environment that remains suspicious about technology.