Aqueduct

Posted by amy at August 7th, 2006

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.

Posted by amy at May 30th, 2006

I am moving ahead on my capstone project. I finished drafting the first two phases and have just begun work on the heart of the project - the instructional design. I am working off partial content, and will be using a bit of backwards design - as I have a quiz that is used at the end of the class to assess student learning. I’m not a big fan of quizzes, and since my plan is to design this for a Blackberry and I would rather students improve their verbal reasoning skills and not their quiz taking abilities, I am going to be spending day working on verbal assessments. To help manage this project, I am using a site called Backpack (www.backpackit.com) which is put out by a group called 37 signals. This may be the easiest project management tool I have found - certainly much easier than Microsoft Entourage - which I will most likely end up switching from in the next few weeks.

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.