EDES Assignments

This document lists all assignments for the EDES course. Individual assignments are denoted as (I) and group assignments are indicated as (G). In summary, you will need to complete four assignments, with three of these consisting of multiple parts:

• Good/Bad Design presentation (I) (10% of final grade)

• Flash modules (I) (10% of final grade)

• Case-study (G) (30% of final grade)

  • Classroom component

  • Reflection component

• Learning environment (G) (45% of final grade)

  • Learning Environment Description (Analysis)

  • Learning Environment Storyboard (Design I)

  • Learning Environment Prototype (Design II & Development)

  • Completed Environment & accompanying essay

These assignments will contribute 95% to your final grade. The rest of the 5% comes from being an active participant in the unit. Being an active participant means that you need to be completing the assigned readings, asking/answering meaningful questions, and contributing to the online discussions as assigned. Therefore, participation  (5% of final grade)

___________________

100%

Good/Bad Design presentation (individual assignment)

Due date: variable as assigned

Each week, students will engage in good/bad design presentations. Specifically, students will be given 10-15 minutes to present:

• Two (flash-based) websites/environments that believe to fall under the “good design” category along with reasons for their choice,

• One (flash-based) website/environment that believe to fall under the “bad design” category along with reasons for their choice,

• And, the framework they used to evaluate the aforementioned websites/environments.

A sign-up sheet for presentation dates will be handed out during the second week of class.

Flash Modules (individual assignment)

Due date: throughout the semester – see below

During the course of the semester, in addition to working with flash during class, you will be completing a set of flash modules outside of class. These modules have been specifically designed for you, enabling you to learn important aspects of educational software design in a fun and interactive way. In addition, these modules will start off with the basics, becoming increasingly complex over time.

For each module, you need to:

• Complete all levels of the module

• Complete one extension at each level of the module

Once completed you will need to upload each module to the server space provided for you by the university.

For each module submit the following form to me. Face-to-face students: please submit a paper copy of this form to me. Distance education students: please email me a copy of this form (word or pdf format, only. Do not submit this in the body of your email!)

Due dates

November 19 Flash modules 1 & 2 due (scroller & xylophone)

November 26 Flash module 3 due (simple function)

December 3 Module 4 due (setRGB)

Case-study (group assignment)

Due date: variable

For this task, as part of a team, you will investigate one of five cases assigned (student and case-study assignments will be done at random – further information about this will come at the second or third week of class). There are two components to this assignment that you need to complete:

• Classroom component. Your team will lead a 1-hour classroom discussion of your case study, focusing on the design and evaluation aspects of your specific case study. Questions to consider are: Is your application well-designed? What’s good and what can be improved? Is it effective, efficient, engaging, socially appropriate, and possibly transformational? What other heuristics can we use to evaluate the software that you investigated? I encourage you to consider other questions too – there are other questions/issues relevant to our class and I encourage to investigate those as well. Finally, you are free to engage us with your case study in whatever way you deem appropriate, but you should NOT simply stand up in front of class and lecture to us. You can create discussion groups, create simple learning games, show us relevant videos/multimedia, give us tests… consider yourself to be the instructor for the hour! I encourage you to be creative and take small risks. Note however, that you only have 1-hour. If we need to walk somewhere else to engage in this activity, walking time is limited to 10 minutes – 5 there and 5 back – leaving you 50 minutes of teaching time.

• Reflection component.
  

NOTE: Students who are not part of the case-study group of the week will need to explore the case study for the week and be prepared to engage in thoughtful and well-informed conversation regarding the case study. Participation via thoughtful engagement is a requirement for all case studies, regardless if you are teaching the case study or not. DO NOT EXPECT YOUR COLLEAGUES TO TEACH YOU THE CONTENT.

Case study details and due dates:

Case study 1: http://edes0809.wordpress.com/assignments/case-study-1/

October 29: Case study #1 classroom presentation.

November 12: Case study #1 written component due by 4pm.

(The written component needs to be submitted to Christine Chadwick and to myself)

Case study 2: http://edes0809.wordpress.com/assignments/case-study-2/

November 12: Case study #2 classroom presentation.

November 26: Case study #2 written component due by 4pm.

(The written component needs to be submitted to Christine Chadwick and to myself)

Case study 3: http://edes0809.wordpress.com/assignments/case-study-3/

November 19: Case study #3 classroom presentation.

December 3: Case study #3 written component due by 4pm.

(The written component needs to be submitted to Christine Chadwick and to myself)

Case study 4: http://edes0809.wordpress.com/assignments/case-study-4/

November 26: Case study #4 classroom presentation.

December 10: Case study #4 written component due by 4pm.

(The written component needs to be submitted to Christine Chadwick and to myself)

Learning environment (G)

Due date for final project: January 12, 2009

See individual components below for due dates

This is our major assignment for the semester and it will be divided in four parts:

• Learning Environment Description (Analysis)

• Learning Environment Storyboard (Design I)

• Learning Environment Prototype (Design II & Development)

• Completed Environment & accompanying essay

Each part will be handed in separately at specified dates. Before each successive part is turned in, I will provide you with feedback that you can use to improve your next submission.

Your task is to describe, design, develop, and evaluate an electronic learning environment (educational software). Please note that an “environment” can refer to many things. For example, an environment can be a flash game, a simulation, a tutorial, or website.

You are free to come up with your own idea about your environment but you need to clear it up with me first to ensure that it is feasible and relevant. Below is a template that you can use to come up with your own idea:

Design, develop, and evaluate an environment to teach _________________ (audience) for/about/ ______________ (skill/content/behavior).

You will earn bonus points if you find a real client whose educational needs you will attempt to solve with what you create in this class.

Below are some ideas to help you get you started. Note that some of these may need to be delineated further before they are ready to be implemented.

Design, develop, and evaluate an environment to

• teach children fine motor skills.

• teach a history topic.

• teach the importance of teeth brushing.

• motivate young adults to read more fiction books.

• teach someone to cook your favorite dish/desert.

• teach someone a specific function of a software (e.g. animation in flash).

• teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division.

• teach something in a foreign language (e.g., greetings).

• enable learners to evaluate online sources of information.

• teach teachers how to use different pedagogies.

• teach sign language (not the whole language!)

• teach a novice how to play a short tune on a guitar.

• teach people how to patch a flat bicycle tire.

• teach people how to barter at the Saturday market.

• teach children to resist peer-pressure (e.g., related to smoking, drugs, alcohol).

• convince victims of violence to report their abuse to the authorizes or to someone they trust.

The environment that you will design/develop needs to go beyond information delivery and “page-turning” and I will assist you in conceptualizing it during the initial stages of the project. It needs to:

• have a clear educational objective/goal

• be interactive. The learner should be actively involved in the process and/or experience. It is not acceptable to, for example, produce a “slide show” which the learner passively watches, without any active involvement: nor should their involvement be akin to mere “page turning”, i.e., just pressing a “Next page” button every now and again. Interactivity connotes:

  • that the environment, at some point, asks for the user to input some information and/or take some action, and the environment then responds to that information in some way, and/or

  • the user has some control over the experience: for example, that they have a choice of routes through the content,

• have multimedia elements. At least two of text, imagery, video, and sound should be used within the software to impart information and learning.

• include some sort of learner assessment

The environment, if appropriate, could also include:

• A help menu or some other kind of scaffold or instructions

• Content in languages other than English

• Different views or modes for different user groups, e.g. teachers and students

• Some kind of more permanent output, e.g. a “record of achievement”, quiz or test results, a file (image, spreadsheet, text document, etc.) which could be used afterwards, etc.

We will be following an simple instructional design process for this project. An abstract overview of the process we will be following is available here:

http://tls.vu.edu.au/eLearning/CreatingOnlineUnits_ID_Trad.html

More specifically, each component of the learning environment project is described below:

Learning Environment Description. For this part of the assignment, I would like you to turn in a two-page, double-spaced, 12-point font document describing:

• your idea for your educational software,

• the strategy/pedagogy that you will use to teach your topic,

• and the assessment(s) that you will use to evaluate whether the learners achieved your desired outcomes.

In addition, I would like you to:

• describe your audience (learners),

• their characteristics,

• and any constraints that you need to consider when designing/developing a piece of educational software for them.

A form that may give you additional help can be located at: http://www.uiowa.edu/~c07w180e/current/Fig13-2_Learners.pdf

Learning Environment Storyboard. For this part of the assignment, I would like you to turn in a storyboard along with a description of or background to each storyboard screen. A storyboard is a graphic organizer showing how the learner will go through the software and what they will see on the screen. Examples of storyboards are presented below:

http://www.rollins.edu/it/video/storyboard2.jpg

http://accad.osu.edu/womenandtech/Storyboard%20Resource/graphics/stickfigures.jpg

http://teachable.org/200617073/images/storyboardflowchart/storyboard_sample_spaceship.gif

Learning Environment Prototype. For this part of the assignment, I would like you to turn in a prototype of your environment/software. By prototype, I refer to a version of the software that models the final version but is not fully completed and may need to be further developed. Essentially, this is an alpha version of your software.

Completed Environment & accompanying essay. At this stage I expect a fully functional and polished piece of software along with an accompanying 1,500 word essay that addresses the evaluation element of the course. The essay can draw on your previous work (Learning Environment Description & Storyboard) and should include, at the very least, some discussion of the following issues:

• The educational aims and objectives of the software

• A short account of the design process which mentions, if appropriate:

  • Task analysis

  • Storyboarding/prototyping

• Pedagogies underpinning the design

• Interaction Design features

• User testing or evaluation

• Problems that arose.

Reference should be made to the research literature whenever appropriate. Marks will be given for going beyond the texts studied in class: you are encouraged to use the bibliographies of those articles to explore other literature that may be relevant, and to then cite this literature. You should consider, as a minimum requirement, the need to cite at least 4 pieces of literature.

Deliverables for this assignment

• 1 piece of educational software burnt onto a CD-ROM.

• 1 self-evaluative commentary (done as a GROUP), around 1,500 words in length, saved on the CD, and printed out and handed with the CD.

• These materials need to be submitted to Christine Chadwick by January 12, 2009. DO NOT submit anything by email.