Activity Report
Jean Kreis
NLII 2004 Fellow
March 22, 2004
The UA MOATS project is to create an instrument with which an instructor, or instructional support person, can enter an instructional problem or goal and a wizard will suggest an array of solutions or processes to attain it. The array will be displayed along a continuum based on the inputs from the instructor concerning the instructor’s goals, preferences, and/or key instructional variables such as learner characteristics, subject matter content and learning task characteristics, or other contextual variables such as course level, class size, and teaching philosophy.
My NLII research is focused on gathering a broad range of instructional design theories (prescriptive) along with developing or discovering excellent examples of their implementation in higher education. I see the Bridging Community as key participants in this process as knowledgeable critics of the practices which is necessary for the recursive process of honing and development.
This quarter I have researched five theories and have begun the process of structuring their organization into an ontology for easier database programming.
Programming Committee; Corporate Chair; Preconference Presenter (Pedagogy: Exploration, Implementation, and Learner-Centered Environments)
I actively participated with colleagues from the western regional universities and community colleges to put together the inaugural conference. As the corporate chair and sole person on the committee I read offered revisions, rejections, or acceptances for every proposal abstract as well as finding conveners for the sessions. All preconference seminar attendees were new to the NLII interactive experience. And the workshop provided the first of a series of opportunities to utilize a methodology that we intended to use later in developing the Bridging Community of Practice.
I attended the 4 day workshop held at Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ. Participants were primarily from Arizona, but there was also a team from Texas and a participant from a community college in Washington.
AI is an emerging approach to organizational transformation based on the premise that organizations grow in the direction of what they repeatedly ask questions about and focus their attention on. The methodology is based on theory of social constructionism. We are using the methodology as one way of eliciting the strengths of the newly forming Bridging Community within the context of the 2004 Spring Online Focus Session/Workshop. Additionally, the AI methodology, while having been utilized internationally across the business community and other organizations, it has only recently been introduced to the education community. It has rarely been used in the context of an extended community of practice that must use multiple technologies to communicate and get to know each other. Our work offers additional information to the AI community as a result, along with offering our community a methodology for structuring and harvesting information.
As a Co-Facilitator of the NLII Bridging Community of Practice that builds bridges between research and practice
· in order to transform teaching practice and learning design practice (based on the appropriate and effective use of technology to support teaching and learning, grounded in the science of learning)
· through individual, group, community and institutional learning,
I envision:
· designing workshop curricula to facilitate the community’s knowledge of each other and each others’ projects, plans, needs
· soliciting and assisting the professional development of 2 other facilitators in the community (see MOU for their responsibilities)
· working toward a seemless flow of development in the community from
o initial design of the BVCOP
o Spring Online Focus Session
o AAHE f-2-f meeting for those members who can attend
o Summer Focus Session
o Further virtual development and institutional project support
o EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting f-2-f
o NLII Annual Meeting f-2-f
Next Generation Course Management System Workgroup Report – With the other workgroup leaders, we presented on the status of the continued work that followed from the March 2003 NG CMS Focus Session in Tucson. Patricia set the context with a summary of Colleen and Jeremy’s work on the Learning Map, Active Learning, and the Conceptual Framework. She then demonstrated the Functional Requirements Spreadsheets and how they came to be developed. I discussed the need to work with the technical development of the Functional Requirements, and how Scenarios functioned at multiple levels (Highly Abstract and cross-system, User Focused, and finally technical usage). Building on the demonstrated functional requirement that Patricia had pointed out, I then read an excerpt of one scenario to show how the two items worked paired together.
I also presented the conceptual framework of MOATS with two colleagues from Australia & Canada. In the last year Tom Carey and I have been searching for projects of a similar nature so that we can offer to the higher education community a set of resources that meet this need in the community. The session was “enhanced” in that we first presented our projects and then I facilitated a call for participants to describe their projects. We created a matrix of information during that session and made it available immediate to the community via the San Diego Experiment. The session was successful in that we elicited new partners in our endeavors.
Additionally, I was on the Annual Review Team who was each assigned a presentation to attend, take notes, and gather the presentation for uploading into the San Diego Experiment. I also facilitated two lunch tables of discussion around the Bridging Community.