MOATS Development Plan

Draft Version 2

April 4, 2004


1.  Define the Purpose

a.      Why we’re building it?

                                                    i.     Needs

1.     Faculty and those who support faculty need a resource grounded in learning science & educational research to assist in the selection of, design, and implementation of appropriate instructional strategies to meet instructional problems or outcomes.

                                                  ii.     Life area

1.     Professional – related to work

                                                iii.     Common threads

1.     Interest in understanding learning

a.      Finding ways that technology can facilitate/enhance learning

b.     Finding out more about how learning occurs and what activities/strategies enhance learning

c.      Unexpected outcomes when teaching and learning involve technology in the process

2.     Interest in facilitating instructional design

a.      Developing ways in which technology can enhance the learning process

b.     Developing processes by which strategies/activities are able to be matched to sets of preferences, learning or instructional

c.      Capturing information in an iterative process to add to an evaluation and revise understandings

b.     Who are we building it for?

                                                    i.     Primary: Instructional designers, instructional technologists,

                                                  ii.     Secondary: faculty, educational researchers, vendor partners (?), learning scientists, cognitive psychologists,

c.      Goal for MOATS developers

                                                    i.     To create an instrument with which an instructor, or instructional support person, can enter an instructional problem or goal and an array of solutions or processes to attain it will be returned. The array should be displayed along a continuum based on the inputs 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.

                                                  ii.     The instructor or instructional support person should be able to view and select a solution along the array if the primary solution is not the most desirable.

                                                iii.     The selection based on the input pattern of variables should be stored so that popular selections are immediately available.

                                                iv.     New instructional design theories should be easily entered into the system. (version 2 of MOATS?)

d.     Mission/Vision statement :

                                                    i.     To assist those in higher education charged with the education of students to carry out that charge and to do so with the best use of technology in the most pedagogically appropriate manner to create active citizens.

e.      The backstory

                                                    i.     While Wayne Brent was working on his Masters in Educational Psychology (approximately 7 years ago), he envisioned a tool that would assist faculty in creating courses. He also envisioned a tool that would connect this informed a “course creator” to the technologies that built the courses - a middleware program. His vision was that a faculty member (or support staff aiding them) would use a tool to think through what technology most suited the course need of that moment, then the faculty could make the selection using that tool. The tool would work “behind the scene” to create the necessary accounts in the proper technology for the faculty member and upload the necessary student data for the appropriate course section(s). The faculty would then be able to log in there, from the initial site where s/he had first encountered the information regarding the instructional problem and what technology would best meet the problem.

                                                  ii.     When I began working for Center for Computing & Information Technology (CCIT), Wayne and I talked about this vision he had. Instructional design and faculty development have been topics of great interest to me (my first graduate work) and I began development on the concept of what would be involved by developing a web-storyboard of “one” possibility three years ago. Wayne and I then began to invite others from campus and other institutions to view and interact with the concept site, to give feedback and offer suggestions that they would like to see in further developments of the tool. The web-storyboard came to be the holding place for the totality of everything associated in the vision.

                                                iii.     The reality of developing MOATS called me to think in a smaller more focused direction. My work in the last year in the Next Generation Course Management System WorkGroup and via it, my introduction to the Teaching and Learning Community of Practice (T&L COP) emphasized that the greatest need in the larger community lay in the development of the Teaching Tool, the wizard-like instrument that would return a suggestion when an instructional problem or goal was entered.

f.       Identity

                                                    i.     MOATS – Module Organizer and Teaching Suggester – Moats are also the trench dug around a castle ostensibly to keep invaders out. However, they also keep the castle-folk within the keep. We need to be aware of the moats we dig, unintentional or not. They should at least be useful and we should have bridges by which we can cross them, allowing the community to pass within and without with ease.

 

 

2.     Members

a.      What members would like to, need to and be interested in knowing about each other, including patterns of selections

                                                    i.     Levels – Administrators, Faculty/Instructional Developers, TA,

                                                  ii.     Rights – Sharing files, Adding files, Deleting files

b.     Purpose – quickly find strategies to meet goals

                                                    i.     Members – Find other strategies via other members, via my own history

c.      Allow for customizing services, events, resources and other aspects of the community to meet specific needs and interests

                                                    i.     Add to a strategy – notes from the iterative process

                                                  ii.     Add a new strategy – regarding a theory already in system

                                                iii.     Add a new theory – within a branch already in system

 

3.     Roles

a.      Application Management

b.     Account Management

c.      Theory Management

d.     Instructional Strategies Management

e.      Empowering the membership – List/Discussion/COP

f.       Supporting managers

 

 

4.     FAQ’s or Helpbook

a.      Flash Movie for Initial Instructions

b.     Help File

                                                    i.     Problems

                                                  ii.     Usage

                                                iii.     Adding to System

c.      Prototype and Usability Testing Data Gathering

 

5.     Events – dates to be completed

a.      Design

b.     Evaluate

c.      Develop

d.     Prototype

e.      Test

f.       Develop

g.      Test

h.      Document

i.       Create Training Materials

j.       Evaluate