The ePAAWS System Project-- Design and Development

•  Project Vision

"We envision an electronic system operating in the Web environment that enables Penn State students throughout their university careers to interactively develop and assess academic and career goals, strategies, and action plans; construct and capture learning project outcomes; demonstrate and reflect upon how and what they have learned; and, in turn, adjust their learning paths--all in the context of learning communities and with the benefit of collaborations and critiques with peers, instructors, and advisors.

The project will focus on the development of an individual planning and knowledge construction system as a component of the PSU e-Lion information and communication system to support and guide students in their self-learning needed to conduct their educational planning, decision-making, and assessment with the goal of promoting their individual growth and development as learners and community participants. The goal is to put the student as a learner and active agent in the center of the adviser/advisee relationship.  

The full development of the ePAAWS System is a long-term project.   This proposal covers the first phase, which involves establishing the basic core Advising Learning Modules and Tools and putting in place the basic organizational and technological infrastructures to support both the initial development and delivery of the Discovery Advising Curriculum and its subsequent maintenance and evolution.

Initially, the project will aim at developing a prototype to serve students enrolled in the Division of Undergraduate Studies. Ultimately, it will be available to students at all locations and in all colleges of the university.  

•  Institutional Context and Readiness

The last decade has brought basic changes to how institutions of higher education view and assess their mission and goals, how they function, how they utilize technologies, and how they organize and manage themselves.   One way of characterizing these changes is to focus on the new patterns that have emerged in the teaching and learning landscape--shifting the emphasis from teaching to learning, recognizing the power of collaboration in learning communities, experimenting with ways information technologies can improve processes of learning and delivery of support programs, and assessing and managing quality in terms of learning outcomes.

The Penn State educational environment incorporates the programming and services of academic and student affairs units as well as those of numerous support units across the University. A culture of assessment, improvement,   and transformation is emerging in the academy, driven by new models of teaching and learning and fostered by new strategies and more sophisticated applications of instructional technologies and communications. The delivery of programming and services by these units is already highly embedded in technology applications, with both staff and students involved at high participation rates.   This existing base of transformation and adoption of active learning and interactive technologies within the educational environment   and support infrastructure will facilitate their extension into the domain of discovery advising learning and curriculum programming.

•  Project Components

The ePAAWS project will have four major components or subprojects:

1. the construction of Advising Learning Modules;
2. the construction of Advising Learning Tools;
3. the construction of the ePAAWS system's technology infrastructure providing linkages to repositories and informational databases and operational support for students and advisers when accessing and using the system; and
4. a pilot application of the system conducted within the Division of Undergraduate Studies.

The design and development of each component will be the responsibility of a Project Working Group, appointed by the Project Executive Committee and guided by the project processes, policies, protocols, and standards developed by Task Forces of the Project Executive Committee.   Each Project Working Group will have an appointed Leader, and will function under the overall project management oversight provided by the Project Director.

•  Project Assessment, Evaluation, and Quality

In each of the design, development, and pilot application stages of the ePAAWS system and for each of the ePAAWs components, pre-, during, and post-assessment and evaluation activities will be conducted to assure quality, relevance, and effectiveness in the resulting system outcome delivered to the larger university learning community.   The design of the assessment and evaluation protocols and their application in each component of the ePAAWs project will be under the guidance of the Project Executive Committee through its Task Force on Project Assessment, Evaluation, and Quality.   Project Working Groups will evaluate the assessment results and factor them into the processes and components of the ePAAWs system.

•  Project Leadership, Governance, and Management

Project Leadership will be vested primarily in the Project Director and the Project Executive Committee.   For the Project to be successful, leadership will be needed both internally to steer and manage the project and externally with other units and personnel across the university to facilitate the inclusion of appropriate expertise and resources in the project's structure and activities.   Partly, leadership involves communications to shape and implant the Project Vision into the larger community and into project participants.   Leadership also involves the negotiation of resources and professional expertise to be made available to the project.   Leadership within the universities governance structure, primarily, the Advising Subcommittee of the Undergraduate Education Committee of the University Faculty Senate and the Administrative Council on Undergraduate Education, is needed to identify related policies that may need to modified or extended to accommodate the ePAAWS requirements.

Management   responsibilities for the project will be vested in an administrative structure including a Project Director, a Project Executive   Committee, three Task Forces under the Executive Committee, and four Project Working Groups. See Appendix IV for more details on the distribution of responsibilities and the membership of ePAAWS project management structure.

•  Project Timelines, Resources, and Budget

The operational challenge in executing the ePAAWS Project will be to assemble the appropriate personnel and resources around each project component and to coordinate and manage their activities such that their individual outcomes fit together in a coherent system that effectively serves the needs of the larger university community.   The personnel needed for the effective execution of the Project are located in units across the university, who for the most part, are fully engaged in fulfilling the responsibilities within their respective units.   To free them up to work on the Project will typically require additional monetary resources such that their units can temporarily replace them while they are on leave to the Project.   These additional resources can be thought of as an investment in the development of important services for the educational development of undergraduate students--a university-wide outcome.   These investment resources are not available in the regular budgets of the collaborating units across the University--they will need to come either from central University budget sources or from the generous support of outside agencies that recognize the value of Penn State achieving the vision of the Project.  

Timelines for the Project components and milestones for their respective stages of design, development, and implementation are identified in detail in a mapping provided in Appendix V.A.   Similarly, a mapping of the Resource Requirements and Sources for each stage of the four Project components is provided in Appendix V.B and a mapping of Budget Allocations is provided in Appendix V.C.

Appendix IV--ePAAWS Project Management Structure

Appendix V.A:   Project Timelines and Milestones Worksheet

To be completed.

Appendix V.B:   Project Resources-Requirements and Sources Worksheet

To be completed.

Appendix V.C   Project Budget Allocations Worksheet

To be completed.