Project Plan and Status
Project Plan Summary
Our goal is to develop the online content for all 10 modules of the Biology 12 course by mid December, 2009. Specifically, the first 7 modules are critical because the plan is for these modules to be the "tool box" of skills that students will need to build up in order to problem solve the assignments waiting for them in modules 8, 9 and 10.
Project Plan Report
This is the current project plan for Biology 12 as of 11/20/09. I have created this plan in one of the few Mac- friendly project management software applications, Omni Plan. I am using the free version of the software, so I am limited to a maximum of creating up to 20 tasks for the project. I'd purchase the full version of the software but in the back of my mind, I feel like I'll find a shareware package that will do the same job. I'll revisit this at the end of this project.
- Update on Project Plan: Apparently, my free license has now run out so I cannot even update the project plan any longer. I've got a feeling this issue will go away when I start to examine Google Sites to create the next project status website.
Resources
The key resources for this project are:
- Tyrone Ridgway: Biology 12 subject matter expert
- Matt Meyer: Lead Instructional Designer and Project Manager
- Beth Bailey: Instructional Designer
- Erin Long: Instructional Designer
ONGOING WEEKLY STATUS
2010
Week of 5/24-5/28
Development elements that are complete and ready for summer 2010 delivery:
- Content in module 1, lessons 4, 5 and 6
- The new module 1 assessments (parts 1 and 2)
Still in development
- Help and FAQ; Help is complete, FAQ is not. Waiting to hear if we will combine into one document
Met with Richard, instructor, TA's and Tess Crossen to discuss use of Elluminate
- They will use Elluminate to conduct office hours during summer session
- Instructor is Denise Woodward
Course delivery to begin on June 1st.
Here is the updated list of development tasks for the summer 2010 release.
Week of 5/17-5/21
- In development of course edits for the summer 2010 version of this course
- Mod 1, Lessons 4, 5 and 6 changes made and approved by Richard
- Still in development
- Help Page
- FAQ
- screen cam transcripts
- Module 10 revisions
- Meeting with Richard and TA's next week to discuss changes
- Redesign of Module 10 to be an individual project instead of a group
- To be called Bio110; summer enrollment is 50 students
Week of 4/26-4/30
- Will accept student course evaluation surveys until Friday, April 30
- Design team began documenting improvements to course for possible June 1 delivery start through World Campus
Week of 4/19-4/23
- Student team presentations due by Friday, April 23 at midnight
- TA's reporting a number of teams at risk of not turning them in on time
- we will examine next week
Week of 4/5-4/9
- Week 2 of 4 of the Module 10 group assignment
- Teams are turning in content outlines by Friday, April 9
- April 9 is also the last day for students to drop the class; we may have some project team shifting that occurs as a result of this.
Week of 3/22-3/26
- Module 10 complete and went live on Friday, March 26
- 93 VoiceThreads created (93 teams)
- 372 students assigned to each of the 93 VoiceThreads
Week of 3/15-3/19
- Students completed Module 8 as of 3/19
- Submission rate for all 16 sections was 85% (up from 84% prior week)
- Module 9 went live after midnight 3/19 on ANGEL
- Module 10
- content is 80% complete in blog platform
- exported all 372 records from ANGEL and imported to VoiceThread accounts
- VoiceThread has provided these extra accounts for free to PSU (saved $650)
- Met with Richard and TA's F2F on Wednesday, March 17 to discuss Module 10 design
- TA's contributed some ideas about workflow of the assignment that we have incorporated into the design (deliverable notification, team creation in ANGEL)
- Presented with Richard at the eEducation Council on March 17. Presented the design, delivery and current data analysis.
Week of 3/8-3/12
- Students completed module 7 and handed in their assessments
- Submission rate for all 16 sections was 84% (up from 81% prior week)
- Module 8 content went live for students on ANGEL on 3/5/2010
- Students get 2 weeks to complete because of spring break; due March 19
- Module 9 assembled and made available in ANGEL
- Will do QA/QC early next week and go live by mid week; goes live on March 19
- Completed further detail design of Module 10
- Expect to have finalized in blog platform by March 19; goes live March 27
- Sent VoiceThread communication to TA's, ID team and faculty to give preview of Module 10. This presentation is intended to preview the design and get feedback from TA's to help fine-tune the execution of this assessment.
Week of 3/1-3/5
- Met with students who have not been handing in assessments on Tuesday night with Richard Cyr
- 12 students in attendance; helped students struggling with Google Docs
- Module 6 assessment submission rate dropped to 81% overall
- Module 8: Published and made ready in ANGEL
- Module 9: Migrated content into blog format; Mod 9 assessment almost ready also
- Module 10: Began migrating content into blog format
- Set March 16 as the day to debrief TAs on format and structure of Module 10 assignment
- Will get student team assignments from TAs that week to setup VoiceThread accounts (migrate user data from ANGEL)
- Published data and analysis of 2nd student course assessment/evaluation (post module 6)
Week of 2/15-2/19
Students completed module 4 with their first Google Doc assignment
For all 16 sections, the submission rate (pdf's put in Dropbox) was 82%
- Met with Richard and TA's to discuss best practices and improvements for increasing the submission rate
- Richard to have mandatory meeting of 'non compliant' students
- Will emphasize 'doing the work' and show mechanics of google docs
- Will change the timeframe for the modules to Friday midnight to the next Friday midnight
- TA's will activate ANGEL chatrooms
- We will create screen casts on specific mechanics in the directions for each assessment
- Will update the syllabus to include these
- TA's will emphasize importance of time management to students
- To enhance TA's communication as well as prepare them for the Module 10 VoiceThread assignment, we are creating a VoiceThread just for TA's and the ID group
- Tyrone has provided the content for module 8 Conference call with Richard and Tyrone to further detail Module 10 assessment project (VoiceThread)
Week of 2/8-2/12
This is a critical week for this project as students hit their first Google Docs assessment in Module 4. Students will have until Sunday, 2/14 to hand in their pdf answers into the dropbox.
- There have been a handful of issues with students being able to share their documents with their TA's.
- All these problems seem to be related to occasional server access issues with Google Docs. All problems 'self-corrected' shortly after being reported by students to TA's
- As of Friday, 2/12, there are fewer technical/user issues reported back to ETS than expected for the Google Doc assignment
- As of Friday 2/12 at 11am EST, approximately 21% of all students (about 80 of 380) have successfully turned in their Module 4 assessment
- ID team is analyzing the Faculty and Student Course Evaluations from the experiences for both groups of Modules 1-3.
- Results of 4 Bio12 sections (the 12 Bio110 sections still being done)
- Met with Richard to discuss the Module 10 design. ID team to continue developing support materials for students for that assignment.
Week of 2/1-2/5
- After finally getting ANGEL access to all the Bio12 sections, found out that there are 16 sections taking our course; this is a total of 380 students
- Our assumption was 80-110 students
- ID team working on module 10 assessment design
- Original plan was for student team's to produce VoiceThread presentation of findings; we are reviewing issues of the bigger scale
- Set next meeting with Richard on Tuesday, 2/9 to discuss status
- Received first feedback from TA's on the course
Week of 1/25-1/29
- Met with Richard Cyr on Wednesday
- He reviewed assessment plan and approved
- We adjusted plan to start surveying faculty/TA after delivery of Module 3; the after each module
- Richard and I are both reaching out to Tyrone to get content for modules 8 and 9
- Shared existing module 10 content and assessment with Richard
- He will review assignment and determine any changes necessary
- Richard said he has very little from the TA's at this point; all things seem to be running smoothly
- Created student assessment survey in ANGEL for module 3
- Created faculty/TA assessment in GoogleForms; submitted for Richard to review
Week of 1/18-1/22
- Completed draft of assessment plan, including survey questions.
- Meeting with Richard Cyr on Wednesday, Jan. 27 to discuss assessment plan and number of other outstanding issues.
- Began getting student feedback through the 'Course Feedback' form that is included with each of the 10 modules; comments are from module 1 only since that is all students should have access to now.
Week of 1/11-1/15
The course, from what we hear, has launched. Still waiting to hear back form Richard as to how everything is working from his end. Meanwhile, behind the scenes:
- Ran into a technical issue in ANGEL: student trying to upload a file to a drop-box cannot do this if running the Safari browser. Confirmed that this is an ANGEL limitation.
- Abandoned trying to run the mpeg-4 camtasia files through a lite box. These videos will be fine running through a separate browser window.
- Our team will pursue finalizing an assessment plan for this course. Tyrone was originally going to create this but with him moving away, this will have to change. Trying to contact Richard for his thoughts on it but have not heard back yet.
Week of 1/4-1/8
This course is set to launch next week, January 11. The course content is mostly ready with a few minor exceptions in module 4 (need to record new audio for a screen cast). We have tested all the content launch and assessment launch functions through ANGEL and they are all working properly.
- Ran through final testing of assessments (Erin Long) and made small corrections
- Final preparation/tweaking of content. Content is ready for delivery.
- Awaiting any final comments from Richard and Tyrone on this course.
- Chris Stubbs is trying to find way to play mpeg-4 screen cast files (camtasia outputs) through a lite-box. Currently, these files play by launching a separate browser window. Should the lite box option not work, the current method of viewing is sufficient.
- Chris Stubbs still trying to get control bar for animated narrations functioning.
2009
Week of 12/14-12/18
- Edited and integrated 2 screen casts for module 4.
- First QA/QC pass done by Erin Long
- Met with Richard Cyr to present the course design
- Richard is very pleased with this design; he will be going through the content over the next few weeks, making notes that are relevant to him creating the syllabus and semester plan for delivering this course.
- Wants us to investigate document management in Google Docs to curb student sharing of assessment documents
- Beth Bailey creating transcript documents for media and interactions in this course for accessibility issues
- 2 more screen casts that Tyrone would like to add
- Integrate the transcript documents
- Work on player control function for the narrated animations (not currently working); will work with Chris Stubbs
- Review design of Module 01 to ensure it still aligns with remaining modules
- Get Tyrone to submit content framework for Modules 08 and 09
Week of 12/7-12/11
- 3 of the 7 modules under Beta review; have gotten Tyrone's feedback and have made edits
- Removing Bio12 blog from this course; Tyrone and Richard agree to shelve it for now
- Tweaked mod 1-7 assessments in ANGEL
- Still need to iron out issues with screen casts
Week of 11/30-12/4
- Media revisions for module 03 made and approved
- Refined assessment approach for google docs in ANGEL.
- Tyrone completed screen casts for module 04 and sent to me
- Having issue with upload and play of these files b/c they are not .swf format; they are mp4. Investigating issue with Brad and Chris Stubbs.
- Zac developing final interactions/animations for course; should be complete next week
Week of 11/23-11/27
- Made revisions to module 03 based on Tyrone's feedback
- Setup assessments in ANGEL that will be links to google documents. Students will do their work and calculations in Google Docs and then hand in assignments to a drop box.
- Continued to integrate media to other modules in course.
Week of 11/16-11/20
Week of 11/9-11/13Overall:
We have now put Module 03 together for review. We continue to do some cleaning up but it is mostly ready to review.
- Graphics/Media Status: View this document to see the breakout of all media/graphics for each module and each one's current status
- Tyrone completed the VoiceThread for Module 7
- Beth applied standards to remaining 6 modules
- Setup the test instance of the course in ANGEL and began to structure the course in there
- Have setup Module 03 and the Mod 03 assessment
- Have asked for portions of other module graphics to begin development
Overall:
Focused on creating the media, functions and interface elements within module 03. We've chosen module 3 because it contains almost all of the elements that each of the other modules have. Once it's ready, we would like to put this module up for some peer review for feedback.
- Module 3 graphics/media: all Mod 3 graphics done and integrated EXCEPT:
- Toolbox image
- Distribution animation
- Sample size interaction
- Graphics/Media Status: View this document to see the breakout of all media/graphics for each module and each one's current status
- Tyrone creating final VoiceThreads for Module 7
- Cleaned up content and design of Module 3 (implement standards)
Week of 11/2-11/6
- Created web pages (entries) for the 7 modules with design
- Handed off media development scripts to Pat and Zac for creation
- Will start with module 3
- Tyrone is now back in Australia
- The course will be retitled 'Intro Bio Lab'; Richard Cyr has asked that refrences to Bio12 be removed and replaced with the new course name
- We will begin by ensuring it is out of the content and page tags
Week of 9/14-9/18
- Tyrone on vacation this week
- Established project plan
- Completed draft of Design Document
- Created Project Website Hub
Week of 9/7- 9/11
- Drafted detail design for modules 1 and 2
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