CECS 5210 - Pilot Implementation (Feedback)

Week 7 -- Live Evaluation

On Tuesday, I met with part of my client team and presented my materials thus far.

The presentation went so-so. I realized that I had not adequately prepared my participants. They were my secondary clients and I had made too many assumptions about their knowledge of and investment in the project. We spent a large portion of the meeting getting everyone on the same page - what is the project and why are we here.

As we started into the presentation, my major concern with my design was confirmed. By using two different paradigms for the presentation versus the job aid, I had confused my audience. What I had been attempting to do was create a stand-alone job aid as the takeaway and a typical F2F training session. My previous concept of an exceptional training session (especially one that uses PowerPoint) only uses the slide show as a prompting device, not the content delivery mechanism. Having taught PowerPoint ad nauseum, this is a design tip that I strongly stress. This might have worked however the presentation was category/task oriented and the job aid was linear. This disconnect presented difficulty to my audience following the presentation.

Additionally, I was surprised at a cultural sensitivity that I completely missed. By using the Children's programming titles, I alienated my audience with my first slide. "Who is Mr. Rogers?" It never occurred to me that my metaphor was culturally bound. Once I explained the metaphor being used throughout the presentation, my clients were able to follow more easily. But this certainly is an area ripe for revision.

So this week, I'm revising what I've created and hope to meet with my primary client next week. It'll be nice to put this phase of the project to rest.

New Client - Learning Technologies Department

Originally, for my CECS5210 class, I was going to work with a professor to redesign and enhance her Blackboard course shell. Unfortunately, after the analysis phase, this project did not materialize. So, 3 weeks into the project timeline, I found myself starting from scratch, looking for a client. I made my way to the professor's office to explain my situation and hoped that it wasn't too late to still pull out a decent grade in the class.

What transpired next was a boon of fortune. My professor became my client. Before I had time to really think about the implications of having the person grading me also being my client, we were off and running. It appears that much like other places on campus, their department has little in the way of formal instruction for new faculty members. Most of what is learned by a faculty member in their first two weeks has come through finding the right person to talk to, asking questions of several people, wandering around aimlessly on campus being redirected to various locations, and shear luck. (Ok, there is also the official Faculty Handbook of the University but that doesn't address those "where is the library, how do I get email, what classes am I teaching, who's in those classes, and do I have wireless access" questions.)

My new project is "to create a learning tools to help new faculty members survive their first two weeks on campus".