Page 180 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

172 10 Educational Project Design and Evaluation
There are two points to emphasize at short-term and medium-term outcomes.
First, the short- and medium-term outcomes should be directly and clearly linked to
the situation of the problem and the goal of the effort. Second, the short- and
medium-term outcomes are usually measured, like outputs (Spector & Yuan, 2016).
However, long-term outcomes are often unmeasurable for a variety of reasons
(Spector & Yuan, 2016). In education, the long-term outcomes might increase the
quality of national population, the rate of employment in a particular field, or the
rate of postgraduate entrancement. Those long-term outcomes can benefit the
interest to the institution or to society. However, measuring these long-term results
often exceeds the scope of the effort (Spector & Yuan, 2016).

10.3.6 A Representative Logic Model

Some of the ideas presented in this chapter will be new to many readers. To help
make the process of developing a logic model to guide design, development, and
deployment of an educational project, an actual case is presented in abbreviated
form next. This case involved a multi-year effort in a large school district with about
40 schools and nearly 50,000 students to redo the entire computing infrastructure of
the district so as to be able to implement personalized and adaptive learning
throughout the school district. Needless to say, this was a very large project with
many different stakeholders, including administrators, staff, teachers, students, and
parents. It was evident at the beginning of the effort that key administrators and
many teachers were enthusiastic about the effort. However, since such an effort
would eventually involve all teachers as the key implementers of what was being
developed, emphasis would be placed on strong and ongoing support for teachers,
including a series of training sessions as the effort evolved.
In addition, it was imagined that some teachers would resist the dramatic
changes planned. As a consequence, to gain support from all teachers, the first-year
effort was devoted to addressing the concerns teachers had with the existing
computer systems—primarily issues involving the student information system.
Such things as a requirement for multiple log-ins to different parts of the system and
duplicate entry of student data were reported and addressed first in an effort to gain
widespread support for subsequent efforts that would affect teaching activities—
namely creating individual learning plans for each learner that were previously only
required for learners with disabilities. Special care was taken to automate and
support as much of that new task as possible while helping teachers to adjust to new
roles shifting from primary disseminators of information to coaches helping indi-
vidual learners develop understanding.
A generic logic model and an actual logic model that was initially developed for
the project described above are depicted below, as shown in Figs. 10.5 and 10.6.
While a logic model is intended to depict what is being done in an educational
project, the model is usually complemented with a description of the rationale for
the effort, which is called a theory of change. As a simple example, suppose a game
is being designed and developed to help young learners understand how plants are