Page 30 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

1.2 The Scope of Educational Technology 17
evaluated and success determined. A requirement analysis creates a framework for a
solution approach.
In this case, it was determined that there was no room in the daily schedule of
courses conducted in the school setting for a new course. The school happened to
have an online learning management system, and the system administrator indicated
that it could be used to host a new course. The logic teacher indicated that the
content could be delivered online, including practice with feedback, although the
formal tests should take place in a monitored situation at the school. Two tests were
proposed, one for the first half of the course on formal logic and a second one for
the second half of the course on informal logic. Both tests had to be passed in order
to pass the course. Passing would involve a grade of 80% or better on each test,
with possibilities for remediation and retesting.
It seems that many decisions had already been made prior to bringing the
educational technologist on board. This is not so unusual and has led one of the
authors to specify the Universal Underlying Principal of all Systems (including
education systems; UUPS—pronounced “oops”): Something has already gone
wrong. When a project begins and the educational technologist joins the effort, it is
not uncommon for the educational technologist to believe that a bad decision has
already been made. Sometimes, it is due to the lack of a needs assessment (not so in
this case). In other cases, it is due to a particular solution or solution approach being
mandated that is not necessarily an optimal way to address the problem. Perhaps
having a self-paced online course with automated feedback on progress and little or
no collaboration is not what you believe best in this case, so you raise the question
—why that particular approach while recognizing the need to offer the course
online and outside the normal day-to-day schedule? The administrator then
responds that doing it as a self-paced online course with automated feedback will
allow it to be offered to other students not at this school who sign up at a cost.
Doing it that way can generate revenue for the school.
You then note that this was not part of the identified need or problem being
addressed. In a way, this is what planners and implementers call mission creep—
expanding the scope of the effort as it evolves. The first corollary to UUPS is that
mistakes and oversights rarely occur alone; one often leads to another. You point
this out to the administrator and say that there then needs to be added a second
need—generating revenue—along with a second goal and outcome measure.
When asked if you can design and develop such a course in collaboration with
the content expert, you say you believe so, but you will need to learn more from the
content expert and the system administrator. That follow-on deliberation can be
considered an early feasibility review of the requirements now in place. Once a
simple prototype is constructed early in the design process (Rossett, 2009), a more
robust feasibility study can be conducted to confirm that what has been planned can
indeed be accomplished.
For the learner: Three corollaries to UUPS have been identified: (1) Mistakes
rarely occur in isolation; one tends to lead to another; (2) resources are nearly
always inadequate to do what you believe should be done; (3) others generally have