Page 32 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

1.2 The Scope of Educational Technology 19
problems, topics, resources, and so on. Finding an approach that best fits a situation
is a typical challenge for an educational technologist.
Many important decisions occur during the planning or design phase, and it is
desirable to see what others think about those decisions. Another corollary to UUPS
is this: Others frequently have good ideas. In this case, a second content expert
might be invited to offer a perspective and students who have had a similar course
could be invited to offer a student perspective. Since the course is being designed to
help high school graduates succeed in their first few years at college, it might also
be good to involve college instructors who have lots of students dropping out due to
poor reasoning capability. Because part of the design process involves selecting
resources and activities, prior to fully developing those resources and activities it
might also be wise to have input with regard to the meaningfulness and appro-
priateness of those things. Finally, part of the design process involves specifying
how the user interface will work, so having input on the interface in terms of
usability and learnability prior to committing resources to development is also a
good idea.
During the design phase of an effort, or sometimes earlier, it is generally a good
idea to create an implementation plan to guide development and deployment and an
evaluation plan that includes both formative and summative evaluations. Many
funded efforts require that such plans are submitted with a project proposal.

1.2.4 Development

Once a design has been specified, it is possible to begin developing and imple-
menting the course. The implementation plan can guide this process. This devel-
opment process is likely to involve the content expert and a number of specialists
(e.g., a media specialist, a programmer, and a system specialist). By this point in the
development of the course, a number of constraints probably had to be addressed
and compromises made, which should be documented. Another UUPS corollary is
that resources are seldom adequate to do what you and team believe should be
done. Compromises are often necessary. However, what should rarely be com-
promised is the intended goal of the effort.
Since a number of highly trained people are involved, it is again wise to proceed
in steps, beginning with a working prototype that includes parts of all major
components including the interface. Once such a working prototype has been
developed, it can be tested internally, just as the design was tested one or more
times before being passed on to development. This iterative process of design and
development is sometimes referred to as design research (Reeves, 2006). This
iterative process of refinement can continue into the deployment phase as data on
use by students become available.
A point worth emphasizing is that each of these activities is seldom a
one-time-and-done kind of thing. It may happen in the evolution of the logic course
that the automated feedback mechanisms are not working as they should, or perhaps
the system is losing track of learner progress through the various modules. Any