15/5 - Final Edition!

I can't believe it - the Showcase is tomorrow.

I can proudly say that our team finished all major design work and programming on our project this past Sunday. We've been working some pretty long hours on Sundays, so we all agreed that we'd stay until we were done. And we did it!  The major last minute changes we made to the project were the addition of a static navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, and 'back' and 'continue' buttons that allow the user to have better control over the slides, and rewatch one if they'd like to go back.  We experienced a minor glitch with the audio on Sunday that caused some reworking in Flash, but we figured it out and got everything working fine. 

I will be bringing a CD for both Dr. Schell and Alissa to the Showcase that has the complete website/module on it. We made sure that all links in the module are relative links, so they should be able to upload the materials to a web server and be ready to go.

Cheryl and I will meet a little early tomorrow to go over the presentation, and we have two small pieces of paperwork to complete, but otherwise, we are good to go. It's been a long, long semester, and my most stressful semester since starting this crazy working full-time and Master's degree program.  I know in the past couple of weeks, our whole team has been concerned about our project, but I can say with confidence that we've accomplished our goals and our client's goals. I am truly proud of our work, and I can't wait to show it off tomorrow at the Showcase.

15/5 Week Fifteen

I can't believe the end of the semester is almost here. It has been an extremely busy week once again for our team. The team met at 2pm on Sunday, and most of us stayed on campus until about midnight working on our modules. I am really proud of the work we've been doing - it has been truly a formative evaluation process for us. We've received feedback from Alissa and some feedback at the dress rehearsal that's caused us to rework some small details in the modules, mostly to do with how the videos are integrated. We added cue points to the dock talk FLV so an outline will appear on the instruction screen as Vicky (the whale guide) talks to the learners. We also tried to include more text in the instruction that relates to the video.

The major purpose of the video is to "situate" the learner on a whale-watching trip. Obviously, a video on a computer is not the most ideal way to situate the learners on a whale-watching trip, but we tried to work with the platform to the best of our abilities. We were also constrained by the video that was available to us.

A secondary purpose of the video is to provide some examples of the information we're teaching. For example, when the instruction is discussing blowholes, we show actual video of a whale blow from Dr. Schell's Whale Class. At this point in the instruction, the video is both reinforcing the material and situating the learner. We only had a few opportunities to use the video in this fashion because the video wasn't clear enough or detailed enough to show things like a whale's baleen in action or the ventral pleats on a whale's belly. This material had to be reinforced with images or illustration instead of video.

I'm a little frustrated at this point because we have worked so hard on this project and I still think there are things that could be improved or changed. However, I do think that we've succeeded in creating really great instruction for seventh graders, which was our ultimate goal. We've already gotten some useful feedback from our alpha testers and hopefully we'll get more good feedback at tomorrow's beta test.

Here's a link to the beta version of our modules: Learning Whale Morphology

15/5 Week Fourteen

It's Dress Rehearsal week!

We have been extremely busy in the past week, and put in some marathon sessions this past weekend. Our beta test is scheduled for a week from today (April 17) at Clarke Middle School. Audra and Cheryl will be conducting the evaluation, and Alissa will be present (and continue to use the module with the students after Audra and Cheryl have completed the "official" evaluation). We are looking forward to some learner feedback and seeing how our module acts in a "real" school setting.

The storyboards and flowchart were delivered to the client this week, and we already received email approval from Dr. Schell. Alissa emailed us back with extensive and helpful feedback, and we've already worked on incorporating some of her changes into the version of the module we'll be showing at the Dress Rehearsal. Both Dr. Schell and Alissa seemed impressed and happy with the structure and flow of the content. My goal is to have all three modules posted online by Dress Rehearsal, although only the first module will be in a finalized format.

It's been a whirlwind of flash programming, video and audio editing and meetings - I think we are in a good place with the project. These last two weeks will give us time to work out the technical glitches and add a few finishing touches that will really tie the whole module together.

Things to do:

• Finish posting modules to web site
• Create glossary page
• Add glossary link to all modules
• Finish importing video to all modules
• Finish recording new audio (after Alissa's text changes)
• Create introduction/direction page for modules
• Obtain resource links from Alissa
• Send alpha test link to consultants
  

15/5 Week Thirteen

This 15/5 will be short and sweet as I am fighting the stomach flu.

On Thursday, we worked on putting together all the interactions we've been programming. It was slow at first, but I think we've got a good system down now. We met on Sunday for several hours and continued putting everything together. Lindsay and I worked on the interactions, Audra worked on storyboards, and Cheryl and Amy worked on video and evaluation.

It was a productive meeting and we all left with more to accomplish:

• Amy is finishing edits on the evaluation report and working on illustrations
• Audra is completing the storyboards and flowcharts and revising her drag and drop interactions to fit the new templates we created
• Lindsay and I are trying to complete programming of all modules
• Cheryl is working on lowering the audio for all video clips and recording voiceovers for the modules

We received approval from Dr. Schell on the hardware/software specs, the learner profile, and the screen specs/treatment rationale (I'm still waiting on the attachment with his signature page, but he and Alissa both reviewed and approved the document).

I think we are feeling better about things at this point. We are starting to have a solid product, now it's all troubleshooting to make sure all the bits and pieces work! I'm afraid we haven't had much work for our consultants yet, and we're running out of time, but we're just having to work efficiently at this point and it's easier to do some things ourselves than to write out an explanation for someone else. We will have some proofreading and editing tasks very soon so maybe we can squeeze it in before the deadline.

Okay, off to nurse my flu. I will hopefully be in class tomorrow!