Week 12, April 10 - 14

Burn out! Interest paper was due this week. Of course, once I got into the meat of the paper, I found that the books I had, well, only three were really useful. Back to the drawing board, the internet!

I need information that pertains to training ROI and Human Capital Value. I found some good things. Gotta get back to the paper.

Week 11, April 3 - 7

Bummer, I wasn't feeling well this week. I managed to finish the two quantitative research article critiques and develop and send my quesitonairre for EDIT 590.

Dr. Kelly emailed his interim exam, ten essay questions, approximately 20 pages once complete. This will require more reading and research to complete. Quiet week.

Week 10, March 27 - 31, 2006

Great week! I finished tabulating the results from the usability testing and the team is preparing for a iteration of changes. this is the week for our team to get organized and ready for final testing and presenting our project to our client on April 20th. I've never used the word iteration so much before this.

Everyone is busy working on projects that are due in other classes. We have an interest paper and two research paper critiques, questionairre's to send out and the formative evaluation plan was turned in.

My interest paper is about a topick that wasn't covered in class, but is very important to the Instructional Designer and trainers. We studied most topics, but we haven't gone into ROI. This is one of the hottest topics in training. It can make a department or break it. The ISD process is great, but without some understanding of how what you are doing fits into the business you can find yourself without a job!

It is coming together. Most of what has been read is being used. The only course I am not comfortable with is the Educaiton Research in technology. Amon kelly is over the top, but I'm sure by the end, I'll have knowledge that I did not have before. I definately see how this class will help in the future. Not that I didn't know that already. It is very important to understand statistics in training. They are used so much for calculating success rates, spending, and during evaluations, especially level four and five. I wish, roi was included in this course, or that this course was aimed more at evaluation, valuing human capital, roi and the business aspect of training. But, Iwill understand correlations, qualitative and quantatitve research, and scatterplots.

I think mentally we are all a little burned out, but excited about the progress we've made.

Week 9, March 20 - 24

Welcome Back! I am back after a week off for Spring Break.

Lot's to do this week. Although the changes we wanted are not on the site, we are going ahead with usability testing. We have two test group scheduled for this week. we are all excited, or anxious to find out what kind of thoughts our two sets of special education teachers will have. We have designed the site with lots of scaffolding, included all of Dr. Dabbagh's instructional strategies, it's very intuitive and we hope it will live up to our original goal, which is to design a site for special education teachers.

The testing went well, the teachers found the site to very easy to use and all teachers made many suggestion, many which will be implemented. Development is such an iterative process. As I said before, we could probably spend three or more months on usability testing alone. All teachers felt the site flows well, clear and everything is easy to find, except the logon. We all thought that was an issue and will be working on that during this iteration of changes. In Dr. Clarks class we used a book called website usability. My team has worked hard to make sure the site can be used by anyone. We've implemented most of the suggestion in the book, except for the commercial type suggestions. We all thought the book had some great suggestions, although most of my team has experience in web design.

In redoing the usability test, I had to take time to review several text books, which had chapters that included information on usability testing - how to conduct testing, sample questions, and other useful information. I also, found tons of online resources which proved very useful.

Spring 2006, Week 8

Wonderful! That's how everything is going. It's interesting to see how everything is coming together for the TTAC project. We are well into the design phase and all we can think about is usability testing. We've been working with Shuangbao to get changes and updates loaded on the site. Aala'a and Matt are are specialist on data base and flow sheets. Without them we would not be as far along as we are now. It feels good to have a competent team that works together. If this program teachers nothing else, it's teaching me that good communication, negotiation and teamwork is the foundation of a successful team. Oh yeah, I forgot to say trust in your teammates abilities.

Well along with design and development comes usability testing. Our schedule includes about five different rounds of usability testing. We have to do this testing to find out how our site flows, whether the content is usable, and if the supports are adequate. We will also find out if the site works and can do what we want it to do. We feel good and are looking forward to this part.

I am secretly wishing we could do more, but with time constraints, I know that's not possible. we will make the most of the testing we have set up and work with the results to implement a "dynamite" system. We forge ahead!