Assignment: Reflective Assignment 2 (Fall 2015)

Due: Saturday, September 5th, 2015, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth).

Assignment Instructions

Last week, you described in more detail what problem or phenomenon you might want to investigate. This week, you’ll explore possible solutions or methodologies for investigating those problems or phenomena.

You’ve spent the first three weeks of the class researching some of the areas of educational technology, developing the knowledge you need to select and ultimately contribute to a certain section of the field. In this assignment, reflect on the position of your chosen problem or phenomenon in the context of the broader industry or research community. What are the existing solutions or theories? What ideas can you leverage? With what ideas or tools are you competing? On whose work are you building? Note that not all of these questions will apply to everyone; choose the ones that are most applicable to your problem.

For example, imagine I have chosen the problem of individualized feedback in education. I would first describe the problem I am interested in addressing: individualized feedback is very difficult to give at scale, but is critical to effective learning. I would then note some of the initiatives that have been undertaken in the area, especially intelligent tutoring systems, automated agents that give students individual feedback on their work. Then, I would reflect that a major problem facing intelligent tutoring systems today is that while they are effective in well-formed problems like math, they suffer in more interesting but poorly-formed problem domains like essay-writing.

The primary goal is for you to structure your understanding of the problem you would like to address; thus, make sure that completing this assignment is useful to you. If you find what you’re writing or thinking about isn’t very useful, choose to write about something else — it’s more important for this exercise to be useful than for it to address the checklist of questions provided here. The secondary goal is for you to provide a write-up that can be used to solicit feedback from your classmates and mentors, so make sure to include any questions or ideas on which you specifically want to receive feedback.

Your assignment should be approximately 500 words long. This is neither a minimum nor a maximum, but rather a heuristic to simply describe the level of depth we would like to see. Feel free to write more, or if you believe you can complete the assignment in fewer words, feel free to write less.

Submission Instructions

Please submit your assignment as a .pdf, .docx, or other common document file via T-Square. You can find the assignment submission page by going to T-Square, clicking CS6460, clicking Assignments, and then clicking the assignment title. Resubmission is allowed any number of times up to the due date.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

Your assignment will be evaluated on the extent to which it follows the directions and achieves the learning goal on a simple rubric: Does Not Meet Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Exceeds Expectations. Any assignments graded as Does Not Meet Expectations will have the opportunity to revise and resubmit once.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your mentor and classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas. All grades will come from the graders alone.

You will typically be assigned four classmates to review. Peer reviews are due one week after the due date of the assignment, and count towards your participation grade.