Full Calendar

The following is the full week-by-week calendar for the Spring 2018 OMS CS6460: Educational Technology class. Numbers in parentheses indicate the recommended number of hours to spend on each task. Note that these are merely recommendations. Based on your background and the nature of your project, your personal experience will likely vary. This calendar is intended to help you understand the work you should be putting into the class and monitor your progress as you go forward.

Week 1 (Week of 01/08/2018)

The first week of class is the “getting to know you” phase. You’re getting to know the class structure, the assignments, your classmates, your mentors, and the field of EdTech in general. By the end of the week, you want to feel comfortable with the expectations of the class and confident interacting with your peers on the class forum.

Week 2 (Week of 01/15/2018)

The goal of this week is to provide some set-aside time for you to explore the field of educational technology. Select a few areas, read the materials, and explore further whatever catches your eye. Your goal is to gather a broad understanding of the areas of educational technology so that next week, you may begin to narrow down your area of interest.

Week 3 (Week of 01/22/2018)

This week begins class’s work in earnest. Your goal this week is to start to settle on what general area of Educational Technology you want to explore in this class. At this point, areas can be very large: you could be interested in higher education, or intelligent tutoring systems, or gender in education. By the end of this week, you want to have a general idea of the area of Educational Technology on which you want to focus. You should start to consider which track you will want to take. You might take the development track, where you build a piece of educational technology, or you might take the research track, where you research a phenomenon related to educational technology. You need not decide yet, but you should start to keep this question in mind.

Week 4 (Week of 01/29/2018)

Last week, you identified a general area of educational technology on which you want to focus. This week, try to distill that down into a specific problem or question. You might be interested in taking the development track, solving a certain problem by designing a tool or technology that can help people learn or work in educational institutions. Or, you might be interested in the research track, exploring a particular phenomenon related to education, like how people learn in certain settings or how certain variables affect the learning process. This week, you want to decide the narrower problem or question you want to explore, with a special focus on understanding what work has already been done in the community on this.

Week 5 (Week of 02/05/2018)

This week, it’s time to put what you’ve been learning about the previous three weeks into a general plan of action. The first week, you got familiar with the overall landscape of educational technology. The second week, you zoomed into a particular area of that landscape. The third week, you zoomed in further to a particular problem or question in that area. This week, focus on deciding what you want to do to contribute to the area of this problem or question. If you take the development track, what are you going to build? If you take the research track, what are you going to investigate? Either way, how will what you do contribute to this area? If you take the content track, what are you going to teach, and how? In any case, how will what you do contribute to this area and build on what others have done? Continue to explore your area, with a focus on understanding the current state of the art and the open problems or questions to address.

Week 6 (Week of 02/12/2018)

Last week, you made the case that you have ideas for how to contribute to a particular area of educational technology. Why, though, should the community listen to you? This week, your focus is going to be on verifying your knowledge. How do you prove to the community that you have thoughts to which they should listen? This is about more than just having ideas; this is about connecting those ideas to the community’s current solutions or theories, explaining how it builds or improves on the current status quo, and demonstrating your ability to evaluate others’ ideas in this area as well. You’ll need to continue doing some research this week, but your focus should be on depth rather than breadth.

Week 7 (Week of 02/19/2018)

This week, you’ll plan the rest of your semester. You’ve spent the last six weeks dedicating yourself to deeply understanding a certain corner of the educational technology landscape. This week, plan out how you will contribute. What problem are you solving (on the development track), question are you answering (on the research track), or content are you teaching (on the content track)? How will you go about accomplishing that goal? You’ll want to continue researching your area this week (and by now, you should have come to the realization that there is always more to read about your field), but your main emphasis this week is on planning the rest of your semester. Plan out the big goal, the week-by-week progress, and the intermediate milestones that you’ll use to get feedback from your classmates and mentor as you go along. Make sure to plan out contingency plans as well; if something goes wrong, you want to be able to course-correct.

Week 8 (Week of 02/26/2018)

And we’re off! This week you start your real project work. Early in the week, your mentor should let you know that your proposal is accepted; he or she might also suggest some corrections or improvements. These go beyond the simple grade on the proposal: the proposal is an agreement between you and your mentor for what you will do the remainder of the semester for your course project. From this point on, what you do week to week will be heavily contingent on the nature of your project. Remember to complete your Weekly Status Check every week from now on; this is how your mentor will keep up with your project progress, adjust accordingly if your plan has to change, and intervene if there are difficulties among team members.

Week 9 (Week of 03/05/2018)

This week, you are free to focus on your projects. The first project deliverable will be due the following week in the form of intermediate milestone 1. For this week, work on the project tasks you outlined in your proposal, and complete the mid-course survey to let us know how things are going.

Week 10 (Week of 03/12/2018)

This week, your first intermediate milestone is due. The intermediate milestones are your chance to get feedback and report your progress. The kind of progress you report and the kind of feedback you solicit will be heavily dependent on the nature of your project, but make sure to make it clear to your mentors and peers what kind of feedback you would like to receive.

Week 11 (Week of 03/19/2018)

By now, you may have encountered a significant stumbling block. That’s alright — there’s still time to pivot and find a different spin on the same domain. If the data is insufficient for a quantitative study, perhaps it’s time to do something more qualitative. If your tool is proving to be more difficult than anticipated, perhaps you can scope away from the more difficult parts and focus on those things most pertinent to this class’s learning goals. Chat with your mentor about adjusting expectations if you think it’s necessary.

Week 12 (Week of 03/26/2018)

We’re about halfway through! Now is a good time to revisit your original proposal and ensure that you’re maintaining the big picture view of the original project. It’s one thing to cross off the items on your to-do list, but it’s something else to make sure those items are fulfilling the original vision.

Week 13 (Week of 04/02/2018)

This week, your second intermediate milestone is due. This marks the two-thirds point in the project portion of the class. Try to use this intermediate milestone to gain the feedback from your classmates and mentor that you need to prepare for the final project deliverable. If you are on the development track, you may want to have your classmates beta test your tool. If you are on the research track, you may want to get some initial feedback on the data you’ve gathered, such as some interesting types of exploration and analysis you might not have considered.

Week 14 (Week of 04/09/2018)

As we start to get close to the end of the semester, you’ll want to start brainstorming what conference or journal might be most appropriate for your work. You may not want to actually submit a publication, but the final paper is practice for professional, polished writing about your work. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to take the next step to publishing your work if you so desire, so go ahead and start exploring what venues might be of interest.

Week 15 (Week of 04/16/2018)

Next week you want to have plenty of time to put together your presentation and paper for the project, so this week try to wrap up the bulk of the work on your project itself. That way, you’ll have time to focus on presenting it to the world with your work next week.

Week 16 (Week of 04/23/2018)

It’s the final week of the project phase of the semester. By now, you should ideally have your project just about wrapped up — this week, you want to focus on getting it ready to present to the world. Spend a bit of time organizing it for delivery to your mentor, and make sure to revisit your proposal to make sure it will be clear to your mentor how your delivered project fulfills what you promised to do. After that, though, focus on how you’re going to present your project, both to your classmates (in the presentation) and to the world (in the paper).

Week 17 (Week of 04/30/2018)

The semester is over, your projects are submitted, and now all that’s left to do is enjoy a look at what your classmates have been working on for the past three months. However, that doesn’t mean your projects are over. This week, think about what next steps you might want to take with your project. Do you want to try to spin it up as a start-up business? Open source it so others can contribute and improve on it? Turn it into a research project for additional course credit? Try to publish it at an academic conference or in a prestigious journal? The hope is that the end of the semester is merely the end of the beginning for your project; we look forward to seeing it go to great places in the future.