Full Calendar

The following is the full week-by-week calendar for the Summer 2017 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 05/15/2017)

The first week of class is usually the “getting to know you” phase, but in the shortened summer semester, you’ll also dive right in! 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. You should also have begun some exploration of the field of EdTech.

Week 2 (Week of 05/22/2017)

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 and the problem you want to tackle. 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; the research track, where you research a phenomenon related to educational technology; or the content track, where you develop some actual instructional material. You need not decide yet, but you should start to keep this question in mind.

Week 3 (Week of 05/29/2017)

This week, it’s time to put what you’ve been learning about the previous two weeks into a general plan of action. You should have a good idea by now of the problem you want to solve. 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? 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 4 (Week of 06/05/2017)

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 5 (Week of 06/12/2017)

This week, you’ll plan the rest of your semester. You’ve spent the last four 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 6 (Week of 06/19/2017)

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 7 (Week of 06/26/2017)

This week, your first intermediate milestone is due. The nature of your milestone will depend on your project. If you’re on the development track, you probably want to show off some prototypes or preliminary designs. If you’re on the research track, you might want to preview your surveys, interview scripts, or recruiting materials. If you’re on the content track, you could show your early lesson plans, scripts, visuals, and other materials, you’ve already created. In putting together your intermediate milestone, focus on what kind of feedback you’d like to receive, and provide to your mentor and peers the content necessary to get that feedback.

Week 8 (Week of 07/03/2017)

By now, you may have encountered a significant stumbling block. Maybe the data you’ve gathered doesn’t actually demonstrate what you hoped it would demonstrate. Maybe you couldn’t find participants or testers. Maybe the technology you’re using won’t cooperate. 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 9 (Week of 07/10/2017)

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. This week for your intermediate milestone, you’ll hopefully have some data, a functioning prototype, or some content to preview.

Week 10 (Week of 07/17/2017)

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 11 (Week of 07/24/2017)

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 12 (Week of 07/31/2017)

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.