Assignment 3 (Summer 2018)

By now, you’ve spent a considerable amount of time researching educational technology, exploring your selected area, and brainstorming the problem you want to solve. Now, it’s time to start to synthesize that into a plan going forward. In this assignment, you’ll create a mini-proposal, clearly defining the problem you’d like to solve and how you plan to solve it. Then, in the full proposal, you’ll further articulate this with a plan of action, weekly tasks, and intermediate milestones.

Start by clearly articulating the problem or question you’d like to address with your project in this class. Don’t jump straight into what you plan to do, make sure to clearly set the stage for what you plan to do. Describe the problem or question, citing other solutions or literature to justify that the problem you are examining exists and has not been solved yet. Generally, the problem or question can usually be summarized in a single sentence, but you’ll need a couple paragraphs to demonstrate with citations to explore what others have done to justify it is as worth exploring. For example, some summaries might be, “Online instructors have difficulty identifying individually struggling students in large online classes”, “Do students interact with classmates differently on class forums based on their perceived genders?”, or “There is not presently a comprehensive, effective instructional on teaching principles and applications of deep learning.”

After you do that, it’s time to propose what you’re going to do. You don’t have to have all the details worked out just yet — that’s what the full proposal is for — but for this miniature proposal, you want to describe at a very high level what you want to do for your project. How will you address the problem or answer the question you identified above?

Your writing on this assignment can be somewhat informal and reflective because completing the assignment is meant to primarily be a learning activity for you; however, to adequately complete this assignment, you will definitely want to be able to cite specific sources, whether they be competing products or existing papers on similar ideas.

The main goal of this assignment is for you to start to define what you will contribute to the community. The secondary goals are for you to be able to find classmates with similar projects in mind, to provide your mentor and classmates with the information necessary to help you find more material, and to have you learned to drive your own research into a topic.

Your assignment should be approximately 800 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

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment submission page in Canvas. You should submit a single PDF for this assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (through OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and submit a PDF that links to or otherwise describes how to access that material.

This is an individual assignment. Even if you already plan to work on a team for the project, this assignment should still be completed individually.

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

Grading Information

As with all assignments in this class, this assignment will be graded on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), in accordance with the grading policy outlined in the syllabus. If your deliverable receives a 9 or below, you may revise and resubmit it once within two weeks of the original due date or one week of receiving a grade, whichever is later. Resubmissions may receive up to a 9. Note that this should not be treated as a de facto free pass to submit sorely lacking work initially; we reserve the right to deny resubmission or grade a resubmission more harshly if we perceive the original submission was lacking in earnest effort.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your 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 mentors alone.

You will typically be assigned four classmates to review. You receive 1.5 participation points for completing a peer review by the end of the day Thursday following the deadline; 1.0 for completing a peer review by the end of the day Sunday; and 0.5 for completing it after Sunday but before the end of the semester. For more details, see the participation policy.