Monthly Archives: March 2012

Zoho Project Management

One of the online collaborative tools I’ve been learning lately is project management software. We are playing with Zoho Project Management (selected due to it’s integration with GoogleDocs). I’d heard of project management software before but didn’t really have a need for it.

Course Production

Photo by striatic

We (Andrews University) inherited 120 courses through the merger with Griggs University. These courses are in need of upgrading. After spending several months getting a handle on the state of the courses, how they were used, and stats about them, I knew that we needed some method to manage the work of the upgrades. In addition, we have several staff working on the project. I wanted a way that everyone involved could see the work to be done and could even pick next projects on their own. Self management is possible if everyone is trained and can see the pile of work!

We have several different categories of people working on the courses:

  • Student workers
  • Staff
  • Instructional designers
  • Course authors (subject matter specialist)
  • Two of us are supervising the student workers

All of these people have logins to the Zoho site except for the course authors. But we did make a dummy account called “AUTHOR” so we could mark and track various tasks that the course author is doing.

Zoho Projects Features

We are using only a few of the features of the site:

  • Tasks. We have a Task List for each course. We may assign work to the students, or they can also assign themselves to a job. They know to pick a job that they are trained on. Within Tasks, each job has a completion graph. Everyone is putting the percent finished at the end of each day so we can monitor progress and who will need another job soon.
  • Milestones. At the moment we have four milestones. We are using them as big categories for the sets of courses we are working on. We have a deadline for each milestone.
  • Wiki. We have a couple pages with instructions, and have collected a few supporting links.
  • Documents. We haven’t put up too many documents – a few syllabi in progress. Most of our documents are on our shared drive for courses instead.
  • Dashboard. The dashboard is fun to see our progress.

Other Uses

Now that we have a system going with Zoho Projects for our course development, I’m starting to think about other ways we could use this.

  • Online Course Approvals. We have an Online Course Approval process that is required by our accrediting agency (NCA HLC). We have built a process that divides the work among the committee members. I’m thinking that Zoho Projects might be helpful for tracking the work.
  • Dissertations. One of my assignments is to figure out a way to track dissertation progress and provide online tools that support it. We have a few doctoral level degrees in the School of Education that are online – and an online tool to support the dissertation/thesis process could be very helpful. I haven’t seen anything online designed specifically for this, so it seems maybe project management software would help. We could have document versions, task and calendar tracking, as well as discussion areas. I have questions around this still, but am thinking about it.

We currently have one Zoho Projects site, which is free. If we expand, we’ll probably look into getting into some type of campus wide plan. But so far we’re not ready to think about that!

What about you? Do you have any large scale projects that need managing? How do you track them? What tips do you have?

 

Reflecting on Federal Definitions of Interaction

Since January, I’ve been working hard on creating new Andrews University definitions of distance education that match these federal definitions (34 Code of Federal Regulations 602.3):

Correspondence education means:

Education provided through one or more courses by an institution under which the institution provides instructional materials, by mail or electronic transmission, including examinations on the materials, to students who are separated from the instructor.

  • Interaction between the instructor and the student is limited, is not regular and substantive, and is primarily initiated by the student.
  • Correspondence courses are typically self-paced.
  • Correspondence education is not distance education.

Distance education means:

Education that uses one or more of the technologies listed in paragraphs (1) through (4) to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor, either synchronously or asynchronously. The technologies may include:

  1. The internet;
  2. One-way and two-way transmissions through open broadcast, closed circuit, cable, microwave, broadband lines, fiber optics, satellite, or wireless communications devices;
  3. Audio conferencing; or
  4. Video cassettes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, if the cassettes, DVDs, or CD-ROMs are used in a course in conjunction with any of the technologies listed in paragraphs (1) through (3).

Interaction!

The emphasis in the quotes above is mine. I find it very interesting that the focus of the difference between the two types of education is interaction. It reminds me of the development of the AVLN standards in the early 2000s. What did we emphasize? Interaction:

Courses developed shall address the relational basis of learning

  • a design for interaction between learner and content
  • a design for interaction between learner and learner
  • a design for interaction between learner and teacher
  • a design for interaction between learner and self (reflection)
  • a design for interaction between learner and the community (includes service)
Interaction (photo by ConferenceBasics)

At best, correspondence courses only address the interaction between learner and content, and learner and self; and may not even do reflection well if the course uses primarily objective assessment methods like multiple choice, true/false, and matching.

Is Correspondence “Old”?

I have found it interesting to observe the objections and concerns on campus about the term correspondence. It is a term that makes people think of paper correspondence courses from the World War II era. However, given the federal definitions, many online courses are actually correspondence courses!

  • Courses that are self-directed and self-paced (what about independent studies?!)
  • The concept of putting syllabi and PowerPoints online to make an “online course”. Problematic! No interaction!
  • Even a course consisting of video clips, recorded lectures, either online streaming or on DVD/CD is correspondence is there isn’t INTERACTION.
  • If a course doesn’t have a thriving discussion area, is it correspondence?
  • If a course consists of readings, assignments turned in to the instructor, and the instructor never initiates communication with the student, is it correspondence?

Reflection

When you really think through the ramifications of these definitions, it raises the bar for the quality of the course!

I can see a focus emerging for faculty development workshops in the coming months: interaction. What is it? What does it look like? How do you design for it?

I know Carol Skyring has been researching interaction and some of you are constantly thinking about it as well. What other tips and resources do you suggest for ensuring quality interactions in all forms of distance education?

Estimation Applied to Course Production

A few years ago, my brother, a programmer, shared with me the concepts and challenges with estimating time for software development. For example, as addressed in Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. I’ve found the concept interesting before, but now more applicable in my work.

Bean Counting! (Photo by cookbookman17)

Griggs University brought about 120 distance education courses to Andrews University, and many of them are in need of upgrades and complete rewrites.

Part of my recent work has been to start developing a system of course development and revision. As I organize a small force (army?) of student workers and staff to work on courses, I’ve been looking more closely at estimation. I am heading towards having an estimate for how long it takes to do certain sets of jobs – like creating quizzes, applying CSS designs to content pages, etc.

This includes teaching my workers how to do their own estimation for converting lessons to HTML pages with appropriate CSS applied. In one case, we thought through carefully two different ways to approach the estimation process. I thought it might be helpful to share here two simple methods that I taught:

Approach #1: Starting with known amount of time on a task

If you know how much time it takes to do a certain task, then you can estimate how long it will take 10 or 20 items of the same type of task.

So, the question is: Given a known amount of time to finish a task, how long will it take to finish x tasks?

For example: given 1.5 hours to finish 1 lesson how long will it take to finish 40 lessons from where I am now.

Steps:

  • 40-14 = 26 (40 lessons – 14 done = 26 lessons to do)
  • 26×1.5 = 39 (26 lessons left x 1.5 hours to do the lesson = 39 hours to complete goal). Round up to 40 hours; which is about 5 days of work
  • Given that 80-90% of work day is accomplishing tasks; 10-20% is interruptions and breaks etc. …
  • 40 hours x 10% is 4 more hours; so that is about 45 hours actually accounting for breaks etc. Or a better more generous estimate would 45-50 hours left for this job.

Approach #2: Starting with a desired end time (pedal to the metal method)

If you have a desired end time, then you can estimate how fast each task needs to be completed.

So the question is: Given a specific deadline; how fast do I need to do each task?

For example: Given that I want to finish 26 lessons by the end of the day on Thursday, and it is now Tuesday afternoon, how fast do I need to do each lesson?

Steps:

  •  I have 26 lessons left (40-14=26 see above).
  • In two days (Wed & Thu) I plan to work 9 hour days with an hour of interruptions and breaks, so I can estimate about 8 hours a day per day.
  • 16/26 = .61 (16 hours divided by 26 lessons = the fraction of an hour that I need finish a lesson in)
  • Convert the decimal to hours:.61 x 60 minutes = 36 minutes per lesson

Reflection

I’ve come to the conclusion that this type of thinking isn’t necessary “caught” or “taught” in our high schools and colleges. Students may know what estimation is, but might not be able to apply it to real-life scenarios when they graduate.

What do you think? I realize this is a very simplistic method to estimate how we are doing in our work, but it’s a start. Do you try to estimate progress on online course development? How do you do it? What data do you collect and track?