Asking the right question is super important to get the "right" response.
In my last post, I talked mostly about the main tech and logistical challenge of working -- or rather not working -- on the Project Book, and then went in-depth into the early stages of how the process went for the DOE guide.
I didn't say much about Project #3: The Getting Started Guide for teachers new to iEARN projects.
This task is quite different from the other two. Basically, it requires repurposing a lot of the media, documentation, and information that iEARN currently has in three main areas, and creating a succinct, "quick-and-dirty" guide to jumping into iEARN projects for teachers who've never done this kind of thing before. The iEARN teachers' community is, once you're in it, extremely welcoming, warm, helpful, open, generous, and supportive. However, getting started and finding your way into that community can seem intimidating to a teacher who has never done any kind of international collaboration, used web 2.0 technologies, or project-based learning. Those are three concepts that even on their own are sometimes tough for teachers to wrap their heads around; mesh them together and it can be enough to send a teacher away saying, "No thanks, I'll just keep doing what I've always been doing."
…. Which is exactly what we DON'T want!
Currently, iEARN's resources for getting started are in three main areas:
- The aforementioned Project Book, on pages in the beginning of the book, before you get to the sections on all the various projects. This book is available in print and media formats.
- A Multimedia Guide, available online and via CDROM (don't scoff -- many teachers in schools in developing countries don't yet have consistent and/or reliable internet access)
- Notes and instructions about projects available online on the Building Connections section of the international iEARN website.
Some countries have additional resources, but they're available only in that country's language, for the most part, and so would not be as accessible to me or the general audience of international iEARN teachers. There are also loads and loads of informal and anecdotal tips available for teachers on the internal message boards of the iEARN Collaboration Centre, but if you're totally new to iEARN, you might not even know where or how to access that.
My task: make all of this easier for teachers to understand.
Well, I never thought I'd say it, but I found myself digging out readings from my Ed Design course. Despite my having tossed the Smith & Ragan book on Instructional Design I bemoaned for so long (Word on the Street, are you listening?), I begrudgingly trawled through my annotations from that course and looked over all the stuff on Needs Assessment. Yep, that includes Tessmer and Rossett, too. If you were around when I was taking that course, you'll know that I grumbled about it more often than not. So, let this be testament that, like James Bond, I will never say never again. I once swore I'd never need Smith & Ragan, or any of that needs assessment stuff. Well, I was clearly wrong, as here I sat rifling through readings and annotations looking for where to begin.
You see, I thought I never needed that stuff because I am a teacher. Needs assessment? As my dear friend Sava says, "That's like, Learning 101." And as an "expert" teacher, I thought I knew all I needed to know about needs assessment. But what I didn't realize is that needs assessment in a classroom or formal learning situation is much different than in other situations, particularly those where the users are spread out geographically and by almost every other demographic possible -- language, age, ethnicity, experience, and so on. Not to mention that as a teacher, you spend time with your students; you KNOW them. When you're doing instructional design, you often don't know them at all. So you have to ask questions.
And so here was itty bitty insight #293487: I like teaching better than instructional design. In ID, the relationship with the learner is less important. You're one step removed from it because you're designing something to help someone learn, rather than being directly involved with the process of learning. This is an important bit of insight for me, although not surprising, as I had suspected as much when I was actually taking the aforementioned Ed Design course. But anyway, my point is that I realized that when doing any kind of ID, needs assessment takes a completely different approach than teaching because it's not as social and directly interactive as the relationship between teacher-student.
So, what did I do next?
- I talked to the tech people at iEARN and got analytics history for everything on the Multimedia Guide and the Building Connections section of the iEARN.org site in the previous month
- I put together a survey to send out to current iEARN teachers, asking them for feedback about all the different media available for getting started.
… and that survey was way harder than I was expecting! "Oh, I'll do a survey!" I thought. Easy peasy. Yeah, notsomuch. After reading all those Ed Design papers again, I realized that creating the right kind of survey was going to be much more complicated than originally thought. The types of questions needed to be just right. There needed to be a balance between those types of questions. I needed to gauge feelings as well as competency. I needed ratings and open-ended suggestions. And, my users all spoke different languages as their mother tongue. Egads - if anyone took this survey it was going to be a miracle!
Eventually I got it done and Lisa agreed to send it out in the next iEARN newsletter, as well as posting it on the forums. I spent a good chunk of time monitoring the forums and piping in here and there to get a feel for how teachers used them as a resource for getting started. I made notes, lots of notes. I went through everything in the Project Book, the Multimedia Guide, and the Building Connections page and made more notes.
And then I waited.
It took 2 weeks, but we finally got enough responses for me to do something with! I was hoping for a minimum of 25 responses. We got 27. That was enough, as far as I was concerned. It was June -- the end of the school year for many teachers, and teachers are crazy BUSY at that time of year; I know this from experience. Luckily, the respondents were also a very good cross-section of the iEARN teacher population -- from 12 different countries and all with varying levels of experience in iEARN projects -- so this meant the sample would be at least semi-accurate. I mean, this isn't a scientific survey or anything! But we did need something that would at least give us enough data to get a pulse on what people thought of the current available resources for getting started in iEARN projects.
The next steps would be aggregating all this data and presenting it in some way that would inform me as to HOW to do this new getting started guide, and WHAT to put into it. Does that sound daunting to you? It didn't to me.
Not at first. But that's because I hadn't seen the responses yet.
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