Oh goodness. Well, my history comes back to life in this course. It’s been a while since I’ve designed something for learning – and then to apply a meta-analysis on top of that… was not easy, but I contributed to the group work well enough and put in some long hours to achieve what I needed to. I will say I was nervous about group work – not that the group members wouldn’t be able to pull their weight, but the way I work (which is deadline focused – and maybe some sort of undiagnosed ADHD-like-thing where I put stuff off until I have to finish it!) and whether I’d be able to pull it all together.
I don’t really recall, however we started building out an H5P object that tried to slim down the choice of EdTech tools out there – using branching logic. Ideally this would be done programmatically – so a simple PHP script to take your answers and give you some suggestions. Here’s an embed of the project:
Now it’s obviously not finished, and with 1555 unfinished stems, you’re more likely going to find holes than not. Remember this was built during the pandemic, and was heavily influenced by pandemic thinking. Give someone a resource and let them use it to help them make a decision. Make it available so that someone could contextualize it by taking it and reusing it elsewhere. However in the process, I think the entire group started getting a little nervous. Who would actually determine what’s best for a given situation? How do we quantify a process that is often part-discussion, part-negotiation? Are we just substituting our opinion and philosophies for instructor agency?
And for me, the major flaw is that there’s no (current) way to inject a human’s empathy into the subject. Empathy is a huge design component for what I used to do, which was consult with people and help them make ethical, compassionate (for themselves and their students) decisions about educational technology. How can we design a tool that eliminates one of the key components?
Also, the H5P branching logic tool really stops being useful after three levels – you just have too many options to practically do something with. And maintenance would be such a painful piece. With that said, the process that the group worked – without any real forming stage (if you are a firm believer in the forming-norming-performing stages of group development) – basically thrown together and boom, start producing. It worked. I could pat ourselves on the back and suggest we’re high performing folks and of course we’d perform, but I just think it was dedication to the project.
So if you’re not part of the ETEC course or reading this upon reflection, the resource is started, you can clone it and finish it if you’d like.
NOTE: I wrote most of this on January 13, 2022 but tidied up the writing over the subsequent six months. When I was finished tidying I backdated the entry.