Course Description
EDUC 492/692: Educational Technology Capstone
This course is a service learning practicum in which participants form teams to design and develop an educational technology solution in an actual school or workplace. It employs metacognitive assessment through a learning community where participants create a shared knowledge base of best practices and tools of Web design.
Taught from a service learning perspective, the purpose of EDUC 692 is to provide candidates with real-world experience applying what they have learned in the program to solving an educational problem in a local school or workplace. The resulting project may prove useful in the candidate’s job search because it gives potential employers an example of what the candidate can do.
Course Modules
This course is organized into a series of modules that are presented to you via the Web. The modules are attached to a collabsible menu that organizes the modules in roughly the same order in which they will be discussed in class. You need not complete these modules in this prescribed order, however. Rather, you can work through the course at your own pace, skipping modules that do not interest you, and spending more time on those that do.
Team Approach
In this course, participants form teams to design and develop an educational technology solution to an authentic problem in an actual school, workplace, or community setting. Participants learn how to search the educational technology knowledge base and read scholarly research articles about what has been learned by other groups developing applications in the content area. Informed by this research, the team learns how to work together to design a Web-based environment and present it for critique and discussion by the entire class. Participants learn how to select an appropriate hardware platform and suite of development software. In the discussion forum, participants learn how to comment on progress and make constructive suggestions as the environments undergo development on the Web. In the wiki, participants create a shared knowledge base of best practices and tools of Web design. By logging project contributions in an online reflective blog used for grading purposes, team members experience the power of metacognitive assessment.
Assignments
Your grade in this course will be based on your performance on a series of assignments that appear on this online syllabus. At any time, you can view the assignments. This list of assignments provides you with a snapshot of what you need to do in this course. All the rest is optional. It is totally up to you how much of the other material you will want to complete. Your instructor will help guide you, depending on the topics you choose to pursue.
Grading
You will receive grades on three kinds of activities. First, there are communication assignments that involve you in online discussions with your fellow classmates and your instructor. Second, you will submit logs at three checkpoints during the course to document the progress you are making toward accomplishing your project. Third, you will create an ePortfolio Web site. These three parts of the course each constitute a third of your final grade.
Flexibility
The key word in this course is flexible. As you work through the modules in this course, many educational technology techniques and approaches will be presented. No one would have time to study all of these materials in depth in one course. Do not feel overwhelmed, therefore, if it seems like there is a lot of material here. There is, but the purpose is to enable you to pick and choose the tools and techniques most useful to your project's goals.
