1.5 – Course Requirements

The following paragraphs provide a detailed description of all requirements relevant to completing ETEC522 successfully.  Please review them carefully.  Your instructors are deeply interested in your success, so please don’t hesitate to ask questions if anything is unclear, or if some creative modification of these requirements might benefit your learning experience.

Assignments 1 and 3

You will be asked to present your understanding of course materials within two (2) major submissions, one analytical and the other persuasive. The former (Assignment 1) will consider a specific market or venture. The latter (Assignment 3) will propose a new venture, or else a new direction for an existing venture. We are looking for critical thought, design, and presentation (structure, composition, and use of media) of a high professional standard.  As being clear, compelling and concise is a ‘businesslike’ virtue, these submissions have a 2,000 word maximum length (or 8 minutes maximum in a narrative media form).

ASSIGNMENT #1:  Market or Venture Analysis

Submit a thorough market analysis or venture analysis of a specific real-world learning technology market or venture of particular interest to you. For example, your subject could be a company (large or small), a program within a school district, an initiative on a campus, or a project within a company, a set of campuses, a regional group of companies, an area described by a research report, or any relevant (to you) segment or cross-section of the global learning technologies marketplace.  One way of thinking of a “market analysis” is simply a compound venture analysis: there will likely be several or many entities involved in the analysis, instead of one. One way to understand the intent of A1 is imagine that you’ve got a friend who wishes to invest $1 million in a certain learning technologies market segment or a specific company, and they’d like your expert recommendation (market or venture analysis, respectively) about whether this is a good idea. This submission may be a standard written paper or an equivalently compelling expression of your work in a medium or media of your choice (2,000 words or 8 minutes maximum). For this assignment you could also obtain (or create) and analyze a “pitch” from someone central to the subject of your study. Consult your instructors if in doubt.

Assignment #1 will be worth 25% of your final grade and is due at the end of Week 6.

Rubric for Assignment 1 (pdf)

ASSIGNMENT #3: Venture Pitch

Applying your start-up skills and research savvy, provide a compelling pitch that champions the future of an original real-world venture. Your venture can be an existing enterprise where you role-play what you would do differently if you were in charge, or it can be an imagined initiative or enterprise that you would like to create. Remember that friend with $1 million we used as an example in A1?  Now you’re trying to persuade them to invest in your venture!

Create a short, media-rich “elevator pitch” (1 minute maximum, using any medium or tools that most persuasively conveys the essence of your venture) together with a longer “venture pitch” (2,000 words or 8 minutes maximum, in any medium that most persuasively conveys the substance of your venture). Your objective is to be credible, well researched, and very convincing to your instructors and peers.

The intention is that your venture concept will be reviewed by the entire class within the Venture Forum (Stage 4 of ETEC522) – who can be imagined as a great test market or a group of sophisticated investors.  Such sharing fits with the “open innovation” context of ETEC522, but if you would like to keep your venture private for any reason, it can alternatively be reviewed confidentially by one of your instructors.

Please remember that we’re looking for a pitch that focuses on persuading investors to invest in your venture, not a pitch that convinces customers to buy your product or service.

Assignment #3 will be worth 25% of your final grade and is due at the end of week 12.

Rubric for Assignment 3 (pdf)

Assignment 2: Emerging Market Analysis

Stage 3 of ETEC522 focuses on specific emerging markets.  For Assignment 2 small groups of students will work together to:  A) produce an Open Educational Resource (OER) that serves as a launchpad for exploring and understanding the current nature and opportunities of one of these emerging markets; B) deliver an engaging, interactive week-long experience for the whole class using their OER; and C) publish a final OER enhanced by cohort response.

If you have a special interest in an emerging market, let your instructors know about this by email in the first week of the course. They will take your interest into consideration when forming the Emerging Market Teams (“EMT“s). You will be notified by the beginning of the second week which emerging market you have been assigned to, and which of your peers will be on your EMT.

As a new experiment for this iteration of ETEC522, each OER should aim to complement and extend the work of the New Media Consortium (NMC) in their Horizon Project, and specifically the crowd-sourced publication of the Horizon Reports and associated Horizon Navigator resources.   Our rationale is that the Horizon Project is the premiere source for practical information and analysis related to emerging technologies in education, so our best objective for 522 is that your work can appreciate and build that value, and possibly inspire new directions for it.  The intent is therefore that your final OER will be published in Horizon Navigator as a signature contribution that can simultaneous enhance your reputation (as an educator, expert and author) and that of 522 (as a distinguished source of market analysis).   In consultation with the NMC, there are two areas where we believe your OERs can provide truly differentiated value to the world:  1) providing an experiential approach to understanding emerging markets; and 2) providing an opportunity-driven perspective.  We expect that 522 students will discover additional dimensions of valuable contribution, and we do encourage that.

In short, 522 teams will create an experiential learning resource, test-drive it with the cohort, then publish it for global use.

Your detailed A2 instructions are:

1. Gather your EMT and collectively establish a compelling focus related to your emerging market that leverages the strengths and interests of your team and creates unambiguous value (timeliness, insight, importance, etc) for a global audience of learning technologies professionals.  For example, while the NMC primarily serves higher education, you might more strategically select a focus on K-12, or corporate learning.  As another example, when the NMC looks at “mobiles” in general, you might more strategically focus on “mobile ESL” or “mobiles for pro-d”.   The objective is not to provide a generalized overview of a big topic, it is to create a concentrated, highly-valuable analysis of an especially important and opportunistic leading edge of that topic.  Use the reserved section of this weblog (and/or other online tools) to enable the most effective teamwork.
2. Break out your overall A2 workload evenly across your team, making sure that everyone has a specific, tangible role to play that affords them a real opportunity to shine.
3. Design and compose your OER.  The basic idea is that the OER will begin with a brief launchpad within the weblog that links to an interactive/participative/immersive learning experience that your EMT stages either in the weblog or elsewhere on the web, with arising discussion hosted in the weblog.   However, please propose to your instructor any variation on this basic design that achieves the objective in some better fashion.  Given the alignment with NMC and the Horizon Report, it is expected that all components of the OER will follow a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.
4. Launchpad:  Analogous to an “elevator pitch”, your launchpad should be brief, informative and highly engaging – communicating why your audience should be interested in your perspective on this emerging market, and what they should expect in terms of a worthwhile experience.   Post your launchpad in the assigned area of our weblog at the beginning of your assigned week.
5. Experience: While the entire learning experience may be hosted in the weblog, EMTs are encouraged to apply other online learning/interaction/collaboration/discussion tools of their choice to host the most relevant and worthwhile experience.  The single constraint is that the experience will remain reasonably available and appropriate to future self-guided and formally-contexted learners wishing to access your OER.    For example, the experience might focus on learning applications, solutions providers, stability, usability, total cost of ownership (TCO), future potential, and/or other issues and opportunities specific to your emerging market .  The objective is for the interaction to be engaging and worthwhile to the cohort, and valuable to the final OER.   And please respect the cohort’s time and attention: aim for a high quality of engagement rather than a high quantity of material to review or large number of activities to complete.
6. Discussion: Actively encourage and moderate the participation of the entire cohort in the experience and the questions/discussions arising from it.
7. Use the cohort experience to refine and finalize your OER. Unless communicated otherwise to your instructor, it will be assumed that the final edition of your OER will be published in the weblog, submitted for publication in Horizon Navigator, and ready for evaluation one (1) week following completion of your cohort experience.

We believe this joint OER publication will be worthy of your CV, so be sure that your authorship is apparent.

Assignment #2 will be worth 25% of your final grade and is due one (1) week following your assigned presentation week.

Rubric for Assignment 2 (pdf)

Assignment 4: Participation Portfolio

Interaction with your fellow students and the instructors is essential to the ETEC 522 experience. The final 25% of your grade for the course will be based on a self-assessed portfolio that demonstrates the quality of your participation in the course weblog.  There are four parts to your Participation Portfolio submission:

1. Keep track of the most important postings you make during the course so that you can submit a list of between  5 (min) and 10 (max).   It will be prudent for your list to evidence insightful participation during every stage of the course.
2. On or before the last day of the course, send the appropriate instructor an email entitled “A4 Submission” where the body of the email is a 500 word (max) statement describing your active involvement in the course, cogently linked to the identified postings.   Use your statement to objectively rate your overall contribution relative to the cohort (e.g. “top 25%”).
3. (Optional) If you have one (or more) specific constructive suggestion(s) for what might be changed in future iterations of the course to improve everyone’s participation, including your own, post these in the weblog.
4. Use the PulsePress tools to like/dislike other students suggestions, and possibly comment on them to add value.

Please note that an online weblog is like a live conversation: your participation needs to be timely to add value.  For example, posting your thoughts on one group’s emerging market analysis when the next group is already fully underway isn’t helpful because it breaks the continuity for everyone else.

Assignment #4 will be worth 25% of your final grade and is due at the end of week 13.

Rubric for Assignment 4 (pdf)

Assignment Deadlines

Please note that no assignment will be accepted late without prior consent, and that normally 10%/day will be deducted even when such consent is given.

Activities

A set of Activities will be provided at various times. These will not be graded directly, although they do provide good opportunities for Participation Portfolio contributions.  They will also clearly support your investigation of concepts surrounding success on the Assignments.

Evaluation

The general format for the evaluation of your success in ETEC 522 is summarized here; the detailed requirements for each assignment, discussion forum and activity will be presented as they occur. Students in the MET program will be marked in accordance with the following grading standards:

Fail: Students are given a failing grade if they do not participate and/or do not complete one or more major assignments.

75 – 79%: A mark in this range would be issued to a student who completed all assignments but at a level considered inadequate for graduate level work.

80 – 84%: Adequate work for a graduate student, meets requirements.

85 – 89%: Good work, what we expect of our best graduate students.

90 – 95%: Excellent work, better than average and better than expected, what we hope for.

A mark over 95% would be given in rare circumstances where a student produced work of such outstanding quality that it merits special recognition. This work would be well outside the range of what was reasonably expected.