Week 11: Report

Since I haven't written over fall break, I have to say the past two weeks have been busy. Contrary to my post for Week 9, our team really did further work on our storyboards -- formatting text, making placeholders for images, adding basic ideas for interactions, etc. Our prototype will likely be the actual work we present at the dress rehearsal. So, that's the work ahead of us.

I've met outside of the studio with a number of team members over the past two weeks. Daisy and I had a productive graphics session, zeroing in on buttons and screen design for our module, as well as brainstorming a basic template for our Flash files to follow. Daisy, Kazu, HueiHsien, and I met to review the Flash file and talk more in depth about how the interactions would be integrated into it.

We did meet last Thursday for another intense work session. We went through all the storyboards again to iron out any issues with content, images to be used, illustrations needed, and further clarification of ideas. Most of our concepts are pretty solid and ready to be put into action.

Yesterday Kazu, HueiHsien, Ahram and I met to determine our approach to building the interactive items. We continued to iron out problems with the sample Flash file and decided to meet this upcoming Saturday for a work session, to output as much of our interactions as possible -- working together will be more effective for us since we can stop and talk about ideas and problems as needed.

Remi and I have been in contact by email and phone, as she's been testing the use of our sample Flash file. My goal tomorrow night is to assign our consultants to help migrate our static content from the storyboards into the Flash file. Remi has noted items that are unclear and need direction. I've also set up directions for our consultants to follow to help format images that we will import into our Flash file.

We're two weeks out from the dress rehearsal on November 15. I hope our work will fall into place quickly after this weekend's session. Remi and I have talked about starting formative evaluations on November 12.

I feel confident that we will get this work done. I realize that my experience with Flash may make me a bit more assured about this than my teammates, considering the degree of interactions we'll need to produce this weekend. If all goes as planned, we could spend the remaining weeks after the rehearsal doing minor tweaks and finalizing our various documents.

Not to forget, all of our documentation to date has been approved. Our client temporarily passed authorization of documents to the PDCs. This was good since they weren't entirely up to speed on the project's current status.

Documentation and reporting are useful, although awaiting approval for the next steps isn't always how things work here internally. More often it's the case of getting a project done and delivering a final product -- with meetings for Q&A along the way.

Working Project Documentation

Finalized docs (awaiting approval)

Supporting work

• Flash template (in development)
• Screen Design
• Treatment Rationale
• Storyboard: Unit 1, Lessons 1-3
• Storyboard: Unit 1, Lesson 4
• Storyboard: Unit 2
• Learning System Design
• Flowchart: Unit 1, Lessons 1-3
• Flowchart: Unit 1, Lesson 4
• Flowchart: Unit 2

Week 10: Assignments

To do for next week:

• Edits to storyboards (assignments below)
  • changes discussed in 10/18 meeting
  • further development if missing test/activity items
  • review images for your section, specify which ones to use where
  • if lacking images, note what you want and where - including illustrations, graphics
  • if lacking content, note what you need and where (specifically test/activity items)
  • tell Emily what content/images you need

• Lesson 1 - HueiHsien, Emily
• Lesson 2 - Ahram
• Lesson 3 - HueiHsien, Remi
  • HueiHsien add in all content
  • Remi help develop test questions
• Lesson 4 - Emily
• Unit 2 - Kazu
• Prepare flash file for development
  • interface, symbols, design guidelines - Daisy, Emily
  • plan for consistency between files (Flash guidelines - layers, scenes, names, etc.)
• Submit documents for review - Emily
• Contact Holly for content needs - Emily

Team meeting: October 25, 4-6pm, 603 Aderhold
(regular meeting room, Em check availability)

• show group plan for Flash file
• divvy out development work based on storyboards

Prototypes and resources

Storyboards
Coming soon

Edited content for storyboards (10-17)

• Unit 1, Lesson 1
• Unit 1, Lesson 2
• Unit 1, Lesson 3 (in review)
• Unit 1, Lesson 4 (in review)
• Unit 2, Lesson 1-4

Prototype resources

• Prototype_doc (word file - preferred)
• Prototype_ppt (ppt file)
• Working example for IPM
• Graphic resources

Week 9: Report

A good bit has happened since my last posting. Our Task Analysis, Performance Objectives, User Profile, Hardware/software Specs, and Formative Evaluation Plan were all approved by our client.

Daisy has done more work on our screen design and treatment rationale. This document will be coming together very soon with the supporting info for the learning system design. This part of the project will be designed in a pre-set template, so this shouldn't be too much to add.

Kazu, HueiHsien and I have brainstormed ideas for our interactions and test items. We presented these to the team in our last meeting. This past week, while Daisy has done more graphic development, the rest of us have each worked on a prototype for a particular lesson. These should be based on the storyboards presented last week, as well as our team discussion. We're using a basic screen design to determine how much space we have for content and activities in our prototypes. This work will help us line up work for assembling our module. Some of our interactions will require a bit of creative programming and our SME's support through providing and approving test content.

I've also recruited Myra, one of our 6200 consultants, to help look at the page flow of our content, as well as final edits. I really hope we'll be able to divvy out work to our other 6200 consultants soon. I expect we will have graphic work and other parts that we'll need help on.

I've consolidated all of our storyboards into one document that details our project from the top of the learning system to lesson activities. With a little bit of elaboration, this should serve us well for the learning system documentation.

Week 8: Report

Our team meeting tonight was lively, as usual. We went through the project timeline I provided and discussed various deliverables and actions listed. We reviewed Daisy's most recent screen designs and discussed elements to add to it. Ideas of interest from that discussion:

• Captivate suggested as a tool to teach the learner about our module (how to navigate, what to expect, etc.)
• Add navigation to module (help, back/foward buttons, icons for diff activities)
• Use different objects in interface for exercises in particular units.
  • Unit 1: identification, imagery, and case studies (folder with tests, documents)
  • Unit 2: client interactions (phone call)
• Adapt the notebook object to record a synopsis of the lesson, perhaps as closing summary.

The evaluation section of the project timeline was reviewed. Remi, suggest edits as needed. For our beta evaluation, Remi has suggested having 2 tests - one for each unit of our module. I will talk to Duren about who we can ask to do this, as well as timing. The beta eval will probably be near Thanksgiving, which could be difficult if we don't plan ahead.

We've decided to keep up with our time on our blogs, not in a separate spreadsheet. Be sure that you do this!

I suspect our 6200 consultants may be getting antsy from not having had much assigned yet. We are entering our development phase, so we should start distributing tasks very soon.

• Week 8 Assignments

Week 8: Assignments

To do for next week:

• Post recent documents (Emily)
• Determine interactivity for content (Kazu, HueiHsien, Emily)
  • document ideas as needed (sketch, storyboard, description, etc.)
• Screen and graphic design: look-and-feel, navigation, etc. (Daisy, Ahram)
• Flowchart and screen specs of online system (Emily, HueiHsien)
• Review project calendar docs (All)
• Send to Holly, Duren (Emily)
  • Formative Evaluation Plan
  • Hardware/software specs

Team meeting, October 11:
To be outlined later....

• Present/discuss ideas for interactivity
• Distribute interactive work as possible
• Present/discuss updates to screen design
• other items of interest....

Upcoming work:

• Flowchart, storyboards (Nov 1)