Course Requirements
EDUC 818: Educational Technology Foundations
This course is all about discovering your foundations and articulating your educational technology standards and goals in an e-portfolio Web site. Thus, the course requirements revolve around you and the nature of the standards you adopt.
Participants will be expected to spend at least twelve hours per week studying books and articles in the educational technology knowledge base, practicing ePortfolio Web techniques, and working on team projects.
In the sidebar is a list of the specific assignments and how much they count toward your grade in the course. You can think of these assignments as consisting of three major parts, each of which counts for a third of your grade. The design and implementation of an ePortfolio Web site will constitute one-third of the final grade; online class participation will count another third; and your project logs will constitute the final third. All students must make effective use of the course discussion forum to communicate with team members and their professor. Students will keep track of their projects by logging their progress in Web pages that the instructor will visit periodically to review and comment.
Assignment #1: Goal Statement
Your first assignment is to state the reasons why you enrolled in this course and what you hope to accomplish by taking it. Please describe what the term "educational technology" means to you, and in that context, tell why you decided to take this course and state briefly what you hope to get out of it. If you have only a general idea right now, go ahead and describe your goals in general terms. If you have more specific goals in mind, please enumerate them. I will use this information to help advise you and guide you through the appropriate course materials.
Assignment #2: E-mail Registration
In response to the e-mail registration assignment in your online course environment, you tell your course instructor what is your e-mail address. Yes, there is an e-mail address on file for you here at the University of Delaware, but just in case I need to contact you about something related to this course, I want to make sure I have a good working e-mail address. Being able to reach you when I need to is so important that I am giving you 5 points for telling me: What is your e-mail address?
Assignment #3: Discussion Forum
Every student in this class is required to participate actively in the course discussion forum. To enter the discussion forum, log on to the course and click the Forums option. One of the first messages you write in the forum should inform your fellow classmates about the nature of the project you are hoping to create. The forum is an excellent place to network with your fellow students and form teams in which you can work together to create your projects.
Assignment #4: Cool Tool Wiki
This course has a wiki that you can enter by following the link to Wiki after logging on to your online course. In this wiki, we want you to write a message in which you share with your fellow classmates the coolest tool you discovered while taking this course. On your page in the wiki, tell us the Web address of your cool tool, and describe the reasons why you think this tool is cool. In addition to creating new pages, the wiki also enables you to modify or add to submissions made by your classmates. If you have more information about a tool submitted by one of your classmates, for example, you can select the option to edit that page and add your own thoughts. Through this process of having every member of this course contributing to the wiki, we develop a shared knowledge base of cool tools and best practices for using them.
Assignment #5: Blog Checkpoint #1
This is your first checkpoint for submitting project logs to be reviewed by your instructor. You submit your logs by writing in the Blogger that you will find in your tools menu after logging on to your online course. In your blog, please write about the contributions you made so far toward accomplishing your project's goals. You may also write about problems your project encountered and tell how you plan to solve them. The deadline for submitting this log is flexible, but in general, you should try to submit it about one third of the way through the course.
Assignment #6: Blog Checkpoint #2
This is your second checkpoint for submitting project logs to be reviewed by your instructor. In your blog, write about the contributions you made toward accomplishing your project's goals, and describe any problems your project encountered and tell how you plan to solve them. The deadline for submitting this log is flexible, but in general, you should try to submit it about two thirds of the way through the course.
Assignment #7: Blog Checkpoint #3
This is your third and final checkpoint for submitting project logs to be reviewed by your instructor. In your blog, write about the contributions you made toward accomplishing your project's goals, and describe any problems your project encountered and tell how you plan to solve them. The deadline for submitting this log is flexible, but in general, you should try to submit it during the final third of the course.
Assignment #8: ePortfolio Project
Final versions of ePortfolio projects must be mounted on the Web for Dr. Hofstetter to review and grade. As mentioned in the course preamble, the purpose of the ePortfolio Web site is for your team to define the meaning of "educational technology" in the context of your school or workplace, list the standards that the team has adopted, and reflect on the extent to which they are being met. This process will enable you to maintain an ongoing awareness of priorities for your continued professional development. Note: If you are a CTHE doctoral candidate, this ePortfolio is the third required element of the CTHE Program Assessment Framework. Please go there and scroll down to read item #3, Standards-Based Educational Technology Framework. See also the rubric that Dr. Hofstetter uses to rate your portfolio for program assessment purposes. In order to pass this assignment, you must score acceptably in all three dimensions of this rubric.
Assignment #9: Course Evaluation
Your final assignment in this course is to evaluate it. Use the Schedule tool in your online course to see when the course evaluation window is open. You must log on to the course evaluation system within this window of time. The Web address of the course evaluation system is www.udel.edu/course-evals. After you complete the course evaluation, your instructor will give you credit for completing it. The responses you give are completely anonymous. While your instructor will be able to see the ratings and comments, it is impossible for your instructor to identify the person who gave a certain rating or made a given comment. Once you complete the evaluation, your grade on this assignment will be an automatic A.
