Lesson 9 Savvy Start Projects
9-2 Looking Ahead
Your course 1 project takes you through the Savvy Start process, but your capstone project may be entirely different than what you worked on here in course 1. The capstone of this certificate takes place in a 10-week Practicum Course where you have 3 assignments:
- Project Plan – A plan outlining the depth and scope of your final project based on your individual needs and circumstances for the practicum course.
- Summary of Work Accomplished – A one-page document that summarizes the scope of your project and identifies the set of assumptions and constraints underlying your design process.
- Project Presentation Webinar – 5 minutes to present highlights of key elements or issues related to your project, and you will have two additional minutes to answer questions from your colleagues.
Practicum Project Scope
In most cases, your Practicum Project builds on the “Project Proposal” you began in this course. But there are a range of possibilities with regard to the nature and scope of this practicum project. Here are a few examples:
1 working module
If you are designing an online course, you might choose to outline the whole and then develop one instructional unit as a fully realized prototype, giving you the experience of actual materials development. Your deliverable would be a workable module which could be stored on disk or mounted on the web.
Set of learning activities
You might choose to write a full set of objectives for a 10-module course, and then concentrate on devising a selection of assignments and learning activities that build towards those objectives, including designing ways in which outcomes could be demonstrated (assessments). This approach concentrates your efforts on learning
issues rather than on web development. Your deliverable would be a set of learning activities that could eventually be turned over to a designated web designer for engineering into a web-ready module.
Full storyboard map
You might storyboard the materials and learning activities for a module or set of modules. Your deliverable would be a map, not a completed module, that is ready for the next planned stage in materials development.
Grant proposal
If you are preparing for program administration, your project might involve institutional planning rather than instructional design. Your deliverable might, for example, be a complete grant proposal, including detailed audience and purpose analysis, marketing plan, budget, and so on.
Prototype module
If your real-world challenge is to pioneer or lead the development of an e-learning program within a company or institutional culture that doesn’t quite “get it,” your project might involve developing a prototype module to demonstrate to key managers or bosses the potential that can be achieved through purposeful e-learning design.
Your deliverable would be a prototype module accompanied by an explanatory commentary aimed to address the specific fears of your key managers or bosses.
Short eLearning course
A short training is one that can be completed in one sitting. If you are proposing a short training with a defined audience and approval/buy-in from your job, and you have all the content, interactions, and assessment ready to go, you may be ready to actualize that training. Your deliverable would be a short eLearning course ready to be hosted on the company intranet/LMS or even used in an academic setting as an online learning activity.
These project scope descriptions give you a sense of the range of actual practicum projects successfully developed by previous graduates of this program.
⭐Shar’s Note:
The information on this page is to help you see beyond the now (course 1) and to feel comfortable that what you design for this course may not be what you end up with at the end of the certificate (practicum). I keep repeating this message because I do not what the perfect to be the enemy of the good. The goal for this course to NOT to end up with a final storyboard to build the project, the goal is to experience the iterative design process; in other words, the journey is the destination.
The prototype storyboards you’ve developed for this course are artifacts from the process and belong in a portfolio to demonstrate that design is an evolving process. Some day you’ll go looking for these initial and revised prototypes to show as examples and it’s good to have them.
A few years back, I wanted to show several design styles to stakeholders and ended up asking a colleague to grab screenshots of course homepages for me because I forgot to keep track of these assets myself. Well, now I have those screenshots and can use them to jump start the Savvy Start process by showing what’s possible so that we can talk about we want to do for the project at hand.