Final+Reflection



Jennifer V. Greene  EDET 650/Fall 2012  December 10, 2012  Final Reflection

In developing my project on Microsoft Access and CourseSites, I found that I really enjoyed creating presentations and educational materials. Although I have been teaching in some capacity since my sophomore year in college, I never really had the chance to create, from scratch, my own materials. Lesson plans, materials, and guidelines for the most part were provided. For this project, even though I had some material from classes I took, I had to create a course and a database. This I found truly exciting and along the way I learned a lot about not only education and technology, but also myself.

 So far, I think I have a good grasp on creating a course specifically designed to just get my coworkers started in Access. I know it is slim on details such as creating advanced queries and reports, but my coworkers are not trying to learn how to program in SQL or even in creating reports. They just needed a basic overview of how it works. They have told me that they are going to let me handle all the programming and “dirty” work. They just want to be able to request a custom report from me or open an already created one.
 * //Self-evaluation of my progress... //**

 I must admit that a great deal of my progress was hindered because I have grandiose ideas and then get stuck trying to pull them off. I had visions of the database to put all databases to shame, and reality didn’t hit me until around Thanksgiving when I started programming. I had pretty much finished most of the course and I was creating the tables for my database. I made a few mistakes and had to redo about six hours of work.

My next rude awakening happened when I was discussing the database with my colleagues and learned that, indeed, they did not want to have to put in a lot of data. They are just too busy to do so. We have all been asked to do a lot more with a lot less, and although the extra data would be nice, I was asked to scale back some of what I was doing. This made me rethink what I actually needed, as opposed to what I had planned. It hit me like a freight train then that it didn’t necessarily matter what I thought was best or what I wanted, it was the customer that I was working for that had the final say. I thought I was doing that all along, but when I started doing my revisions, I saw where I was adding this little part and that little part, and how I had gotten away from what was needed.

 //**Lessons learned...**//  The most important and difficult lesson I learned was that I had to be more customer focused. It is not about all the flashy “cool” things that are available. It is creating first, what the customer wants, and second, using the “best” tool for the job. I have a tendency to get really “techie” and want to add the latest and greatest gizmo, software, animation, or automation to whatever I do. I dream “too big” many times. I had to face reality several times and learn that the simple solution may be the best solution for a problem. My customers want a “workhorse” database. Nothing flashy or advanced, just a working piece of software that delivers what they ask for with the minimum of effort on their part. they requested the same of the course. They wanted to learn what they needed and then to move on to the next thing. Several og my bibliography articles addressed these exact issues, and I found they were helpful in getting me back on track.

 If you could read my posts in previous courses, I often pose the question about technology that just because we can, should we. Well, I guess I had to learn myself the answer to that question. Just because you can automate a form doesn't mean you should. Just because you can build a wiki and blog on CourseSites doesn’t mean you should. There is a time and a place for everything and I am learning that not all solutions have to be as highly interactive as others.

 Throughout our classes in Ed Tech, we have been asked to seek out ways to make learning both educational and interactive. In other words, we need to make courses person centered so that they are given a course that they can make their own, build community, and learn interactively. This may be the case in many instances, but I felt that what my customers wanted was a barebones course to get them the information they needed without all of the fluff.

 //**Difficulties I encountered...**//  To be truthful, the vast majority of difficulties I encountered were of my own creation. As stated above, I am often overambitious. I will build a Rube Goldberg machine when all my customer wants is a click here, get this product. But once I got my imagination under control, the process became much easier. I know I will be tinkering with my database a lot more, but I will refrain from wholesale changes unless asked to do so.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Another difficulty was time. It has been very difficult throughout grad school to find time to work with the job I have, and this internship brought that to the forefront. Not only do I travel a lot for my job, but all of my coworkers travel extensively and have a lot of reports to create. It was a chore getting time to speak to them all together, and I ended up speaking to them through email or quick snatches of time during the day. It has led me to the conclusion that not only could creating solutions not be a “side” job for me, but that it is important to manage time wisely. There were times when I should have been working on my project that I wasn’t. I have had to budget my time better and learn to do what I can whenever I can.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> My only problems with Access came when I had a minor error that lost me several hours of programming time and a power outage that caused me to lose some more time when my upload did not save correctly as I was moving my files from my laptop to my Dropbox account. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> CourseSites offered a few challenges, but those were, again, errors on my part that I quickly figured out. CourseSites is very intuitive and is a great vehicle to use in instructional delivery.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Timesheets were my biggest bane. Either I was out of the office or my supervisor was, and I got very behind in submitting them. It was just something that I did not focus on, and my efforts at getting them done should have been greater.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> //**Successes I achieved...**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> My greatest success was getting my course and database complete. For a while I thought I wasn't going to make it, but I did. I thought about giving up once or twice, but I just couldn't do that. I did a couple of all nighters, but overall I think I turned out a quality database and an entertaining, yet informative introduction to Access that my coworkers will be able to use. As I said, I had to scale back the database, but I am confident that It will be what the office needs, and since I am there, I can continue to grow it and customize it to their needs.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> **//Things I would do differently...//** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I think that as stated before, I would have scaled back my original plans. I was overreaching and too ambitious. I tried to do too much, and as a result, I was pressed near the end to correct my mistakes and generate a quality working product.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I also would not have underestimated the amount of work that can suddenly pop up in my job. We had several changes that affected our caseloads and responsibilities and I became overwhelmed at times.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I also would have paid more attention earlier to my annotated bibliography. I have to admit I did it and forgot about it. But when I started to get overwhelmed with making choices for how this part should look or how that part should be addressed, it was my bibliography that saved me. Of greatest use were the articles on creating courses and adult learning theory. They guided me to the changes I made to streamline the course and include just the content that was needed. There was not a lot of scholarly research on Microsoft Access, but I did find a few articles on databases. I had to use blogs and forums for a great deal of my information on Access.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I have had a good time laughing at some of the things that I found myself doing in my internship that I learned in previous courses. I did a few modifications to the course and database to make it easier to view for some of my coworkers. Although they won’t admit it, some of them have difficulty seeing, and I made sure I darkened the text and increased the font size. As they were testing the course, I had a few ask if I could change fonts and images to make them easier to see.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> //Interesting ways my experience relates to previous coursework...// **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I took a lot of information from adult learning theory that we learned in earlier courses and that I gleaned from my bibliography when I designed my course. It helped me keep everything static in form but also interactive in delivery.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">I was introduced to both Google Docs (now Drive) and CourseSites in earlier courses and now I depend on both heavily. This semester I was involved in the creation of two courses with CourseSites and it was nice to have previous experience with it.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> **//Strong emotions I experienced...//** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Overall, I am awed that I completed this task and very proud of my products. I think that They are a vast improvement over anything I would have created before being in Ed Tech. I know I do have a lot more to learn, but it is exciting to have completed this project. It has allowed me to find something I genuinely enjoy doing and hopefully will have a chance to continue doing in the future.