Samples of Work
EDIT 9990 (Foundations) Research Proposal
This is a research proposal that I wrote in EDIT9990 for examining faculty perceptions of online discussion postings. This study focuses on using content posted in open communities that facilitate academic-style discourse where the communities provide ratings of the posts to indicate quality. My idea is to have faculty rate those same posts to see if the notion of quality between the two communities is similar.
EDIT 8190 (Studio) Artifact & IRB Protocol, submitted March 2016
This is the IRB protocol for the study outlined above. Included is the consent letter, a follow-up interview protocol, a recruitment email, and an example data collection form. The actual prototype data collection mechanism is built using Flask, a server micro framework, and MySQL, a common database.
Consent Letter
Follow-Up Interview Protocol
Recruitment Email
Data Collection Form Example
Discussion Data Analysis
Using the Desire2Learn Valence API, I was able to gather all discussion posts from online courses at UGA between Summer 2013 and Summer 2015. With IRB approval, I have been working to analyze this data over the past several months. The total dataset contains approximately 225,000 discussion posts across approximately 7,500 discussion topics. Through a process of examining each topic title/description and then fully examining a random sample of 2% of the topics, I was able to identify a set of criteria that I believe can be used to isolate discussions that are of the “academic style” I am working to analyze. That is, discussions where a question is posed to the students, each student responds to the question, then the students go about replying to and discussion each other’s initial posts. Through the process of narrowing the topics, I was left with 2,260 discussion topics containing 82,730 posts. Posts that were disregarded include “introduction” topics, “general discussion” topics, and “group workspace” topics. This research is ongoing, but so far I have been focusing on examining who is participating (i.e. students, instructors, teaching assistants), when the posts and replies are happening, and why the phenomenon of orphans (i.e. original posts with no replies) is more prevalent in some topics and courses than others.
AECT 2016 Conference Concurrent Session Proposal, February 2015
I submitted to present at AECT2016. My proposal focuses on the mechanics of using an LMS API to extract researchable data (i.e. the process used for the Discussion Data Analysis Section above). I have linked to a copy of my proposal below.
Online Learning Fellows 2016 Faculty Course, Module 2: Pedagogical Design in Online Courses
As part of my job at the Office of Online Learning, I worked with the design team to revise the professional learning materials for the Online Learning Fellows program. The module that I took lead on dealt with the instructional design in online courses. The goal of the module is to help faculty think through their instruction in a systematic way so that they can produce a design document that will serve as a roadmap for their course development effort. A screenshot of the module contents is below.