Wicked Problem Project: Part A - Description of Need or Opportunity

This post is for my CEP 812 project, and defines a need for a solution using technology, at my current workplace.

The important educational need that I am addressing relates to my employment at Michigan State. My group creates, maintains and helps support MSU business application (web-based) software. For the WPP, I would like to concentrate on "user support" for our applications.

We have approximately 12,000 users of our software, and they include MSU faculty, staff and students. These users come from across the US and around the world; the technology skill level of each user varies, so proper instruction and communication is a necessity.

Currently technical and procedural information is primarily communicated to our MSU users through written and (static) online documentation (text with pictures). This form of content delivery may be difficult at times for our low-tech and non-English users to fully follow and comprehend. I will focus on enhancing a portion of these user documents, via technology.

To address this educational issue using technology, I will develop interactive/animated instructional lessons on important, job-critical software processes, and store these lessons on the Web. Vodcasts will be developed, using Jing (a free video software creation tool) to record the screen interaction and my narration/directions. Jing’s five-minute video time limit is ideal, as it will keep lessons short and focused on a specific topic or set of instruction(s).

According to Lori Griffin (Curriculum Director for the Library Video Company), "...video is clearly an instructional medium that generates excitement...(and)is the perfect medium for students. (It) taps into emotions which stimulate and enthrall students, and it provides an innovative and effective means for educators to address the curricular concepts." ^

The Vodcasts sessions will be accessible via links from a wiki or website; comments and instructions for use will be listed on the wiki/website. These video lessons will provide interactive, complete step-by-step instructions, with narration to explain key elements, processes and terms/acronyms.

My scope is affected by the excessive amount of existing technical documents and processes. Therefore I propose to start with one supporting technical lesson(s), targeting an issue/topic that my group receives a lot of support questions on from users. Initially I plan to forward the vodcast link on to support MSU's users that have questions or issues that are answered in the Jing vodcast. This can serve as a real-time "beta" test of my vidcast, with feedback from real end users. Feedback will be reviewed and I will revise vidcasts as necessary.

Research supports the positives of providing an interactive video session; the importance of viewing screen paths and the interaction of screens to the students. Instructor’s ability to highlight and visually explain important topics and lesson steps.

My best search results were with Google search (I also accessed the Yahoo search engine, MSU's eResearch site and Google Scholar), and used terms related to “use of video in education instead of text,” starting with small fragments of the search line, and adding to it. Search string content was tricky, as entering too much or too little search text resulted in “hits” that I was not interested in/did not pertain to this project. It is also difficult to find current, relevant supporting results. I would continue to use Google’s search engine only going forward, and use key works instead of longer sentence snippets. MSU's eResearch and Google Scholar offer some powerful and widely-inclusive quoted research. I found the sites powerful, but the ability to accurately search for my topic somewhat difficult, even intimidating at times, due to the lack of hits on the search terms I used.

I will create a wiki/website and one interactive, narrated vodcast during this MSU course. Afterwards I will continue to create and add new vodcasts (and post to the Wiki/webpage), based on the types of support calls received. I will schedule yearly reviews of my recorded sessions, to ensure content and stated information continues to be relevant and correct.

To check the success the vodcasts I will request reports from our support calls database, to see if the number of support calls decreases. I also plan to survey the vodcast viewers, where the viewer can rate the vodcast and indicate if it has assisted them in resolving their questions/issues.

^ Griffin, Lori. Using Video in the Classroom.
10 April 2012. http://www.libraryvideo.com/articles/article13.asp.