Faculty workshops

Scenarios - Faculty workshops

Meeting at the Workshop
Dr. McPhearson finally completed her long flight to Accra on Tuesday. The 20-hour flight and time change left her a bit spacey, but she managed to get through the first introductory meetings with the University of Michigan researchers and medical faculty. The rest of the African medical faculty would be in Accra by the evening and the workshops would commence Wednesday morning. Dr. McPhearson was excited to be back in Africa, and eager to begin work on the OERs.

The following morning all the faculty and researchers had assembled and the meet &amp; greet began. Dr. McPhearson became acquainted with a number of other medical faculty from the University of Nairobi, University of Ghana, University of the Western Cape, University of Cape Town, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and the University of Michigan. While the faculty had a broad range of disciplines, there were a couple of people interested in or focusing on infectious diseases, including Dr. Moikeena from the University of Nairobi. While Dr. Moikeena was not currently doing research in ID, she was intimately involved in the education process of students at the university. Her strong will and passion for transferring knowledge to students connected well with Dr. McPhearson's own feelings about teaching the fundamentals of science and medicine to her students. As the workshop progressed, Dr. McPhearson found herself continually engaging with Dr. Moikeena.

Brainstorming and Planning
Dr. Moikeena was impressed with Dr. McPhearson's understanding of ID issues on the African continent. She learned that Dr. McPhearson had studied in Uganda in the 1990's and together they began discussing the impacts of public health education around disease transmission. This set off an hour-long brainstorming session where the two doctors traded lists of known problems in ID education (both public and medical students), current research in the area, and teaching practices at both Johns Hopkins and Nairobi. Dr. Moikeena discussed at length the need for updated materials for educating medical students. Since the cost of textbooks was too high many students were using outdated texts citing outdated research. While the medical faculty was able to provide anecdotal information to the students, that knowledge was not being passed on efficiently. Dr. McPhearson described how her students, even with access to a gold mine of medical knowledge, still were not exposed to, and therefore did not understand, the African environment for which disease manifested and spread.

The two began to figure out what resources each had available in terms of research, texts, lectures, and other supplementary materials. After they had compiled a list, they set up a plan for constructing new materials that would combine the latest research with the context of African medical care and disease. Alas, it was time to rejoin the main group for a workshop on defining OERs and figuring out what it means to create them. Drs. Moikeena and McPhearson, along with the other faculty, learned some simple rules about copyright (US and International), and started to understand that creating OERs was a bit more detailed than they initially thought. The University of Michigan researchers were helpful in explaining the issues and going over the process of "clearing" intellectual property issues. The information seemed to be more than one could handle in a day, but apparently all the information would be available in paper and electronic form for reference. The Michigan team also demonstrated a software program that would help the faculty manage the content they created. It was unclear, but it appeared that the software would also assist the faculty in communicating and collaborating to build the OERs.

Remote Collaboration
Dr. McPhearson flew back to Baltimore and immediately began collecting the materials she and Dr. Moikeena listed out. After she had compiled a large set of resources, she began emailing them to Dr. Moikeena in Nairobi. Unfortunately, due to the large number and size of the documents paired with the slow internet connection, Dr. Moikeena had some difficulty receiving the materials. Also, the two faculty were unclear in understanding the differences in copyright law between the US, Kenya, and the policies of their respective universities. Straightening this out took multiple emails to a large group of people - even then, it did not seem like either side had a clear answer on how to proceed with the licensing of the OERs they were creating. Either way, the faculty tried to focus on preparing the best materials possible. Dr. McPhearson hired a student in one of her classes to help her with organizing the materials on which she and Dr. Moikeena were working. The student was also in charge of identifying potential trouble spots for content (e.g. 3rd party copyrighted work). Dr. McPhearson's instructions to the student were fairly basic, given her own understanding of copyright, so the two ended up removing a lot of content from the resources they felt they could not use.

At a couple of points in the process, Dr. McPhearson became frustrated with emailing resources to Dr. Moikeena. The process was slow, unpredictable, and difficult to organize. There was also a time when she had a great graph for Dr. Moikeena to use in one of her lectures, but she couldn't accurately tell Dr. Moikeena which page of which lecture of which class the graph should appear. These frustrations deepened to the point where Dr. McPhearson resorted to preparing materials the way she saw fit and then sent them to Dr. Moikeena with carte blanche to change the content around.

However, both Drs. felt they were learning a great deal from one another during this process. They also gained a considerable amount of knowledge about copyright and instructional technology differences. In interviews following the collaboration, both Drs. agreed that the technological issues added unnecessary frustration and could be avoided in the future with a better system in place for sharing materials and communicating with one another.

Dr. McPhearson
(Goal 1: become acquainted with other faculty)

(Goal 2: brainstorm with other faculty around education issues)

(Goal 3: become trained in copyright issues and content clearing)

Goal 4: compile and send a set of materials

 * 1) Goal: Her goal is to compile and send a set of materials from her office in Baltimore to Dr. Moikeena's office in Nairobi.
 * 2) Intention: She intends to identify useful and relevant materials, zip them up, and send them to Dr. Moikeena in Nairobi through email.
 * 3) Action: First she must search through her computer, her paper files, and perhaps online. Then, for the paper files, she must scan in anything to be sent. For the online files, she will need to download them to her local machine. Once she has arranged all the files on her machine, she can begin compressing them. Once they are compressed, she can will draft an email and attach the files to the email. She will then send the email to Dr. Moikeena.
 * 4) Execution: She searches through her computer, using simple hunting and gathering techniques (relying on memory for where the materials were on her local machine). If she could not find a material, she would use the OS search feature, which searched both title and text for matching content. For her paper search, she dug through titled folders trying to find what she was looking for. Sometimes she sifted through stacks of paper with little result. Those materials she was able to scan into her computer, but was not able to do OCR. Her online search was easier because she had recently taught a course and everything was organized in the course management system. Once she had all the materials on her system, she compressed them into one 150MB zip file. She then began writing an email to Dr. Moikeena describing the different materials she had sent. She described relations between the materials, how they fit into one course or another. She also described what valuable information was in each material. When Dr. McPhearson tried to attach the zip file and send it, her email program said she could only send files 20MB or smaller. She then broke up the materials into 20MB groups and zipped them. She ended up sending Dr. Moikeena a total of 8 emails with attachments.


 * Gulf of execution:
 * Here we see problems with finding the appropriate materials to be shared within one's own personal workspace. This required quite a bit of individual memory (faulty) and use of text searching with an unconstrained vocabulary list. To bridge this gulf, we might maintain shared content in a centralized workspace so that both parties can access those materials. As for the searching, by having those materials in a centralized location, we can ask the users to provide certain keywords or metadata, which will help them find that content in the future. We see another problem in terms of file sizes and upload limits. Many email programs do not inform the user of these limits, and the limits are often exceeded. A centralized system should let the user know those limits early on and those limits should be as unrestrictive as possible. A couple of non-explicit gulfs we can imagine here are problems with getting materials into a new system and assigning metadata to those materials in the system. From this scenario and execution of this goal we can see that having a bridge between a course management system and our centralized system would help in the transfer of materials. Uploading something once is much easier than two or three times. As for the metadata, requiring certain metadata at the initial upload or usage state in the CMS might alleviate some problems with adding metadata later (inopportune times).
 * 5. Perceiving the state of the world


 * 6. Interpreting the state of the world


 * 7. Evaluating the outcome

(Goal 5: organize a set of materials)

Goal 6: construct new materials with Dr. Moikeena

 * 1) Goal: Dr. McPhearson's goal is to work with Dr. Moikeena to create new materials that are OERs.
 * 2) Intention: She intends to determine what content is necessary for the materials and what content needs to be created. She then intends to create new content and combine it with existing content into a complete material. She also intends to discuss environmental context with Dr. Moikeena and send them to her for editing. On the flip, Dr. Moikeena will send her materials for a final edit.
 * 3) Action: First, Dr. McPhearson needs to decide, with Dr. Moikeena, what content is necessary for educational purposes, what content already exists, and what content needs to be created. She then will need to begin creating content through the use of software tools for presentations, writing, graphic design, plotting, etc. She will need to combine new content with existing using these same applications. Her discussions with Dr. Moikeena will take place during the creation and combination of content. She will then use email to send the files to Dr. Moikeena while receiving files in emails from Dr. Moikeena.
 * 4) Execution: Dr. McPhearson began with an email conversation with Dr. Moikeena discussing notes from their previous talk on education necessities (when in Ghana). From that discuss they divided work based on the materials needed to be created. Materials that fell under Dr. McPhearson's discipline were assigned to her (this included much of the technical content). She began compiling existing content into a document to figure out where the gaps were and then began filling in those gaps with newly created content. Some of the new content was created from data she had on her local system. Other content she pulled from the web, including a few maps, social-type images, and histopathology images. Dr. McPhearson had remembered the "open search" sites the team from U-M had recommended and used those to build content for her materials. However, she had some difficulty when it came to inserting licenses and understanding those licenses. Once Dr. McPhearson had the content assembled in the materials, she made notes about what needed to be done by Dr. Moikeena. She compressed the files into a couple of emails (remembering the 20MB limit), and sent them off to Dr. Moikeena. About a week after she had sent those materials, she finally received Dr. Moikeena's materials for editing.


 * Gulf of Execution:
 * We can see a couple of gulfs here. First, each party needed to keep track of and possibly remember their discussion from Ghana. This can be a very lossy process. One way to counter this potential problem would be to allow the individuals to immediately enter their notes and thoughts into a wiki or some sort of knowledge capture tool that both parties can refer to and edit as the process goes along. This way there is reduced loss of information and greater continuity of thought. Another problem comes about when Dr. McPhearson tries to find, understand, and inject the license information for the content she has downloaded from the web. The intended task was to get new content, but the execution of that task involved an open search, understanding the meaning of open, and attachment of a license. We could help smooth this process with good explanatory materials, but if it's not in the user's field of vision at the time of the intended task going into execution, it might not be used. The next potential gulf is in the notes she writes to Dr. Moikeena. While some software tools allow for commenting directly on the document at hand, others do not. In order to not lose this important information, a system would need to allow discussion on particular pieces of content within a material. I'm thinking about the discussion tab on a wiki... Lastly, Dr. McPhearson is forced, again, to break up her materials into multiple chunks to send via email, not to mention downloading content from email. This can be countered with a centralized repository of materials for both parties.
 * 5. Perceiving the state of the world


 * 6. Interpreting the state of the world


 * 7. Evaluating the outcome

(Goal 7: interact with student)

Goal 8: secondarily edit materials

 * 1) Goal: Dr. McPhearson's goal is to complete a secondary edit of the materials Dr. Moikeena created.
 * 2) Intention: She intends to review Dr. Moikeena's content, make comments to Dr. Moikeena about the content, and then suggest/add new content to supplement or replace Dr. Moikeena's content. She then intends to send this back to Dr. Moikeena for further comments and tweaking.
 * 3) Action: The first task for Dr. McPhearson will be to open the materials sent to her. She must then review the content and make notes of the thoughts she has. She will then need to find or create new content to supplement or replace content from Dr. Moikeena. Finding new content will require a web search, while creating new content could require a number of steps including locating and formatting data, constructing tables, graphs, or graphics, and adjusting content. This must all be embedded into the documents and then sent via email to Dr. Moikeena.
 * 4) Execution: Elaine looked through the materials Moikeena had sent her. She began making notes within the document itself, but the resorted to another application for notes that would allow her to add in images and audio with the notes. Images were necessary to include when she was finding new content. The content search was not too much of a hassle, but locating the data for new graphs was difficult given her limited set of data on the particular topic of interest. She ended up emailing a colleague to see if he had a more complete set with which to work. Her colleague was happy to help out, but became interested in Dr. McPhearson's project. She spent some time explaining it to him and he wondered how he could get involved in a greater capacity. He felt he might have other content to contribute to this particular set of materials. After Elaine added the new content to the material and began drafting another email to Dr. Moikeena. She wondered just how many emails would be necessary in this process...


 * Gulf of Execution:
 * It looks like note-taking within the documents probably does not allow for the intended task to be completed. While some applications allow for different types of commenting, most content creation apps do not. A web-based software tool that allowed a user to make annotations along side the content would be ideal here. Attaching audio, video, or images as well as text might be nice. As for the next problem, it appears that obtaining the best content for the material is not always easy. Sometimes people outside the project have the best content and in turn are interested in helping out. A way to advertise the need for certain content might speed this process along and actually improve the quality of the output.
 * 5. Perceiving the state of the world


 * 6. Interpreting the state of the world


 * 7. Evaluating the outcome

Dr. Moikeena
(Goal 1: brainstorm with other faculty around education issues)

(Goal 2: become trained in copyright issues and content clearing)

Goal 3: receive a set of materials

 * 1) Goal: Dr. Moikeena's goal is to receive a set of materials in Nairobi from Dr. McPhearson in Baltimore.
 * 2) Intention: She intends to open an email from Dr. McPhearson and download the attachments.
 * 3) Action: Dr. Moikeena will need to first turn on her computer. She then will connect to the internet through DSL. She will open up a browser and point to her university mail system to read her email. She will then begin reading emails and may then download any attachments.
 * 4) Execution: Dr. Moikeena turned on her computer at work in the morning and went through her usual routine of opening email. She connected to the internet and went to the university mail system in the browser. As she began reading emails, she came across one from Dr. McPhearson. She then noticed that Elaine had sent 8 emails, all with attachments. Dr. Moikeena's previous experience with emails like this resulted in her system getting a virus, so she was very cautious as she looked over the emails deciding whether or not to download them. She went ahead and read the email and decided the attachment was valid. The 20MB download over a DSL connection took about 15 minutes. She ended up spending over 2 hours trying to download all of the attachments. Her internet connection was a bit spotty, so she had to re-download a couple of the attachments. Eventually she had everything that McPhearson had sent.


 * Gulf of Execution:
 * 5. Perceiving the state of the world
 * 5. Perceiving the state of the world


 * 6. Interpreting the state of the world


 * 7. Evaluating the outcome

(Goal 4: organize a set of materials)

Goal 5: construct new materials with Dr. McPhearson

 * 1) Goal: Dr. Moikeena's goal is to construct new OERs with Dr. McPhearson.
 * 2) Intention: She intends to determine what content is necessary for the materials and what content needs to be created. She then intends to create new content and combine it with existing content into a complete material. She also intends to share environmental context with Dr. McPhearson and send them to her for editing. On the flip, Dr. McPhearson will send her materials for a final edit.
 * 3) Action: Dr. Moikeena needs to discuss with Dr. McPhearson what content is necessary and then determine what content she will be responsible for. She may need to create new content or find existing content. She will compile all this into a document (or set of docs). She will also need to communicate with Dr. McPhearson about the context of her environment. She will then send those documents to Dr. McPhearson.
 * 4) Execution: Dr. Moikeena corresponded with Dr. McPhearson, trying to organize notes from the Ghana session and determine what content and materials would be necessary to include in this course. She came away from that discussion with a list of content to prepare. In order to prepare the materials, Dr. Moikeena pulls from her own resources, but also from her colleagues. She must contact a number of doctors and researchers in her department and at neighboring universities in order to gather the content necessary for her materials. This process takes weeks to accomplish and results in her materials getting to Dr. McPhearson a bit late. Also, when it comes to understanding copyright law, Dr. Moikeena is confused by the ambiguity in Kenyan copyright law when using creative commons licensed content that originated in the US. She is not sure how to proceed with these legal questions. She is able to compile as much content as possible for the materials and began to send them to Dr. McPhearson. How will upload speeds affect her process? Can she upload all these materials at once? At all?


 * Gulf of Execution:
 * It's questionable whether or not Dr. Moikeena can even complete the task of uploading/sending content back to Dr. McPhearson. Are file formats a problem? Are connection speeds a problem? What about the use of shared computers to connect to the internet? Should we have a server running there that communicates with a server here once a week, once a day? We clearly need to know more about the environment there before we can begin designing anything to address those needs.
 * 5. Perceiving the state of the world


 * 6. Interpreting the state of the world


 * 7. Evaluating the outcome