Online Learning Portfolio

Description

I developed this online Introduction to Statistics course for the Educational Psychology department at The University of Texas at Austin. The course is project-based and provides students with a choice of scenarios (and accompanying data sets) to contextually ground their learning.

Since students in the course are likely to come from a variety of background majors ranging from Education to Business, they are given the opportunity to select a fictitious client that they would like to work with (e.g., Business Executive, Elementary School Principal, Doctor, Police Captain, College President, Athletic Director, etc.). Each client has accompanying data sets, which the students will use to solve weekly problems that relate to the topic of discussion (e.g., sampling distributions, t-tests, regression analyses, etc.).

To generate data for each client that would yield desired results, I developed a statistical data generator that would generate realistic data sets from a variety of interacting variables based upon ranges, variances, and interaction effects (e.g., linear, curvilinear, etc.).

I also created all graphics used in this course.

Roles

Course Developer, Data Engineer, Graphic Designer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

I developed this mobile application and web resource as a reference and instructional aid for students in statistics courses. It provides quick access to common statistical equations in a simple, fast, and elegant interface.

The tool uses a jQuery mobile and Android-based front-end connected to a PHP/MySQL back-end.

Equations are stored in the database and are presented as images and LaTex equations for screen reader accessiblity.

Project URL

Common Statistical Equations

Roles

Web Developer, Application Developer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

I developed this training system (and dozens of trainings within it) for the Learning Technology Center at The University of Texas at Austin. By providing structured, scaffolded trainings on procedural knowledge, the training system is intended to supplement or to replace many face-to-face trainings that had previously taken place in the college, thereby allowing trainers to focus more upon conceptual and pedagogical objectives.

While creating the tool, I solicited feedback from technical support staff and other instructional designers to improve the interface and developed several custom Drupal modules and a custom, mobile-friendly Drupal theme to provide necessary functionality and to improve user experiences.

The tool additionally tracks user progress through trainings, allows for the assignment of trainings, and provides thematic step sheets for easy-to-understand guides to technical problems.

Roles

Training Developer, Web Developer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

I developed this hybrid Human Sexuality course for the Educational Psychology department at The University of Texas at Austin.

Collaboration is a core component of the course. Students work in small discussion groups of three to four members and share reflections through the LMS.

Much of the development work for the course consisted of taking preexisting HTML and PDF files from the subject matter expert and making them ADA compliant.

In its first semester, the course served nearly 400 students.

Roles

Course Developer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

I developed this online training for the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Its purpose is to help teacher education students understand issues related to professionalism, risk, and personal expression in social networking sites (e.g., Facebook).

The training is mastery focused and tracks student completion, thereby fulfilling legal requirements for the university regarding student acknowledgement of professional expectations online.

The training utilizes images, animation sequences, and casual-voice narrative to engage learners, and to achieve necessary functionality, I developed custom Drupal modules in PHP/MySQL.

As of Fall 2012, over 200 teacher education students had completed the training.

Roles

Web Developer, Instructional Designer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

I developed this unit as an online supplement for educational policy and administration courses to explore the issue of K-12 teacher retention.

The unit provides stories from real teachers who have left the field in the context of three project-based learning sessions. Each session provides a student project page and teaching materials, and each project is focused upon helping students to create meaningful artifacts (e.g., recruitment posters, in-service materials, job descriptions, etc.) that will be beneficial to them as administrators.

I also created all graphics used in this unit.

Project URL

Why We Don't Teach

Roles

Instructional Designer, Web Developer, Graphic Designer

Development Tools

Description

I developed the Collaborative Tool to support secure video sharing and analysis, specifically for the purposes of video case-based learning.

With this tool, teachers and teacher education students can easily record instances of their teaching or interactions with students, analyze these cases (either individually or collaboratively), and share them with others in their course or research group.

As of Fall 2012, nearly 500 educators and students had used the tool to analyze and share over 600 videos.

Project URL

Collaborative Tool

Roles

Lead Developer, Web Designer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

The Personal Learning and Collaboration Environment was a pilot project that looked at combining social networking functionality into teacher education cohorts and sought to understand the viability of replacing the college's groupware system with a social networking platform.

Using Elgg, I lead the development of the tool, which allowed for cohort and course grouping, status updates, profile creation, content tracking, social bookmarking, internal messaging, file sharing, photo sharing, and threaded forum discussions.

Through the course of the study, over 200 teacher education students and faculty members used PLACE, and results of our study are currently under review by a major journal.

Roles

Lead Developer, Researcher

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

EVIDA was designed as a bilingual, social learning environment, which was used to connect elementary students from the United States and South America.

The goal of the project was to support social sharing between the two groups as they learned about other languages and cultures.

Using Elgg, I lead the development of this environment, which supported fast content translation, photo sharing, and map tagging of content.

Roles

Lead Developer, Web Designer

Client

The University of Texas at Austin

Development Tools

Description

Salamander Rescue was a prototype ludic simulation that focused on helping middle school students learn about Earth Science and scientific inquiry.

With a team of other graduate students, I worked to develop the environment, which was named a finalist in the Disney Learning Challenge at SIGGRAPH 2010.

I created and textured all 3D models depicted in the screenshots.

Project URL

Salamander Rescue

Roles

Level Designer, Interface Developer, 3D Artist

Development Tools

Description

Alien Rescue is a ludic simulation that focuses on helping middle school students learn about Space Science and scientific inquiry.

With other graduate students, I helped develop version 4 of the program, which moved to a web interface, and conducted research on the software's efficacy for learning (cf. Kimmons, et al., 2012).

I created all content depicted in the screenshots.

Project URL

Alien Rescue

Roles

Level Designer, Interface Developer, 3D Artist

Development Tools