Project Abstract
The Business & Finance unit of the Basic Camp Director’s Course (BCDC) has, until now, been delivered exclusively in a week-long training conference. The course is offered four times per year, but there is always a waiting list for sessions. Because the logistics and expense of a week-long training session are increasingly challenging, Dr. Gwynn Powell , a member of the ACA National Board of Directors, has asked to create an online version of the unit.
We will develop this module as a prototype that the ACA can then use to develop similar online versions of the other 13 units in the training session.
Client Profile
The client for our project is The American Camp Association as represented by Dr. Gwynn Powell and Kat Shreve. Dr. Powell is an Associate Professor in the Recreation and Leisure Studies Department in the College of Education at The University of Georgia. She is also a volunteer for the American Camp Association, specializing in curriculum development and research application. She will serve as the liaison between Genesis Learning and the American Camp Association. Ms. Shreve is an ACA national staff member with nationwide responsibility for training. She will provide content and ongoing input to help us design this unit in a way that will be most practical for the organization.
The ACA Web site describes the organization as follows:
“The American Camp Association (formerly known as the American Camping Association) is a community of camp professionals who, for nearly 100 years, have joined together to share our knowledge and experience and to ensure the quality of camp programs. Because of our diverse 7,000 plus membership and exceptional programs, children and adults have the opportunity to learn powerful lessons in community, character-building, skill development, and healthy living — lessons that can be learned nowhere else.
“As a leading authority in child development, the ACA works to preserve, promote, and improve the camp experience. Our association is committed to helping our members and all camps provide:
• Camp communities committed to a safe, nurturing environment
• Caring, competent adult role models
• Healthy, developmentally-appropriate experiences
• Service to the community and the natural world
• Opportunities for leadership and personal growth
• Discovery, experiential education, and learning opportunities
• Excellence and continuous self-improvement “
(
http://www.acacamps.org/about/profile.php)
Adapted with permission from
http://www.nov8tivedesigns.com/
This has been a challenging week. We wrapped up our needs assessment and received our client’s signature last Thursday. We then dug in on the task analysis.
That job has proven to be a real challenge for several reasons:
- In our earlier course work, we have learned at least three different approaches to this particular phase of design. Because we don’t yet have a lot of experience, synthesizing all those is a bit tough.
- We have different ideas of what is classified as a goal, an objective and a task, so we are now working to get all those consistent across the entire document.
- We got a bit beyond the scope of our project when writing the instructional objectives and are now backing up to be certain everything is congruent with our original instructional goals.
- Almost everyone in the group has had health or more-than-usual family pressures in the last ten days or so, which has slowed us down a bit.
We had a number of technical problems with Horizon Wimba and with WebCT on Monday, so we lost a lot of frustrating time dealing with those. That has triggered discussion about more frequent face-to-face meetings, perhaps every other week. With three of our five members living outside Athens, that’s a tough problem to work out.
All that said, we’re still moving forward. We’re getting the hang of using Google docs and that is working well for us. This is really our first attempt for all of us to make extensive edits to the same document.
By next week we’ll wrap up our task analysis and instructional objectives. We have assignments for each of our 6200 consultants and I will make those tonight. Our client will be out of town for the entire week (February 9-16) so we’ll have to get sign-offs when she returns. The good news is that this also gives us a little breathing room! We have roughed in a timeline, using an earlier team’s spreadsheet as a template, and plan to complete that task as well.
Myra Blackmon
Project Manager
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