Assignment Description
Project 2: Deciding on a Learning Environment

What are the benefits of replacing aspects of schools, universities and training programs with their mediated equivalents? What gets lost? With information about everything easily available, how does formal instruction stack up against self-directed learning?

For this assignment, imagine that you have some actual free time to learn something new. (This, I know, will require quite a conceptual leap). Even in these early days of the information era, you have many choices on how to go about that: you could take a traditional class, an informal class at a place like the Learning Annex, an online class from just about anywhere, or you could just teach yourself through a combination of web sites, books, and other materials.

How do you choose?

To complete this assignment, follow these steps:

1. Decide on a learning goal. What is it that you'd like to learn in this imaginary world with disposible time? How deeply would you like to learn it? Describe your answer in a paragraph.
2. Search the web for courses (online, face-to-face, and blended), web sites, books and other ways in which you might accomplish your learning goal. Distill your choices down to 3 or 4 and write a short paragraph about each.
3. Look inward and ask yourself what is important to you about a learning environment. What aspects of the materials, teachers and other learners, physical setting, social and other interactions, convenience, etc. are important to you. Make a list of the top 10 aspects.
4. Decide for yourself how important each aspect is relative to the others. Give each aspect a weighting from 1 to 10 (each aspect should have a different weight).
5. Examine each of your 3 or 4 learning environments and estimate the degree to which each environment contains each aspect and represent it with a number from 0 to 10.
6. Use the weighted sum methodology described in Chapter 10 of the Jones text to come up with ratings of each of your choices.
7. Provide the final matrix of numbers as well as a couple of paragraphs describing the end results and any insights you acquired by going through this process.

This assignment counts for 20% of your course grade. It is an individual (not group) project and is due the week after Spring break, turned in via Moodle. You will be scored using this rubric.