Campus Quest CD-ROM
Three University of Minnesota faculty:
have developed two CD-ROM delivered case studies dealing with the environment of the Twin Cities campus in St. Paul. Students are taken through natural resource management and/or agronomic scenarios and must propose solutions to policy problems based on background research, application of decisionmaking heuristics learned through their coursework, and their individual experiences. The designers provide an array of simulated experiences (submission of proposals for comment by instructor/clients, programmed feedback, etc.) that challenge students to utilize their knowledge, expertise, and communication skills to solve complex problems.
Instructional Problem
Q. Please describe the instructional problem you were attempting to address. Who was the intended audience? What solutions had been tried in the past? What did you hope to improve?
A. The 'germ' of the Campus Quest project was originally planted when Jim Perry, University professor and natural resources management consultant, began working on two local consulting projects, the Brown's Creek development and another concerning the parklands around Lake of the Isles. To complete those projects -- because, as Professor Perry puts it, he's "long on inspiration but short on implementation" -- Perry hired a graphic designer/multimedia developer who used Director to deliver video footage, site maps, and other decision-support information. The Lake of the Isles project, for instance, used a visual map as an interface; as users rolled their cursors over different sectors on the map, those sectors lit up and enabled decisionmakers to access information specific to those portions of the Lake. Perry and company also used QuicktimeVR to enable users to do a visual walkthrough of the area and its problems/challenges. Unfortunately, as Professor Perry relates, though these provided some useful context for the projects, they didn't really succeed in simulating decision making. These were static, graphic images that that allowed the user to see problems and visualize conditions, but they did not lead the viewer into any decisionmaking scenario.
With these experiences in mind, Perry and Steve Simmons -- faculty who have long used case studies as a teaching tool in their graduate and undergraduate courses -- sought to combine the active engagement and complex problem-solving environment of the case study with the mass storage, hypertextual organization, and complex data processing capabilities made possible by CD-ROM-delivered multimedia applications. For the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Small Grants Program, Perry and Simmons collaborated with Professor Toni McNaron, former co-Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Services, to address the pedagogy involved in developing effective multimedia decision cases. The team decided to develop two decision cases -- collectively entitled Campus Quest -- that will be delivered on CD-ROM for use in 6 CNR and COAFES seminars.
TEL Strategy
Q. What technology enhanced learning (TEL) strategies did you adopt to complete this project? Was the content presented differently to your students than in past (non-TEL) applications?
A. As Jim Perry points out, case studies have traditionally been used to simulate complexity, model the process of decisionmaking under uncertainty, and provide students with immediate consequences ('feedback') resulting from their policy recommendations. For example, in one possible case study 'path', Perry's students enter the 'front end' of a case study by way of a problem description (e.g., "I'm worried about Romania and discharges into the Danube running into the Black Sea"). Once he provides users with background on the conditions, the stakeholders/decisionmaking team involved, and the several choices available to policymakers in a given situation, the students then make choices at the first level; subsequent choices are limited by the outcomes of earlier decision(s). By following these 'scenarios' through, Perry is able to simulate the chains that can lead, on the one hand, to revolution, economic disruption, and/or ecological disaster or, on the other, successful clean up ot the Danube basin, etc. The problem for students was to write a final statement explaining the impacts of their final decisions (e.g., 'cleaning up the Danube' might put severe strains on the Romanian industries discharging waste into the Danube, requiring some sort of strategy to mitigate those effects). This active approach -- which casts the student in the role of a decisionmaking participant rather than a passive reporter -- provided a potential solution to one of the biggest challenges facing the Campus Quest design team: to develop a project directed away from simple acquisition of knowledge and toward acquisition of skills that will enable students to be more effective decisionmakers.
Because of the expense involved in developing and managing decision cases of this sort -- not only did faculty have to invest a great deal of time in developing an effective scenario, but they also had to coordinate the appearance of 'guest experts' in class, facilitate field trips or develop background materials to provide necessary context, and manage the complex interactions between students, experts, and the instructors themselves in order to create a meaningful experience -- they have traditionally only been taught in relatively small graduate seminars. For this TEL project, the Campus Quest team wanted to take advantage of the advantages offered by CD-ROM-delivered media to develop cases for use in first-year classes, available for use both as in-class examples in Perry and Simmons' classes as well as for distance education purposes.
Two decision cases are presented on the Campus Quest CD-ROM (for further details of the Campus Quest opening sequence, click here to open Clickstream #1 in a new window). The first, the X-28 case, examines urban-agricultural interface issues. Field X-28, part of the University of Minnesota's experimental research station adjacent to the St. Paul campus in Falcon Heights, has long been fertilized with manure, giving rise to odor complaints from the nearby residents and fears about nitrate infiltration into the local water supply. Students in this scenario review background materials presented on the CD-ROM, access digitized video briefings and testimony from University decisionmakers (the students' 'clients') and content experts (for further details of the 'Receive Your Charge' sequence, click here to open Clickstream #2 in a new window), and commission virtual field tests that provide up-to-the-minute information on soil chemistry and other relevant scientific data (for further details of the 'Research the Issue' sequence, click here to open Clickstream #3 in a new window). Students then complete a written proposal reviewing the problem and their proposed solutions which they submit via email or as a printed document.CD-ROM delivery simplifies every step of this process for Steve Simmons in his Agronomy courses. Videotaping expert testimony and photographing the field itself saves on the administrative overhead that used to be required to schedule visits by busy content experts and transport students to X-28 itself, as well as opening up the possibility of delivering the course to distance education students; use of email and other electronic communication forms enable the students to query the experts with specific questions that can be answered asynchronously. The virtual field tests provide an opportunity for Simmons to present a brief tutorial on proper sampling methodology, as well as familiarizing students with the process of gathering and interpreting data, guided by Soil Science expert Professor Deborah Allen. Finally, preparing and submitting a proposal familiarizes students with professional practices and provides an opportunity for encouraging critical reasoning and communication in the context of their subject matter specialization.
The second Campus Quest case -- an exploration of iterative decisionmaking regarding a wetland area on the southeast corner of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities's St. Paul campus -- depends entirely on programmed scripts to manage students' passage through a complex long-term policy-making process (for further details of the Campus Wetlands sequence, click here to open Clickstream #4 in a new window). Like the X-28 scenario, this case supplies a great deal of digitized background information to familiarize students with the issues and problems surrounding the wetlands reclamation. Unlike the X-28 case in which students are dependent primarily on human feedback from the experts and instructors to understand the possible consequences that might accrue to their proposed policies, participants in the wetlands case are put in the situation of not only proposing a solution to reclaiming the wetland, but they are also asked to live with the long-term consequences of their decisions by managing the project they propose and being confronted with not only the human fallout from their decisions but also unexpected natural events, such as floods, or the impact of seemingly unrelated political decisions or events beyond the students' control (e.g., budget cuts or increases in enrollment at the University which affect the parking situation on the St. Paul campus). Using Macromedia Director's powerful scripting language, Lingo, the Campus Quest team have created this system by first providing students with a menu of options to choose from in proposing their initial solutions; these initial choices open up some opportunities and close off others, while randomly generated events introduce an element of uncertainty that forces students to be flexible and plan for contingency. In combination, the X-28 and wetlands cases provide a very useful framework for encouraging creative thinking, combining the acquisition of content knowledge with practical decisionmaking skills, effective communication, and luck to demonstrate the complexity of planning and implementation in a real world environment.
Another way the designers sought to take advantage of computer's capability to encourage active learning by prompting students to respond to queries at 'teachable moments' was the develop of a 'reflection' button. When the students clicks this 'reflection' button, he or she will receive a menu of activities to engage in, including:
- working with a 'single neighbor -- someone else registered in the course (either at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities or elsewhere);
- writing in an 'informal notebook' that the students can keep in association with their coursework "in order to preempt some of the things that'll result in a flood" (McNaron). By keeping track of the pros and cons of a given decision, this informal reflection encourages students to think about the different solutions or reflect on their modus operandi to determine if their approach is effective;
- cooperating with a small group;
- speaking with someone close at hand or searching the internet to consult with virtual experts;
- discussing things electronically with the instructor; and/or developing a visual idea map -- many students are more visual than verbal -- to help them visualize and understand the problem and proposed solutions.
The point of the reflection button is to get students to 'cast back' -- the problem with traditional CD-ROM instruction, from Dr. McNaron's point of view, is that it compels users to move linearly, very fast and the "one thing we know about straight lines is that they get us somewhere, but students often don't realize where they've been; you need a circle or spiral, something messier, to enable [students] to look back. The reflection button is [designed] to break them out of the 'click, click, click, click, click' thing and get them to do something else, 'mump [muck?] around' is my word for it, something that will give them some sense of being in a learning environment that's more complex than a simple linear presentation."
Finally, the Campus Quest team are developing a faculty manual to help instructors use the CD in an active learning setting.
Hardware and Software
Q. What hardware or software did you use to produce your project? Did you have to do anything unusual to make the software work for your specific applications?
A. The Campus Quest CD-ROM was developed in Macromedia Director, using Director's powerful Lingo scripting language to overcome one of the biggest challenges facing the design team -- presenting information in a way that it will be useful to the student-as-consultant. The two radically different case studies took advantage of different facets of Director's functionality.
The X-28 case is mainly an informational presentation. The students navigate through the array of background materials by way of programmed 'hotspots' that enable them to discover information and make connections in ways that are meaningful to them individually and, thus, make it possible for each to generate a more informed proposal for their clients. In doing so, Simmons has tried to present materials in the way they would've been presented with a traditional paper case, with the realization that the students won't actually get to visit X-28 or interact with experts in the way they would have in the classroom. The context for which the case is designed is broad; though it could be used in, for instance, an economics course, its application potential is much wider than agronomy -- it extends to any course that has to deal with urban-agrarian interface. Expert testimony is provided through the media of text, image (taken with digital cameras or scanned and edited using Adobe Photoshop), and video (digitized at the Digital Media Center and edited using Adobe Premiere). Tutorial information on decisionmaking, etc, is provided in the form of hyperlinked supplementary texts. One of the primary pedagogical problems confronted when using technology-enhanced case presentations is the challenge of facilitating the process and/or guiding students through it. The Campus Quest team simulated some of the interaction that was traditionally part of the face-to-face presentations by requiring students to post a preliminary plan describing the problem (as they saw it) and their intended approach as an intermediate checkpoint prior to actually beginning work with the videotaped 'expert witnesses.' Once students have presented that plan to the instructor (as the client/dean's surrogate), the student-consultants go on to their initial video 'meeting' with the Dean. Students can then:
- take a virtual fieldtrip of the X-28 site (text, image, and video),
- review soil surveys and agronomic data about the site, and
- complete a 'virtual soil sampling' process that simulates the process/results of such a survey, educates the student about soil sampling techniques and laboratory procedures, and provides expert testimony that helps them interpret the 'test results.'
The final step is to produce a proposal for the dean, as well as a cover letter, which students either submit as an email message -- generated within Director and transmitted via a CGI (common gateway interface) script to the instructors -- or a text file -- again, generated by Director and then saved to the student's hard drive -- and printed for hand or snailmail delivery.
The second Campus Quest case, called "Campus Wetlands," combines background material with a complex computer-moderated decision model that simulated how making policy choices creates a unique set of opportunities and constraints, and results in both intended and unintended consequences. Students have to select policy priorities that limit future options available to them. Having set their goals, users then select the kind of project they want to develop; in doing so, they then proceed to a budget worksheet that helps them develop the project, providing line items linked to the types of things they want to do (e.g., selecting certain types of 'high impact' projects don't permit them to develop facilities like portable lavatories). Students then have a chance to change their minds before committing to a hard and fast budget. Once they've committed, the simulator proceeds with construction of the project, using a random event generator to create realistic opportunities (e.g., selecting some types of recreational projects may enable the project to earn its own capital that can then be reinvested for future development) or constraints (e.g., a major storm washes away the recreational facilities and they can't be replaced since the project is funded from non-recurring funds). Whereas the X-28 case gave students a relatively unstructured decision-making environment that required them to make and defend recommendations in class discussions or their written assignments, the Campus Wetlands case uses Director's scripting capability to provide immediate feedback on policy recommendations and force them to think in terms of contingency planning to hedge against outside events beyond their control.
Both Campus Quest cases depend heavily on Director's strengths as a 'media management environment' -- providing a relatively easy to use interface for combining and controlling multiple media -- and an interaction manager, using Director's Lingo scripting language to handle both user input and run the decision simulator. As Jim Perry points out, "Everything we do depends on the software capabilities. [For a project this complex, I recommend that faculty] hire someone to make Director work [and to weave] in the audio and video."
Project Team
Q. How many people worked on the project? What were their roles? Did you work with any central support units?
A. Four to six people worked on the Campus Quest project at any one time:
- Jim Perry and Steve Simmons created content and supplied the initial ideas for the project;
- Toni McNaron made the pedagogy explicit;
- Laurie Dickinson (a private consultant) programmed it all;
- Pam Davis (PhD student in Water Resource Science) and Scott Wilson Barnard (DMC) provided collaboration and advice.
When asked how many hours he estimated it took to design and produce the Campus Quest prototype, Perry replied "Many thousands. We are in the second year of two TEL grants -- many thousands of hours' work for approximately $25,000!"
Instructional Outcome
Q. What was the instructional outcome of your project? Did you achieve your goals? Why or why not? Do you intend to make any revisions to your project?
A. The Campus Quest CD-ROM is currently under development, with the first two cases completed in December 1999. In terms of the relative success or failure of the cases as designed in pedagogical terms, the Campus Quest team feels that their planning and dedication have resulted in a pair of active learning exercises that address the range of activities involved in planning and implementing public policy. By providing students and instructors with both an open-ended scenario (X-28) and one in which there is a certain degree of simulated randomness and in which feedback on policy recommendations is instantaneous (Campus Wetlands), the Campus Quest designers ask students to analyze, solve, and communicate about problems in different ways. As Steve Simmons notes, "creating cases is like setting a stage for a play; when you put props on that stage you shape the sort of experience the student 'players' have. For [the X-28] case, we elected to leave the 'economic' prop off the stage." Perry adds "try to remember that the X-28 case requires students to submit a proposal that they can then defend in a face-to-face setting [although it could also be a virtual defense], so a proposal that suggests spending $1 million to clean up the X-28 site and move all the houses out of the vicinity is going to be pretty hard to defend. The constraints in [the X-28] case are built into the final-product-defense mechanism rather than hard-coded into the problem from the beginning [as in the Campus Wetlands case]. Our intent was to produce two different kinds of cases -- one that was highly structured and one that was not, to give students a variety of experiences and appeal to a range of learning styles."
In both cases, designers have attempted to emphasize not only students' abilities to solve the particular problem under consideration but also to develop their metacognitive skills, encouraging them to take the time to think about their problem-solving processes. As Toni McNaron notes, "we've made a concerted effort in the case of [the Campus Wetlands case] to insert 'reflection buttons' to force a 'break in the circuit' to get students to break out of the button-pushing process; in [the X-28 case] there are more of those moments assumed in the 'logic' of the presentation -- in attempting to develop a proposal, students are naturally forced to reflect and, hence, need to be prompted less obviously." Steve Simmons adds, "[in completing the X-28 case] students have to provide a thorough rationale for their decision. We envision the CD-ROM as acting as a platform for prompting in-class discussion; naturally in that sort of environment there is an expectation that students will engage in that sort of metacognitive activity . . . the CD isn't seen entirely as a standalone. With [the Campus Wetlands] case, students have to live with the consequences of their decisions; with the X-28 case they can go on to something else and the dean has to live with the consequences."
Innovative Feature
Q. Please describe the most innovative aspects of your project.
A. Using an asynchronous medium like CD-ROM, combined with the potentially global reach of computer-mediated communication technologies, the Campus Quest team have opened up an experience that has traditionally been available to a very limited population of students. In addition to broadening access to the case study experience -- both to larger numbers of students and to students who are, potentially, geographically distant from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus -- the multimedia materials delivered in support of the Campus Quest cases, their hypertextual organization, and the use of electronic mail (in X-28) and Director scripting (Campus Wetlands) to provide students with feedback to their policy recommendations are designed to appeal to a wide range of student learning styles or 'intelligences.' As Professor Perry notes, "The most innovative part of our project is that we're simulating decisionmaking -- and people have to live with the results!"
The Campus Quest design team have also developed some innovative support materials for faculty who might adopt the CD-ROM for use in their own classrooms. In addition to the two ready-made cases, faculty will receive an instructor's guide discussing instructional strategies for incorporating active learning assignments in their own classrooms as well as a guide to developing effective cases for future use.
Advice
Q. Do you have any planning, design, or development advice for other instructional multimedia developers contemplating a project like yours?
A. Perry: "I don't think I'm the guy to give advice, but here goes:
- Plan on doing less than you plan on.
- Plan on things costing you more than you plan.
- Plan on things going slower than you plan.
- If you can figure out how to do it in advance, don't do it. This is supposed to be risky, experimental, not developmental.
- Spend three times the time on discussion, design, and planning that you spend on programming.
- Spend twice as much on evaluation and revision as you spend on programming."
References
Readers interested in developing technology-enhanced case studies or simulations may find some of the following resources useful.Case Studies
D. Hudspeth and F. G. Knirk. 1989. "Case study materials: Strategies for design and use." Performance Improvement Quarterly 2(4): 30-41.Wilbert J. McKeachie. 1994. Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers (9th ed.). Lexington (MA): D. C. Heath and Company.
Roger C. Schank (ed.). 1998. Inside Multi-Media Case Based Instruction. Mahwah (NJ): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Patricia L. Smith and Tillman J. Ragan. 1993. Instructional Design. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.
Scott M. Swinton (ed.). 1995. Teaching and Learning with Cases: Promoting Active Learning in Agriculture, Food and Natural Resource Education. East Lansing (MI): College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Michigan State University.
Simulations
Cathy Stein Greenblat. 1988. Designing Games and Simulations: An Illustrated Handbook. Newbury Park (CA): Sage Publications.More Information
What are decision cases?
Teaching with case studies; also known as 'decision-forcing cases'; enables students to confront a simulated real-life problem. The verisimilitude of these decision cases; their character as poorly structured problems, affecting an array of actors who may have conflicting agendas, to which there may be no one 'correct' solution; can provide students with the opportunity to:
Make use of 'domain-specific' knowledge in creative ways
Rather than simply testing students' ability to recall declarative knowledge (as you would with, for example a multiple-choice exam), solving a problem forces students to frame the question in terms of what they know and don't know, demonstrates the interconnections between pieces of information, and creates a context in which learners can go about acquiring new information required to make an informed decision or applying decisionmaking heuristics to develop a proposed solution;
Practice procedural knowledge
Gain experience in applying general problem-solving skills
Case studies do all this in an environment in which students receive adequate feedback to see the possible ramifications of their proposed actions and understand how they might improve their problem-solving processes. By forcing students to consciously evaluate their decisionmaking, instructors can help learners explore alternative solutions and weigh potential decisions in light of students' content knowledge and their understanding of possible outcomes; something that would likely be impossible in a real-life situation over which the instructor has little control (see especially Smith and Ragan, pp. 256-257).
What are some of the advantages of CD-ROM delivery?
Anytime/anywhere delivery to students
fewer needs to schedule classtime and/or coordinate expert visits and fieldtrips;
Flexible arrangement
students can generally move through materials in any order they choose -- although faculty can limit access to materials programmatically if it fits the instructional situation -- as well as enabling students to view and review materials, something they can't often do in a face-to-face situation;
Connectivity to outside resources
CD-ROM-delivered applications can make use of the Internet to promote connections between students and other students, content experts, resource materials, and faculty. Such applications can also read files from or write files to students computers;
Adaptive feedback
CD-ROM-delivered application can be programmed to provide immediate feedback to students based on their input. Most authoring packaged also enable designers to incorporate options for students to proceed down different paths, each with their own faculty-defined outcomes, as well as the capability to inject random events (weather, illogical decisionmaking by policymakers, etc.) to enhance verisimilitude.
