A Tale of Two CEs - or "I Get By with a Little Help from my Cohort".

My final video and the story behind it...

LINK:A TALE OF TWO CEs -- MY FINAL VIDEO

As the deadline approached for our Culminating Experience proposal, I was a little confounded about how to approach the project. I had two ideas:

There were benefits and drawbacks for both.

Idea 1 – Integrating Technology into Second Grade

Benefits included a need for more study on tech in primary grades, access to a second grade classroom and the ease of setting up the study – I could clearly see how to write the proposal. The drawback was finding a way to get the time off work and do the implementation of the study.

Idea 2 – Mental Health Interventions for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairments: A Multi-Dimensional Curriculum

Benefits included a community need for determining effective means of training service providers, access to international experts and the convenience of being able to work on the curriculum at any time. The drawback was that I couldn’t figure out how to write the proposal – the project (as I had conceived it to that point) was project-based and consisted solely of creating the curriculum. There was no example of how to set up the proposal for a project structured in that way, and every time I thought I understood what I was doing, I found myself unable to even approach writing the proposal.

So I talked to my peers. On different occasions, I talked to Liz, Robert, Dana and Olga about my indecision. I also talked to Melissa, an iMet student in a different cohort. At some point, they all said the same thing – that it sounded like I wanted to do the Older Adult curriculum, but that I was hesitating to commit to it because of my confusion.

I decided to wade in. It took literally all day for each day of that weekend, but I found a way to write up the proposal for the curriculum. It was flawed, but I did it. And in the process, and upon receiving good advice from Dr. Jelinek, I distilled down my idea. What I ended up proposing was this:

An Evaluative Research on the Efficacy of an ELearning Instruction Module for Mental Health Interventions for Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults

I will develop an asynchronous online module based on the content of a webinar and then send that module out to former participants of the webinar for their evaluation. I’m going to triangulate that data with interviews with administrators and experts in the field and with my own observations. What I hope to establish whether this approach is a helpful resource for service providers or whether it would be a waste of resources to dedicate time, energy and funds to developing such modules.

I’m very happy to have progressed through to this point.

However, the story doesn’t quite stop there. When I first developed the storyboard for this assignment, I basically created a report of my project. Yet again stumped by confusion, I picked up the phone and called Liz at work. She reminded me of the real story of my CE – that period of time when I was so frustrated and indecisive. “Do that,” she suggested.

And so I have. “I get by with a little help from my friends…” (Please imagine the dulcet tones of Joe Cocker tailing off as the screen fades to black…)