For four months Loretta Donovan worked remotely with two graduate students she had never met as they created the concept for a corporate e-learning system. The three received awards from PacifiCorp.
October 26, 2006 (Press Release) --
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Less than one year ago, Loretta Donovan, president of worksmarts and a Tuckahoe, NY resident, learned that the Association for Educational Communications and Technology needed mentors to guide graduate students in an annual e-learning competition. In May she was introduced to Yao Huang and Will Lancaster of University of Memphis whom she would guide through the process. In October the team received awards in a Dallas ceremony for their efforts. Donovan says, "This competition hones the classroom learning of grad school into workplace-ready skills. I would hire Yao and Will tomorrow. Their work is outstanding. They are smart, savvy and hardworking."
As sponsor of the competition PacifiCorp, an electricity producer with more than 1.6 million customers and based in Portland OR, is specifically interested in promoting collaboration and mentoring within the professional community.
The goals for this award are to:
* improve the professional practice of design and development in adult learning and performance-improvement settings;
* promote collaboration among students, faculty, and practitioners; mentor promising students by leaders outside their home institutions; and,
* recognize innovative design-and-development approaches to adult learning and performance-improvement problems.
Loretta Donovan has been called an "e-learning evangelist". Active in the field since it emerged in the mid-1990s as a cutting-edge approach to workplace training and higher education instruction, she has developed online courses for clients and taught web-based graduate courses at Teachers College, Columbia University and blended courses at New York University. She has written about implementation issues in The AMA Handbook of E-Learning: The Effective Design, Implementation, and Technology Solutions, and recently authored an article on Realizing the Potential of Collective Learning through Blogs for Learning Technology Newsletter, a publication of IEEE Computer Society.
Yao Huang and Will Lancaster successfully completed the first phase of the competition in May and had a rough abstract when they met Donovan via email. Over the the next four months, the three collaborated using email, Skype and conference calls to broaden the students' original ideas and create a solution that was technologically, financially and educationally sound. Their second phase proposal was identified as one of the top submissions which moved them to the final competition which was held in Dallas on October 12. On October 11, the trio met face-to-face for the first time.
Three teams of finalists in the PacifiCorp Design and Development Competition presented their design solutions in the third and final phase of the competition. Finalist teams Linda Smith and Eric Sikorski of Florida State University, Jingli Cheng and Semiral Oncu of Indiana University, and Yao Huang and Will Lancaster of University of Memphis each gave a half-hour presentation to a panel of judges. Their task was to make a case for support of their design solution and answer questions regarding their design decisions.
Presentations at the AECT Convention were the culminating experience in a three-phase process that began in May with teams of graduate students from various Colleges and Universities making suggestions for alternative solutions to a design problem. The field was narrowed for the second phase of the competition where the teams were asked to create a cost effective design model for training that met the needs created by the company’s originally stated design problem. From this, three finalists were chosen to attend the AECT Convention to make a case for their design implementation before judges acting as a Board of Directors.
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Less than one year ago, Loretta Donovan, president of worksmarts and a Tuckahoe, NY resident, learned that the Association for Educational Communications and Technology needed mentors to guide graduate students in an annual e-learning competition. In May she was introduced to Yao Huang and Will Lancaster of University of Memphis whom she would guide through the process. In October the team received awards in a Dallas ceremony for their efforts. Donovan says, "This competition hones the classroom learning of grad school into workplace-ready skills. I would hire Yao and Will tomorrow. Their work is outstanding. They are smart, savvy and hardworking."
As sponsor of the competition PacifiCorp, an electricity producer with more than 1.6 million customers and based in Portland OR, is specifically interested in promoting collaboration and mentoring within the professional community.
The goals for this award are to:
* improve the professional practice of design and development in adult learning and performance-improvement settings;
* promote collaboration among students, faculty, and practitioners; mentor promising students by leaders outside their home institutions; and,
* recognize innovative design-and-development approaches to adult learning and performance-improvement problems.
Loretta Donovan has been called an "e-learning evangelist". Active in the field since it emerged in the mid-1990s as a cutting-edge approach to workplace training and higher education instruction, she has developed online courses for clients and taught web-based graduate courses at Teachers College, Columbia University and blended courses at New York University. She has written about implementation issues in The AMA Handbook of E-Learning: The Effective Design, Implementation, and Technology Solutions, and recently authored an article on Realizing the Potential of Collective Learning through Blogs for Learning Technology Newsletter, a publication of IEEE Computer Society.
Yao Huang and Will Lancaster successfully completed the first phase of the competition in May and had a rough abstract when they met Donovan via email. Over the the next four months, the three collaborated using email, Skype and conference calls to broaden the students' original ideas and create a solution that was technologically, financially and educationally sound. Their second phase proposal was identified as one of the top submissions which moved them to the final competition which was held in Dallas on October 12. On October 11, the trio met face-to-face for the first time.
Three teams of finalists in the PacifiCorp Design and Development Competition presented their design solutions in the third and final phase of the competition. Finalist teams Linda Smith and Eric Sikorski of Florida State University, Jingli Cheng and Semiral Oncu of Indiana University, and Yao Huang and Will Lancaster of University of Memphis each gave a half-hour presentation to a panel of judges. Their task was to make a case for support of their design solution and answer questions regarding their design decisions.
Presentations at the AECT Convention were the culminating experience in a three-phase process that began in May with teams of graduate students from various Colleges and Universities making suggestions for alternative solutions to a design problem. The field was narrowed for the second phase of the competition where the teams were asked to create a cost effective design model for training that met the needs created by the company’s originally stated design problem. From this, three finalists were chosen to attend the AECT Convention to make a case for their design implementation before judges acting as a Board of Directors.
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