Problem #7 - Difficulties in Achieving Continuous Improvement of Instructional Materials At the outset, the project team committed to the philosophy of continuous improvement, in terms of an iterative sequence involving design, implementation, assessment, redesign, etc. This notion of continuous improvement addresses two different dimensions of quality, the ramifications of which were not fully appreciated at the outset by the project team. Continuous removal of flaws contained in new and revised materials - New materials may be expected to include some flaws, even though great care and diligence are undertaken by writers and reviewers. The project team was quite surprised, however, by the numerous flaws that surfaced, not only during the first use of the new materials in the classroom, but also after corrections/revisions were made to those materials. Continuous changing of assignment data - To reduce the possbility of students sharing solution information on assignments from semester-to-semester, the project team set out to change the data used in assignments each semester, while keeping the overall scenario of the assignment constant. A major problem occurred in trying to make changes in data contained in those assignments involving the "serial cases" change in one handout implied the need for changes in the remaining sequence of handouts in the serial case. The amount of work required to make such changes and the difficulty involved in avoiding errors as changes were made were both considerable. Solution to Problem #7 Each semester during the three-year grant, the instructional materials were revised; some semesters involved more significant revisions than others. However, a slowdown occurred in the amount of changes made to the serial cases. Ideally, data in serial cases would be electronically linked from handout to handout using embedding and linking routines now available in word processing and spreadsheet software. Unfortunately, user friendly linking software was not available when the grant was started. Hence, some of the serial case handouts were not yet electronically linked, which continued to limit the extent of changes that can efficiently be made each year. [ Previous | Next ] Home | Overview | Introduction | Motivation for Change Structure of the New Courses | Obstacles | Resources | Outcome Measures Reaction of Interested Parties | Recommendations for Interested Parties | Links | Index