Milestone #1: Pitching Project

The John Glenn College of Public Affairs, Management Development Programs offers a wide variety of training to public sector employees.  The longest running program at the Glenn is MAPS (Management Advancement for the Public Sector).  MAPS training are one-day seminars on a variety of soft skill topics.  Courses offered through MAPS range from leadership, management skills to creative thinking and presentation skills. In the 2017-2018 MAPS season, there are 53 unique seminars.  MAPS season run from September to May.

Currently, these training seminars do not offer anything outside of the classroom. At the end of the day, a student receives a certificate of completion and their learning is finished.  Which leaves most students, even those with the best of intentions, with little reinforcement of the ideas they just learned.  What’s from stopping a student from going back to work the next day and forgetting everything they just learned?  How can we help students remember the course content long term?

Ormrod discusses long-term memory in Chapter 8 of the book titled Human Learning.  In it, Ormrod suggests that repetition and review can help students, engage in additional processing of the information that creates a stronger understanding and create stronger associations with things in memory. (pg. 220).

Trying to answer those questions is what drove the idea for my project.  How can I help students create longer-term learning for these already created courses?  By creating reinforcement points that are available for students to review.   The idea was pitched to the Director of Management Development Programs, Maria Mone, on December 1st, 2017.  She was on board with the idea, but I left the pitch meeting with some additional things I needed to work out.  After a successful discussion about what the points would look like, myself and my advisor, Dr. Rick Voithofer, came up with a timeline and tasks that needed to be completed.

Reflection:

  • What was successful about your pitch?

The project contact and I easily agreed to the terms of the project.  I believe that is because we both shared the same vision on how to begin to implement online tools and long-term learning into this program.

  • How could you have improved your pitch?

In hindsight, I believe the pitch could have been a bit more formal.  A more formal meeting would have helped me better understanding of how to sell someone on a project and my vision for it.

  • What feedback did you get and how will/did you address it?

The project contact wanted to understand how I believed these reinforcement points would help students.  At the time, I could point to the fact that it would help them remember the learning but I had no theoretical  basis for this claim.  Going forward, I need to remember to discuss repetition and review in terms of long term learning.

Check out Milestone #2: M.O.U./Project Plan for details on what happened next.