Research / Projects
Teacher Education Goes into Virtual Schooling (TEGIVS): The goal of the project was to create a national model that integrates Virtual Schooling (VS) into preservice teacher education in four collaborating institutions (Iowa State University, University of Florida, University of Virginia, and Graceland University). Being a part of the TEGIVS project helped me develop and apply my research and leadership skills as a project coordinator as well as provided me with an ever-lasting experience while working with diversified and active project members including both graduate students and faculty members. Along with a number of conference presentations, I actively involved in the preparation of the project final report, created one of the project scenarios, and conducted a workshop at the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) conference in August 2008.
Advanced Instructional Systems Design (Curriculum & Instruction 603) [Website: An e-portfolio on entrepreneurship experiences in Instructional Technology]. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~acorreia/ci603/pages/: During the summer 2007, I designed CI603-Advanced Instructional Systems Design course website. The goal was to present student-led efforts in Instructional Technology Consulting through a website based on robust instructional design principles and thereby facilitate the entrepreneurship processes in the department. This process helped me advance my graphic and web design skills as well as gain deeper understanding of iterative design process. Thielen Student Health Center Online HIPAA Training: Dr Farrah Yusop (former CI and HCI student) and I designed and developed an online environment to educate Thielen Student Health Center (TSHC) employees on their responsibilities to protect patients' personal health care and financial information according to policies. The training consisted of 3 modules which were created separately as Flash files and then embedded into the website. For each of the module, there was 1 scenario designed to give users basic everyday dilemmas related to the subject that they would probably encounter in their daily work and 1 tutorial following the scenario to provide some guidance related to the dilemma(s) posted in the scenario. The scenarios were accompanied with sounds and pictures. The texts were omitted from the slides to avoid redundancy effect. Similarly, the tutorials included simple content and images to assist in retaining attention and for easier recall. Additionally, each tutorial had a Reference section which consisted of links to additional resources available on the web. Furthermore, a consistent and predictable navigation design was provided in order to help users feel comfortable in exploring the website. Website URL: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~yasemind/TSHC-hipaa/pages/ Online Masters of Science Program in Plant Breeding: In this project, I have been working with Dr Ann Thompson along with the collaborators in the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University. Developing an education system to meet the challenges facing students was one goal of this project. A distance learning on-line model, structured similarly to the successful MS in Agronomy model would address the needs of prospective students and increase the pool of trained plant breeders.We surveyed curriculum content for other Plant Breeding Masters programs around the world. We contacted the following universities: Texas A&M University, Cornell University, UC Davis, University of Hohenheim (Germany), and University of Wageningen (Netherlands). We organized the list of courses in each program according to four major subject areas; Genetics, Breeding Methods, Statistics, and Synthesis. Then we compared the courses in each area to the ones available in the current Plant Breeding and MS in Agronomy programs at Iowa State University. We created a set of guidelines for the Plant Breeding faculty and personnel engaged in the creation of MS in Plant Breeding. The guideline includes the description of major steps namely design, development, implementation, and evaluation followed in building an online program. We also created a list of factors affecting the success of online programs. In addition, we presented a paper on needs assessment in the design and development of Distance MS in Plant Breeding at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Denver, Colorado (April 30-May 4, 2010). We are in the process of writing two journal articles for publication from the project. The first article focuses on needs assessment conducted to analyze a variety of stakeholders’ needs and expectations regarding the MS program in Plant Breeding. The second article will be a research review on factors affecting the success of graduate online programs. |