Course Reflections
Well, I know what I don't want to be when I grow up, and if I knew what EDTECH 505 entailed, I may have never started down the road with EDTECH 501.
Actually this course will probably be of the most benefit to me in my current position. As much as I love standing up in front of a classroom and teaching, over half my job is involved with evaluations. Strangely, I'm going to have to teach a course in "Apparent Cause Evaluations" in the fourth quarter of this year, and I will undoubtedly draw on what I've learned this semester to balance our in-house procedure with evaluations in the outside world.
The fact of the matter is that evaluations are hard. I have never in my life spent so much time developing analytical models and scrutinizing plant drawings. The odd part was that I wasn't looking for how to fix a piece of equipment, but rather looking for the most efficient way to fix a piece of equipment. In conversations with the individual who peer checked my analysis, we found that there certainly was more than one way to skin a cat, but when we looked for the most efficient route, there was only one way. .
The thing I've found most ironic going through this material is how little time the nuclear industry spends with formative evaluations. Granted, we have our needs analysis and performance analysis templates to drive us to offering useful and timely training, but the fact of the matter is that it is almost a pro-forma process for us. We spend most of our time performing summative evaluations. The industry tends to concentrate more on where we have been and not where we're going. We get better by examining what has happened and improving on it. It works, but after this course, I feel like there might be a time lag we could overcome if we dwelled on the future and not the past.
So this leaves only one more class and the portfolio, and while I was dismayed to discover that my next class is only 7 weeks long, I was happy to find out that it didn't start until June 29th. That means that tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm going to start work on EDTECH 522. I truly am grateful that the powers that be have given examples of previous portfolios. Most courses don't change much from semester to semester and reviewing previous examples helps in preparing for what lies ahead. I will however reiterate what I posted in a class discussion thread. Presumably the individual reviewing my portfolio will read this. Trimming this particular course down to seven weeks does a disservice to those who take a summer version. All the work is valuable, albeit time consuming and cutting the time allotted in half will result in either students receiving a diluted version of the material or resisting an overwhelming urge to jump off a bridge due to being overworked.
