Discussions

Your Name and Title:

Anne Fox

School or Organization Name:

Anne Fox (freelance company)

Co-Presenter Name(s):

None

Area of the World from Which You Will Present:

Denmark, Europe

Language in Which You Will Present:

English

Target Audience(s):

anyone needing to organise an international digital student project

Short Session Description (one line):

How distributed ConCurrent eDesign can help you plan more effective large scale international projects.

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

The 45 minute session will be a slide show presentation with questions invited along the way. The presenter is an experienced online presenter, used to using Elluminate, now Blackboard.

Distributed CCeD is a process potentially useful for the development of projects for large numbers of students who are widely spread geographically.

ConCurrent eDesign is an approach to planning from the engineering world which has been transferred to the task of developing student projects. The idea originated when NASA needed to save money and shorten planning time. It has now been adapted to the planning of digital pedagogical projects.

In my session I will present a broad outline of the process which basically revolves around 'if you are not in the room then you are not part of the process'. This means that all relevant decision-makers and stakeholders should be part of the process so that it can move on quickly. When challenges are identified, the relevant person can be consulted, the challenge resolved and so the process can move on.

This process has been tried and tested by the Technical University College of Trondheim with companies such as the major telecoms company Telenor and the the Statoil petroleum company. In these cases the facilitators from the university worked in the same room with the key people in the target organisation.

The UnderstandIT project, supported financially by the European Union under their Leonardo program, is now testing out a distributed version of CCeD. This means that the development process is carried out online instead of physically in the same room. In UnderstandIT we are looking at what is needed to transfer this proven approach online.

I will describe the case study that we used in the project to test out this process. Preliminary results show that it is perfectly feasible to produce a project design document through a process which happens completely online with developers in Portugal, Italy, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark and Norway.  One of the key outcomes of this case study was that we were able to adapt the project to fit the local contexts and importantly, the cultural differences in each of the four stations where the project would run, so that we did not end up with a one size fits all solution but instead an adaptable template. This has beneficial implications for groups wishing to develop digital projects across large distances where it is simply not practical to meet physically for the four or five intensive meeting sessions needed for the CCeD process.

The UnderstandIT project is making guidelines for carrying out the distributed CCeD process available to all as the project progresses.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:

Slides at slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/foxdenuk/c-ce-d

http://annefox.eu/?s=cced&searchsubmit=
(scroll down for English)

http://aitel.hist.no/understandit/