Educational Technology: Conceptual Foundations

I went into this course with high hopes. I did actually learn a lot and enjoyed my time. However, the course is set up in an extremely poor manner. No clear rubrics for assignments, many students got no feedback from their mentors, and while the assignments at the beginning provide a learning experience, they also contain quite a bit of busy work. Unfortunately, the grading effort I experienced from my mentor was very disappointing and inconsistent. I had a death in the family and didn't finish one of the first assignments (my problem), and my grade wasn't great. However, my mentor gave me the same grade for the same type of assignment that I put 2x the effort into. I resubmitted the first of those assignments and received an A, by adding barely anything and still leaving parts incomplete. The grading of this course is a joke. The course is big on incorporating peer reviews, which I found to be equally poor when it came to getting feedback. The peer reviews often focused on criteria that was made up by the peer reviewer. The projects are created by the students and approved by their mentors. I got a peer review saying that the testing for learning outcomes in my project was not sufficient. I did the development track, not research, no experiment created. Such testing was not part of my proposed project or one of my goals for the course. This course could be amazing with an overhaul.

I took this class in Spring 2024. The course is split into two phases: an exploratory phase and a project phase. In the exploratory phase, you explore the literature in Edutech and write several papers where you summarize research and respond to prompts in the form of essays. This phase took me around 20 hours per week.

In the project phase, you can choose to either work individually or in a group. There was also an option to do research with Code.org, and this would satisfy the project requirement. You had to apply for this, and from the responses on Ed Discussion, it looks like the majority of applicants got ghosted. It was slightly inconvenient because we didn't have a timeline of when the selected applicants would be chosen, so it was hard to move forward with selecting a project because we were all hoping to be chosen by Code.org, but didn't know when or if that would happen. A couple of people asked about this on Ed Discussion, but got radio silence.

As others have mentioned, the projects are graded very leniently. As long as you turn in your weekly progress checks and make progress every week, you should have no problem getting an A from your mentor.

Overall, I like the idea that you get to work on a project you’re passionate about. There’s no grading inconsistency like some other courses because you’re paired with a TA who acts as your mentor.

However, there’s a chance you might end up with a TA who’s clueless about your project. I was assigned a TA who not only lacked understanding of the project I was building, but also had a condescending attitude. Interestingly, this is the only one out of four courses where I found peer feedback more valuable than the grader’s. That being said, this course could really use some external mentors, kind of like in the Intro to Health Informatics course.

If you’re looking for a reason to tackle an education-related project and aren’t banking too much on the mentor, then go for it.

Honestly, I think course CS6460 has so many little and big things that should be included in other OMSCS Courses.

The Course Full Calendar with all updated links is wonderful (all OMSCS Course must have it, exactly in this course format (not other).

It is impressive that I never had an office hour in a telepresence video tool, but I did not need it, every single week action items were clear and received more than enough inputs at Ed Discussions interactions with peers and TA's.

Canalize everything as possible with your mentor at Piazza. This person must become your best guidance for the course healthy progress.

I definitely and strongly recommend this course to learn how to do academic research and translate all of it into a final product or service.

Just get ready on the first 4 weeks the heaviest part of the whole course is on these first weeks, later you will just move forward smoothly.

And before starting the course try to have a research topic described in terms of a final Educational Technology product or Service.

I loved this course! Highly recommended.

If you're reading this review then you've probably already looked up this course and sample syllabi and know the rough structure so I won't go into that much here. No lectures, no exams, very self-paced/self-motivating (unless you choose to be part of a team for the project, then less self-motivating).

Everyone has different measuring sticks for how they rate courses, so I'll do my best to justify my rating. To me, this course was the most valuable and interesting course I've ever taken, in OMSCS and otherwise. I could see this paradigm being adopted for many other courses in this program.

For the project tracks, the lines delineating them are not strict and are somewhat fuzzy, but in a good way. For example, I went the research track, so I did a bunch of research, wrote an academic paper, but also developed some prototypes using Python to illustrate different principles in the research topic.

The beginning of the course can be somewhat strenuous digging up a bunch of academic papers, reading, digesting, and writing about them. BUT if you make sure you have at least a vague idea of your project topic from the start, then you can steer your research for these initial assignments in that direction (which I believe is the goal of these assignments in the first place). Essentially you are doing a ton of the research up front before your project even starts.

Once those assignments are done, the schedule really becomes a lot more flexible as long as you keep up with the milestones you set in your proposal and are open and communicative in your weekly submission to your mentor. I had a week or two where family stuff came up and I couldn't stick to my proposed schedule, but I made it up in other weeks, made sure I ticked all the boxes from my project proposal, and made sure I thoroughly and clearly stated what I had accomplished for each status update, milestone deliverable, etc.

Honestly the hardest part about this course is the participation points. I was so focused on my own research and on developing my project that I found it hard to devote enough time every week to doing helpful peer reviews.

Anyway, take this course! It is awesome.

Even though the topic of your project needs to be related in some way with Education, you can spin almost any interesting topic into being applicable. If you're interested in LLMs, then you can research/develop an LLM education bot of some sort, if you're interested in data analysis, then you can develop an experiment relating to how students do such-and-such and collect data to analyze.

It is really a great starting point for anyone that wants to learn how it feels to do structured research (for a future PhD program or for work). For me, I loved the entire process and learned a ton about myself, my research style, and my interests.

This is one of those courses, more so than any other course, that you really get out of it what you put in.

This is a great course! I'm surprised we don't see more reviews for this course as it is a specialization elective for two of the specializations.

Overall, the assignments take a lot of time, but are easy. But if you're a procrastinator, then you have no hope. The earlier assignments require at least 18-20 pages of writing (due weekly!), so if you wait until Sunday to work on it, you're doomed. I don't understand why anyone would rate this course with difficulty > 1. Writing papers isn't that difficult, it just takes a lot of time. I've read below, from other reviewers, that you'd be doing yourself a favor if you know what you want to work on beforehand. In reality, you can come into the course without having any clue. The first 3 assignments are you doing research on any areas of education/educational technology. The "areas" of education are pretty massive. You can do research on how to improve teaching methods, grading methods, study bias in education (why some demographics are not represented adequately) etc. After 3 assignments, you've perused through 45 articles (15 each), and read your peers' papers, up to 9 peers per assignment. So that's an additional 9 x 15 x 3 papers. You should be able to come up with a topic after getting exposure to 600 articles. 15% of your grade is participation. If you're timely, you'll get 1.5 points per peer review, 9 peers per deliverable and 13 deliverables. That means just doing peer reviews alone, you'll get 100 points for the 15%. You can get up to 40 points by writing timely posts in the discussion board. It seems like they give 1 point per post. They say 0.2-3.0 points per post, but from my experience, a decent 4-5-sentence paragraph gets you a solid point. We had two intermediate delivers for the semester-long project. You just need to come up with a 5-10 minute video for each. It's not that difficult; talk about what you did, come up with some PowerPoint slides, and spend a minute or two showing off what you got so far. Let's see, what else... right. The project itself is whatever you and your mentor decide. I do think this is one thing that can be improved. The projects that many of the students were doing was basically not challenging at all. One student for IM1 (Intermediate Milestone 1), presented the results of one survey they did, and then drew some conclusions. Then she said, "I'm almost done with the project". I was rather shocked how their mentor would let them get away with a very low-effort project. But it wasn't just her. Because we did peer reviews we can see other's works, and I think most of the students picked very easy topics/projects. I think I even mentioned that to my mentor, and they said that I'm drawing conclusions on just a few submissions, so it's not valid. To be fair, I would say about 10-15% did some very excellent projects. There were a few for sure that I think were publication-worthy. Ok, so to wrap things up here, if you put in the effort, and don't procrastinate, it's an easy A. "Easy" meaning not intellectually demanding, just spending the time to research and write.

This is an excellent class. It operates mostly as an independent-study class and it is very different from most of the other OMSCS classes.

You will learn how to perform academic research, read and understand different perspectives, think through alternative solutions to a designated problem area. In addition, you will get the opportunity to review your peers' work and gain exposure to diverse topics in educational technology. You will also get the opportunity to learn how to present your work (via the milestone 1, 2 and final project presentations). These are all valuable skills to develop, whether it's in academia, in the workplace or elsewhere.

You can find all of the information on what's expected here: https://omscs6460.gatech.edu/fall-2023/

Pacing: Assuming a 16 week schedule, weeks 1 through 7 are dedicated to research and writing. Then, weeks 8 through 15 are dedicated to working on your project. Week 16 is where you deliver a presentation (recorded), a final paper summarizing your work and your actual project artifacts.

Assignments: As mentioned, the first 7 weeks are heavy on reading and writing. Assignments 1, 2 and 3 each require reviewing and citing 15-20 academic sources. This mean you'll learn how to skim and figure out the most important parts of each academic article that you are reviewing.

On my end, I wrote 15-20 pages per paper for A1, A2 and A3. For the Qualifier Question and Project Proposal, I wrote 7-10 pages each. From my experience, the writing component of the class was most concentrated at the beginning. While it can feel daunting, if you can get through that initial challenge, the pace does ease up.

The remaining assignments from week 8 onward were weekly status check-ins with your mentor, two intermediate milestone presentations where you record a video of your progress to-date. This is a good chance to practice your public speaking, communication and presentation skills.

Toward the end, I picked up my pace of work. So this class had a bit of a U-shaped workload for me (spike at the beginning, to get the written work done, slower-to-moderate pace for the middle, then a spike of work at the end to finish my project, get the final paper and presentation out the door, etc).

I would recommend this class for someone who has an idea of what they want to create or build. It's also great for someone who really wants to divde into a specific area of educational technology. It does require for you to be able to manage your own time and deliverables and some honestly about your current skill set when choosing what to build during the semester.

This is a wonderful course if you want to develop something or write a research paper. The first part is pretty research and writing intensive, which requires a lot of time, but afterwards it gets a lot better depending on what you want to do for your project. I was one of the unfortunate ones who had an unhelpful mentor who eventually stopped responding. My experience in the course would've been better if there's no mentor system at all and just have TAs grade the papers. The forum's surprisingly dead. I expected students to brainstorm and help each other but none of that really happened. Overall, I learned a lot as I was passionate about my project. Could I have learned the same amount and made the same progress on my own time? Probably. The greatest benefits from the course were the structure and the credit.

This is the greatest class I have ever taken. For context, this is my 5th degree.

If you want to pursue a PhD in the future, then you really should consider taking this class. It is structured the same way a PhD is.

You have 3-tracks to choose from: research, development, or content. You can research an area and submit for publication. You can create your own tool or online course. You can do pretty much whatever you want.

The negative reviews for this class are a reflection of the student, not the class.

I really enjoyed this course and I'm glad I took it, but I also seriously considered dropping the course during the first three weeks. I read the reviews from past semesters, so I knew that I would be doing a lot of reading and writing during the early weeks of the course. I was still surprised by how much time I spent on the first three writing assignments. I put in probably around 40 hours on each of those assignments. I learned A LOT by doing those assignments, but I also really struggled to find the time to do them well.

Once I made it out the other side of those first three papers, the hours I put in each week were around 10-20 hours. On the heavier weeks I put in extra hours to learn things that were new to me that I needed to learn for my project (Javascript, React, asynchronous calls to APIs, web development as a whole...) so a lot of that extra time could be avoided by choosing a project that relies on skills you already have instead of one that pushes you to learn new skills.

I had an excellent mentor and I felt like the whole process or proposing and then executing my project was very rewarding. I learned a lot, I really enjoyed the work, and I produced a finished final product that will be one of the highlights of my professional portfolio.

I DO NOT recommend this class if you're looking for an easy course to pair with something else. For me, the best thing about the class was pursuing a project that was interesting to me, and I wanted to be free to put all my time and energy into that project. Also, the work load in the first six weeks of the class will make it very difficult to complete any other coursework.