THE HUMANE USE AND CARE OF LABORATORY ANIMALS

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

• RAPID PROTOTYPING
• FORMATIVE EVALUATION
• FINAL REPORT

RAPID PROTOTYPING back
Because of time constraints and because I believe design is both a top-down and bottom-up process throughout, I used a Rapid Prototyping as my design model. The PACUC/LAP administrator was very anxious to have some version of these orientations up and running by fall of 2003 for incoming students.

For my first prototype, I simply reworked the current online instruction a bit, customizing the content to the undergrads as directed by the PACUC administrator. In this round I simply tried to familiarize myself with the content and structure of the material. Was it organized logically and optimally? I also looked at motivational issues, and tried to apply some recommendations for the design of online instruction - namely developing interactivity, student control, and 'instructional immediacy.' PACUC's current online instruction was linear and consisted of some 30 slides. By adding a course map, I gave the students the option of navigating the instruction in other ways and of starting and stopping when they wanted to. I also used multimedia to enhance 'instructional immediacy.' Thoughtfully designed courseware (sometimes using JavaScript and Java) can somewhat make up for the loss of the instructor's 'personality' and nonverbal interaction with the instructor and one's peers. I tried to get at the ethical and attitudinal components of the instruction by 'giving the animals a voice' through image and multimedia. PACUC folk often make the observation that the animals cannot speak for themselves, so I tried to find ways in the instruction to remind students through images and multimedia that animals were living beings perhaps in some ways not too unlike themselves.

I put this version on my Purdue Career Account website and emailed instructions to the PACUC education subcommittee on how to access it. The committee had mixed reactions to the graphics and other experimental changes to their instruction. However I felt the initial prototype also accomplished its purpose by assisting the committee to recognize and arrive at a more optimal organization of content for undergraduate students. The committee and the administrator and I met at least two more times to talk about changes. We trimmed the instruction to just 17 slides and tightened up the organization and presentation of various concepts. During this period the opportunity opened up to put the instruction on the University's WEBCT platform. There were several advantages to this - WebCT offered the committee a secure platform, and was also a familiar learning and teaching environment to many students and professors at Purdue. Access was available both on and off campus. WebCT offered the advantage of automatic grading and notification, and it also put complete control of the instruction into the hands of PACUC and LAP (whereas the current website did not). Purdue's WebCT team met with the educational sub-committee and me on more than one occasion to assist in the process of getting us access to WebCT.

Consequently July 2003 I attended several training classes for a new version of WebCT called Vista that Purdue was rolling out for fall 2003. Shortly thereafter I put the revised prototype on Vista, requested accounts, and emailed a brief tutorial to the PACUC educational subcommittee on how to access the instruction. This time, I introduced a brief ethical dilemma scenario as recommended by the literature for teaching ethics and critical thinking. This was something totally new to PACUC's training. I also tried to deal with issues of accessibility in the second prototype, being careful to use HTML that would make sense to those viewing the training in aural and non-visual channels:

• I found a CSS training link that does a fantastic job of scaffolding people like myself who need to venture into new areas in order to make their websites more accessible.
• I made the current prototype more 800x600 resolution 'friendly.' The first one was developed with 1024x765 resolution.
• I streamlined load times for those who will be accessing the instruction at lower bandwidth. Since I did much of the work from my home computer on a slow modem, I felt like I gave the load times an adequate 'torture test' on my own computer!

From the feedback of the committee, conducted mostly this time through distance, the third and final (we thought) prototype evolved.

FINAL FORMATIVE EVALUATIONS back
I used this prototype to conduct formative face-to-face evalutions with a small group of undergraduate students who worked at the Animal Holding Facility. I sat with the students and observed their comments and reactions as they worked through the instruction and took close note of their response to the ethical dilemma scenario. I learned a lot from them, needless to say. I also administered a pre-test and a post-test to see if the instruction was in line with the objectives, and then I interviewed the students on the experience of using the instruction.

From the students' feedback I learned that I needed to make several significant changes - not only to the instruction itself but to the design of the WebCT Vista Interface. The instruction needed to contain better explanations, more definitions and repeated exposures, and provide a clear scaffold or framework to help new college students sort out and better understand relationships among a confusing array of terms, acronyms, and entities within the university and out in the larger world of research compliance. Also since students would be logging into Vista and taking the instruction without anybody there to tell them how to proceed, I had to make the Vista interface absolutely intuitive. So I changed the Vista Course Home Page from this design to this one. I also figured out (due to the persistent or insistant requests by students and the PACUC committee) how to link directly to a WebCT Vista Quiz from one of my own html content pages! I'm not altogether certain that's a supported feature of Vista however, so I included instructions for the more 'standard method' of access as well.

After making the changes described above, I contacted a final group of students to try out the most current prototype (not shown here in WebCT). This final formative evaluation took place completely over distance, as the instruction was intended. I sent the students directions and a tutorial for how to access the Vista Course. They took the pretest and quiz using Vista's quiz facility. I set up my Interview using Vista's Discussion Board tool.

FINAL REPORT AND PRESENTATION back
More details and a discussion of the results of these final formative evaluations are contained in my final integrated project report.

On a final note, while I used Dreamweaver, html, and javascript programming to model the instruction, our ultimate goal was flexibility. Once PACUC had a model or map of the orientation, they could manipulate it using whatever tool they preferred. I learned during the SME formative evaluations that PowerPoint was the preferred tool for PACUC members and would give them maximum control over the design and maintenance of their instruction (while WebCT would give them maximum control over their online learning environment). The committee has made a version on the instruction in PowerPoint available on their own website until such time as they can arrange to move entirely onto WebCT.