Complete thesis - Murdoch University

A team comprising the researcher, the Academic Support Officer from Murdoch’s TLC asmentor, a third year SE student as research assistant and a CS student with expertise ininteractive graphics as technical assistant laboured over one semester plus the summer breakto redevelop the unit. Each role was critical to the success of the redevelopment:• the CS student produced all the code required for the interactive component of theenvironment – in an open format based on xml and Java scripting, so that parameterscould be adjusted as necessary throughout the semester, and the web pages modified• the SE student maintained records of the team meetings and helped source and developsupport material required by the PBL process. In addition, as the top student in theclass when she undertook ENG260, her perceptions of the learning environment werevaluable (although it should be acknowledged that the best students are less likely tobe deterred by a bad learning environment). Also, although a gender agenda was notexplicit, it was important that the scenarios being developed did not demotivate thefemale minority in the class• the Academic Support Officer’s role was to keep the researcher focussed. Most decisionsduring the process were met with a why? – the need to explain and justify required avery critical and reflective approach to the task, and was invaluable. In addition, herexperience was in applying PBL in an IT environment, enabling some commonalitiesto be exploited• the researcher acted as discipline expert, and, obviously, had initiated the project. Allthe conceptual modelling was mine, as was the development of the scenarios and the‘sequencing’ within the environment• discipline colleagues at Murdoch acted as sounding board, while my academic supervisor– an RE practitioner and researcher took on the role of devil’s advocate.Final testing was completed only days before the unit commenced: this tight schedule meantthat some decisions were deferred (eg the lead time was too short to remove the final examfrom the assessment profile). Absolute commitment to run in PBL mode was not requireduntil after Week 1 classes - the Apprenticeship model as backup was always possible. However,once the decision had been made it was very important that the technical infrastructure wasrobust: the problem scenario was dependent on online triggers being released automaticallyand available to students.Sections 7.2.1 and 7.2.2 describe the extensive planning required before the CreativePBLmodel could be implemented.283