The Goal Aware Process - Data Flow
The Goal Aware Process is a simple pedagogical idea that seems very basic to Instructional Design. A teacher should lay out your objectives, design activities, engage students in those activities and monitor progress toward objectives. Isn't it odd that this basic pedagogical principle isn't supported in courseware?
I attended the Usability Camp at the Sakai conference today. There was a lot of talk about modeling scenarios and use cases, developing personas and usability of tools. A common theme that came up in the conversation was the difficulty to create consistent workflows that involved multiple tools. For the Goal Aware process, this would mean that faculty could consistently "markup" their activities and "rate" student performance towards them in any "Goal Aware" tool.
How are we handling that now? We use a helper tool from the Goal Management tool to provide a common experience for faculty. The user experience is one where they are "consistently" taken away from the assignment tool (for example) and then back. Ideally, this interface could be implemented on the same screen. As Jim pointed out a while back, this is pretty hard to do right now. This is partly because of the many different interface technologies that tools can be (and are) built with.