Humanely Speaking

17. Lynx http://www.purdue.edu/Research/ORA/animals/onlineorientation.shtml link no longer active as of apr 2008 http://secondlooks.hypermart.net/MyPortfolio/EDCI670/PACUC/sitemap.htm http://secondlooks.hypermart.net/MyPortfolio/ORA/PACUC/prototype5/coursemap.htm http://ecourses.purdue.edu/webct/entryPage.dowebct

18. Questions

Notes de l'éditeur

Good Afternoon!
The topic of my presentation and final integrated project is Developing Instruction on the Ethical Use and Care of Animals used in Research and Teaching at Purdue – and as a little introduction, this video snippet –less than 2 minutes in length
This video snippet raises a question which I would like to propose to you
One of my tasks in developing instruction for the humane care and use of animals used in research and testing was to conduct a search and write a review of literature applicable to the topic. This ranged from the teaching of ethics to best practices in developing online instruction.
Background – the humane care and use of animals in research and teaching is federally mandated by the Animal Welfare Act of 1966. This legislation came about because of notorious inhumane and unethical treatment of research animals as well as animals in other areas of society and is not unlike the path that human subject research has followed in the 20th Century.
Whenever people do not catch and respond appropriately to the “ethical cues,” then usually some sort of external governance is enacted to regulate institutions and those who would do research – not only in what may be done to animals in the name of research and teaching, but in how animals are transported, housed and cared for daily. Lack of compliance can bring heavy consequences both the individual researcher and to the entire institution. Therefore through executive memorandum, Purdue set up an institutional animal care program
PACUC evaluates and approves all research protocols and teaching activities in light of Federal regulation about the humane care and use of laboratory animals. It is made up of scientists, administrators, lay people/members of the community. LAP oversees the daily care and provides veterinary care to animals housed on Purdue campus. An important component of both PACUC and LAP’s mission is to provide training to animal users on campus, both general, and species specific. For the past many years PACUC and LAP have offered a general one-size fits all to animal users on campus – to include researchers, graduate students, animal caretakers, and undergraduate students. They offer the orientation as a face to face workshop and they also have an online version. PACUC / LAP have an on-line general orientation that is well done, nicely integrated into their website, and very linear. At the end the user goes to a quiz.
However, recently they have wanted to offer different orientations to different audiences. The first one to emerge, the one I have done for my final project, is an online orientation for undergraduate students. Why? Mainly undergraduates share a subset of the duties involved in caring and using animals. They usually don’t have to write a protocol and put it through the PACUC approval process, for instance. Yet they are often the ones who are on the front line – the first responders when an animal is sick, or perhaps the first to witness noncompliance.
Instructional gaps were difficult to identify initially. I was given the message that everyone does their part pretty well and animals are generally well-cared for on Purdue campus. But as the design process unfolded,– I found that there were certain key points that PACUC and LAP really wanted the undergraduates to get:
These ultimately became our goals and objectives.
PACUC and LAP had already started working on their current orientation – a PowerPoint Presentation – to tailor it to undergraduate students. So I decided that since we already had a model to start with, and the SME’s had begun adapting it, that I would employ the instructional design model of rapid prototyping. Essentially I took the adaptations of their PowerPoint Presentation, their online instruction, and other information I had gathered during the analysis phase – such as the literature review I had done on effecting or developing ethical behavior/attitudinal change and critical thinking, and developing effective online instruction and came up with a model.
With the first prototype, I started learning the structure of the content and trying to integrate it with what I’d learned in my literature search. It was also VERY EXPERIMENTAL. I did a very intensive search for multimedia and images of animals, feeling like this was the way to give them a voice. I used animal animations and animal backgrounds and animated animal back grounds, and sometimes sound, and other means of interactivity. I also developed a course map – the current online orientation is well done – but it’s a series of 23 slides navigated sequentially. The course map also gives students the ability to jump in and out at different places and to see where they are going. I also worked from the model that the committee gave me and the current online instruction. But, I think the committee felt it was a bit much. We had a couple of face to face meetings – which I would consider my first SME formative evaluations – and I think the prototype did its job. People often don’t know exactly what they want, until they see it – or at least until they see something.
And from those meetings we began to see how the content was structured and we pared down from some 33 slides in the original orientation to 23 to 16 slides and organized them under four major sections – background, PACUC roles, LAP roles, and Students roles. In contrast to the current instruction which dwelled quite a bit on PACUC and LAP roles, this new orientation spends most of the time on the student’s role in the ethical care of animals And instead of all the animal pictures (I still used some) I developed some graphics and charts to help convey that concept (show PACUC LAP YOU). We also changed the language and even the intent in some cases to address ethical dilemmas and quandaries pertinent to undergraduate students. In subsequent prototypes, I paid more attention to issues of interactivity and accessibility. In the first prototype I used a Java interactive puzzle to piece together an organization chart. In subsequent prototypes I Javascripted pop up definitions, and created a Fireworks rollover. We decided to try WebCT as a platform – it offered certain advantages of security, was a familiar platform to instructors and students, offered automatic grading of quizzes, and gave the committee the most control over their own learning materials, which the current website does not. So in July I took several WebCT Vista classes and put the orientation in WebCT Vista.
Then we took it to the students. I conducted two formative evaluations, the first with three students face to face and the second with 4 people over distance. In the face to face formative evaluations, I gave PACUC’s quiz as a pre- and post-test to see if the measures were in line with the objectives and then observed the students as they worked through the instruction and used the interface. Afterwards I conducted a brief interview. I asked them what they thought of the graphics and images – and if they felt the instruction made them want even more to care for animals ethically and humanely. Even though the first group was only three people, I had a broad range of experience – a freshman, a sophomore, and a senior. I conducted one session with the freshman and the senior, and a separate session with the sophomore. I recommend letting students be in informal groups when going through a face to face formative evaluation – I felt like I learned a lot from their conversations with each other. The second formative evaluation was more problematic – it gave me an appreciation of the difficulties of teaching over distance. Again, I administered the pretest and posttest – this time in WebCT. I never saw these students face to face. I sent them instructions through email on what to do. However I didn’t hear back from all my students – there were 3 or 4 who volunteered but only one took the pretest and the posttest. WebCT didn’t email me – even though I thought I’d told it to. Another took just the pretest – and did quite well on it – and even though I had sent instructions I wasn’t sure what people had actually done. So then I went and found some friends and family to go through the instruction – and essentially that was mostly a test of WebCT inexperience, different bandwidths, and hardware platforms. A test of accessing from home.
The first formative evaluation – the face to face one – had a fairly big impact on the instruction. I made quite a few changes. I changed some diagrams, expanded information and definitions, and gave more than one exposure. Of the second group one and a half students finished the instruction and gave feedback, and two Non-Purdue people finished the instruction and gave feedback. The scores between these two groups of people were different, reflecting the lack of relevance in the Non-Purdue group and the importance of situated-learning in the student group. Both evaluations brought the issue of WebCT as an interface to the forefront, perhaps the second group more than the first. Consequently, I redesigned the home page from looking like this – to looking like this. To be absolutely intuitive. I also found out how to fire up the quiz directly from my content page (show this in WebCT) – and I’m not sure that’s a supported feature, but it certainly was a requested feature from both my students and my SME’s. I also left the standard way in, in case the capability to link directly from a content page is just an anomaly that will go away.
Conclusions The students who were already working with animals seemed quite appreciative of the information in the orientation. These people already had high ethical standards – as gauged from an ethical dilemma question I posed in both the pretest and posttest. So while the instruction did not necessarily increase their awareness or desire to treat animals humanely ethically, it did give them important information they needed, in order to do so – and they seemed to really appreciate it. Most students scores improved from the pretest to the posttest, but of course the short answer grades were a little subjective.

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