Project Updates

Hi everyone, hope your school year is off to a great start. I have had an incredibly busy semester so far. Just to remind everyone, my final project is revolving around a new assessment system just implemented at UMaine's COEHD, called Tk20. Since I am working for the COEHD as a grad assistant assigned to Tk20, I thought revolving my final project around Tk20 would be a great way for me to really familiarize myself with the system. So for my project, I volunteered to develop a lot of the training materials and to create and maintain the help site. To give you a better idea about Tk20, it is essentially just a massive database being used to collect, store, analyze data, and generate comprehensive reports. The COEHD is going to use Tk20 for on-going program evaluation and to assist with the NCATE re-accredition process. For the first stage of the implementation process, every student in a NCATE program is going to be uploading key assessments into Tk20, where it will then be evaluated by faculty to demonstrate that the students are meeting NCATE standards. We have already undertaken a massive training effort and have provided training to over 70 classes. For the first part of my project, I developed the training guides for the students. Now all my time is being put into developing how-to guides and developing the help site. The training materials and how-to guides mostly consists of step-by-step trouble shooting tutorials in the form video screencasts and PDFs. The Tk20 help site is going to be the main source of information for both faculty and students. It is still in development, but here is the link so you can see where it is at: http://umaine.edu/edhd/tk20-information/. There is also a FAQ subpage with additional resources.