EDTEC 540 Performance Analysis
Core Standard 8: Systems
Understand that we live and work within systems of cause and effect in which actions may have multiple origins and consequences.

For this standard I chose one of my first projects in the program, the performance analysis from EDTEC 540: “Edline Deployment Issues” and its reincarnation as the “PT Makeover” from EDTEC 685. Links to the relevant documents are in the sidebar.

Context
This artifact was created for the first educational technology class I ever took: EDTEC 540 in Spring 2007 taught by Corey Fayman. I was not accepted in the Master’s program yet, and enrolled in this course as part of the College of Extended Studies. This assignment was a wonderful introduction to the field and matched my work experience perfectly (so much so that I chose to revisit it for the PT Makeover assignment in Dr. Allison Rossett’s EDTEC 685 course in 2009).

For this performance analysis, I studied an online system used by my employer. This school had hired me mid year to take over when their technology director went on extended medical leave. One of the most pressing problems facing the school was deployment of the GradeQuickWeb/Edline system to allow teachers to publish their grades online for parental access. On my first day, I was told that Edline "wasn't working right" and needed to be fixed. Since I was unable to communicate with my predecessor, I had to educate myself about the systems and the school before I could even begin to recommend a course of action. I soon came to realize that there were a whole constellation of issues that would need to be addressed before the system would be used successfully, some technical, some procedural, and some requiring staff training. The course textbook (Mager and Pipe’s "Analyzing Performance Problems") would prove extremely helpful in the weeks ahead.

Outcome
Though this artifact is from several years ago, I still feel it is as relevant as the day it was written. I encounter many of the same types of issues daily in my current work with another much larger school, namely the need for systemic thinking and solutions. In this case, the faculty and administration all viewed the problem to be a technical one - that Edline had a bug or that it was a “computer problem.”

But Edline (which in the end did have configuration issues) was not deployed in isolation, and the reality was that the Edline software was only one piece of a complex system of academic policy, staff training, school procedures, technology limits and stakeholder expectations. For the end result of correct grades being accessible to the correct parents online, all of the component parts needed to be correct as well.

Throughout my career, I have personally guided several schools through this process of migrating to digital record keeping, including systems integration and data management. In each case, administration has approached such adoptions without understanding the extensive nature of such a change. Understanding the causal interplay of the many elements in a school community is necessary for successful change management. One cannot change one element in the system without repercussions through out the whole interrelated structure of the school. This artifact demonstrates that all too clearly.

Challenges and Opportunities
Since this assignment was related to my actual work, the type of problems I faced were familiar to me. I am usually up to a logical challenge, but this particular case had so many moving parts it did strain the limits of my patience and troubleshooting ability. The inability to communicate with the person most directly involved in creating the current situation meant that I had to reverse engineer probable chains of causality on my own. I also had to deliver some bad news about the extent of issues to my employers, who “just wanted to fix Edline” without looking at any of the underlying causes of self contradictory academic policy or inconsistent staff expectations.

My Contributions
My professional work requires understanding systems and the untangling the many inputs and outputs of modern organizations. This artifact was created solely by me and demonstrates these abilities on both a theoretical and a practical level.

Lessons Learned
This project reinforces how fundamental an understanding of systems is to any successful organizational initiative. In my many years of working with these systems in schools, I also have come to expect that this understanding is not as widely shared amongst administrators and faculty as I would have hoped. I guess that’s why they call in a consultant!