Please extend your congratulations and best wishes to:
- Ward Cates, President-Elect (2006)
- Lois Wilkins, Secretary Treasurer (2006)
- Ana Donaldson, Board Member-at-Large (2006)
- Jim Ellsworth, Board Member-at-Large (2006)

A new AECT weblog directory lists the new AECT RSS feeds for the Association and for its Divisions, and allows members to add their weblogs to a members’s directory.

Call for Participants (students, mentors, judges)
PacifiCorp and the Design and Development Division of AECT are pleased to announce the second annual PacifiCorp Design and Development Award for promising instructional design research by graduate students working with mentors in the Design and Development Division. PacifiCorp is specifically interested in promoting collaboration and mentoring within the professional community.

The goals for this award are to:

• improve the professional practice of design and development in adult learning and performance-improvement settings;

promote collaboration among students, faculty, and practitioners;

• mentor promising students by leaders outside their home institutions; and,
• recognize innovative design-and-development approaches to adult learning and performance-improvement problems.

Guidelines

The PacifiCorp Design & Development Award competition is open to student members of the Design and Development Division of AECT. Details on AECT and Design and Development Division membership information can be found at http://www.aect.org. Division membership is free and AECT memberships for students are discounted. Interested faculty and students are strongly encouraged to join the D&D division and to sign up for the D&D listserv.

The Award Committee formulates a problem statement each year with a challenging conceptual or practical problem relevant to the interests of the adult learning and performance-improvement community. Graduate students who wish to respond will form teams of two and prepare a preliminary solution abstract of no more than 1,500 words (12 point Times Roman font, double-spaced, 1 inch page margins, APA 5th edition style) that offers a proposed solution in response to the problem statement. Teams from all across the world may participate, and the two graduate students need not be at the same institution.

The 3-member judging panel will select up to six abstracts that they believe are most promising –based on creativity, theoretical soundness, and practicality. The Award Committee will then match mentors to these teams. The assigned mentors – who will likely come from either corporate or academic backgrounds – will then become active members of the design competition team, working closely with the two graduate students on the final paper. Final papers will be limited to 5,000 words, including all references and appendices (also 12 point Times Roman font, double-spaced, 1 inch page margins). Submissions can contain no more than 10 tables and figures. Design teams may develop associated design-and-development products related to the problem statement, as appropriate. These additional materials/artifacts must be accessible via the Internet and can consist of no more than 10 Web pages.

For the final portion of the competition, the 3-member judging panel will then select up to three final papers based on creativity, theoretical soundness, and practicality. The graduate students will present these papers at a special session during the Annual AECT Convention. While the mentor may help the students prepare for this session, he/she can play no role in the presentation itself. The judging panel, who will be joined by a fourth member from PacifiCorp, will then select the best presentation from that session for special recognition at the D&D/RTD Awards Luncheon. Presentations will be judged on clarity, teamwork, and professionalism.

All graduate student finalists invited to present at AECT will receive free conference registration. Award-winning papers will be considered for likely publication in ETR&D.

See below for deadlines and additional submission requirements.
Timeline

1. Call for draft papers, mentors, and judges goes out. 31 Jan 2005
2. Selection of mentors and judging panel (3) by the committee 1 Mar 2005
3. Draft papers due from 2-member student teams 1 Apr 2005
4. Selection of up to 6 promising draft papers by the judging panel. 1 May 2005
5. Final papers and any additional materials/artifacts due to committee 15 Aug 2005
6. Selection by judging panel of up to 3 finalist teams for AECT D&D 75-minute session 1 Sep 2005
7. Selection of best presentation from session by judging panel AECT annual meeting, October 2005
8. Presentation of awards to finalists and winner at D&D/RTD Awards Luncheon AECT annual meeting, October 2005

All submissions for the competition must be in MS Word, .RTF, or .PDF file formats and sent ent via email to Monica Tracey (tracey@oakland.edu) by midnight of the appropriate deadline listed above. You will receive an email confirmation when your submission has been received.

Problem Statement

The problem statement for the 2005 PacifiCorp Design Award is:

You work as a human performance and training specialist for a leading edge electronics company, Lighting Inc., with offices in 23 states in the USA and in 13 other countries. The products that your company develops are state-of-the-art electronics products for the home. The company has developed a reputation for being innovative by applying new technologies to create products that range from email-enabled sensors that send email to a specified address when particular events occur to medical monitors that record readings, develop histories, identify trends and send reports and alerts to selected email addresses.

The company takes pride in being the first to bring an innovative application to market but has recently experienced a series of setbacks due to competitors being able to find and apply new technologies in innovative ways ahead of in-house efforts involving those same technologies and similar applications. The corporate leadership has decided to attack this problem on two fronts: (1) hire a number of young and very promising engineers; and, (2) create an advanced engineering design institute to reinvigorate the current engineers. The plan is to provide two groups with the means to support these efforts and to evaluate outcomes after two years and again in five years.

The person responsible for the training effort has asked you to work on this project and assigned you to the task of developing a plan for assessing short-and-long term outcomes of the advanced engineering design institute, which is tentatively planned as a one-month long intensive, project-based training institute at one of the company’s six regional training facilities. Your task is to provide a plan to assess transfer of training and other beneficial outcomes that can be attributed to the advanced design institute. Your plan should include:

1. A short summary of the design institute, its overall structure, the training approach adopted, and the intended objectives.
2. A statement of the rationale for the institute and a justification for expenditures in support of the institute that identifies anticipated benefits, including new product development.
3. A description of the transfer of training challenges that arise in this situation, including those specific to a project-based approach.
4. A method to conduct pre-and-post assessments after graduates have returned to their workplace settings that addresses the transfer of training issues identified earlier.

More information relevant to the solution of this problem statement can be found at http://www.lehigh.edu/~mjba/PCDesignCompetition/.

Call for Mentors

The PacifiCorp Design & Development Award Committee is seeking volunteers to work with 2-member student teams on this year’s problem statement. Mentor volunteers may come from either academic or corporate backgrounds but should have extensive, practical experience in design and development and be able to lead student teams to relevant instructional design theory and useful research in the field. Assigned mentor volunteers will come from a different institution than the students, working with them at a distance using available technologies. In addition, mentors will likely need to be available to the student teams over the summer months for a total of between 30 – 50 hours (see timeline, above).

Interested mentors should contact Monica W. Tracey (tracey@oakland.edu or 248-370-4415). Additional information about the competition and expectations of mentors can be found at http://www.lehigh.edu/~mjba/PCDesignCompetition/.

Call for Judges

The PacifiCorp Design & Development Award Committee is also seeking volunteers to serve as judges for this year’s competition. Judges will be called upon three times during the competition: 1) to judge initial proposals, 2) to judge final papers, and 3) to judge presentations at the AECT national convention (see timeline, above). Judging may include conference calls with other judges and competition committee. Judges may come from either academic or corporate backgrounds but should have extensive, practical experience in design and development and have extensive knowledge of relevant instructional design theory and research in the field.

Interested judges should contact Monica W. Tracey (tracey@oakland.edu or 248-370-4415). Additional information about the competition and expectations of judges can be found at http://www.lehigh.edu/~mjba/PCDesignCompetition/.

Click here to go to the competition website.

Call for Participants (students, mentors, judges)
PacifiCorp and the Design and Development Division of AECT are pleased to announce the second annual PacifiCorp Design and Development Award for promising instructional design research by graduate students working with mentors in the Design and Development Division. PacifiCorp is specifically interested in promoting collaboration and mentoring within the professional community.

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