Graduate Student in Educational Technology
Department of Educational Technology
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA 92182-1182
Dear Graduate Student,
You have been recommended by the Department of Educational Technology as a potential QED sub-contractor. As leaders in the analysis, design, and evaluation of instructional products, QED is constantly seeking new ideas and we invite you to submit a letter (an initiating memo) by the date indicated in the QED Project Plan. This memo should identify an educational or training problem suitable for our SITE Series. You may address training or educational problems for any age group, but we are particularly interested in addressing the needs of California's culturally diverse school and work populations. We therefore encourage, but do not require, you to consider target populations that have been traditionally underserved by the educational and training establishment such as immigrants, minorities, and the marginally literate.
Your initiating memo must succinctly address the following issues in less than 500 words total.
1. Describe the social, informational, and technical sub-contexts.
Select an instructional problem or opportunity that might reasonably be addressed with about 7 hours of instruction. Our project timelines will not allow for extensive research on subject matter content. Therefore, you should select a super-context with which you are familiar or you have easy access to a SME.
You should briefly describe the SITE in terms of three sub-contexts: the technical or operational context (e. g. fax machine, cell phone, word processor); the social-cultural context of learner performance (e. g., needs of some organization or community); and the informational context related to this instructional opportunity.
2. What is the population of learners or prospective users that will be addressed by your proposed product?
Briefly describe the prior knowledge and acculturation of the prospective learners as these relate to acquisition of SITE-related skills and knowledge. Describe factors such as age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education in terms of how they might help us to make future instructional decisions about content, instructional strategies, delivery systems, and the like. Other relevant issues include the literacy level of the target population and the approximate size of the population. Please provide a Rough Order of Magnitude estimate (ROM) for the numbers of people who might actually use the product within, respectively, the San Diego region and continental US. Very rough estimates are all we need at this point (e. g., hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people).
3. What are the current performance problems and opportunities of the target population?
Describe the current or likely performance problems of the population within the SITE. Consider performance problems in all three sub-domains: technical/operational, sociocultural, and informational. We are also interested in performance opportunities as well as problems. In other words, would better knowledge of the SITE help people to do something in the social sub-context that is new, useful, and even unanticipated. How could an instructional product empower members of the target population to realize their goals and interests?
4. What is the justification for using a product to address the problems and opportunities?
We want to know why you think the problems and opportunities you have identified are amenable to product-based solutions. Why would a product-based approach be better than simply hiring teachers, trainers, or coaches to implement the instruction? In this context, you may want to address the possibilities for recovering our potential product development costs. What are the chances that we could recoup our development costs and make a profit given the potential size of the market (target population) identified in your ROM and the potential cost of product development?
5. What is the justification for using instruction to address the problems and opportunities of the target population?
Our niche in the training and education industry is design of instruction, not manuals, job aids, or performance support systems, and the like, although we do design products that integrate with such informational resources. For example, some of our products include components that teach people to make better use of manuals and on-line support systems. We also embed in our instructional products components such as job aids where appropriate. However, QED attempts to ensure that people will develop specific skills and knowledge that can be measured. All of our products provide opportunities for guided practice and evaluation of learner performance.
Level of Effort for Initiating Memo
We recognize that it will not be possible to respond to the five issues listed above in great detail in such a brief pre-proposal, but you should respond in some way to each of the five points. In any case, we will not entertain pre-proposals that exceed the 500-word limit.
Submittal of Preproposals (Initiating Memos)
Submit Preproposals to QED in the form of e-mail letter or memo. You will receive within a few days, by e-mail, notification of any contract awarded and further details about requirements for the next phase of the project, the Initial Analysis of Problems and Opportunities.
Please make sure that your pre-proposal includes your e-mail address and home and work numbers.
Possible Award of a Follow-on Contract for Initial Analysis
Our technical and marketing experts will review your pre-proposal, and subject to their approval, we will contract with you for Task 2, an Initial Analysis of Problems and Opportunities (IA), which will be due no later than indicated on the QED Project Plan. Should it be awarded, the contract for the IA will be a fixed price contract for a total of $720. This includes 23 hours for your labor as a design-analyst @ $25 per hour and an additional 25% for incidental costs and your overhead. For tax purposes, you will be considered an independent contractor. However, once submitted to QED, the IA will be considered the result of "work for hire" under applicable copyright statutes and QED will become the exclusive property of QED. You may, however, use the IA in your professional portfolio as an example of a work product.
Your initial analysis will be reviewed by our staff and you will then be invited to team with other QED contractors on further product development efforts which may or may not carry forward elements of your pre-proposal and/or Initial Analysis.
QED looks forward to reading your pre-proposal and to a creative and productive prototype development effort. Welcome aboard!
Cordially,
Gabriel Ozgood
President and Chief Creative Officer
Quality Educational Design, Inc.
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