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This product  was created for MIT510-Design and Development of Instructional Technology. It is an evaluation of an instructional problem and the determination of a solution from alternatives. In this project I was guided by the CIPP evaluation model to identify the context of the problem, nature of the inputs, the processes involved, and the products of produced by the instruction. This project depended heavily on an examination of the organizations and systems that affected the solution of the problem. 

This project was inspired by a real world problem in my field as a Physical Education specialist in a North Carolina public elementary school. The state Board of Education has recently passed the Healthy Active Child initiative, which will require all North Carolina elementary school children to have 150 minutes of Physical Education classes and/or active physical exertion by the year 2006. Currently, children in Pender County, NC, where I teach, have no more than 90 minutes a week of such activity. The state Board of Education provided two suggested methods of meeting this need. I analyzed both methods and proposed a third that I thought would better meet the needs and constraints of the school system.

I was informed via the state Board of Education Web site of the requirements of the new initiative and the proposed solutions. I was able to call on fellow Physical Education specialists for information on the situations at their schools, including numbers of students and amount of time students spend in Physical Education classes. These resources helped me analyze the current situation.

At present, there has been no discussion of implementing the Healthy Active Child initiative in the Pender County school system. As with most innovations in the public schools, administrators are probably hoping that it will go away before spending time on approaching the problem. Because of the public schools' track record on environmental change, it is not unlikely that the administrators are correctly reading  the handwriting on the ivy covered walls. If and when the Healthy Active Child initiative is implemented, it will be up to each school or school system to determine how to best achieve the aims of the initiative. At this point I will be prepared to present my analysis as presented in this artifact for consideration of the administration. I believe that my approach will not only be recognized as the best, but also the most cost-effective in terms of money and teacher time. 

Although most projects done in this course are team projects, I did this one on my own because of my particular interest in the subject. I called on my expertise as a Physical Education professional and my knowledge of the elementary school environment and its constraints on teachers, students, and the system itself, as well as surveys of my colleagues, to reach a solution that is possible to implement with little institutional change.

Reflecting on this artifact, I am pleased with the solution I proposed for increasing the physical activity of children. This is a problem I have been concerned with for some time, and the trend has been to shorten Physical Education time rather than to lengthen it. I appreciate the opportunity this course afforded to learn a systematic approach to analyzing organizational problems and found its application in this instance enabled me to develop a plan that is logical, realizable, and defensible.

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