Open High School (OHSU)

The Open High School of Utah is an online charter high school that started with an enrollment of 125 students. I was hired to create two 9th grade courses: English and Earth Systems. The curriculum was composed largely of free educational resources, though some instruction had to be written. This document will explain my role in greater detail, as well as provide writing samples. My experience there demonstrates project management, writing, HTML, CSS and image-editing skills.

BuyFlipRent.com

BuyFlipRent.com is a website that offers self-directed workshops about real estate investment. The program consisted of eight, one-week workshops with five days in each workshop. My primary task was to get the workshop material from the subject matter expert and re-purpose it to fit the website. I wrote assessment items and potential goals for users. I also added stock photography and review screencasts.

Beyond these responsibilities, I was also in charge of coordinating blog posts with experts for the site. Additionally I submitted bugs and worked with developers as needed. Because BuyFlipRent.com requires payment to view the workshops (beyond a trial period) a full copy of the entire program is not available. However, I have created a document that goes into greater detail regarding my involvement.

Flex Cloze

The project was for a research group at BYU. They requested a Flex component that could create a 'cloze,' which is paragraph of text with missing words that students would have to complete. The research group wanted the cloze text to be stored an XML component. This project demonstrates knowledge of Flex 3 and XML processing.

Flash Football

The purpose of the Flash Football interactive lesson is to introduce little league football participants to football play terminology. My partner on this project, Bruce Daniels, was a little league football assistant coach. He found that little league participants had varying levels of knowledge regarding football play terminology. Since there are many demands on a coach's attention during play practice, Bruce felt an interactive flash lesson done by participants at home would be beneficial. The interactive lesson has three lesson modules with three corresponding self-test sections. Flash Football was built using Flash 9. Bruce created the field, text and helmet graphics, and wrote the instructions. I was in charge of the Actionscript coding, documentation and project management.

Vitality Medical

Vitality Medical is a medical supplier that sells exclusively online and has been in business since 2000. Initially I was hired for two tasks. The first was to expand the website's layout. Originally the Vitality Medical website had been designed to fit an 800 x 600 monitor resolution. My boss felt that by this time (Feb. 2006) most people had a monitor capable of supporting a 1028 x 768. To make this enhancement to the website, I changed the HTML to expand the tables to the necessary widths. This was not a simple task, since each page consisted of at least four templates. Still, I found the task of changing the code to be rewarding. I also had to use the original photoshop file that the website was created from to generate longer versions of the graphics. The expanded layout is still in use today.

My second task was to write articles for website. These articles would have three purposes:

1. Generate traffic
2. Encourage customers to stay longer on the website
3. Help customers make informed decisions about product purchases
4. Reduce the number of incoming phone calls

I wrote over 44 articles for the website about topics ranging from What is an oxygen concentrator? to I'm concerned about my parent(s) falling. What should I do?. Because I didn't have a lot of medical experience, these articles demonstrate my ability to learn and understand new subject matter quickly. Usually my research consisted of analyzing respectable medical sites on the internet. In some cases, I would call manufacturers regarding their products. Ethics are always a large part of writing in the medical field, because misleading information can be harmful to customers. All of my articles are currently visible on the website.

I gained other responsibilities over time such as creating new monthly banners for the top of the website and other banners to advertise certain promotions.

USU OCW: English 1010 and 2010

Many people have heard of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative which made their course material available to anyone regardless of enrollment status. Utah State University started a similar initiative and my instructional technology projects class required that we put up two courses - English 1010 and 2010. These two courses are required for graduation at USU and are typically taken in the first and second year of enrollment.

Because OCW courses are available to anyone, copyright is an issue. Both English 1010 and 2010 require two or three textbooks that are copyrighted. To replace them, my group members and I used the Creative Commons search engine to find material that had been licensed for free reuse. While this may sound simple, it was a time consuming process.

Because I had received my Bachelor's degree in English, my role, unofficially, was project leader. We used Google Docs to divide work and keep track of progress. Hand-coded HTML was used in certain instances.

T-Tapp

T-Tapp is an exercise program designed by Teresa Tapp especially for women. A professor in the Instructional Technology department, Dr. Joanne Bentley, has been working with Mrs. Tapp to produce an online "train-the-trainer" course. My role was to produce help create the course pages in WebCT. I hand-coded the HTML and used a stylesheet to help with uniformity. I also scanned pictures out of Mrs. Tapp's book (with permission) and edited them using Photoshop. The course is not currently available; however, I have created a PDF which shows the course layout.