Charles A. Elliot
ED TEC684 - Management
Prof. Joan Wackerman
December 4, 1996

Final Presentation

Drug Abuse Interactive Multimedia Project

 Section 1: The Setting

The type of business of the client, MindStar, Inc., is a nonprofit corporation that provides printed and multimedia informational products, including newsletters, videotapes, and audiotapes.

MindStar’s target audience consists of Mental Health Clients, or persons who have psychiatric diagnoses, their families and friends, mental health professionals, and the general public. Mental Health Clients have psychiatric disabilities including:

Clients can be persons of any age, gender, and race, but tend to be white. Clients come from all levels of education and backgrounds. Ones seen in hospitals often are poor.

 Section 2: Rationale for Designing Instruction

MindStar feels that the multimedia presentation on drug abuse is necessary for its clientele as part of the corporations’ mission statement to teach and empower clients of all ages. The need has been made apparent in the CEO’s interaction with clients, and especially by his observations in a psychiatric hospital where many of the patients there were addicted to drugs; heroin seemed to be the major topic of discussion, second only to the usual favorite topic of cigarettes. The CEO had been planning a series of educational programs to include the topics of nutrition and smoking cessation. However, it became evident to him that a program on heroin, cocaine and crystal meth (speed) was of much higher importance in terms of immediacy of saving lives than the topics of nutrition and cigarettes.

The producer, ACE UnLtd. Corp., has just recently gathered other data about the need for the instruction during the interview with the SME who is a Charge Nurse of a hospital Chemical Dependency unit. She talked about the "vicious cycle" of Mental Health Clients who exacerbate their mental illness by taking these drugs, and that people often who do not start with mental illness become schizophrenic by taking the drugs. She cited statistical data about the approximately 94% of crystal users in one study who had physical damage to their nervous system resulting from their drug use.

The nurse provided human data about one of her patients that they tried to help, an attorney who was well-liked, who died from a heart attack one day while shopping, from the accumulated effect of cocaine use on his heart. She provided the data that approximately 60% of all people who go to an emergency room or ICU for any reason are there from the direct result of drugs or alcohol, although this may not be visible at the time. She said that the rule was that if there are more than two broken bones, you need to look seriously to the use of alcohol or drugs.

ACE UnLtd. has also gained data about the need for this instruction in the interviews with the SME who is a Mental Health Client, and who has been a user and addict of heroin, cocaine, and crystal. She, like other drug users whom we have met, says "Don’t use drugs!"

 Section 3: Project Constraints

The media has not been a source of much constraint. ACE UnLtd. and MindStar both chose to use the multimedia format by itself because of the advantages of having the learner branch at his or her own pace and interest level through the instruction. The learners can choose their own sequencing and depth or learning, and can choose to repeat or skip any area. The Director software allows the inclusion of graphics, sound and video clips within the program. No additional materials were deemed necessary, such as manuals. The production plans will eliminate the problems of converting from PC to MAC formats. Both versions will be combined in a hybrid release. The opportunity to release the product on the Internet has some technical drawbacks, such as 2-bit video and a truncated palette, but the additional audience size will counteract these drawbacks.

The length of the program in terms of learner contact will be approximately 20 minutes. This will vary based on learners’ interest and reading speed. Some learners could probably go through it in less than 5 minutes and get nothing from it. This is a constraint but is in the nature of interactive programs; the learner is not forced to read all of it. Technically, the length of the program is designed to have about 80 frames, including 10 graphics, 20 sound clips, and 4 video clips. The limitations of this size is discussed below under time and budget.

The producer had intended to have up to 6 SMEs, with two each of psychiatrists, other health professionals, and Mental Health Clients. SME constraints were that psychiatrists, possibly the most knowledgeable professionals for this program, were unable to participate because of their time constraints. One mental health worker who had been a heroin user in the past, and who publicly has talked about his experiences, would have provided a good perspective, but he declined to participate. A Mental Health Client who earlier was willing to participate had just checked himself in to a hospital at the time that the producer needed him. The resulting one client SME and one professional SME worked out well as both provided excellent content. The one professional, however, was ill and unavailable for a 10-day period, and the interview needed to be rescheduled. There was enough flexibility in the schedule that this was not a problem. The client SME was unavailable for a few weeks due to a drug relapse.

The original budget was for 62 days with lower than realistic daily rates for the personnel. The total came out to $17,500 which the consultant said was very low. The second budget on Microsoft Project for 70 days with realistic daily rates came out to $416,218 which the consultant said was too high.

The original schedule for 62 days was too long for the intended 150 hours to complete the project in an ED TEC 798 Independent Studies project. We converted the days on the Excel spreadsheet for each task to 2.5 hours per day to approximate the 150 hour requirement. Then the tasks and hours were spread out over the number of weeks remaining using another spreadsheet. Constraints were that often the numbers of hours had to be expanded or reduced to fit the realities of the project. For example, the normal 12 hours per week of the project became 15 and then 24 for the last few weeks of the project. This was not caused by panic, but by the intent to produce the media segments sooner, and possibly to end the project 3 days earlier than the last scheduled day. Constraints include that the length of time allowed for the project of 150 hours is only about 1% to 2% of the time required to produce a full-length commercial multimedia product. The product here will only be a small fraction of what could be produced given commercial staffing and budget.

Section 4: Assumptions and Bidding

The total cost to develop the instruction will be $111,375. This figure is derived from taking the budget for 70 days on the Microsoft Project data and reducing it to the intended 150 hours of the project as an Independent Study course for ED TEC 798.

The assumptions being made to assure staying on time and budget are the following:

Section 5: Performance Challenges

A unique performance improvement challenge is that the evaluation phase is not part of the overall design. Subsequently, there is no testing of performance. There are six stated course objectives that guide the course design, but performance improvement measures on these objectives were intentionally not built in to this version of the program. Upon further funding, the team plans to do this evaluation, with it being a high priority for "next time". Because Internet use is intended to be the prevalent use of the program, the evaluation would be built into the multimedia presentation with an option called "take test".

The strategy closest to being unique is having the sound clips of the professional nurse SME and, hopefully, the client user SME, as possible parallel selections for the learner to hear and compare.

 Section 6: Production

All of the staff except the SMEs is one person. He has produced pre-computer multimedia for years, and once before with the Director software. So, no staffing challenges are expected except that that producer sometimes has to stop to think what role he performed in order to log the daily hours by role. The drug user SME has been hard to convince to record sound clips for the production. The fact that we have the professional SME on tape might convince the other SME to record the clips. We are not expecting or asking her to be videotaped with her face showing, but just audiotaped.

We are monitoring the logging hours by role as it happens each day, to eliminate forgetting. We are monitoring the user SME question very carefully. She was asked at a good moment after several weeks of personal bad moments and relapse. Time is running out, so we plan to be assertive without ruining it. On the other hand, if she says no by the time of our absolute deadline for recording, we will either record another person, using the SMEs’ thought patterns from our interview notes, or just use text instead of audio.

 Section 7: Final Assessment

The top three indicators that the project is successful down the road are the following:

The most useful learning experiences gained by the team that works on this project are the following: