Section+1+Needs+Analysis

=Section 1 - Need Analysis Report=

Executive Summary
The Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is an academic institution of higher education offering academics in mathematics, science, and technology. The university requires copy write and plagiarism awareness training for entry level students at both the undergraduate and graduate level. With internet and technology rapidly changing, Harrisburg University seeks to familiarize students with the proper way to reference writing and media in essays, blogs, podcasts, wikis and other mediums.

Business Need
Harrisburg University seeks a learning solution for student understanding of the ethical implications of plagiarism in order to reduce academic instances of plagiarism.

Learning Opportunity
A learning module outlining the consequences of plagiarism as a career and reputation killer will teach students to take responsibility for their own work.

Expected Benefits
Students will be less likely to take shortcuts in their writing. Students will take more care to cite sources when borrowing ideas inspired from other authors. HU professors will reduce the number of confrontations when verifying student sources for authenticity.

Audience Analysis
A typical student at HU is an undergraduate in their early twenties. A secondary audience is the graduate student, average age in their forties. Males and Females are nearly evenly split in both categories.

Older students may not be familiar with referencing media in blogs, podcasts, wikis and other mediums that were not available to them years ago. The upcoming generation are more technology savvy, having quickly caught on to the copy and paste features of word processing. Some incoming freshman may have slipped through high school with teachers too busy to verify student sources.

Project Design
An asynchronous video will illustrate to incoming students what plagiarism is and why they need to be more conscientious writers. The video will be shown to incoming students during orientation and plagiarism training with Nancy Adams, the school librarian. HU will use open-source media and digital imaging through the use of the school video camera.

Project Success Measures
Professors will track the number of student plagiarism responses before and after the training.

Out of Scope
The film will be short in length and will not get into the specifics as to how to avoid plagiarism and any rules about what constitutes plagiarism.

Estimated Project Costs
Project costs should not exceed the price of any film or software that will be needed to be purchased for the video (if any). Total cost should be less than $100.