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2008 Competition
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  PacifiCorp Site
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General Guidelines

The PacifiCorp Design & Development Award competition is open to student members of the Design and Development Division of AECT.  Details on AECT and Design and Development Division membership information can be found at http://www.aect.org.  Division membership is free and AECT memberships for students are discounted. Interested faculty and students are strongly encouraged to join the D&D division and to sign up for the D&D listserv.

The Award Committee formulates a problem statement (coming soon!) each year with a challenging conceptual or practical problem relevant to the interests of the adult learning and performance-improvement community. Graduate students who wish to respond will form teams of two and prepare a preliminary design abstract of no more than 1,500 words (12 point Times Roman font, double-spaced, 1 inch page margins, APA 5th edition style) that offers a proposed solution in response to the problem statement.  Teams from all across the world may participate, and the two graduate students need not be at the same institution.

The 3-member judging panel will select up to six abstracts that they believe are most promising ?based on creativity, theoretical soundness, and practicality. The Award Committee will then match mentors to these teams.  The assigned mentors ? who will likely come from either corporate or academic backgrounds ? will then become active members of the design competition team, working closely with the two graduate students on the final paper. Final papers will be limited to 5,000 words, including all references and appendices (also 12 point Times Roman font, double-spaced, 1 inch page margins). Submissions can contain no more than 10 tables and figures. Design teams may develop associated design-and-development products related to the problem statement, as appropriate. These additional materials/artifacts must be accessible via the Internet and can consist of no more than 10 Web pages.  

For the final portion of the competition, the 3-member judging panel will then select up to three final papers based on creativity, theoretical soundness, and practicality.  The graduate students will present these papers at a special session during the Annual AECT Convention.  While the mentor may help the students prepare for this session, he/she can play no role in the presentation itself.  The judging panel, who will be joined by a fourth member from PacifiCorp, will then select the best presentation from that session for special recognition at the D&D/RTD Awards Luncheon.  Presentations will be judged on clarity, teamwork, and professionalism.

All graduate student finalists invited to present at AECT will receive free conference registration.

All submissions for the competition must be in MS Word, .RTF, or .PDF file formats and sent via email to that year's competition coordinator by midnight of the appropriate deadline listed on the "Timeline" page.  You will receive an email confirmation when your submission has been received.