Assignment
PROJECT’S PURPOSE
Students will demonstrate their competence in working collaboratively, proposing team activities, writing reports using research, creating visual presentations, and considering audiences. These skills will be assessed through a team organization proposal, a team organization report, a team organization visual presentation, and a self/peer assessment.
MATCHING COURSE OBJECTIVES
Upon completion of this task, you will be able to:
- Employ important strategies for writing persuasive messages and proposals
- Write clear problem and purpose statements
- Understand how to use the internet and library to conduct secondary research
- Organize information in proposals and reports
- Write reports and proposals that are focused, objective, consistent in viewpoint, smoothly connected, and interesting
- Collaboratively write well-organized and persuasive proposals and reports
AUDIENCE
In accomplishing this project, your team should imagine that you are employees of a regional office of the U.S. National Park Service. Your team has received an assignment from your supervisor that your team must create safety information for visitors to your region’s national parks.
Written Report and Visual Presentation’s Audience
The audience of the team organization report and visual presentation is your team’s supervisor, as well as his/her contemporaries and his/her managers.
The written report will contain information that evaluates the current state of the safety information available to the public and suggest changes that should be made to that information.
Helping to Ensure Visitors’ Safety at the U.S. National Parks
Your boss, the Assistant Director of Communications, just gave your team your first assignment. The office recently received a directive from national headquarters requiring the regions to ensure that visitors to their parks can acquire sufficient safety information from the parks’ websites.
To begin to address this directive, your boss wants you to study and assess the safety information on the websites of THREE parks in your region. Some issues to address include the following:
- Is the current information provided for each park accessible and sufficient?
- Is the information clear and useful?
- Does the information make the danger clear without being scary?
- Is there information on one site that should be included on all the sites?
- Can visitors easily access the information once they are in the park (many parks are out of cell phone range)?
- Address other issues that your team identifies based on the content of the websites and research that you have collected regarding safety concerns with camping, hiking, etc. in national parks and the best practices for communicating that information to visitors.
Team Organization Report
Each team (through its leader’s submission) will submit a properly formatted, professional quality report to the instructor.
The written report must include the following:
- Title page (including the team members’ names)
- Transmittal message
- Table of contents
- Executive summary
- Introduction (including a problem statement and a purpose statement)
- Discussion of the issue about (Gateway Arch National Park) 3 pages
- Conclusions of the team regarding the issue
- Recommendations for the audience
- References
- Appendix (not required, create only if necessary)
The Team Organization Report must include the principles discussed in BC’s Chapter 3, “Designing Documents with Visual Appeal,” Chapter 11, “Researching and Writing Reports,” and Chapter 12, “Creating the Right Type of Report.”
