My favorite thing about COMM 41 has been the ability to blog and, in a way, learn on my own. I have never taken an online class before because I was always hesitant to take one. I was afraid that I would forget about it or that the material will be difficult to learn without a teacher.
To my surprise, I loved the way I learn the material. I was very organized and straight-forward. Every week we would read a chapter or two, then blog about it the rest of the week. This pattern helped me from forgetting about the class, and allowed me to learn on my own pace. Blogging about a specific topic each week helped me explore and engage the subject more than I usually would. By the end of a week, I felt that I was fully informed and knowledgeable about the topic. Additionally, I was able to let my voice heard by other students anonymously which made it easier for me to say what I wanted to say without my identity being revealed. This class, although it was online, was the most interaction I have done between classmates because of this method.
My least favorite part about the class was the lack of structure when it came to group assignments. If it wasn't for my nagging ways, many of the group members would not have done their work correctly, on time, or at all. This can be improved by requiring students to check in with the professor where they are at with their group project personally. That way the students can keep up with the project, and the professor can see their progress.
I agree with you about the learning process in this class. I was definitely afraid how the class would have went if there was no teacher. But I was able to go past it and eventually got used to it. This definitely similar to what all people use today such as facebook or twitter and people just blog about their day or just any interesting topics they come by. It was definitely hard to meet up groups because I just didn’t have the same time or schedule to meet every one up. I felt like emailing was too hard to keep up with them. People weren’t viewing the emails on time and think there should be another process or just no group meetup. A way to improve this is have a longer deadline for the project and maybe just one group project. I felt like 3 took up way too much time especially the last group project when each person had to gather up 7 more people.
ReplyDeleteThe comments that you made really rang true for me as well. When coming in to the class I was very skeptical about the way the class would be run. I have never taken an online class before either so I really wasn’t sure what to expect. However, going through the class really made me have a positive outlook on online learning because the class was so structured and the due dates didn’t deviate apart from the deviations in the student’s favor. Also the assignments that were scheduled for each week were very clear and they were never too difficult. Also besides what you have said the other advantage I see is that our professor was so open to questions that we had.
ReplyDeleteHello =) I agree, I like that we were able to blog because I’ve never done so before so I thought that was pretty interesting. I’ve taken online classes before so I had an idea of what to expect but when I first learned about the blog posts I was a little overwhelmed then after the first one I realized how easy it was! I didn’t like how we needed to wait 12 hours between posts though because I would do them all at once then post them 12+ hours after the previous one. I think maybe the week should be split up and the posts are due on one day, then the comments a few days after.
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