I'm hoping you will be up for one last discussion. I know you're all extremely pressed for time, but if you have a few moments between now and the end of the semester, please chime in with feedback on the class. I'll post this over on the wiki, too, so if that's your preferred medium, you can just comment away over there.
Two things to keep in mind:
- The group project is part of the curriculum at UNLV and that is not going to change, so while I'd love to get your suggestions on how to make the group project better, comments regarding your generalized hatred of the group project won't help me all that much. I already know most people hate the group project; some days I hate it too.
- "This class was too much work" or "Took too much time" is not a completely helpful comment. [I have a student in my other section who is signed up for a three-credit online class in dance (don't know how that's possible) for summer session, and the average completion time for that class is 4 hours. That's probably actually educational fraud.] This class is the exact same workload as the face-to-face class; that means you should have been spending 10 hrs/week on this class (plus a little more in the beginning when you were getting used to the technology). If you found you were spending more time than that on class and you can identify the things that pushed you over the top time-wise, I would love to have your insights.
I'm interested in any thoughts you might have, but I'm particularly interested in:
- What projects/assignments/tasks you found valuable and why? Which you found not valuable/why?
- Preferences for different aspects of our technology: How did you like WebCampus generally, WC discussion boards and email, the wiki generally, the wiki as a space for doing a collaborative project? What parts of the technology would you like to avoid using in future classes? Any suggestions for using any of our existing technologies in different ways or other technologies you've worked with that we didn't use in here?
- Value and utility of the textbook: Did the readings help you understand how to do major projects? What features of the textbook do you like/dislike? (You can skip over the quiz function; we all hated that and if they don't fix it by the end of the summer we won't be using this textbook.)
- Course communication processes: Instructor to student, student to instructor, student to student? Too much, too little, too whatever...?
- Especially if you're signed up for the online document design class in the fall, what would you like to see in your next online class (things we did here you liked, or things we never thought about doing)
Nothing you post here will have any impact on your grade, obviously. I won't even have time to look at this until the semester is over, but since I'm expecting the same sort of constructive professional discourse I've seen from all of you all semester, that doesn't really matter.
Thank you in advance for chipping in with whatever you have that will make this class better for students in the future!