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Looking over this semester I have learned a lot, not only
have I learned about the economics of organizations, but I have also learned a
lot about group collaboration and group work. From the lectures to the online
work we were exposed to a lot of different information. I found the most
challenging part of this course but also the most interesting part was when we
learned about insurance. I struggled a lot with these excel homeworks, but in
the end I was happy that I was able to experience them. I think I found this so
interesting because my father works in insurance and I had never really had
much exposure to this field besides what we talked about.
When it comes to the layout of the course I liked It a lot, I
believe that this is the most well organized course I have been in, all of the
deadlines were on the course website along with the lecture lessons if you
missed lecture. I found the excel homework to be very beneficial and it was a
nice digression from strictly blog posts, because as I do enjoy writing the
blog posts, this class would be very dry if it was based more on blog posts. What
I mean by this is that if all of the online work was blog posts this class
would be a lot less interesting, the blog posts were nice, but the excel
homework was a great change up that really diversified the course.
When it comes to my process of doing the blog posts and
excel homework, I honestly didn’t have much of one. I would look at the blog
post a few days early and start to get ideas floating around for what I was going
to write about then come Friday I would write my post. When it comes to the
excel homework I just did it when I had time early in the week. Early on the
excel homeworks didn’t take much time, but later on there was a few of them
that really threw me through a loop and took some time to do. I also enjoyed
the group paper. This was my first Econ course at University of Illinois that
had a group project in it, and I felt that to be refreshing. I had not been
involved in one of those for a while and it was nice to get involved with
others and write a paper.
Overall when it comes to improvements to the course I only
have one. I am not sure if it has been tried before because honestly I am not
sure how it would work, but my thoughts would be if everyone got to comment on
everyone else’s blog posts. What I mean by this is that every week a student is
assigned 2 random posts to comment on, this would get everyone involved in the
class to see everyone else’s viewpoints. I know that other student’s blogs are
on the website, and are there for anyone to read, but I feel that most students
would not branch out of their group unless they were told to. I understand that
the groups need to be there for the group project, but I just had the thought
of everyone getting to see the other student’s posts they would get a better consensus
of the views of the class. Also I would like if this class changed the group
project a little bit to involve something along the lines of the excel
homework. What I mean by this is having numbers to work with along with our
papers so we can understand the papers more, because they can be a bit
confusing at points. Besides that I enjoyed my time in this class greatly.
