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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.
Commenting on other students posts but different students each week is interesting from the point of view of the person commenting. I'd ask you to think it through from the point of view of the person receiving comments. (Incidentally, you certainly could have commented on other students posts, in the sense that nothing was stopping you from doing that. Of course, it wasn't a requirement.)
ReplyDeleteGetting students numbers - not as easy as it sounds, but if I'm hearing you you want data from actual companies. It's an understandable request, though a challenge for me to implement.
when it comes to the viewpoint of receiving comments i think it would be good because it would be a new point of view each time. i liked my group members point of views, but by the end of the semester i found their responses to be predictable, as i am sure they felt the same with my responses. i think it would be cool to have a different person comment on my posts each week so that i could get more diverse feedback.
ReplyDeletewhen it comes to getting numbers for the final project i figured it would be more work that actual payoff. that would be a painstaking task, but in theory i believe that it would be an improvement to the project.