The course that was and is...

There are many challenges involved in providing a web based class, and this one is no exception. While overall the class was delivered effectively, there are a few things which could be done better or perhaps omitted in the future.

One of the things I used most often in this course was the group wiki. While it provides an excellent platform to discuss ideas, it is at times difficult to use due to bugs in its programming. The benefits of the wiki outweighed its problems, since for collaborative efforts it works quite well. The calendar was also helpful, but it could be refined. Specifically events which spanned multiple days sometimes would overlap other events and it was difficult to see that multiple assignments were going on at the same time. I liked the announcements via email and I think that an option to notify a user by email with deadlines would be advantageous to this sort of class.

There were other parts of this course which were less than satisfactory, but did not interfere too much with accomplishing the assigned tasks. The "podcasts", although novel, did not add significantly to the course, as all the material in the podcast is available in other portions of the website. The forum is an important part of the feedback portion of this course, however it would have been more effective had there been more possibilities of keeping the information on one page. The calibrated peer review is also a good part of the course, but in order for it to reach its full potential, it needs slight adjustment. The text submission portion at turnitin.com and then transferring this to CPR is a hassle which could be avoided by choosing to either do all work though CPR or turnitin.com. Choosing both is overkill.

The worst thing about this course was the initial setup. The sheer amount of login information required was daunting. To make things worse, the usernames on some of the websites were pre-chosen and so keeping up with more than one username may pose a problem for some people. Unfortunately I see no way to fix this totally given the diversity of assignments.


Although there are many facets of this course which could be improved, it is a good course. I would certainly take another course like this and suggest that others take web based courses as well. The assignments were interesting and informative. My favorite part of the course was the group portion as it broke pace with the other business oriented assignments. As web courses in general become more developed, they will increasingly become the place for students to take this course.