End of Summer 2010 Semester
Originally published at Highmoon's Ponderings. Please leave any comments there.
Well, the Summer A “semester” (I have a hard time calling a 6-week term a semester) at FIU is now done and in the books. How did I fare? Pretty good actually.
- Intercultural Communications: A
- Human Growth & Development: B
I’m happy with my A; this was my first online course and I was a bit worried at first. I mean, I’m more than familiar with online tools, but it’s different when it’s for fun and for a grade. It wasn’t, actually. Moodle was an easy program to use, and in general functioned like an all-in-one package of a lot of tools I am used to from my wanderings around the net (polls, forums, tests, email, file archives - all together). It did demand that I put a lot more on my end, as with no set class times, I could do the readings whenever I wanted. Test and quizzes did have deadlines, so that acted as my time-keeping device. I think the professor did a good job of actually making the tests challenging, knowing full well that we had our books to reference during examination. All in all, I think I would take more online courses in the future (though someone will have to explain to me why online courses cost $200 more than a regular in-class course).
I’m ok with the B in Human Growth & Dev. I was shooting for an A, of course, but let’s face it, memorizing a 15-chapter textbook in 6 weeks is bound to take its toll. There was just a lot of material, which was only being covered only superficially in class. At times I felt as if I might as well have taken this as an online course as well; the only difference in the workload of these two classes was that I had to show up on campus twice a week. It was a good class, but like all introductory-level courses, we had around 60 people, so there was very little opportunity for good discussion. We also completely skipped the age group to which I belong, the 25-39 Emergent Adult group, so that left me deflated (I was really looking forward to exploring what the heck is going on with my age cohort). Given that the professor actively sought to make each test harder than the one prior (she said the class average was too high - ?!), I’m good with the B I got.
I have to say, it feels good ticking off these classes from my pre-requisites list. It puts me so much closer to my actual Nursing classes. I’m actually looking forward to Fall classes!
So now I’m on vacation until the Fall semester starts in late August, which is fantastic as I need it. My brain was starting to fizzle there towards the last weeks of class.
In a couple of weeks I’m off to North Carolina, then in early August it’s Gen Con.