After already taking EPSY 1259, I knew a little bit of what I was getting into when I registered for this class. Having said that, I still learned many useful techniques to enhance my online learning that I didn’t know before this class.
The most interesting topic to me was the online collaboration section of the course. Google Docs is a really powerful tool that will help me a lot going forward in my college career. It is more efficient than dropbox, the service I had been using, because multiple people can work on the document at the same time in Google Docs, and you do not have to deal with conflicted copies of files. Online collaboration is only going to become more and more important throughout my career with the amount of group work I will have in Fisher, and my busy schedule with the Track and Field team. I will have less time to meet in person with people, and I will need to be more in tune with online collaboration.
I have also learned that I need to be a little more focused when it comes to my online classes. I made an effort to keep up with this one, and that is why I think my grade will be good. In previous semesters I was missing online quizzes and discussion posts, but this class helped me keep a schedule, I set a specific time each week in my phone to work on class material and my phone alarm went off at that time each week. I did not miss a single assignment in this class. I’ve learned that I can easily handle any course load that is given to me as long as I take the necessary steps to accomplish it.
My most meaningful experiences were discussing each of these topics with my classmates. I have never really had a meaningful class environment in an online course like we have in this one. I think I read more of my classmates discussion posts in this class than in any previous online class I had taken. That was very cool to me, and I wish more online classes were structured this way.
This class has given me plenty of tools that I can apply to the future. Aside from the online collaboration part of the class that I already mentioned, the whole idea of using your time wisely and managing time effectively will help me a lot. While I had previously made a calendar of how I used my time in EPSY 1259, making a new one in this class was still interesting because I got to see my progress from last semester. This helped me get more out of that assignment, and a lot of other students probably did not have the opportunity to have that.
All in all, I am happy I took this course because of all the skills I learned, especially those mentioned above. I think I would recommend all students to take this class before taking any online class at this university.