by Judy

For the past few days, every time I log into my class, a window pops up inviting me to take an end of course survey. I have been clicking on “remind me later” for the most part, but finally I just did so it would stop annoying me. It asked me to rate the class on a scale of 1-5 (1 is worst, 5 is best) for different categories regarding the class.

How helpful was the course material? 4.

How qualified was the instructor? 4.

Etc, etc. After each set of questions regarding a particular category there was a box for me to write comments in. And guess what? Simply from the act of writing them out, I learned a couple things.

My instructor. I feel like I learned more from discussing the course materials with my classmates than I did from my instructor. That is not to say I did not learn a lot from this class; I had pretty much no knowledge of grant writing five weeks ago, and now I have a thorough understanding of all of a successful grant’s components. I feel that at the end of the class I will be able to write a viable grant on my own. What’s more, I will have my group project, for which I am the editor, among other roles, to prove that I can write a grant. Speaking of…

Group work. It’s not that I don’t like group work. However, I feel that it would not have been too much to ask of us to do the group work on our own (and then I could show my project as something I did all by myself). Part of that is undoubtedly personal preference, and the way I know I like to work. The way our project was set up, we did many of the parts collaboratively each week, and will combine them with some new material to make one whole grant. There are five people on each “learning team”. Trying to divvy up many of these weekly components among five people was difficult. I think if part of the goal of the class was to gain skills in group work, then group work should be a part of the class. However, I would have preferred if the class had been divided into more, smaller groups, say three people.

I felt really good after filling out the survey. How many terrible teachers have I had in my life? More than a couple, I can assure you. One professor I had in college in particular I did not like, so much so that I considered going to the head of the department, but he was the head of the department. So that was not an option. A few departments in my college did use a survey, which the professors were not allowed to read until after they had turned in their students’ grades, but I have no idea how effective those surveys were. So the fact that the University of Phoenix cares enough to actively ask me my detailed thoughts on this course makes me feel pretty good.