Online Education Review Week 15

I have taken a ton of online courses in my time here at OU and by far this class along with the one I took in the previous semester are the most time consuming. When I a student takes an online course one of the things that they do expect is that there is a somewhat self pace aspect of the class. That being said one of the bonuses about this class is that because you are forced to engage with it on what feels like 29 hours a day you are flooded with a ton of creative stories to read that you might have not taken the time to read in a normal online course. In this class there is no escaping the reading assignments because you have diaries that are due so in order to do the diaries you must read the stories. Also there are other assignments that you must complete and if you don’t do your diaries then you will not be allowed to complete the other assignments. I will admit that there are times throughout the semester when the work seemed very redundant, examples like writing a diary, then a story, and finally an essay but I think it is important for some writers to go through these steps as part of their creative process. For myself one of things I would remove from this class is all the dang pictures. I think they are important for the storytelling posts, but for the other assignments I think there would be no issue if the pictures were removed. Another thing that would be interesting is that as I have already mentioned that there were times that things seemed a bit too much of the same each week to maybe change things up half way through the semester by removing the reading diary assignment and adding another storytelling assignment. I think one way that you could really foster creativity is to make the students write two story telling posts but to have them write the posts over the same story, then for the essay assignment during the week have them talk about the challenges that they faced when trying to write two different tales based off the same story. I think that would break up the monotony and really make things pop off creatively. Over all I loved this class and I would recommend it to all students. The Professor is extremely enthusiastic about the material which is really refreshing because I have been in classes on campus where the professor seems asleep and simply on cruise control during lectures. This professor seems so full of energy each week which makes the student want to continue to work hard and be engaged in this class.

Picture Attribution

By MeekMark (Own work. Transferred from en.wikipedia) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

College Writing Review Week 15

Pencil

I am an English major with a focus in the writing track not lit and cult so writing plays a huge part in my college experience. One of the things that I have learned over the past twelve semesters is that although there are rules to proper writing, there is not proper way to write. I think one of the things that I love most about writing is the freedom a person has to express their view points on subjects that they choose. One of the things that this class allowed me to do most is to experiment with different writing styles to help me develop my voice. It was not the storybook or the diary assignments that I enjoyed most, instead it was the storytelling and the famous last words assignments that allowed me to be the most creative. I would say that as a total my college experience has taught me to just write and express myself the way I feel like doing so.

Picture Attribution

By Dmgerman at en.wikipedia [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons