Online Experience-Caroline Kreul

Engineering 271 is also a hybrid course, but is substantially different than LIS 201. In that course, students use a web program that mimics a real-life engineering firm, complete with consumers, interdepartmental communication and corporate oversight. Whereas LIS 201 uses various websites in tangent with classroom, lecture-style learning, this class uses an offline entity to gain real-life skills.

In terms of how effective the use of various internet sites was, I was rather unimpressed. I do think that there's value in knowing how to use sites like Blogger, but I felt that there was a lot of confusion, particularly at the beginning of the course, about which mediums we were supposed to be working with. I also felt that there was just such a cluttered amount of tasks to complete each week that it ultimately detracted from gaining knowledge from the course. For example, because we weren't assigned terms until Tuesday's lecture and our discussion meets on Wednesdays, that left a very small window within which to read through and find the terms. It also didn't make sense to read the readings ahead of time as I'd inevitably have to go back through the entire reading again to find the terms. This felt particularly unfair as other sections had two or three nights to study the quiz terms. Towards the middle of the course, I found myself just skimming the readings to find the terms instead of reading them for overall content. In general, the overall feeling that I got from the course was that, because this is a 4-credit class, the professor just tried to cram in a bunch of things to do to make it "hard" (ie. at least two long readings, a weekly quiz, online activities, paper or exam/week, etc.).

I really don't think that the whole hybrid course is the best idea for courses other that those relating to the information society, digital studies, computer science, or journalism. I think that the best learning that I have had, and keeping in mind that the majority of my classes in journalism and digital studies have online components, were those experiences in-person talking to my classmates and TA. There is no substitute for those kind of interpersonal interactions and I think that, particularly for those subject outside of the ones I listed, that in-class learning style is vital.