Case: Course Review Task Force

Course Evaluation (Qualitative)

These are the open-ended comments provided by learners on the course evaluation survey...

Please comment on what you feel were the positive aspects of this course.

• It ended..... eventually.
• The team assignment was the best part.
• Choice of assignment topics, i was able to do something relevant to my work (2 birds, 1 stone).
• Simple and predictable: read, write, exam, done.
• seemed like a pretty good survey of the topic.

What topics or other elements (if any) would you like to see added to this course? Why?

• More current developments in the field – online/news stories, real cases.
• I have found (on my own time) some good documentaries about some of the course topics that I think would add a lot - freedocumentaries.org.
  
• Elluminate or some other interactive element. We have this in other courses and it works well to bring people together.
• an instructor who showed up would have been nice - just sayin'...
• In one of our other courses, we were directed to some podcasts. I liked that a lot because i could listen on the road or at the gym. Something like that would have been great in this course.

Please provide any other general comments you have regarding the course or the instructor.

• Way...too...much...reading!!!
• Wow...I really hated this course, which is weird because I’m actually VERY interested in the topic, but (no offense), I found the material really boring and torturous to get through. There was too much reading and not enough action (textbook, articles, websites, all the monologues in the forums...). I’m sorry that so little sunk in.
• This course made me feel dumb. It's not like I have a learning disability or anything, but I felt like I was constantly in battle against the material. I don't know how others managed to find the time to get through it all (maybe, like me, they didn't). It was hard to figure out what was important, and the online forums didn't help - just more and more stuff to read.
• I don’t feel we got any direction from the instructor online. Are we supposed to just discuss among ourselves? Didn't get much out of the forum activity at all. Felt like i was posting just to get the participation mark.
• This course would be brutal if you don’t consider yourself a “reader”, which thankfully I do. I took a speed reading course several years ago, and i’m not sure how i would have made it through without those skills.
• I liked this course – thank you!
• Compared to our courses last term, this one was a dead zone. The material was not only excessive (ie., felt like millions of pages of reading), but exceedingly and unnecessarily boring (I Googled and found other things to keep myself sane).
• Hello...hello...hello....Am I trapped in an empty cave?! Oh no, wait...it’s just the online space for this course.
  
• Maybe it’s not fair to compare, but the instructors from last term were way more with-it, or with us. Our instructor barely and rarely showed up online - I swear several days would go by before they even logged in.
• I don’t feel like I learned anything in this course; I just tried to survive it. There was so much reading and writing, no creativity, no practical application....I’m not the only one who feels this way, but others I've talked to didn't want to raise the issue, they just wanted to put their heads down and plough through the mountain of work. I tried to do the same and I hope I pass. Shame I didn't learn anything, though.