RSSUniversity of the People Week 4 thoughts
Oct 06
school assignments, english, homework, Learning Journal, peer review, University of the People No Comments
Hey readers!
I thought I should give you guys a quick update on how things are going with my schooling at University of the People.
Things seem to be improving and others seem to be going nowhere fast. It took the school about a week after our discussion on the learning environment to acknowledge our displeasure with many aspects of it and our suggestions on how to change things. Supposedly things are in the works but other than them finally getting the forums working as they should, there is no indication that anything is happening other than the fact that they say there is.
I am liking the length of the homework assignments although the deadlines that we have to go by are very strange and I don’t think they work that well for a global school. They also don’t seem to care about the fact that nobody sees a purpose in having a learning journal and a really crappy one at that. They seem to be sticking to their misguided ideas and keep reminding us that if we don’t use it, our grade will be affected by it. They can keep saying that all they want but it wont make me care any more than I did in the first place which is not at all. I still refuse to use it. My English class seems to require us to use it for the assignment this week. I am torn between wanting to complete my assignment and hold on to my boycott of the learning journal. I am still not sure what I am going to do but I suppose I better decide soon since the assignment is due tomorrow.
Maybe I am not talking to as many foreigners on there as normal but I haven’t noticed the lack of English skills this week as much as in weeks past. That said, it seems that likely because of them, many people don’t seem to be understanding the assignments and how to do them so when I grade them, I have to really mark them down because they didn’t do what was asked. I hate doing that because they don’t understand the question but the school was very clear about knowing English when they got into the school so I can’t say I feel too bad for them when they get bad grades because they don’t understand enough English to do their assignments as required by the school.
I am also slightly annoyed at the fact that they are teaching the basics of the desktop with XP. XP is old and about to die, it should not be used as an example in a learning environment. If you are going to use Windows, use Vista or even Windows 7. There have also been a number of other people with issues with this because they use Linux instead of Windows. I agree with them that it should be taught in more than one operating environment and I fully support their desire to have some of the material compatible with their systems as I use Linux as well on occasion.
Oh, and the calendar they use is crap! They need to use Google Calender.
That is all of my thoughts for this week on my experience at University of the People. More next week.
-pcnerd37
