I thought I should give my thoughts about week 2 of University of the People, so here it goes!

Lets start off with what I find really annoying shall we?  This week is the first week of doing peer assessments which I am fine with but I am still frustrated with the lack of proper English skills that many of the students have.  When I grade the assignments of several other students, I often end up having to interpret what they are trying to say because of missing words in their typing, poor punctuation skills and problems with people copying and pasting their answers from various word processors which can put in a bunch of strange style information and make things look really strange.  The other problem I have with the peer assessments is the system itself.  When you go to grade an assignment, the screen is split between the grading sheet on top and the assignment on the bottom which would probably be OK except for some very annoying bugs such as after you have finished and click a link within the page, it just goes to the link in the top half of the page and the submission stays on the bottom half of the page.  In order to get where you are going and have it show up properly, you must open the link in a new tab or refresh the page completely or something stupid that I shouldn’t have to do.  The language used on the system can also be confusing at times too and some questions have no relevancy to the submission which makes grading even harder.

I also still find the whole journal thing completely retarded and the journal system is by far the worst I have ever seen.  Apparently people don’t remember it or don’t like it either because the teachers have put up reminders telling people to make submissions in them as it is part of our final grade because it allows teachers to track our progress and such.  Dear teachers, if you want to track my progress and know what I am thinking, read this blog and listen to my podcast as I do not want to use your horrible journal system.

Now that the ranting is over, lets talk about the good and just plain interesting.  I find it rather interesting that besides the discussion forum which we are required to participate in, there are two other forums that are for the class, one of which is without the teacher and one is with.  One would think that assignment related stuff would stay in the one with the teacher and the other one without the teacher would have a huge array of topics but it seems to stay on the topic of school which I find rather curious.  I will have to try to change that this week.  It is good to see a decent bit of participation in the forums, even if some of them are hard to understand due to the fact that English is not the first language of many of the students.  As for the good, the workload has picked up now that people are starting to get familiar with the system which is good although I am not sure how much I am really getting out of the work.  The intro to online learning class I learn stuff from but that is just because it is getting me familiar with the system and such but I am not sure what I am learning from the English composition class.  It doesn’t feel so much like there is teaching going on so much as read this and do this assignment.  I guess I am used to this because that was how my English classes were all through high school, almost entirely busy work and no real teaching or learning.  Hopefully that will change but I am used to it if it doesn’t.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for week 2.  I will post my thoughts for week 3 around the middle of next week since new school weeks start on Thursday which I still find very strange.

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