Having completed the online course I was studying, a little behind schedule, I can now review it. In principle, online courses are great, especially if you live in an area where the educational provision does not meet your requirements. If you are self directed and motivated to study you will gain more from what is on offer – conversely if you need the stimulus and drive of physically being present in a class online learning may be a challenge too far!
I prefer learning in a class environment face to face, but have got on well with on-line in the past so I didn’t expect to have difficulties. Unfortunately due to other commitments I was unable to “attend” the lectures in real time – one observation from watching them later, although there was some opportunity for people to be more interactive, it didn’t seem to be a great part of this course. This could be for a number of reasons – if you are not accustomed to this kind of communication, it can seem intimidating to dial in and speak or perhaps it was too short a course for people to get fully involved and able to participate.
There was a forum for adding comments in each week of the course but this wasn’t used much – which is a shame as it could have been a good platform for people to have exchanged ideas. Perhaps there was quite different interests and experiences which made it more difficult for the participants to feel comfortable in commenting on each other’s ideas. I felt quite a time pressure between each week and was unable to look at other participants work fully to be able to make any kind of useful comments or start a thread of discussion which was worthwhile – so that being said, perhaps it is important to look at what sort of time commitment you can give to a course before embarking on it to make it more of a valuable experience for yourself and other participants.
There are positives to having completed a course in this way however – I felt on the whole the course was useful. I do feel I had quite good background knowledge of the topic beforehand but did learn some new things and got some good pointers on how to further my knowledge and where to look for more information and good examples of organisations to study. There was an individual task to complete for which I received feedback – having some sort of validation is always helpful and despite not having the class dynamic, by having some dialogue it is beneficial for developing ideas and feeling you are on the right path. Having also the opportunity to study something over a period of a month and hear from people from all over the globe was valuable and made me think a bit more about my own ideas in context.
In general it brings to mind the need to be organised and informed – highly relevant when the other thing I have been concentrating on is starting to look at an application for funding to further the exchange residency project I started earlier in the year. Our group are keen to put in a proposal to allow us to work on something with a bit more scope than before – seeing that we all work well together and have common interests we’d like to pursue. I had the opportunity to chat through what was expected in the application with my mentor at our last session – just going through and talking about the basics is really helpful to iron out any obvious things that won’t work, or things that need to be said. In addition to that, Susan invited an archaeologist round to chat to me about her current projects – we had felt there may be scope to either work together or have some sort of crossover or mutual support. This is yet another way that having guidance and insight from an experienced practitioner can help – their network which allows you to contact people and resources you may not otherwise have been exposed to or be readily able to access. I am in an incredibly fortunate position and hopefully the forthcoming application bears fruit. The next stage of writing it will be a little more taxing…
