06 Nov Online courses at SFSU

At SFSU some of the courses are online. I had never encountered this before as my home university does not offer online courses. In this blog post I will share my experiences with online courses.

The online course I am following this semester is Understanding Politics (which is very interesting by the way!). At the beginning of the semester the professor sent all students the syllabus by e-mail. In a regular class, you would get this printed in class. Then we had to take a short quiz on the contents of the syllabus, to make sure everybody had thoroughly read it. Following this, everybody introduced their selves on the forum on iLearn.I thought this was really nice because you still get the feeling you’re part of a class, even though the class is online.

In the weeks following the professor posted an online lecture each week, which we had to watch. We also have to read a chapter from the text book each week. Each week, we take an online quiz on the lecture and the reading. Another assignment is to write a weekly post on the discussion forum. Every week there is a question to answer on the forum or a prompt to write about.

The midterm was online as well. It consisted of three parts: multiple-choice questions, short essay answers and a longer essay. The final will be online too.

I would recommend taking an online course. It may seem a little strange not to be in an actual class, but it is very easy to contact the professor or TA. Besides this, you can schedule when you want to watch the lectures and do the readings, which is a great advantage of taking an online course.