Week 6 Learning Journal – UoPeople

Tomorrow is the first day of unit 7 at UoPeople. The last week has been hectic, scrambling to get all of my assignments finished. I also had a graded quiz this week which was worth 15% of my grade. I have some comments that I’d like to make on the quizzes I’ve had at UoPeople so far, but I’ll save them for when I do my term summary in a couple weeks. To summarize this week, I thought I’d just share my learning journal assignment entry.

Here it is.


 

For this week’s learning journal I would like to talk about the challenges I’ve been having keeping up with my studies. Not just this week, but the last few consecutively. There has been a lot going on in my life, and I’m pretty happy that I’ve been able to keep my grades up in spite of the challenges.

I knew this week was going to be especially challenging, since it was me and my wife’s anniversary this past weekend. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get online to work on school for 2 days straight. On top of that our babysitter is off on holidays this week, so I’m taking care of our two year old son during the day.

The last few weeks have been almost just as hectic. However, even with all of the distractions I still managed to ace my assignments thus far, and I earned 100% on the graded quiz today. There are a few things that I have been doing this term to help me achieve good grades despite being pressed for time.

The first most important thing I do, is when I do have time, I take advantage of it. I will take diligent notes, and make sure that I’m spending time reviewing all of the material I’ve learned up to the current unit. Ongoing review of the material is key for me. I’m always conceptualizing what I’m learning and trying to find ways of applying my study’s to real life. I’m constantly preparing for the final exam, and always reviewing my work before submission.

This practice helps me whenever I get bogged down with responsibilities outside of school. Whenever I don’t have as much time as I’d like to have for school, I know I’ve already made up for it in the previous weeks. I usually try to plan ahead for busy weeks to mitigate some of the headache that comes with being overburdened, but it’s just not always possible. So I think it’s better to just spend the extra time on school when I have it.

The second thing I make sure to practice is logging on to Moodle every single day. With some minor exceptions, I never miss a day at school. I log on even on the days I know I can’t accomplish much if anything at all. It helps me a lot to just simply spend five or ten minutes reading the discussion posts or reviewing material. One of the things I learned when I use to play guitar and various other instruments, was that to get good at anything, you must do it every day no matter how little time it may be. Many times when you go to spend only five or ten minutes doing something, you will find yourself spending twenty or thirty. It really adds up over larger periods of time. Even a half hour a day still adds up to fifteen hours a month.

This sort of leads me into my next tactic, which is mastering the basics. I strongly believe that no matter how good someone thinks they are at anything, the basics can still be improved upon. This course is an introductory course to programming, and I’ve been programming for a couple years, but I still take this course just a seriously as any other course. I know that knowledge can be gained from this course as long as I make the effort to challenge myself.

I once heard someone say that if you read a book with a golf ball sized consciousness you will come away with a golf ball sized understanding of that book. If you go back and re-read that same book with a baseball sized consciousness you will then come away with a baseball sized understanding of that book. This is exactly my philosophy in this course. I have already learned all of the concepts from our textbook before, but I was not as experienced then. Now I am learning the concepts from a new point of view; one with more background knowledge, context, and greater understanding of the surrounding concepts not mentioned.

Maybe that’s what really has helped me be successful so far in this course, is the fact that I’m taking it seriously. I really hope that I can keep it up for the rest of my time here at UoPeople. I’m sure I have many more challenges on the road ahead.


 

I just want to thank everyone who has been reading my blog lately. Your emails and comments really mean a lot to me. Thanks for all of the support. Wish you all the best!

Cheers,

Dan

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