Honors 490 was classified as a directed study course to satisfy the study abroad requirement for honors. This class was made available because of COVID-19 not allowing people to study abroad instead of simply omitting the requirement for the affected years if the effort was put into trying to study abroad. This class did not provide any of the essences of a study abroad. The reason this was counted as a study abroad was that two classes were coming together (ours and a Dutch class). There was an attempt at having us interact and talk about how living in the other place was along with various other prompt questions however they were weak and unnatural questions. We did not really learn about their culture nor did they truly learn about ours as we were focused on the semester-long project. I did not learn anything during the course of the class that I would have expected to from a study abroad and feel I would have had the exact same experience (though with less annoyance) without the requirement entirely. This is not to say I didn’t want to study abroad, see the tab under the about section. This semester-long project was focused on combating climate change with whatever solution we brainstormed together and then presented at the end of the class in the form of a podcast. This goal was very vague but I think lent itself well to the format and encourage new ideas to emerge however the groups having multiple points each person wanted to include ended up making the final products into jumbled messes. I think it may have been better to have groups based on similar ideas for the project or just overarching categories so that people in each group didn’t feel like their idea got cut and the project didn’t feel cluttered including everyone’s ideas that are far outside the scope. I feel like we struck an alright balance however could certainly see how some of my group mates might have felt like their ideas weren’t being fully valued as they got cut from the final project (the main idea was an amalgam of everyone’s, but subpoints became wildly overrun). This course also suffered from timezone issues and technology differences. Our group meetings were outside of class time so we had to find times when none of us were in class and were awake which made it difficult to find times for everyone. This was a big issue for one group mate who was never available except for one day when no one else was. The technology differences were big too as they had not used the platforms before and the other US student and I hadn’t used WhatsApp before to communicate with the Dutch students. Class times and due dates for this class were changed at random times it seemed as well making it extremely annoying to know when something needed to be done. The final project had its deadline pushed up by a day (within a few days of the due date, not early). In conclusion, this class was not well structured, many of the logistics could have been improved, and the communication was poor both from the professor and the groups.
Above is the trailer for the podcast.
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