The spring 2020 semester has been fraught with many new experiences and equally many challenges that I never thought I would encounter, or at least not in such a setting. Apart from the normal/expected challenges of school related activities, halfway through the semester the university was closed due to the Coronavirus pandemic and classes were transferred to a completely online setting. This change did not have an enormous impact on the way I received instruction since all of my courses already had at least class notes posted online on Canvas, some already had some part of lectures posted online as well. Greater difficulties did arise however in courses whose whole nature required face to face interaction such as my engineering design course where prior to the university shut down we were planning on building a small Over Sand Vehicle (OSV) in a team of 8 students, and in my physics laboratory course where we would conduct a variety of experiments related to the subject matter taught in my regular physics classroom course. The end goals of these courses changed both rapidly and radically. For example, in my engineering design course our OSV project was changed to a new project in which we had to design and construct a Rube Goldberg Machine that was supposed to be linked between each group member's household. This rapid shift in project scope created many difficulties from re-working each group member's responsibilities to working with one another remotely on the entire project from design to testing all the machine's 16 steps in real time from one household to another. My physics laboratory course had to create new virtual experiments that we could complete from home in order for us to still have a working knowledge of the physical apparatus involved and how to use them for experiments.
Despite the many challenges that arose during this semester, two things that have worked well this semester, the Canvas system where all of our work related to courses was handled (such as lecture materials, exams, and grades) and online instruction. I personally have had very little issue to the way online instruction has been provided and carried out. I was able to still understand the material well and without communication troubles such as poor internet connection or complications with my computer. These have significantly eased both the transition and actually learning and completing assignments in an online setting.
If I were to do another semester or part of a semester online, I would try and recreate as much as possible the experience of going to school, i.e doing school related activities only in a certain part of my house and taking breaks when I would be walking to and from classes. These are to help prevent me from sitting in a chair the entire day and I believe would help me be even more productive.
The CPSG101 class has helped me learn from this experience by displaying how useful it is to be able to convey information across a variety of platforms. It is true that previously the course was taught in a traditional classroom setting, but the material presented in class was already readily available online and I was able to easily adjust to a new learning style. I believe that this has many applications in the domain of Aerospace Engineering where communication between team members is vital and ensuring that there are different kinds of means of communication gives much flexibility in being able to complete the task at hand regardless of outside conditions.