It is high time to reflect….

This semester with our online English course was much more productive than that we had last year. I would like to share the strong points of this course and some struggles I had during this semester.

I really liked the way the course was organized. We were provided all the assignments beforehand uploaded on Moodle. It helped me to organize my time properly. Every week blog posts were neither difficult nor time consuming. Moreover, instaneous feedback our instructors provided helped me to improve my next tasks. I could improve my writing not only from the feedback the instructor provided, but as well from the feedback the instructor left under my peers’ work. I think it was very beneficial for everybody. Commenting on my peers’ blogs was another interesting and useful activity. Although we are separated by distance and we are too busy with our jobs, commenting appeared to be an opportunity to interact, to reflect and to improve.

As for struggles, I found conducting mini research to be distractive task. Personally, I hardly found time to read literature on my large-scale research, and reflect on it. Dealing with one more research was difficult for me. Especially in terms of defining research problem, finding relevant literature and writing literature review for mini thesis. I think I could benefit more from writing mini thesis if the task was assigned last year. If I were the instructor I would, at least, assign to write mini thesis on the topic students have chosen for their large-scale research project. It would be much support for both students and supervisors to fulfill a good work on proposed research thesis.

Finally, I want to say that if we had good time management skills we would have dealt with any task easily. So, I suggest online learners to learn how to organize their time properly and not to procrastinate. It is bad habit thing to leave everything to the last moment. Doing your tasks the last moment makes your tasks of poor quality and lower grade. Therefore, I suggest everybody who decided to undertake online learning to learn not to procrastinate and organize their time properly.