The instructor was Rena Hanaway and I liked her. She was accessible and very kind and I want to say that my review is in no way meaning to insult or demean anyone at all. I am not pointing fingers at anyone, I'm simply stating my own experience and opinion.
First of all, I own a music collaboration company. I'm a bit of collaboration junkie via technology. In my youth, I started with Compuserve in 1990 and played in the first AOL chat rooms and I played with Yahoo Messenger and the first versions of iChat. I got my masters degree at NYU in Interactive Telecommunications at the Tisch School where I learned digital audio, digital video, Marcomedia Director, Hypercard scripting etc. And as I grew out of playing with collaboration toys, I ventured into ftp servers, file sharing, iDisk, Google docs and project management and collaboration sites like Central Desktop, BaseCamp, Glasscubes, Huddle, iWork.com etc. I can say confidently that I know about collaboration in the digital age.
I realize that I have more experience than your average student but I would think that my instructor would also have some experience with collaboration tools. From what I experienced in this class, she didn't and had never even used Office Live while having her students using MS Office in a class about collaboration.
I would think that a course named after the word "collaboration" would somewhere utitlize collaboration in the course. Honestly, there was nothing emergent or collaborative about this class. We created a blog which is very outdated. Anyone current and tech savvy knows that blogging is dead. Very few people blog anymore. It's been replaced with social networking. This was known many years ago so why is Full Sail teaching us how to blog? Why aren't we using Schoology or something like that? Isn't their goal to create cutting-edge educators with this program? Wired magazine wrote an article back in 2008 exlpaining how blogging was dying. See HERE. And this was 3 years ago. There are countless articles about how blogging is down over 60% in the last few years. You'd think a university teaching education would be on top of current trends and not waste our time going backwards.
Here is the saddest thing of all that happened in this collaboration course. The only true collaborative assignment required us to read other student's research papers. Ok great, we're going to finally collaborate!! But wait, this was done via pasting our formatted research papers into the cell of a spreadsheet. This is described in detail in my next post and I show you exactly what this looked like. This assignment was the straw that broke my camel's back for me. I am supposed to pay thousands of dollars to be taught that emergent collaboration is pasting a research paper into the cell of a spreadsheet on Google Docs?? I'm sorry, but this is absolutely appalling and unacceptable.
The class meets weekly via a web conference at a site called Wimba. I've used Webex a lot for business and this is a version of that but geared more towards education. It's a cool tool. However, the instructor brought nothing collaborative for us to do during these conferences. To me, she sounded exhausted not enthusiastic and just matter of factly, explained about the week's exercises and asked if there were any questions. There were these long lulls of awkward silences because I know other students, like me, started making dinner or watching TV because there was nothing engaging or requiring our attention in any Wimba that I sat in on. She made no use of the Wimba screen to show us anything at all nor were we ever asked to collaborate. She was not organized or focused and the entire class just sat there silently while she explained the week's assignments which we could have easily read about online. Why did she not use this time to actually teach us something about collaboration? This was a collaboration tool... Show us cutting edge collaboration solutions in schools and businesses, get a guest speaker to show us if she didn't know? Why were we in a class about collaboration and not collaborating?
The class taught how to create blogs, use iMovie, iWeb and review a few "Web 2.0" tools - and while some of the skills are useful, what is truly emergent or collaborative? As stated, blogs are on the way out and the term "Web 2.0" was a buzz word back in 2007. We never really got to see or review our fellow student's work, so again, nothing at all was collaborative.
I also thought that this program was going to focus on what was actually happening in current cutting-edge eLearning environments. How are cutting edge schools collaborating? Let us research that and then show it to the class. The possibilities for this class were endless but nothing was utilized.
My experience was that I could have put little to no effort whatsoever and received an A. 10% of my grade was clicking a button that I abided by "Global Professionalism Standards" and 10% of my grade was posting to a blog and 7% of my grade was pasting into a spreadsheet. That's over 25% of my course and what did I learn? That was about $1000 right there for doing nothing.
Full Sail needs to teach what this class is named for, "Collaboration". iMovie and iWeb are great, but they should be in a separate class teaching iLife applications and after we learn iLife apps, then get us to use these applications to create something collaborative. Show us how to work together with the latest technology. Assign one group to Office Live, one group to Huddle.com etc and then lets get in the Wimba and show our sites and our collaborative projects and lets all learn something together.
Anyway - that's my basic assessment of this class. A huge disappointment and a huge waste of time and money.
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