User:Eas4200c.f08.WIKI.E/extra3

Wikimedia vs. E-learning
During this course, we used wikimedia to turn in our homework. Our homework consisted of writing up the class notes and doing some matlab assignments. We were asked to form teams to work on this Wikimedia homework. The format of these homework assignments forced us to attend class once every two weeks in order to get the notes for our assigned day. When doing this type of work, Wikimedia is a much more convenient and usable program to upload and format than E-learning. E-learning was not designed to do what was require for this course. Wikimedia's ability to save all archived versions of pages as well as the ability to easily interface with equation editors made it user friendly for students. It also allowed for easier grade formatting and uploading. I see E-learning as an older, less usable and less versatile version of Wikimedia.

I do believe that Wikimedia is a more versatile program than E-learning and was a much better decision for us to accomplish our homework as assigned. However, I do not believe that Wikimedia allowed me to learn Aerospace structures effectively. We would prefer to have traditional homework problems that would allow us to practice the method rather than regurgitating theory that we may or may not understand. Also, assigning Matlab to try to patch this significant problem only compounded it because most of us have never used Matlab, adding another program we needed to learn to succeed in this class, without learning any actual Aerospace Structures. I believe assigning homework in this way has hindered my learning. An argument could be made that I can always look back at these pages to find information about structures. I would respond to this argument by saying that none of our homework was graded carefully enough to catch errors or that it was written with any understanding or authority of the subject it was discussing. I would much rather turn to a validated source like a textbook than look on Wikiveristy. I strongly disagree with the style in which this class was taught. Because I have learned near nothing in the class, I would venture to say that the homework's effectiveness on my learning experience was a utter failure.