POLS 1100 – Summer 2014
Below is my course reflection for American Institutions, POLS 1100, Prof. Kurt Shirkey. This was an online course. Below is also a link for my persuasive essay on Electoral College reform. This persuasive essay was the semester capstone piece, and demonstrates the skills and knowledge I obtained in this course.
Course Reflection
Prompt: Take a look at SLCC’s learning outcomes for General Education at the end of this syllabus. Note that while no specific course helps students move toward achieving all of those outcomes, each Gen Ed course is supposed to help you make progress in achieving as many of those outcomes as are relevant to the course. Making specific references to your work in this course, tell me how you have progressed toward achieving at least three of those outcomes.
The learning outcomes most obviously acheived by participation in this course is developing the knowledge and skills to be civically engaged. As early as Chapter One, I learned about the “Five Very Important Questions” of political analysis. Whether at the local or global level, I can ask simple questions like, “Who benefits?” and, “How is this related to that?” to learn more about a topic. I can get civically engaged simply by understanding the nature of political power, and use that knowledge to my advantage as I look for opportunities to participate in civil political activities.
This course, unlike many online courses, provided a platform for online discussions with the rest of the course members. Over the course of a week, we had the chance to respond to a prompt, as well as responding to other students’ responses. Many discussions dragged on for pages, and the most common phrase I saw was, “I didn’t think about it like that.” Through these online discussions, I learned how to more effectively work with others in a professional and constructive manner, even if the work was conducted online rather than in person.
I could very easily say that this online course developed my computer literacy. But it was more than just working online – Mr. Shirkey gave great guidance for setting up my ePortfolio. I can’t say that my ePortfolio was bad before this class, but with the detailed ePortfolio assignments from this course, I made many small changes to improve the overall usability of the ePortfolio. Rather than courses that only require me to “just upload a document,” these assignments strengthened my ePortfolio and made me reform my ePortfolio into the state it is in today. I’m sure that the course set by these assignments will lead me to further changes that will make this an ePortfolio I am proud to display.