Online Capstone: SWOT Analysis

For this blog, I will be conducting a SWOT analysis for the online capstone course. For those of you who don’t know, SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Overall I have had a very positive experience in this course so far, and I have found it to be a great course to wrap up my degree with. However, there are also a few improvements that could be made.

I will start with S: strengths. I appreciate the wide variety of projects that this course offers, and that we are given some time to make a selection. When exploring my options at the beginning of this quarter, I saw projects ranging from AI/ML to robotics, to web development. There are also opportunities to work on impactful industry projects as well. This variety allows students to choose a project based off of their career interests and personal time constraints. I also liked that the professors were able to match us to teams so that we are able to find teams who have the same interest in a given project.

Next I will discuss W: weaknesses. Fortunately, I haven’t found very many weaknesses in this course. I believe the experience for this course is highly team dependent. The only thing I wish this course had was more time. It is probably not possible, but I think it would be better if this course were to span two quarters in order for students to have adequate time to produce a capstone worthy project. While I have had a great experience with my capstone project, I can’t help but to feel that what we are delivering is a little bit underwhelming for a “capstone” of our degree. This isn’t due to lack of skill, but only to the time constraints of the OSU quarter system. With another few weeks, my team would be able to polish our project a lot more as well as add more features.

Moving onto O: opportunities. I think it would be nice if this course posted demos from other teams to a shared channel (as long as the team didn’t have a NDA). This would allow students to see what other technologies/applications are being worked on. Maybe students could try out other team’s applications and leave feedback similar to how stakeholders/customers would in a industry setting.

Lastly, I will discuss T: threats. I personally do not believe that there are any threats to this class based off the way it is structured right now. The only potential threat is being assigned a teammate who doesn’t communicate or do their work. However, the surveys throughout the term give opportunities to report this type of behavior.

In my opinion, this course is structured very well and it has been a great conclusion to my three years at OSU