The biggest strength of this course was allowing individuals to explore any type of topic that they wanted to for their project. The fact that you can choose one of the many presented projects or submit your own if you decide to means that you are able to really have any sort of topic that can be beneficial for your future career. The inclusion of industry projects is even more helpful as it already gives you contacts to people in the industry as well as gives you experience for what it may be like when working with a team and learning how to meet their goal for a real world project. In this course, I had the opportunity to work with an industry partner and found the experience incredibly helpful. I have come across many learning opportunities for how to navigate understanding the clients needs and figuring out how I can deliver what they want in a realistic way by the given deadline.
A weakness was the project selection process. I had a difficult time determining which projects I thought were the best fit for me. Some descriptions are extremely extensive and include all the required and preferred qualifications, while others listed very little. For my project, it was in the middle with a fairly detailed description and some desired qualifications, however, an issue that we ran into was that the scope of the project was much larger than what was initially provided. While I completely understand that expectations change and that clients don’t always know what they want from the beginning, I do believe that it would have been helpful to have a more complete description about what types of technologies the client envisions using and what the final product will look like.
One way that I believe this course could improve upon would be to have some easily accessible resources for the students. For example, in the discussion board, there could be different threads that people could post to if their project falls under a certain category. If there were projects related to building a website, people in those projects could post questions or provide helpful information there. In my project, we ended up using machine learning and interacting with a 3-D model, almost as a game. I believe that initial threads that mention these things or even a section where people could post threads about those topics would have helped so we could see what other people were using and we could share where we got stuck.
One aspect of this course that could end up being a threat is making sure that the expectations of the different projects are relatively equal given the timeline and number of people on the project. If there are not enough people to divide up the work, it can make it difficult for the project to get accomplished by the end of the course. Similarly, if the project goals are too high and are not properly altered once the work gets started, there will also be an incomplete resulting projects. Both of these can make it hard to feel that you are getting everything out of the course that you should be and are making significant progress.
Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed this course and I am grateful for the experience, especially being able to work with an industry partner and create a project that I am proud of!
