I would like to ask what are the goals of online university classes. I have just helped a friend to prepare for the paper she has to submit this week. The topic regards the comparison between two different table which have to be prepared by the student using two different softwares. After we spent some time understanding how the table should look like and which data we can use, we realized that we only had one of the required softwares available and no idea of how to get the other for free. We checked the book, the website, the class description and nowhere was to be found a link or a hint of how to get the necessary software.
It is not about just a calculation or a nice image search. The needed software is very expensive and very big - and my friend did not want to have to pay for it. After some research, we found out that it is possible to install it for a trial time, so we did, the laptop crashed, we moved to another computer, which also crashed, and after various trials and a lot of bon bons we managed to get it installed.
So, I was wondering. What is exactly the aim of the class? To learn how to use the software, to know what the software is used for, or the know how to get stuff from the internet in case you have no money to pay for licenses?
I would have appreciated a hint on the class website suggesting how to get the software for free - it would have saved few precious hours of work. But this is of course only true if the goals of the class are the knowledge and expertise of the software or maybe the theory behind, and not how to find them. If this is not the case, I suppose it is an important ability also to optimize the time of a research in internet, so that you become more efficient. Might be.
But I was thinking, this is a class organized for people who already work and mostly do research online al the time. Is it really necessary to do that also for a software? Are there not more important things to learn?
It is not about just a calculation or a nice image search. The needed software is very expensive and very big - and my friend did not want to have to pay for it. After some research, we found out that it is possible to install it for a trial time, so we did, the laptop crashed, we moved to another computer, which also crashed, and after various trials and a lot of bon bons we managed to get it installed.
So, I was wondering. What is exactly the aim of the class? To learn how to use the software, to know what the software is used for, or the know how to get stuff from the internet in case you have no money to pay for licenses?
I would have appreciated a hint on the class website suggesting how to get the software for free - it would have saved few precious hours of work. But this is of course only true if the goals of the class are the knowledge and expertise of the software or maybe the theory behind, and not how to find them. If this is not the case, I suppose it is an important ability also to optimize the time of a research in internet, so that you become more efficient. Might be.
But I was thinking, this is a class organized for people who already work and mostly do research online al the time. Is it really necessary to do that also for a software? Are there not more important things to learn?
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