Course Strengths and Weaknesses & Would I Recommend It?

The format of the class is a definite strength that I liked – first reading the material, then answering questions that helped me apply to myself what I had learned in the readings, and finally learning new points of view by reading and responding to the postings of my fellow classmates. I also liked the online format that allowed me to do the class work when it was convenient to me. This was a definite strength of the course. Other strengths of the class were the two assigned projects, the Conflict Assessment Paper and the Conflict Resolution Workshop. The paper helped me personalize what I had been learning and the workshop helped me both see the connections between all that I had been learning and realize that what I had been learning is definitely applicable to real life situations. An additional strength of the class was the ability to email the professor any time I had a question, knowing I would always get a response.

I had to think hard to come up with a weakness of the class. A weakness of the class for me is the need to wait until other people post in order to get my responses done. I like to get my work done as soon as possible because I never know how my week will go and whether I will have time later in the week or the next weekend for homework. I ended up responding oftentimes to the same classmates who also got their postings done early in the week, so I didn’t interact with as many people as I would have liked.

All in all, for me, the strengths of the class way outnumbered the weaknesses!

I would definitely recommend this class to other students, and I wish I had taken this class many years ago. I had so many “aha” moments when reading the material, both regarding past and current conflicts of my own, and also conflicts family members have gone through or are going through. There were so many times in the readings that I thought, “If I had only known this,” or “How can I get this material into the hands of this particular family member so that she/he can make sense of her/his actions and the repercussions of those actions?”

So I would recommend this class to other students because I believe it could have a profound effect on their personal and professional lives. The course material and activities provide a different way of looking at and dealing with conflict than most people have. The material is not complex—the readings are easy and the homework and projects may take time, but aren’t prohibitively difficult. And the student would have the opportunity to take a class completely at their convenience because of its being purely online. So what student wouldn’t want to take a class they could take on their own time that would have an impact on their lives?!