As the first week of study draws to a close, it’s time to pause and reflect on events of the previous week.
When I originally applied for the course I did wonder if I’d be in a class of 1 or 2. That’s clearly not the case and I was pleasantly surprised to discover there are around 19-20 fellow students studying alongside me. There’s a huge amount of diversity too, my peers coming from in with very different backgrounds, goals and levels of experience. This will serve a rich source of knowledge and ideas over the next two years and hopefully beyond.
The course so far has been very straightforward, most likely because we’ve been working through the on-line induction process: getting used to the tools, breaking the ice and we’re being eased, gently, into the life of a postgraduate student. I feel certain the pace and workload will ramp up as the module progresses.
Canvas, the learning management system we’re using is very easy to use both in the web browser and mobile app. The discussion boards have been very lively since the ice-breaker posts — sometimes making it difficult to keep up. I’ve had a lot of meetings at work this week making it impossible to check the boards during the day. I need to look at what I can do here because most of the time, by the time I saw a post it had already been answered. I also need a more efficient way to get to the new content, something else to look into.
It was clear from the outset, when the first module was released, I would face two big challenges in the weeks and months to come:
- Adjusting to academic life — I’ve been in industry for such a long time now that academic thinking, research and writing, whilst not necessarily difficult, feel somewhat alien as they’re not skills/mindsets I’ve had cause to develop.
- Managing the workload — I have strategies for this based on prior experience. Setting up a default diary will create the time I need and adopting Agile practices will help to plan, manage and deliver the work.
Discovering we need to maintain a Critical Reflective Journal in the form of a blog was a welcome surprise and resolved the issue of how to store my course notes. With this, my 5th post of the week, I’ve been over-blogging. The reason is simple, I need practice at researching material, writing my notes and adding citations. To develop the reflective mindset I felt the need to practice. I doubt any of the posts I’ve written thus far come anywhere near as yet but I’m confident that in time this will change.
Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash
