UoPeople – Week 5 – Learning From Mistakes

Learning from mistakes made during week 5.

Today marks the last day of my 5th week at UoPeople. I’m still moving along strong in my courses but I have made a big mistake this week that I’d like to share with you. Find out what UoPeople is here.

When I first started my courses here at UoPeople, I had never done any online courses before, so the whole process was 100% new to me. The intense little motivator that lives inside me however, told me to work really hard on developing a system to make progress in my courses as efficient as possible. This includes the way I take notes, the way I go about my reading assignments, and my approach to ultimately completing assignments and passing tests.

I devised a method for assessing my school week at the start of each unit so that I would have a good idea of the time I’d need set aside for completing all of my assignments, and going through all of the reading material. This process also includes taking note of any assignments that may be due before the following Wednesday, like most are. Which brings me to my big mistake.

The Mistake.

I don’t know if it was because of how hectic the month of May is for me. My wife’s birthday, her best friends birthday, my grandmother, her grandmother, her sister, mom, aunt, and her great-grandmother, all have birthdays, plus it was Mother’s Day last weekend! Perhaps amongst the chaos of May, I missed the detail of an assignment due date, or maybe I was just careless, I don’t know. But the fact remains that I scheduled to sit down and write an assignment this past Monday, and realized it was due the night before!

Luckily this assignment was a discussion assignment and not a written assignment, but my grade will still take a hit for my carelessness. I messaged my instructor right away, and proceeded to complete the assignment anyways and submitted it. He later got back to me and said he would see about giving me partial marks, and said he understood. Apparently this is not uncommon for new students at UoPeople to miss an assignment that is due on the Sunday, rather than the Wednesday like most others. I’m still waiting to find out whether or not I’ll get a grade or given an ugly fat zero

The Lesson.

Of course we should always learn from our mistakes, so what did I learn?

My lesson learned from this is that I really have to double check my due dates. No matter how hectic my weeks might be this is such an important step. If I’d known my due dates, I would have focused on that assignment first and would not have had any in-completes this week. Now I’m patiently waiting to find out whether or not I get a zero, and the feeling really sucks!

Tomorrow, I’ll find out what my school week will be like and if I get ahead on everything, I plan to make a tutorial for that walks though my own personal learning strategy. With the exception of this weeks mishap, I’ve been doing very well so far. Most assignments have been 100% if not, none less than 90%. Which suggests I’m doing something right, at least so far…

One last thing before I log off.  This past week, registration opened up for next term, and I signed up for programming fundamentals. I’m no expert, but looking at the course material, this course is going to be pretty easy for me, which should open up some free time to get back to sharing some code and programming tutorials.

Cheers!

Dan